7

EVE DID WRITE an article about the ball, although in light of other revelations that night, its significance faded rapidly.

A week before the ball, we were standing in the bathroom at the end of our corridor. She was behind me, pulling back the red straps of my dress while I practised taping my chest. Our voices echoed off the tiles like one.

‘Of course, the whole event is still fucked.’ Eve had been deploring the theme for several days now.

‘Because of the cost?’

‘Yeah, and the pageantry of it. All this dressing up.’ She motioned to my ref lection in the bathroom mirror.

‘Thanks.’

‘You look great, obviously. I’m just saying: will it be worth it when you rip the bandaids off your nipples in the morning?’

Although that was not something I had ever done, or considered doing, I made a mental note not to try it.

‘I think we’re making the same point,’ I said.

Eve looked at me sceptically in the mirror. Her hands, still holding the dress, were cold against my bare back.

‘The pageantry is expensive,’ I continued. ‘There’s a high threshold to entry.’

Under the hum of the fluorescent lights, Eve’s face glowed with purpose.

So Eve wrote about a more persistent problem—one that got right to the root not just of the event, but the whole institution. For research, she spoke to the student organising committee. It comprised seven members, but Eve stopped interviewing after five, finding their answers identical. The interviews went pretty much as follows:

Q: What’s the budget for this year’s ball?

A: One hundred thousand dollars.

Q: Is that normal?

A: It’s the same as last year.

Q: And you spend it on . . .

A: It’s tight.

Q: ??

A: There’s the catering, the design, the DJ, the add-ons. And there’s also the competition. You know, you always want to be better than last year’s. You want to be the year that’s remembered.

This phrase was repeated a lot: the year that’s remembered.

So these interchangeable boys lost sleep and made phone calls and ran around the grounds at dawn on the day of the ball, screaming at freshmen in cherry pickers that they’d have to work faster if they wanted to assemble the Arc de Triomphe in time for the DJ to set up—all with a degree of gracelessness, desperation and attention to detail that they would have mocked in a reality TV star planning her wedding.

And the master, when interviewed, sat back in a plush leather armchair, his fingers delicately steepled, and said to Eve, ‘It’s a wonderful responsibility for them. A fantastic thing to put on their CVs. I mean, have you ever organised a party for two thousand people, with a one-hundred-thousand-dollar budget, and made a profit?’

Eve blinked a few times, her pen hovering over her pad, before she acknowledged that no, indeed she had not.

THE NIGHT BEGAN inauspiciously, with Pre’s in a sweaty bedroom.

When I knocked on Balth’s door, I felt like a high school girl. It was as if I had somehow recrossed the Rubicon, and was once again a cringing, peer-obsessed creature, deferring authorship of my personality to the imagined gaze of others. Claudia’s dress, so delicate and soft, pulled and tugged in painful places where it was fastened with Hollywood tape. And the expensive silk, crisp breeze and absence of bandaids had conspired to expose my nipples, which stood straight and loud: lighthouses for mockery.

Balth opened the door and, in a moment, re-erected my self-esteem. All because when he first saw me, he didn’t say anything at all. Instead, he stuttered.

‘You look . . . um, I . . .’

‘Thanks.’

‘No, it’s just . . . I don’t—I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but you look beautiful.’

‘Beautiful?’ I said, in what I hoped was a wry tone.

‘Well, it’s just that, you know . . . I mean, obviously I look amazing, so it’s a relief to see that you won’t be letting me down. I’ve been fretting about it all day.’

It was not so much the look of him but the smell that warranted comment. His hair was gelled into a sticky glob of bottled testosterone; his deodorant was obviously not a subtle bar but a loud, aerosol affair, applied throughout his room like air freshener, and beneath it all was not a hint but an affront of cologne which I imagine was sold as ‘musky’ but was instead reminiscent of fermented apples. The final touch was a scented candle, which he had inexplicably positioned in the centre of his desk, and which tried to insist—by shouting resolutely over the aromatic din—that we were in an expensive homewares store.

Once I’d crossed the threshold, he popped a bottle of champagne, his hands slipping around the neck so much that I could only assume they were very sweaty. We drank it out of mugs. Mine had brown grime just under the rim, indicating where the water level usually sat. The bubbles of the champagne frothed just beneath it.

People dripped into the room, and the girls took turns complimenting each other on their appearance and being self-deprecating in response.

‘Michaela, you look amazing, I love that dress.’

