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that stuff ?’ Amy shuffles into the kitchen, kimono hanging loosely from her shoulders; tie adrift to reveal her black bikini knickers. Mornings are not her best time. I wave my pan with its slices of ham and gooey egg under her nose.
    ‘Yeuk! Take it away!’ cries the do-gooder of the animal world, whose main diet is rice crackers and anything coloured green or orange. She pours boiling water into the diffuser and then goes hunting for lite soy milk, muesli and dandelion tea: she’s so healthy it’s sick. Well, apart from the occasional joint, that is. No one’s perfect.
    I flip my greasy food onto a plate piled with slices of bread and sit at the kitchen table. Now Amy sits down in front of me and frowns. I’ve heard it before. ‘Why on earth do you eat that crap? White bread! You’ll die of cancer, girl.’ She doesn’t say those exact words this morning but I hear them just the same as she looks at me, rolling her eyes in disgust. We sit for a while, me reading a rock magazine someone’s left on the table, she sighing every now and then as life seeps into her dreary morning body.
    ‘Hey, gang.’ It’s Matt, dressed in his work clothes, his hair damp from the shower. Amy grumps a reply, I look up and smile with a lift of my lips and eyebrows. He slaps a few doors around, clashes dishes, drops a piece of crockery and swears, and then we are three around the table, happy campers.
    ‘So,’ says Matt, ‘I’m off to work, and you lucky buggers are bludging, I suppose.’
    Amy’s too intent on chewing every skerrick of her muesli to bother answering. But I’m not letting him get away with it. ‘Well, if you call spending hours getting the groceries and then slaving away in a library writing an English essay bludging, so okay I’m bludging.’ I don’t tell him that I’ve also pencilled in chocolate fudge ice-cream and a ten-tissue movie.
    ‘Fair enough,’ he says, backing away and grinning as though there’s a wicked thought brewing. Then the thought emerges. ‘Just so long as I come home to a spotless house with my dinner on the table.’
    Amy almost chokes on her muesli. I jump up, grab at a broom and swing it in the general direction of his silly head, both of us laughing.
    ‘Did I say something wrong?’ he asks as he disappears out the door. ‘Bye!’
    ‘You’re a moron,’ Amy calls. ‘Grow up!’ She turns to me and mutters, ‘He’s so immature.’
    ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Just hopeless.’
    We both shake our heads, and smile.
    After breakfast, Amy offers to help me with the grocery shopping.
    ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘That’d be nice.’
    We take our time dressing, and a while later dawdle down the street to the shopping centre.
    ‘Actually, I was thinking of taking in a movie,’ I confess as we approach the cinema.
    ‘Tell me it’s that love saga set in India.’ Amy’s eyes are alight, and when I nod, she whoops. We check out the session time, and find that True Obsession isn’t on for another twenty minutes.
    ‘Let’s leave the shopping till after, and wait in the park,’ she suggests. So we sit on the grass, Amy with her skirt tucked into her knickers and me in shorts, exposing our legs to the sun, watching Saturday afternoon passers-by.
    ‘I’m going to get a navel ring.’ Amy pats her tummy. ‘My mother had one. Hey, maybe we can get one together.’
    ‘Nah. Not really my scene,’ I say. Then I quickly steer the conversation away from me. ‘Your mum a bit of a wild child, was she?’
    ‘You could say that.’ She smiles, almost in a sad way. ‘Mum and my little brothers – Thorn and Harley – we mostly lived wild.’
    I laugh, but she continues in earnest. ‘Who knows where my dad was? – Mum never talked about him. We lived in this bush camp way out of town, in a sort of hippy commune.’
    This explains a lot about Amy: the way she dresses, her habit of leaving her belongings everywhere, the fact that she has no concern about having lights on all day, or leaving