This is an excerpt of Something Bad Is Going To Happen by Jessie Stephens.

The music is so loud Adella can feel it in her chest. She wonders if it might explode through her throat.

She watches a girl a few spots ahead of her in the line move her head to the rhythm, as though by accident. She seems entirely unaware she’s being watched, occupying her own simple world where once there’s music on, you move to it. Your body has no choice in the matter.

Adella wishes she were more like that.

Adella wishes she were a lot of things.

Living in the back of her mind is a version of herself she likes much more. This Adella knows there is room for something funny to be said, and says it. This Adella moves without the stiffness of someone being watched and reads books about clever things she effortlessly recites and doesn’t have an underwear drawer full of undies with various nondescript stains in the crotch. Every night when she goes to bed, she sets early alarms and compiles heaving to-do lists, ready for this new person who possesses none of her flaws or weaknesses. She spends her last waking moments fantasising that she will be someone different tomorrow, and as she drifts off to sleep, she absolutely believes it.

She becomes aware of the silence hanging between her and Sophia, but when either tries to say anything they can barely hear each other. She wonders if Sophia is having fun yet. This would be a good moment to say something but she doesn’t know what. Instead, she looks in the opposite direction, as though she’s come across something very interesting.

By accident, she does. The woman whose head she was watching a moment ago has turned around and she has a face Adella recognises from some social media app. She’s not famous or anything. Just a girl her age who boys at St Luke’s used to talk about, with a face that makes you want to look at it for longer, from different angles. Her handle is something like ‘@its_bronte’. She’s taller than Adella and looks how you’d expect someone to look who shares their name with an iconic beach. Thin. With Bambi eyes, the kind that look curious but perpetually disappointed in everything they happen to come across. Her height makes Adella feel short and slouched. Her clear, unmade-up eyes make Adella feel tacky. Her lilac shift dress with its high neckline makes Adella feel cheap and overexposed. The girl laughs at something and whispers to a friend to her right, and when Adella catches Sophia staring too, she wonders if Sophia would rather be here with them.

She stands up straight and imitates the energy they have.

‘Is Daniel still coming?’ Her tone is purposefully light.

‘Yeah, the rest of the St Luke’s boys are coming too. They’ve been at a uni party, I think . . .’ Sophia pulls her phone out of her black shoulder bag, using Adella’s question as permission to check if Daniel has texted her yet. Adella wonders how much time has to pass since graduating before you stop referring to groups of people by the school they went to. It’s been two years.

She knows that means Nathan might be coming. That’s who she was thinking about a few hours ago when she closed her eyes, letting Sophia swipe fancy colours across her eyelids. The others call him Nath but she doesn’t feel like she knows him well enough to shorten his name yet. She likes to imagine she will one day. When she looks at that group of boys, she cannot understand how anyone, Sophia included, can be drawn to anyone other than him. She’s met the girlfriends of the others and wonders if they, deep down, know they chose the wrong one. Do they notice Nathan when they all go out together? What happens when these people grow up? Do a group of married couples know their spouses were not created equal, with some objectively more desirable than others?

Last time she saw him there had been a series of almost invisible exchanges, so small she’d been left wondering if they really ever happened. As they’d sat around the wooden table in Daniel’s backyard, she could have sworn she’d caught Nathan looking at her. When Daniel had finished with the barbecue, Nathan had brought her over a plate full of food. No one else. Just her. He slipped into the chair beside her and asked: ‘And what’s Adella doing with herself?’ There was something about how he said her name. Like he enjoyed it. But she’d thought all this before and ultimately embarrassed herself when she’d seen those same men with their tongues down other people’s throats on the dark dance floor at Fonda. Her sense of things had never been something she could trust.

Once Adella and Sophia have their vodka raspberries they dance, looking at an unspecified point in the distance, pretending they’re not glancing towards the entrance. Again, Adella wonders if it’s possible that Sophia is genuinely enjoying this moment, while she, only centimetres away from her, is desperately uncomfortable in it.

