THE NIGHT THAT CHANGED ME

The party was in Sydney, in an apartment full of people I didn’t know. Beautiful people, funny people, smart people. A friend, Penny, had dragged me along. I do remember what I was wearing. I’ll always remember that, I suppose. Earlier that year I’d found, in a charity shop, a green-and-black-checked vinyl trench coat with a pointed collar and a neat belt. Inside the vinyl I sweated like the inside of a car, but it was worth it. I had a little skirt on underneath, and green pointed boots. I kept drinking, waiting for someone to notice me, to speak to me, to find me funny, or interesting, or to like my careful green trench, to notice how witty it was, how ironic. But none of these things happened.

Penny stayed in the kitchen, running her hand down the arm of someone called Jeff. She tilted her head back and laughed, revealing the long line of her throat. That head tilt, that laugh, that hand slipping easily down a muscled arm: I couldn’t do it, couldn’t quite understand it. When I tried, the laugh came out broken, the hand too firm on the arm, the head thrown back so fiercely that I could hear my own neck crick. I’d watched it right through high school but even now, at 20, I still couldn’t understand it. It looked like a performance, all of it – the