‘Oh, it’s not mine. I borrowed it.’

‘Still, it looks really good on you.’

‘Really? It doesn’t even fit. It’s held together with Hollywood tape.’

‘Love that. It works every time.’

My turn: ‘You look amazing. Where’s that dress from?’

‘Oh I actually had it at home already. I bought it ages ago but wasn’t sure if the cut was a bit weird . . .’

‘No, it’s amazing. Looks really good.’

And so on, until someone declared it was time to get going.

Before we filed into the corridor, Balth asked, ‘Are you ready to go?’

‘Yes.’ I laughed. ‘I don’t have any other plans.’

Then, before he turned to leave, he touched my arm, in a movement that felt like a leap of faith. I couldn’t tell whether he did it so I might catch him, or so that everybody else would see: to mark me as his Date, like marking a map with an X for treasure. For the rest of the evening, every time I saw Balth on the other side of the room or found him in the crowd, I would feel again the soft brush of that touch. It danced through my mind, sidestepping in and out of significance.

EVEN MY DEEP and firmly held belief that the event was an indulgence did nothing to alter the experience of it, except perhaps to qualify the memory—to add a caveat that if it was the best night of my life, then it was only because I, being not the best version of myself, had given in to it. If I were invited today, I’d go again, and I would probably perform the same mental tap dance as I did at the time: classifying myself as a spectator; ignoring the reality that, like any party, attendance is participation, and when you’re off the sidelines and into the fray, there’s no vantage from which to just spectate.

The St Thomas’ quadrangle, a beautiful sandstone-framed patch of grass which rolled gently downhill, with a cement path cutting it in half, looked like a film set. On one side an enormous structure had been erected that looked exactly like the Arc de Triomphe, and felt to the enquiring hand like papier-mâché. It was held in place by ropes and sandbags, which, combined with drugs, alcohol and high heels, proved a trip hazard that resulted in at least twenty sprained ankles, five sprained wrists, and one broken nose (a clean face plant). On the other side, at the bottom of the slope, was a row of food stalls, white-tented like a village fair, and through it roamed an array of fire eaters, stilt walkers, and jugglers. There were, indeed, poodles, which were held on leashes by waiters at first, and gradually let off so they could be patted and picked up and pictured on Instagram. To say that my gasps upon entering the quadrangle and taking all this in were of disgust and not delight would be a downright lie.

It was the most extravagant event I’d ever attended and likely ever will, and at no point did the thought that I did not deserve this extravagance—that no one did, that I was greedy and gluttonous for even partaking—cross my mind. This current congregation, plucked and gelled and taped to their physical peak, was very much a pampered, irrelevant minority. But at the time, more exhilarating than a cigarette-thick line of cocaine snorted off a microwaved plate in the junior common room, was the thought that this—this party, this extravaganza—was the place to be, and that everyone except us was missing out.

‘It’s a lot, isn’t it?’ Nick said, when we met in the line for a crêpe.

‘Too much?’

He smiled and gave me that sideways look, as if he were passing a note under the desk in class. ‘No such thing. At least, not until after the fireworks.’

‘Literal fireworks?’

‘Yep, like New Year’s Eve.’

I rolled my eyes, but also asked what time they were likely to go off, so I could make sure I was outside to catch them.

‘Where’s Emily?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Bathroom, I think. And where’s . . .’

‘Balthazar.’

‘I love that guy. I didn’t know you were—’

‘We’re not.’

He laughed—a big baritone hoot, which filled me like helium when it should have brought me down. It was the way he laughed when he thought he’d got under someone’s skin, and it was so Puckish, so pleased with itself, that you had to laugh along. ‘I was going to say friends.’

‘We are friends.’

‘So where’s your friend?’

‘The last I saw he was berating the DJ for not playing more Avril Lavigne.’

‘He must be very drunk.’

We lost each other to this blur of heels and blow-dries and dinner suits. Our conversations, like the champagne we drank, popped and fizzed and went nowhere.

NICK’S ASSESSMENT WAS correct. Balthazar was very drunk indeed.

I did not see him again that night, but over the following days word spread quickly about how his evening ended. I personally facilitated the rumour, retelling the tale several times in order to eclipse more salacious stories which might have been told about me. Some time around three in the morning, Balth stumbled back to his room, clutching a kebab from Istanbul on King. Lying in bed, the tender shredded meat overspilling onto his chest and staining his white shirt, he crumpled the wrapping and threw it on his desk, where the scented candle, still valiantly pushing on, set it alight.

