We all sniggered and caught up on each other’s lives as we waited for the delivery. They were both wonderful about my Other Side of the Tissue Box news. Heather even pulled me in for a hug, saying, “You’ve come so far, I am legit so proud.” I absolutely loved coming to theirs. Their flat was exactly how I would decorate my own dream house—from their paint color choices (one of which was honestly called Elephant’s Breath), metallic lamps with giant light bulbs, and a gallery wall of prints I would’ve picked out myself. “We only need three more houseplants, and a framed sketch of a naked woman, and then we get gold platinum millennial cards,” Heather said. I asked Katie what artsy books her indie company were publishing, and then pretended, as always, I understood what the hell she was talking about. I nodded a lot as she explained her recent acquisition from an up-and-coming conceptual artist who made all her work out of dried spaghetti. Heather filled me in on her current list of furies—which ranged from erasure of the word “lesbian” to “inadequate pain relief for gynecological procedures”—her mouth a Gothic lipstick stained from the wine. The pizza took forever to arrive, and the red wine painted me mellow. I curled up on my dusty-pink chair, and let Heather rant on about bizarre male domination of gyne surgery, smiling at her with love. I worried often about alternative-reality Fern, who didn’t meet Heather at university. From the second she strode into my room, took me down to the Student Union for the “Freshers’ Mingle” before promptly tugging me back out again and calling it “a Rape Myth Masterclass,” my life fell into a before and after. Heather was my very own Morpheus, exposing basically every problematic thing at university to me, of which there was a lot. It was a surprise when she met Katie in third year, and brought her back to ours for lasagna. Katie was shy and had basically no political opinions whatsoever. Whenever you asked her view on anything other than conceptual art, she’d just shrug and say “I don’t really know enough about that to say.” It infuriated Heather but also made her a calming influence.

Their buzzer finally went, and we stuffed ourselves on lukewarm sourdough crusts, battling over the one tiny dipping sauce that came with it. Heather shouted, “Broccoli, I made broccoli,” and dumped some cold, purple, tenderstems onto our plates. We each had a second glass of red, and made appropriate oooh noises when Katie delivered her homemade chocolate cheesecake to the table.

“Some of us kept up our side of the cooking bargain,” she said, looking pointedly at Heather as she cut three generous slices.

“Oh my God, this is gorgeous. Thank you. How did you make it?”

“Found the recipe on the BBC.”