By now I was laughing a little bit as Nassim leaned forward and pulled his phone out of his back pocket and opened up an article he’d found on scientific evidence for study breaks and linking increased performance and brain function with healthy food and exercise.

‘Okay!’ I laughed. ‘Okay.’

I’d had a boyfriend before. Briefly. In year ten. A stocky, sporty boy of moderate social standing mainly on account of being okay on the footy field. I felt it was the thing to do, to have a boyfriend, so when he began paying me attention, I went along with it without really feeling any particular preference for him. And then he, well, not so much forced, but rather, coerced me. That is the word I use when I recount the story to myself. I didn’t have any particularly strong opinions about virginity, and so it didn’t seem such a terrible thing to give.

But pretty quickly I realised that for me there was nothing so awful as sex with a guy I didn’t want. Before he’d even pulled on his pants I’d explained to him that the level of pressure he’d applied was unacceptable and a relationship with him was something I could no longer countenance. I’d used that kind of language too, perhaps stupidly, because even then I’d known what the outcome would be: that he would talk and, for a little while at least, I would be known, amazingly and contradictorily, as both a prude and a slut.

But I’d learned something important about myself and my boundaries – I would take a lesson from this. I’d visited Dr Honeycott for the morning-after pill and an STI screen and called it done. I got my head down and studied hard, and decided that guys were simply not worth it.

But right from the start Nassim was different. Once a week he cooked for me. Every Monday lunchtime for four weeks we sat together on a rug under the big oak tree in the northwest corner of the school and I ate handmade falafel that still showed Nassim’s thumbprints even after frying, mujaddara (I had no idea that I could like lentils so much), homemade baba ghanouj, pan-fried flatbread with dukkha, vegetarian pumpkin kibbeh with labneh, meat kibbeh with lemon tahini, fruit cocktail with homemade ashta cream . . . and once, homemade croissants. ‘That seems a little out of left field,’ I’d said, and he’d said, ‘Hey! Don’t you restrict my culinary creativity. I cook what I like.’ And he made me describe everything I tasted, what it reminded me of, my favourite foods as a kid, the sensations, and then, when we had both eaten enough, we walked once, briskly, around the school grounds.

And all that time we talked. About our families. About Nassim’s little sister Nadia and how clever she was at gymnastics, about his dad who was funny but who was never home, about my dad and how gentle he was, and a little bit about my mum, about how she was a supercharged mover-and-shaker in the business world and just about as far from gentle as you could get.