Penny picks up a strawberry and looks at me intently. ‘How are you settling in?’ she says. Her voice is kind, and I worry I am giving off out-of-my-depth-small-town-girl energy.

‘Good, good,’ I say. ‘I love it here. It’s—’ I pause and try to think of something very Melbourne to say, something worldly, chic, cultured. ‘It’s a really nice area,’ I finish.

‘Brooke is so organised,’ Harper says to Penny, still chewing on the carrot. A very ambiguous statement. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? A neutral thing?

Harper and Penny smile at me, and my heart is beating very fast in the silence that follows. I feel personally responsible for the lull in the conversation. Why am I suddenly so bad at this? Without the structures of school, the security of a minor leadership role and the safe haven of my family, I am struggling. I actually had the sad thought the other day that I miss my school uniform. Now I spend hours scrolling through social media to find girls of my body size and type (tall, wide hips, strong thighs, a non-flat stomach, hair that swings between mousy brown and dark blonde depending on when I last went to the hairdresser and if I am under flattering light, pink-toned skin with a tendency towards eczema and extreme dryness but that will turn oily as soon as moisturiser touches it) who dress well, so I can copy their style. Penny is tall and about my size, but she’s operating at three fashion levels, at least, above me.

I hear the front door opening and voices in the hallway.

‘Oh, someone’s here,’ Harper says, and she and Penny go to see who it is. It’s their second year of uni, they grew up in Melbourne, and they’re part of a whole interconnected social group. Harper said she has twenty or thirty friends coming tonight.

Within minutes of people arriving, it’s clear that Harper’s friends and Jesse’s friends are very different types of people. Harper’s friends are artsy, politically engaged, sitting in our lounge room like a big clump of intimidating coolness, drinking wine and debating the merits of a French TV show that I have heard of but didn’t realise anyone my age actually watched, and they all have great hair, somehow, which seems statistically unlikely, but there it is.

Jesse’s friends are a mix of shy and sweet engineering students and old schoolfriends who are living in a share house in Geelong in what appears to be a mostly nocturnal life, where they play video games all night, eat BBQ meatlovers pizza six times a week for dinner, shower on average once every four days, and they recently started a small fire by putting a pizza, cardboard box and all, in the oven to reheat it.