A clumsy smothering using the closest thing to hand—his recently removed dinner jacket—was not enough to dull the f lames. Indeed, the jacket too caught alight. Soon there were smoke alarms, and fire brigades, and people wandering out of rooms, emerging from sleep, or red-eyed from kick-ons, or awake and aggravated with their date in hand, only moments away from sealing the deal on an evening that up until now had gone exactly to plan.

The fire brigade interviewed the college master and asked many, many times about the fireworks.

‘But why?’ the fireman kept saying. ‘It’s not some kind of holiday, is it?’ (In fact, it was just a Friday night in May.)

So the college was fined thousands of dollars by the local council for neglecting to seek a permit for the fireworks, and for the first time in decades the ball did not make a profit. For this reason, it secured its status as a year that was remembered—and all thanks to a persistent scented candle.

By the time this drama unfolded, I was in bed, my pillow wet with mascara-black tears.

AFTERS WERE IN the Jace, which was short for the JCR, which was short for the junior common room. Places, like people, were caught up in the same nicknaming mania that turned Jack to Sackers, and tricked people who knew the code into thinking they had anything in common.

I suspected that Afters would involve everyone sitting on the floor, heels kicked to one side, playing drinking games. I did not anticipate that the games would be so gladiatorial: bared teeth and flared nostrils, sitting up straight to attention.

We started with King’s Cup, which Emily lost. To her credit, she drank the whole cup—a mix of beer and vodka and red and white wine—in one go. I gagged watching her.

Sackers was in his element, combining snorting laughs with hand clapping and fist banging on the little wooden coffee table, which f linched in response. The noise was oppressive. I took another sip of wine, swirling the sweetness in my mouth, and tried to focus on swallowing.

Next we played Never Have I Ever. The rules were simple: we went around the room clockwise, taking turns to list something we had never done. If someone else had done it, they had to drink. Innocuous enough. Except the things that had never been done were all graphic and pointed.

Never have I ever had a threesome.

Never have I ever done butt stuff.

And so it went, witless and unrelenting, until Sackers said something I couldn’t catch.

Everyone roared. Sackers slapped the table and put his arm around me like we were friends.

‘What?’ I asked Claudia, who was at my side in a silk slip, not unlike the dress she had lent me, leaning forward, her hand covering her open mouth.

She looked at me and laughed. ‘Who is it?’

‘What?’ I was yelling. ‘I couldn’t hear. What did he say?’

‘He said’—Claudia was yelling too; I turned my ear towards her and felt the pressure of her shout—‘never have I ever had sex with Michaela Burns.’

The penny must have visibly dropped, landed even with a clang, because another roar erupted. The room had been watching me, and Sackers shook me harder, laughing and shouting, ‘Now she gets it, now she gets it,’ with the exact same volume and intonation as if he were a football commentator reporting on a tie-breaking goal.

Slowly, his face red and his dark eyebrows raised slightly, suspended in a self-mocking stance, Nick put his beer to his lips and tipped the can back, finishing it.

The room reverberated.

Watching Nick, snatches of my first night at Fairfax—the day my mother bought me a jumper and held me when I asked her not to go—came back to me.

A slow-revolving ceiling fan.

The splattering sound of vomit hitting the walls of a metal bin.

Pain, not sharp but steady, where he thrust inside me.

I didn’t know where we were up to in the game, or why anyone was still laughing, or why Nick, his dark eyebrows raised in blank amusement, wouldn’t meet my gaze.

Claudia grabbed my wrist. ‘You never told me that.’

It sounded like an accusation.

‘It was in O Week. We haven’t spoken about it. I didn’t know.’

‘You didn’t know?’ Claudia’s voice was still loud, but it was no longer a shout. For a moment, I thought she looked concerned.

‘No, I was so drunk . . .’

‘You couldn’t remember having sex?’

Flashes returned to me. Stumbling up the steps. ‘I knew I’d got with someone, but I was wasted.’ The smell of alcohol on our breath. ‘I couldn’t have told you his name.’ Hands on a clammy back. ‘Or picked him out of a line-up.’

What had looked like concern was apparently confusion, which collapsed into a broad smile. ‘That’s fucked,’ Claudia said.

And because the alcohol made my thoughts stumble over each other, or because the laughter was mounting to a throbbing in my ears, or because I felt that every eye was trained on me, and at the same time like I didn’t exist—had never existed at all—I laughed with her.

