Loveless(47)

She gestured around her, and when I looked, I realised how correct she was – with the exception of Sunil, Jess, and a handful of others, most faces in the room were white.

‘I’m starting to feel how much it affected me to just … be around white people all the time. Like, being gay and Latina meant that I just … didn’t know anyone like me. As good as it felt to finally have a few queer friends in sixth form, they were all white, so I just couldn’t fully relate to them.’ She chuckled suddenly. ‘But I met this gay dude at LatAm Soc and we had a massive chat about being gay and Latinx, and I swear to God I’d never felt so understood in my life.’

I found myself smiling. Because my best friend was thriving here.

‘What?’ she said, seeing the smile on my face.

‘I’m just happy for you,’ I said.

‘God, you actual sap.’

‘I can’t help it. You’re one of the very few people I actually care about in the world.’

Pip beamed like she was very pleased about this fact. ‘Well, I am a very popular and successful lesbian. It’s an honour to know me.’

‘Successful?’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s a new development.’

‘Number one, how dare you?’ Pip leant back on her stool with a smug expression. ‘Number two, yes, I may have got with a girl at the Pride Soc club night.’

‘Pip!’ I sat up straight, grinning. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’

She shrugged, but she was clearly very pleased with herself. ‘It wasn’t anything serious, like, it wasn’t like I wanted to date her or anything. But I wanted to kiss her – we both wanted to kiss, so, like … we just did.’

‘What was she like?’

We sat at the bar and Pip relayed the whole encounter to me about the girl in second year at Hatfield College who studied French and was wearing a cute skirt, and how it didn’t mean anything in particular but it had been fun and good and silly and everything she’d wanted from being at university.

‘This is so dumb, but it just … it just gave me hope. Just a little bit.’ Pip let out a breath. ‘Like … I might not be alone forever. Like I might have the chance to … be properly myself here. To feel like being myself is a good thing.’ She laughed, then brushed her curls out of her eyes. ‘I don’t know if I ever felt like being me was … good.’

‘That’s a mood,’ I replied in a jokey way, but I guessed I sort of meant it.

‘Well, if you ever consider becoming gay, let me know. I could very quickly hook you up with someone. I have contacts now.’

I snorted. ‘If only sexuality worked like that.’

‘What, choosing it?’

‘Yeah. I think I’d choose to be gay if I could.’

Pip didn’t say anything for a moment, and I wondered if I’d said something weird or offensive. It was the truth, though. I would have chosen to be gay if I could.

I knew liking girls could be hard when you’re also a girl. It usually was, at least for a while. But it was beautiful too. So fucking beautiful.

Liking girls when you’re a girl was power. It was light. Hope. Joy. Passion.

Sometimes it took girls who liked girls a little while to find that. But when they found it, they flew.

‘You know,’ said Pip. ‘Straight people don’t think shit like that.’

‘Oh. Really?’

‘Yeah. Thinking shit like that is, like, step one to realising you’re a lesbian.’

‘Oh. Right.’ I laughed awkwardly. I was still pretty sure I wasn’t a lesbian. Or maybe I was and I was just really repressed. Or maybe I was just ‘X’ on the Kinsey Scale. Nothing.

God. I was regretting not ordering more alcohol.

We sat in silence for a moment, neither of us wanting to really push the issue. Normally Pip was nosy as hell whenever we started talking about deep stuff, but she probably knew there were some things that it wasn’t cool to be nosy about.

I wished she had been nosy.

I wished I could find the words to talk about all of this with my best friend.

‘So, you and Jason,’ said Pip, and I thought, oh no.

‘Uh, yeah?’ I said.

Pip snorted. ‘Have you kissed yet?’

I felt myself go a bit red. ‘Uh, no.’

‘Good. I can’t imagine you kissing.’ She narrowed her eyes and looked off into the distance. ‘It’d be like … I dunno. Like seeing my siblings kiss.’

‘Well, we’re probably going to end up doing it at some point,’ I said. Definitely. We definitely were.

Pip looked at me again. I couldn’t read her. Was she annoyed? Did she just find it weird?

‘You’ve never really been interested in anyone before,’ she said. ‘I mean, the Tommy thing … that was all … you just made up that crush. By accident.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed.

‘But you … you just like Jason now?’

I blinked at her. ‘What? Don’t you believe me?’

She leant forward a little, then back again. ‘I’m not sure I do.’

‘Why not?’

She didn’t want to say it. She knew it’d be disrespectful to say it, to assume anything about my sexuality, but we were both thinking it.