She keeps watching the women around her, their bodies moving as though their brains have stopped speaking to them. Free. Meanwhile her mind chatters away, suggesting she dance more like that or move more like her and where should she be looking? At Sophia? Isn’t that a little intense? Maybe over Sophia’s shoulder. She grabs two more drinks for each of them. How much does someone need to drink before their mind falls silent?

‘Oh no,’ Sophia whispers into her ear while turning in the opposite direction.

‘Wh–’ A man with chest hair that very nearly meets his facial hair grabs her hand while his two friends, one who is comically short, the other comically tall, laugh a few steps behind him.

‘No. No,’ she says, glancing at Sophia who has spat out a mouthful of her drink onto her chin.

He gyrates his hips in too-tight white jeans and just as she clocks them, Sophia leans into her ear, ‘The shoes.’

How to describe them? A leather dress shoe. Maybe a loafer. The length of them competing with the length of his shin. Too big for a short man. She can’t remember why but she and Sophia call them elf shoes when really they should call them clown shoes. The man could be Leonardo DiCaprio, but if he is wearing these alligator skin–looking, olive abominations then they’d agreed no further contact was allowed. A shoe tells you everything you need to know about a person, Sophia often says, because it’s what people put on last when they’ve stopped trying so hard. A shoe will tell you the truth of their character.

‘Can I get you two a drink?’ the man with the fur on his chest asks, getting his wallet out of his pocket as though to prove he has access to money.

Before Adella has opened her mouth, Sophia turns around and says, ‘Yes please! Two vodka raspberries would be great. What’s your name?’ She asks this as if she gives a s**t.

‘Ro–’ The music cuts off the remaining syllables.

‘Thank you, Ro-naaaaz,’ Sophia exclaims, patting him on the shoulder for encouragement.

‘You’re a bitch,’ Adella says. She watches Ro go to the bar with his wallet that looks like it belongs to someone twice his age.

Sophia shrugs her shoulders. ‘I hope he doesn’t spill our drinks when he trips over his own shoes.’

They have almost forgotten about Ro when he returns with a tray of drinks, including a shot each.

‘To two beautiful . . .’ he toasts, holding a shot glass in the air.

‘To Ro-aallummuuula,’ Adella and Sophia murmur before pouring the warm liquid down their throats, burning on the way down.

He asks them both questions they can’t quite hear, something about where they live maybe, and Sophia peers at him over her nose even though he’s only a few centimetres shorter than her.

They smile and nod and then Sophia announces that they both need to pee, leading Adella to the bathroom by the hand.

‘Okay, but what do we do now?’ Adella asks, sitting on a sticky seat while Sophia stands in the corner of the same cubicle inspecting the ingrown hairs on her knee.

‘We hide.’

‘I don’t know, it’s like . . . how much of our time are two drinks worth? Like, do we owe him ten minutes? Half an hour? He looked so proud with his stupid little tray.’

‘Hurry up, I’m about to piss myself.’ As they swap Sophia runs her fingers through the front of her hair.

‘The man forced drinks onto us and as much as we’d like to continue hanging out, unfortunately we’ve lost him.’ She wipes.

‘He’ll be where we –’

‘We. Lost. Him.’

As they exit the bathroom, his white pants glow in the dark, moving to the beat of a remix of an Adele song, and it’s one of the most unsexy things she thinks she might ever have seen.

‘Hang on.’ Sophia holds her by the shoulders, stepping onto a piece of wet toilet paper stuck to the back of her black boot.

‘You know, every time I think I might be hot,’ Adella says, ‘I realise I have wee-soaked toilet paper attached to my f**king shoe.’

‘I feel like that’s a metaphor for life.’ Sophia signals to their left.

They stand behind some kind of indoor hedge, where they can see white pants but white pants can’t see them.

‘There’s Daniel,’ Adella says, signalling with a nod a few seconds later, spotting him behind Nathan. They’re right near the door, shoving their wallets into their back pockets. Nathan’s nose and the outlines of his eyes are lit up by the screen of his phone. She wonders who he’s texting.

Sophia puts down her drink and makes her way over to him, casually mouthing, ‘Hey.’ Adella sees her from Daniel’s point of view. She smiles up at him, her thin top lip disappearing, exposing the gum above her front teeth. On anyone else, that might not be beautiful. Perhaps a different person would make an attempt to hide it. But not Sophia. On her, it is endearing. It looks like she cannot help but smile as wide as her mouth will allow.

