Saturday 16 July

I wake tired. I sat in the bathroom for a long time last night, listening to music and thinking through my escape options. I’ve agreed to shop for formal dresses with Iris and Clem this morning but I’m not in the mood for shopping – I never am. I mainly find stuff online. I know my size. I know the jeans and t-shirts I like. It’s easier when they arrive at my door in a package. I hate shopping at the best of times, and I have a feeling that today won’t be one of those.

I have to be there for Iris’s sake, though. The only reason Clem and Iris are going on the same shopping expedition is because they have to share their parents’ credit card, according to Iris. I’ll be the referee so they don’t tear each other’s throats out.

‘You need a date for the formal,’ Iris says while we wait for Clem to arrive. ‘I’ve got one. At least I think I’ve got one.’

This is BIG news.

‘Who?’ I ask, and it tumbles out of her that it’s Theo Ledwidge. I don’t know him, but she says he’s gorgeous and she met him at chess club and it just happened. She says that last part as if it’s a miracle.

‘You need to hurry up and find someone so we can all go together.’

Oliver immediately pops into me head. I picture him in a tux and bow tie with fantastically neat hair. We’re dancing and he’s telling me I’m not doing it right.

Not Oliver, I tell myself, freaked out by my brain going rogue and suggesting him. I put it down to lack of sleep and the prospect of shopping. What I’m looking for in a date, I’ve just decided, is someone whose most obvious attribute is that he is not Oliver. That’s what I’m looking for in a guy: not-Oliverness.

Clem knocks on our door – kicks at it, really – and saves me from further date discussion with Iris. When I open it she yells at Iris that she wants to be in charge of the card.

‘Mum and Dad put me in charge of the card,’ Iris says, and Clem tells her to hurry up, then kicks the door shut.

We head to High Street, because Clem said that’s where the dresses are. Iris wanted the city, but she won the credit card battle, so I quietly suggested she give in on this one so we could avoid a raging fight at the tram stop.

Clem sat with her friends on the tram, and now she’s flicking through dresses in the short-and-sexy aisle, while Iris browses in the not-so-short-and-sexy aisle. Clem snipes at Iris across the shop – ‘You’re in the old woman aisle’. Iris snipes back – ‘At least I’m not a slut’.

A girl near us flinches.

Clem and Iris are fraternal twins, not identical, but they’re recognisable as sisters. Clem is shorter and has the kind of shoulders shaped by the pool. Iris has the slightly hunched look that comes from sitting at a computer all weekend. Same brown hair, though Iris’s is longer. Same fierce mouth.

It’s not really my kind of shop. Racks full of incredibly expensive clothes, all hanging under the cool gaze of a girl straight out of a fashion magazine. Her eyes are coated in dark green, and they make me think of a beautiful snake. She’s tolerating us. Buy or get the fuck out of my store, her green eyes say. And don’t touch the clothes any more than you have to.

If I had a type of shop, I think it would be one that sells clothes like Max wears. Retro, original, stylishly haphazard. She looks like she’s thrown on a collection of things and they’ve assembled themselves into effortlessly cool. Since that never happens for me, I settle for non-descript and easy to match.

Iris pushes me to try on a dress, though, and I give in. I grab one off the rack – deep blue, silk, short with flowing sleeves. Completely impractical for playing the cello. Too tight around the legs and I’d end up bowing the sleeves.

There’s only one change room free – the big one – and we all go in together and move to our corners. Iris and Clem have their backs to each other, pressed into their corners, undressing without showing skin. I know Iris and Clem fight, but I assumed there’d be an intimacy.

At Shallow Bay High, the Tripodi twins were in our class. They only seemed completely there when they were in a room together. I asked them once what it was like. ‘I’m completely my own person,’ June told me, ‘but somehow I’m Joanna, too.’ With Clem and Iris, it’s as though the thought they could be the same person sets them scrabbling against each other for freedom.

When Clem and Iris are dressed, I’m the one who zips them both up. They turn around, and the first thing they see is the other, and then their eyes shift quickly to their own reflections.

