Val sees someone she knows and disappears, leaving me alone to navigate a sea of trimmed, vacuous hipsters. I find bottles of beer and wine in an ice bucket in the kitchen and pour myself a drink. I take a quick sip, surveying the living room from the relative obscurity of a corner by the fridge.
I look around at the groups of people laughing and talking, and I am suddenly aware of my own isolation. For a brief moment, I panic. No one is going to speak to me. It feels like failure, this involuntary solitude.
I spot Olivia sitting on the arm of a couch next to a boy. She waves to me. ‘You made it.’
‘What happened to the music?’
‘Neighbour was complaining.’
She leans over, her expression serious. ‘It’s a Newington craze-fest. Everyone here either went there or dated someone there. Seems like a bit of a social decline, don’t you think?’
‘Hanging out with your high school friends?’
‘Yeah.’
She excuses herself, pulled away by other voices. She returns a few minutes later, pulling on the arm of a girl; Val comes up behind me at the same moment.
‘This is Dresden,’ Olivia introduces. ‘She went to Barker too.’
Val shakes her hand.
‘What’s your connection to Newington?’ I ask.
‘My boyfriend worked there as a sports coach for one term,’ the girl says. ‘He was also a mentor to a lot of these boys.’
‘Wait, you’re dating Mark?’ Olivia’s mouth is open and frozen.
The girl nods. ‘He’s the one that looks out of place, evidently.’
Olivia is still shocked. ‘Noah never told me. But then again, he never tells me anything.’
‘We met him outside,’ I say. ‘He went to get more drinks with Noah.’
‘Is that where they went?’
Olivia nods with authority. ‘Noah likes to be stolen away.’
The four of us are talking about the boys. If this were a scene in a film, we wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test.
‘I’m going to go and spread my wings,’ Val says. I watch her steer through a stream of people, leaving me to pretend to care about the significant others of my best friend and a stranger.
‘Where are you guys living?’ Olivia asks.
‘Mark’s in Darlinghurst, but I’m studying in Melbourne.’
‘Long distance is impossible,’ I say.
The girl looks at me as though I’ve offended her. ‘It’s not impossible. We make it work.’
‘Of course. What are you studying?’
‘Business and finance. I’m the only child of Chinese immigrants. I suppose it was inevitable.’ She flashes her perfect teeth, satin black hair sliding to part her face. ‘I met Mark here in Sydney when I was interning at EY.’
‘EY?’
‘Ernst and Young.’
Olivia and I nod politely.
‘We got a lot of bad press because Mark was going through a divorce. That’s sort of why I left. Then I won a scholarship to Melbourne Uni. It worked out well in the end, though of course I’d rather be here in Sydney. Mark flies down almost every weekend, so I can’t complain. Oh look, they’re back!’
Noah and Mark walk in with bags in each hand. Their entrance is greeted by a soft cheer. I feel an urge to move towards them. I want to untether myself from the conversation with this perfect Chinese girl. Her perfectly delicate frame, perfect cheekbones and perfect hair. Even her name, despite its novelty, seems perfect. Who gives their Chinese daughter a name like Dresden and then makes her study finance? Who says, ‘evidently’?
‘Which one is your boyfriend?’ she asks me, narrowing her eyes.
‘I don’t have one.’
‘Oh, are you friends with someone here?’
‘This girl,’ I say, putting an arm around Olivia. ‘We’re best friends.’
‘Oh! How sweet,’ she says. ‘I didn’t even know that was still a thing.’
‘What? Friends?’
‘Best friends.’
I walk away. I don’t know how to continue the conversation. I help the boys unpack beer, vodka, whisky onto the kitchen counter. They ask me what I want to drink.
‘Something healthy,’ I say. ‘I have an audition in a few days.’
Mark hands me a glass of clear liquid. ‘It’s nutritious,’ he says, smiling.
‘What is it?’ I bring it under my nose and smell nothing.
‘H-two-oh,’ he says, patting my shoulder and nodding like a football coach.
‘Your girlfriend is nice.’
He looks at me more closely. ‘You met Dresden?’
‘She’s very pretty.’ I keep my shoulders square to his face.
‘Smart too,’ he adds.
‘I know. She’s Asian.’
He laughs, his whole face breaking into a crinkled map of rivers.
Noah calls out from the other end of the bench where he is slicing lemons into wedges. His white shirt clings to him with sweat.
‘Don’t get too close to that girl, Mark—she’s dangerous.’
Mark raises a brow.
We watch Noah hand a drink to Olivia, who is still talking to Dresden, theirs heads dipped forward as though sharing some wild speculation.
‘I’ve got to make sure these girls are not misbehaving,’ Mark says. He walks away. I return to my state of aloneness in the corner of the kitchen.
The rest of the evening passes uneventfully, until someone spikes Val’s drink and she throws up in the bathroom for more than half an hour. Mark and I end up taking her to hospital, because we are the only sober people. My car is parked too far away so Noah insists we take his parents’ BMW.
Mark’s girlfriend wants to come but he tells her to go back to his place. She has a seven o’clock flight to Melbourne the following morning.
‘Don’t come back too late,’ she calls out to him as we leave.
Val staggers along the footpath, one arm slung over my shoulders.
‘Do you want me to carry you?’ Mark offers.
‘I get motion sickness when I’m being piggy-backed,’ she says.
‘I’ll carry you in front of me.’
‘Like a lover?’
He bends down to lift her, her body falls back into his arms like a sack of cement.
‘Get the door.’
I run ahead as instructed.
When he lays her down in the back seat, her hair gets tangled in his cufflinks.
‘Who wears cufflinks to a party?’
‘Dresden gave them to me.’
We get lost on the way to the hospital because neither of us know how to use the sat nav in the car and neither of us knows the area. I take out my phone only to find it dead.
‘Where’s your phone?’ I ask. He pats his pants.
‘I must’ve left it at Noah’s.’
In the back seat, Val is half weeping, half moaning, head lolling against the seatbelt. We take turns looking back like concerned parents. We drive through McDonald’s to ask for directions. We get fifty-cent cones and French fries to share because suddenly I am starving.
‘Don’t tell my girlfriend I’m doing this with you,’ he says.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever see your girlfriend again.’