Everything Sophia detests about her own body is what men love about it – hips and thighs and breasts she grew years before anyone else in their class. Whenever she tries to talk about how hard it was needing to wear a bra in primary school, Adella rolls her eyes. Boys – and now men – have always looked at her and seen someone simply beautiful, but women have the superpower of being able to determine exactly what makes her beautiful. It’s the combination of this with that, her perfect little nose and the dimple on her left cheek. They don’t just have the answer. They know exactly how they got there.

When Adella first met Sophia in Year Seven she wondered if it might be a burden to have a friend who looked like that. She had met few people who came across Sophia and didn’t remark on what was so blatantly obvious. In one of their first classes in Year Seven, the English teacher had stopped mid roll call to exclaim that Sophia might have the most beautiful blue eyes she’d ever seen. Adella looked around the class, noting that Sophia was one of only a handful to have blue eyes at all, and wondered if that comment might make other kids feel bad. Like her. Who had brown eyes. ‘Poo brown’, according to a kid in primary school, who had laughed so hard he cried. When it got to her name on the roll, the teacher glanced up, catching her eye, before moving right along. Whenever Adella brought this memory up, Sophia pretended she couldn’t remember it. They both knew she did.

The only people who didn’t tend to comment on Sophia’s obvious beauty were men who didn’t stand a chance. Muttering that they didn’t know what all the fuss was about was the only power they felt they had.

Daniel buys a tray of drinks, all vodka-somethings, and Sophia and Adella continue to dance together as though the others aren’t there, even though they’re right beside them. Sophia slurs something about Daniel being weird and Adella quickly dismisses her. ‘He’s literally watching you right now,’ she whispers. Sophia smiles. Adella considers telling her how beautiful she looks. The moment passes, and she doesn’t.

‘Hope you enjoyed your drinks.’ They both look up to see Ro turn on his too-big heel, the too-tall friend muttering ‘sluts’ or ‘c**ts’ or some hybrid of the two.

‘Who was that?’ Nathan whispers in her ear.

‘No idea,’ she says, glancing at Sophia whose eyes are wet with tears of laughter.

‘The weirdest thing,’ she leans in towards Sophia, convinced she has stumbled across an idea that is nothing short of profound, ‘is that straight men and straight women... passionately hate each other.’

Sophia hisses ‘yesss’ and then starts inconspicuously doing an elf dance they learned from some viral clip last Christmas.

Nathan disappears from her peripheral vision, and she spots him sliding into one of the deep red booths in the corner, across from a friend she doesn’t recognise. She shouts in Sophia’s ear, ‘I’m going to pee,’ but walks in the opposite direction. She finds herself passing the booth he’s in, his long legs taking up a seat for two.

‘Adella!’ he shouts over the music, leaning towards her. ‘Come sit.’

He shuffles across on the sticky leather seat and then hunches himself over, directing a question about how her night has been into her ear. She tells him she was at Sophia’s before. Even though she’s fairly sure he can’t hear her, she likes how he leans towards her when she speaks, and then angles his mouth towards her ear when he speaks. He smells like Extra peppermint gum and faintly of cigarettes. The friend stands up and gestures as if to say ‘drink?’. Nathan nods.

‘I’m glad you’re here tonight,’ he says, pushing his thick brown hair back off his face. ‘Daniel said you would be.’

‘Why are you glad I’m here?’ She cocks her head to the side with a grin.

He shrugs.

‘Just am.’ He squeezes her knee closest to him.

She asks him about his trip to the Philippines, and then remembers they already had this conversation at the barbecue. She pretends they didn’t and hopes he has a very bad memory.

The friend brings back drinks. They talk about uni.

‘Sophia was saying you’re really smart?’ the other guy says, raising his eyebrows, daring her to agree.

‘Don’t know about that,’ she mutters, bringing the short straw to her lips. It’s a vodka lemonade and she can barely taste the spirits anymore. She knows the question is a trap. But she’d be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy it. As much as she wishes she were more beautiful or outgoing, there is something more noble&n