I stayed for another few rounds, until I had sat long enough and laughed enough that nobody could accuse me of being a bad sport. Then, feeling suddenly soul-numbingly sober, I walked back to Fairfax, swiped into my room and, crouching on my bed in darkness, I cried.

More than my vague recollections, Sackers’s smile, and the knowing way he looked at me before he posed the question, taunted me. I could bear quite easily—indeed, had borne for several weeks—the hazy clutch of bodies that f loated in my memory. But it was the flogging of these bodies for a laugh, for a story, that I couldn’t stomach. As I drifted into sleep, I felt the eyes of the room, like a weight, still on me.

THE NEXT MORNING, with a heavy head and a sickness that shuffled gracelessly between bowel and stomach, I reached for my phone.

The screen was full of notifications. There were news alerts I dismissed, as well as texts from Claudia.

I showered and brushed my teeth then sat on the edge of my bed, towel wrapped around me and hair wet and dripping down the back of my neck. I opened the texts. There were several from very early in the morning, asking where I was and if I’d left, with spelling mistakes that looked like she’d emptied a bag of Scrabble tiles. Below these barely decipherable missives was a text from nine am:

I think you should talk to Emily. She’s upset.

Since the shower, my nausea had faded to an undercurrent. I opened my blinds, registering for the first time what a glorious desktop-background day it was, with fluffy clouds placed against a flat blue sky as if by a graphic designer.

I considered getting a coffee but, still in my towel, with an oppressive tightness in my chest, the thought of clothes and shoes was overwhelming. I lay back on the bed, my wet hair making a pool of the pillow, and replied.

Oh no! Why?

You didn’t tell her you used to sleep with Nick

It wasn’t an ongoing thing?

It was once!

In O Week!

The staccato pacing of these texts: each self-contained, a little stone thrown in my defence, undermined me.

Ok, well she’s really upset. I think you should apologise or something

That was a very Claudia expression. ‘Or something’ was offered as a sweetener, as if apologising wasn’t my only option, although it was so vague and unconstructive it served to underscore that apologising was, really, the only option.

Cringing at how quickly I had switched to defensiveness, scrambling for a f lurry of excuses, I decided to get the apology over and done with. I put on running leggings, a sports bra and my Fairfax jumper, as if to convince my body that it was young and healthy, not dehydrated and ill-treated.

I knocked on Emily’s door and, hearing nothing, entered. It was dark and a mouldy smell emanated from a pile of unwashed laundry. I felt like I was transgressing, crawling into a very dark and private space. She was lying in her bed and the orange plastic curtains were drawn across the window, which lit them up with a white square, like a film projector. The room had an orange tint, so it was not so much dark and dank like a cave, but dark and plastic, like Tupperware with pasta sauce left at the bottom of a bag.

‘Here.’ I handed her a bottle of Gatorade, which I had bought the day before and now offered up with an air of self-sacrifice that probably looked to her, in all its earnestness, more like self-importance.

‘Thanks.’ She sat up in bed and nursed the bright blue drink between her bent knees. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’

‘No worries.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, just have it. It’s a gift.’

‘Thanks.’ She popped the lid, and took a tentative sip.

‘How was your night?’

‘So fun. I stayed till sunrise. How did you end up?’ Her voice was acquiring a clipped formality that I’d heard her use when talking to the master or to her parents on the phone. She hated conf lict, perhaps even more than I did, and shared my instinct that it was better not addressed when it could be suffocated with small talk.

It was her smile, however, that made me uncomfortable. It was so conspicuously an effort of will.

I decided to get to the point. ‘Claudia told me that you’re upset about me and Nick.’

‘Claudia said that?’

‘Yeah, she told me this morning.’

‘Oh, I must have been very drunk last night.’ She laughed and shook her head, as if to reprimand her former self. ‘It’s fine, really. I don’t know why Claudia would have said that.’

‘I’m sorry. I know you like him . . .’

‘I don’t like him,’ Emily said, so quickly it was unconvincing. ‘We’ve slept together a few times, and obviously we’re not exclusive or anything. I wouldn’t make any claims to own him. He’s not mine.’

‘No, I know that. But you’d like to know if one of your friends had slept with him.’

‘Well, yeah. I guess that’s right.’ Emily laughed and sipped her Gatorade.