Clem’s dress is red and short, her stocky swimmer’s legs on show. She looks amazing. Iris is in a black dress that ties around her neck 1960s-style and goes all the way to the floor. She looks like a gothic mermaid, and I wonder if I’ve misjudged her level of rebellion. I need to play her some Mazzy Star. Maybe The Cure. I can see her plinking around to ‘Fade Into You’ and ‘The Love Cats’.

‘Okay?’ she asks, and I say yes at the same time that Clem makes a snorting sound. I’d say it was bitchy, but Iris immediately fires back: ‘You look huge. Turn around and check out your arse.’

Clem does, and I wonder if they were close once. If at some time Iris’s opinion mattered.

There’s quiet for a bit, while they assess themselves, assess each other.

‘Will Theo like it, do you think?’ Iris asks.

‘How much did you pay him to take you?’ Clem asks. ‘Out of curiosity.’

‘At least I have a date,’ Iris says.

There is an intimacy between them, I realise, but it’s a terrible kind where they know what to say to hurt each other and don’t hesitate to say it. You’d never talk that way to a friend.

‘I look like a mutant butterfly,’ I say as a distraction, waving at my outfit. ‘There’s something bizarre going on with the sleeves and the dress is way too short for my legs.’

‘You have great legs,’ Clem and Iris say in unison.

We continue shopping.

Iris goes into the change room to try on another dress, and I wander along the aisles, pretending to look at clothes but not really.

Clem walks over and holds a dress up against me. ‘You’d look good in this.’

‘You didn’t look fat in the red dress.’

‘I did a bit, but I don’t care. Thanks, though.’

It occurs to me that Clem is someone who might know how to get out at night. She’s the polar opposite of Iris. Street smart and only angry when it comes to her sister, really.

She looks through the rack again, checking she hasn’t missed a bargain. I flick through next to her. ‘Have you ever gone out through the portal?’ I ask, and she says no, but it’s easy. ‘You just go down there, push and – voila! You’re free.’

‘But then what?’

‘But then what what? You’re free.’

‘But what happens if you get caught?’

‘You get suspended. So make sure it’s worth it.’

Iris comes out in a shorter black dress, ending the conversation.

‘Morticia,’ Clem says, and then decides she can’t stand it anymore. She puts out her hand and demands the card. There’s some power play, but Clem wins.

She runs out of the shop yelling she’ll be back in a minute. After Iris has changed, we leave and wait for her on the street.

Clem jogs back eventually and gives Iris the card. ‘I took money out at the ATM.’

‘How much?’ Iris asks.

‘Not your business.’ She gives me what feels like an apologetic smile and says, ‘Good luck with the portal,’ then heads across the road to another shop.

Iris doesn’t talk to me all that much after Clem goes. I can’t work out if she’s hurt by Clem’s comment or mad at me. It feels like both.

Five shops later, she finally finds a dress. It’s black, but suits her even more than the others. Iris has red tones in her hair and the dress makes them obvious. She takes off her glasses and studies herself. ‘I’m wearing contacts on the night. And I’m getting SNS nails. You should book in with me.’

It’s an offer of peace, and I take it.

Iris and I seem to have a lot in common – maths, science, a deep love for Arrested Development, peanut butter and all things technical. But proximity made us friends. I don’t think we would have gravitated to each other naturally.

I don’t mean she’s not a good person. On the first night, when I was homesick, she came over to my bed and sat next to me while I told her about the farm. I needed to explain to someone how I missed the animals, the river, all that space, but how, at the same time, I was desperate to come to the city. I needed someone to understand that I could want two completely different things at the same time.

She listened, but she didn’t get it; in Iris’s mind, we’re one thing or the other. Still, she tried to make me feel better. She told me to open the calendar on my computer, and mark the holidays so I could see them coming up. I felt so grateful to her that I invited her to visit the farm on the long weekend in August.

Maybe the reason why she and Clem fight so much is that Clem is all things happening at the same time. Iris thinks about everything she says, plans her entire day. Clem sock surfs down the corridor, collides with the wall and laughs hysterically. I think back to her in that dress today – the wild red next to Iris’s sedate black. I see Clem’s mouth, grinning, next to Iris’s cautious smile. It’s as though in the womb one person was divided. Iris and Clem – two halves of the same person – looking at each other and seeing themselves, seeing a flat chest or fat stomach, when they should see something beautiful.