Her parents sat back and let her do it. Bette showed some mild interest, as if it was something she had never actually thought of doing herself, as if giving a kid a birthday party was some quirky idea that Cathy had come up with all on her own. Hessel, however, showed zero interest, hiding away in his shed and playing with his motorbikes and his horses.

That was, until Danny’s eleventh birthday.

At Danny’s eleventh birthday party – an outdoor military operation orientation game with water balloon grenades – Hessel was there, prowling the sidelines, watching on. Leonie was there for the first time too – the only girl – and she was far and away the best at everything. Cathy remembered Danny being chased by a gang of water-bombing pursuers, Leonie hardest on his heels, and him hollering at Cathy every time he went past her, ‘Blow the damn whistle, Kitty Cat!’ and Cathy, then fifteen, being unable to blow the damn whistle because she was laughing too hard at Leonie’s complete dominance.

By then Danny and Leonie had been best friends for nearly a year. At the start of grade four they were teamed together in mixed footy and they’d wiped the floor with the rest of their year. They were instant friends and spent the rest of that year practising kick-to-kick, exploring the local creeks, sharing cassettes.

But that night, after all Danny’s friends had taken their lolly bags and gone home, when Bette, Hessel, Cathy and Danny sat down to their ‘special’ family dinner of lamb chops and sprinkles on ice cream, Hessel picked up Cathy’s invitation list, laid it in the middle of the dinner table, and crossed off Leonie’s name. Cathy had gone to protest – maybe Hessel didn’t understand that Leonie was Danny’s best friend. Hessel was, after all, completely unaware of the social lives of his children. She’d opened her mouth to tell him, but Hessel made sure she closed it again. He made himself clear.

And Cathy was a fast learner. Quickly, she understood the new line, and where it was, and that she was not to cross it, Danny either. And they never crossed it again.

But they did find a way around it.

‘Danny. Secret Cake next Tuesday,’ she said.

She’d knocked on his bedroom door and opened it to find Leonie sprawled on his rug, reading the back of a record while Danny cradled his electric guitar in his lap, leaning his head towards his tinny practice amp as he played. It was the weekend before Danny’s fourteenth birthday. Nirvana’s unplugged album was jangling out of Danny’s reclaimed speakers from the seventies – monolithic obelisks of fake wood and black-and-gold woven mesh.

Hessel and Bette were out for the day so Leonie was over, as she often was on days like that – she had been doing it for the past few years, sneaking over, hiding out in Danny’s room. Cathy didn’t know how Leonie could stand it, being cooped up in her little brother’s disgusting room like that. Danny had banned Bette from cleaning in there, and there was a certain odour, an indeterminate fog of something Cathy called ‘Eau D’Stinky Bro’. But Leonie didn’t seem to care. She didn’t seem at all concerned about lying full-length on Danny’s grubby rug. Perhaps fourteen-year-old girls were impervious to the inherent disgusting-ness of nearly fourteen-year-old boys. At the ripe old age of seventeen, Cathy couldn’t remember.