‘I’m sorry.’ I pulled out the chair at her desk, then seeing it was covered with clothes, sat on the floor instead.

‘Oops,’ Emily said, motioning to the chair. ‘I’ll move my shit.’

‘No, no, it’s fine—I’m comfortable here,’ I said, with the carpet scratching at my leggings and her wardrobe door digging into my back. ‘I was just going to say, the reason I didn’t tell you—and please believe this isn’t just an excuse—is that I didn’t know until last night that it was Nick.’

‘But you know Nick.’

‘Yeah, I know. But we had sex on the first night of O Week, and I remembered having sex, but I was too drunk to remember the guy’s name or, like, anything about him.’

‘You didn’t remember what he looked like?’

‘Nope. I remembered that he had thick eyebrows.’

‘Nick does have thick eyebrows.’

‘I doubt that’s how he’d want to be remembered sexually. I’m the guy with the huge . . .’

‘Eyebrows,’ we said in unison. Emily was laughing now, her shoulders deflated, her head leaning back against the pillow.

‘Well, now you know,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise until Sackers made a joke about it, otherwise, I’d like to think I would’ve told you.’

‘Fucking Sackers.’ Emily reserved a special contempt for Sackers because—although he was not the first boy to tell her, ‘You’re really pretty for an Asian’—he was the most recent. The presence in our conversation of a common enemy drew us closer. She looked at me, eyes rounded with concern. ‘God, you must have really totalled yourself.’

‘Yeah, I guess so. I don’t remember much.’

She fiddled with the Gatorade bottle, flicking the lid on and off. ‘But it was . . . you know . . . you’re okay and everything?’

‘Oh yeah, I’m fine. Like, would I have made the same choices sober? Probably not. Was it different to any other time two people get drunk and have sex? Probably not.’

‘We’ve all been there,’ Emily said.

The possibility that I might spend the morning in quiet, comforting conversation, turning past events over and holding them up to new, gentle-toned lights, was extinguished by a knock at the door. I opened it to find Claudia and Portia, looking like shells of their former selves, bearing a problem, which was deemed much larger than my own.

Portia’s hair, which had been blow-dried to perfection the night before, now hung limp. Her eyes were glassy and rimmed with black globules of mascara, one of which had fallen and stuck lower down her cheek. She was wearing grey Qantas pyjamas, the type handed out on business-class flights. The flying kangaroo sat flat against her skinny-girl chest.

Emily got up so Portia could take her spot on the bed. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I lost everything,’ Portia cried, putting her head in her hands, her bony shoulders shaking with sobs.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Everything. It’s all gone.’ She sniffled, and wiped a sleeve on her little ski-jump nose. I wondered what kind of act might look dirty on her, when even wiping her nose on her pyjamas managed to look so expensive and clean. ‘I lost my handbag.’

Claudia didn’t miss a beat. ‘Is that your Lucy Folk one?’

‘Yes,’ must have been the answer, because the crying started again, harder.

Claudia continued, stroking Portia’s back with uncharacteristic tenderness. ‘It’s okay, I’m sure you’ll be able to buy a new one. They’re always selling those bags second-hand. What was in the bag?’

‘My room key, my phone, which had all my pictures on it . . .’

‘Surely your pictures will be in the cloud,’ I said.

‘Not the ones of last night, though.’ She looked at me the way I imagined I sometimes looked at her: like I was actually stupid.

‘I have quite a few of us from last night,’ Emily said.

Portia’s head straightened. ‘Can you send them to me?’

I passed Emily her phone, which was on the floor near my feet.

Claudia started counting off items on the fingers of one hand, still stroking Portia like an animal with the other. ‘Okay, so the bag, the phone, the key—we can damage control this. Anything else?’

Her lower lip wobbled. She mumbled something starting with m.

‘What?’

‘My medallion.’

I assumed I’d misheard. ‘What?’

‘My medallion. You know: the little gold coins they had at the grazing table last night that said “St Thomas’ College ball” and had the date engraved?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’ll never get that back.’

I inspected her anthropologically, as if through a glass display case. ‘What were you going to do with it?’

‘It was going to be such a nice memento.’

‘But—’ I wasn’t heard over the sobs, which were even louder now.

Claudia, with a look, suggested I drop it.

‘For what?’ I said. ‘Like to show your children?’

‘Exactly.’ Her limp hair parted across her beautiful face. For the first time, she was looking at me like I was someone who really got it.