Eric wasn't used to being asked about his interests - none of his old housemates had ever done so - and he quickly became exhausted by it. That, and the fact that he'd spent all weekend moving into Rona and Miranda's house, he supposed. He corrected himself: My house. Our house. Then he got the Madness song stuck in his head and got annoyed at himself.

He'd reassured Rona and Miranda that his drums would stay at his parents' house, at least for the time being: it was only a fifteen minute drive away, twenty tops, so it seemed like the best solution for everyone. He knew his parents liked to see him, too.

The room was slightly smaller than his old room - that was the cost of being last to move into a house, he realised - and he'd had to do some careful balancing, placing one bookshelf atop another and stacking his books two-deep in some places. But he was happy: Rona and Miranda seemed like nice people, which told him something because to be honest he didn't really get on with most people. The fact that Rona knew Mal so well had given him pause at first, but now he found - to his surprise - that he enjoyed feeling like he was in a sort of family. The truth was that he'd always felt isolated from most people, except his parents. Even Mal and Steve he didn't particularly enjoy spending time with, even though he loved playing music with them. But lately he'd been given reason to think that maybe he was missing out on something: every time he went up to Queensland he came back glowing and felt sad to be back in Melbourne, and he knew it was because of the friends he'd made up there. He'd made friends up there so much more readily than he had down here. The distance allowed him to be more himself, that much he knew.

So perhaps this was a fresh start in more ways than one. He embarrassed himself thinking like that, he thought it was the most corny thought he'd ever had, but he was clear-eyed enough to recognise that there was, nonetheless, some merit in it.

In many ways he'd blamed his previous housemates for anything that had been making him unhappy so far: he'd never been much good at accepting responsibility for such things, and it was so easy to blame them. That house was poisonous, he declared to himself. He'd declared it many times in the past, too. But this house wasn't: he could feel it. Sure, maybe it was just the after-effect of being out of his old house - but he could feel it. He liked it, and there wasn't a whole lot in the world that he did like so immediately.