Thursday 1 September

MCA is in West Melbourne; it’s a government school, no fees, but entry is by audition for the performance students and folio presentation for the visual arts students. You do the standard curriculum, too, but it fits around the arts stuff, which gets more priority than in a regular school.

This, miraculously, could make moving schools a good thing. And it’s Max’s school. She’s about to graduate at the end of next term, which is basically ninety percent exams, so it’s not like we’d cross paths much – and that’s better when you’re going out with someone, we agree.

Oh my god, please let me get in.

The school itself is a six-storey brutalist building from the early 1970s. So. Cool. It looks more like an office block than a school, to be honest, but over the road there’s a shady park where students go to lie on the grass and stare at the sky, eat lunch, commune with nature and get inspired to new heights of artiness, presumably, before returning to the brute.

Art studio time is designed with integration between disciplines, so there’d be a chance for me to work on set and costume design with theatre arts students, and do some filmmaking as well as printmaking and photography. I tumble out of the folio presentation interview happy-drunk like an over-pollinated bee into a world of bigger possibility, brimming with all the next things I might do.

‘They liked my power pocket dress, too.’ It’s a perfectly simple dress completely covered in different sized pockets. You don’t even need a bag at all when you wear it. It’s actually hyper-convenient. You do need to remember which pocket you’ve put your Myki card into, though. But that’s another story, from another day – Tuesday, actually – involving two very rude tram inspectors. I did find it, eventually.

Max slips her hand into mine. ‘Of course they liked it. It’s genius.’

‘I didn’t even need to explain the context of women and not enough pockets; they were all aha, very witty, empowering about it.’ Their response merged ‘flattering’ and ‘just as well’, seeing as I only last week found out about the feminist implications of the tragic absence of pockets in women’s clothes – from Clare, natch.

‘They said they’d let me know within a few days. What if I don’t get in?’

‘You were in there for quite a while.’ Max is smiling. ‘I take that as a good sign.’