‘Tuesday. No problemo,’ said Danny.

‘Hi Cathy,’ said Leonie. ‘You wanna come in? Come hang out with us.’

‘Ah, no thanks,’ said Cathy, looking with distaste around the room. ‘My room smells better. But any chance of a different spin?’ On these Leonie-days the depressing music they played leaked through the wall from Danny’s front room into her bedroom. Cathy had been making Secret Cake plans and had already banged on the wall a number of times, careful not to rough up George Clooney’s face, and Leonie had shouted ‘Sorry, Cathy!’ and turned it down, but then Danny had just rapped back, a shave-and-a-haircut rhythm, and turned the music up again.

‘What’s wrong, my twisted sister?’ said Danny. ‘Even unplugged Nirvana a bit too hard for you?’

‘Too try-hard, more like. How can you tell what he’s even singing about, anyway?’

‘Don’t dis the ’bain.’

‘“Dis”? You’re not a gangster, Danny.’

‘Yet.’

Leonie laughed at him. ‘We can totally put something else on, Cathy.’ Leonie started sifting through Danny’s vinyl. ‘Anything here take your fancy? Blur, Björk, Elastica, Pavement.’

‘Not bloody Pavement.’ The days they played Pavement were the worst – those songs were barely songs in Cathy’s opinion, the way they jangled away and Danny jangled away with them on his guitar. If that was all he was aspiring to, he might just make it.

‘Come help me choose,’ said Leonie, so Cathy came and perched primly on an upside-down crate after inspecting the surface of it for grime, as Leonie flicked the records for her to see.

‘No, not Björk, too weird,’ said Cathy. ‘Not Blur – they sound okay but they’re always taking the piss.’

‘There might actually be some Twisted Sister in there,’ said Danny from across the room.

‘Ha ha, Danny. Oh, yeah, I guess Elastica would be okay, poppy enough.’ Leonie started to unsheath Elastica and pulled the stylus off Nirvana while Danny was mid-jangle. ‘Oh,’ he said, with a complaining upward inflection, like a toddler.

‘You’ll be alright, Dan,’ said Leonie. She dropped the needle down and the opening strains of Elastica’s ‘Line Up’ started out of the speakers.

‘What about you, Leonie? Tuesday?’ Cathy asked.

‘Count me in. I always love a good Secret Cake Day.’

For the last two years Cathy had run Danny’s ‘official’ party with all his white-boy mates, just the way Hessel wanted it, and then, during the following week, she and Bette had run the ‘unofficial’ one – the ‘bootleg’, Danny called it, with Danny, Leonie, Cathy, Becky and Bette. The big surprise was that while Secret Cake Day was Cathy’s workaround to Hessel’s hard line, once approached, Bette was absolutely on board. More than on board – she drove it.

Two years ago, one afternoon after Danny’s twelfth birthday but before school went back, the three girls piled in the back of Bette’s car. Danny sat in the front where he could have control of the discman, and Bette drove them the one hour to Bendigo. The windows were down, the paddocks flew by. They were squished but happy. Bette stopped at a cake shop and then took them to the old Bendigo hotel where they all drank Coke and ate cake and played pool and Bette sat back and drank a glass of sherry. And afterwards Bette dropped Leonie and Becky at their houses and back home did an admirable job of telling Hessel that only the three of them had been in Bendigo, buying school shoes or textbooks or some other valid school-based enterprise which she knew he would be supremely uninterested in. It was so successful that they repeated it exactly the same the next year, and a tradition was born.