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about my manifesto?
    My phone rang.
    ‘You know, now would be the perfect time for Project Mansion, Hannah,’ the voice at the other end purred. Iz preferred to start a phone call by leaping straight into conversation.
    I laughed. Project Mansion had started when we were fifteen. We hated the small country school we went to and bonded over a mutual desire to leave it, and all of the germs that occupied it, as soon as we could. Of course, we would beextraordinarily wealthy within months of making said move: Iz as an internationally renowned chef with her own Oprah Winfrey-style TV show, and me as a world-class actress, which was what I was positive I would be back then. This wealth, naturally, would enable us to buy mansions in every city we fancied. Hence the name.
    Even though life hadn’t
quite
panned out the way we had imagined, we were still young, and somewhere underneath the schoolgirl frivolity a real plan to move overseas together sat quietly, knitting jumpers and sipping tea, just waiting for us to be ready.
    ‘Oh, come
ON
!’ Iz squealed and clapped her hands. ‘Admit I’m right. Neither of us is tied down; we’re young and unattached…’
    She paused. ‘I don’t mean to be insensitive about Jesse. I just mean sometimes, you know, a break-up can be a great time for a fresh start and stuff…and these times when you’re free and in your twenties are precious, you know? And, and, well, maybe
Gloss
could find you a job on one of their overseas mags?’
    ‘But I just started here!’
    ‘Well, we wouldn’t go
straightaway
…’
    I thought for a second. ‘New York?’
    ‘Too cold at this time of the year. How about Amsterdam? We could live with Dec until we find our feet and our first million euro!’ Her voice smacked of genuine excitement; this was a plan that actually seemed feasible to her.
    Declan was Iz’s older brother. He was an events manager at one of those hyper-modern, groovy companies housed in a terrifyingly hip office that made the rest of the street look like a medieval camping ground.
    I’d always had a bit of a crush on Dec. He had simultaneously formed the foundation of my teenage insecurities and my sucrose-laden daydreams. He was something of a god at school – not only was he Very, Very Good-Looking, all tall and toned without being bulky, with perennially tanned skin from surfing, chestnut hair and warm, brown eyes, he was the first to get his licence, the first to lose his virginity, and the first to be suspended for smoking dope on the back seat of the school bus. All the key ingredients to rule the school.
    I remembered sleeping over at Iz’s as a teenager and wearing a push-up bra under my pyjamas, even to bed, just because he might see my teeny mounds masquerading as breasts during the run from the bathroom to the bedroom, or at the breakfast table, and that, obviously, was unthinkable. He used to make me blush simply by asking me how I was doing, and I would trip up steps when he waved at me in the quad at lunch, and on the occasions Iz and I rode home with him after school I imagined how it might feel to be his Real-Life girlfriend.
    I’d never go near him now, of course. Partly because it would be
completely
weird: he had taken the shape of a (kind of) brother over the past nine or so years – and had lived overseas for near all of that time – but also because he had possibly the most stunning other half that had ever mutated from a single DNA cell – Pia.
    Pia was a Colombian girl who was a model-slash-photographer. Of course. Whenever they came to visit I ravenously consumed what she wore, and attempted to style-bite her once she’d gone, with varying degrees of failure. Pia had an impeccable, internationally travelled glamour about her, and could blend things like Dec’s waistcoat with denim shortsand stacked heels and a cascade of plastic necklaces and look impossibly perfect. Kind of like Ashley Olsen meets Helena Christensen. I was just Hannah. None of her