Loveless(71)

‘I don’t – we don’t – we’re not together!’ Rooney gestured to me wildly. ‘I swear! It was my fucking idea because I’m an idiot! Georgia’s just been figuring shit out and I’ve just been making stuff worse, making her date Jason as an experiment when she never really wanted to do that, and now this –’

It felt like the walls shattered around us. Pip clenched her fists. ‘Wait …’ She turned to me. ‘You – Jason was just an experiment?’

‘I …’ I wanted to say no, he wasn’t, I thought I liked him, I genuinely wanted to fall for him, but … was that a lie?

Pip’s face crumpled. She took a step towards me, and now she was shouting. ‘How could you do that? How could you do that to him?’

I stepped back, feeling tears forming. Don’t cry. Do not cry.

‘Stop blaming her!’ Rooney shouted back. ‘She was figuring out her sexuality!’

‘Well, she shouldn’t have done that with our best friend who’d only just got out of a relationship that made him feel like an actual piece of SHIT!’

She was right. I’d fucked up. I’d fucked up so bad.

Rooney physically put an arm in between me and Pip. ‘Stop trying to make this about something else when we know what this is about!’

‘Oh yeah?’ Pip’s voice lowered. There were tear stains down her cheeks. ‘What’s this about, then?’

‘About the fact that you hate me. You think I’m taking Georgia away from you and because she’s one of your only two friends, you despise me because you think I’m replacing you in her life.’

There was a silence. Pip’s eyes widened.

‘You don’t know anything,’ she said hoarsely, and turned round. ‘I’m leaving.’

‘Wait!’ I said. The first fucking thing I’d said.

Pip turned back, struggling to say anything through her tears. ‘What? Got anything to say?’

I didn’t. I couldn’t form the words.

‘That’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘You never have anything to say.’

And then she was gone.

Rooney went right after her, but I stayed where I was in the corridor. The walls around me were made of paper flowers. Above me were twinkling fairy lights. Students passed, laughing, holding hands, wearing stylish suits and sparkly dresses. The song playing overhead was ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ by Candi Staton.

I hated all of it.





I wandered through dimly lit corridors and raucous crowds. I stood at the edge of the dance hall as the band were finishing their set, playing a slow song so all the couples could hold each other and sway. It made me feel sick.

Rooney and Pip were nowhere, so I went back to my room. It was the only thing I could think to do. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time, wondering if this was the moment when I would just collapse, I could just let it out and start sobbing because I had fucked it all up. I had fucked everything up in my quest to understand who I was. Despite the fact that Pip and Jason had so much to deal with on their own, I had only truly been thinking about myself.

But I didn’t cry. I was silent. I didn’t want to be awake any more.

I went to sleep for a few hours, and when I woke up I could hear the thumping of people having sex in the room above me.

This was, perhaps, the final straw.

Was everyone just having sex and falling in love all the time? Why? How was it fair that everyone got to feel that except me?

I wished everyone would stop. I wished sex and love didn’t exist.

I stormed out of the room, not even taking my phone with me, ran up the stairs to the corridor above two at a time, not quite knowing what I was going to do when I got there, but I could at least see whose room it was and maybe at a later date I could track them down and tell them to stop being so loud …

When I reached the point in the corridor that was above my room, I stopped, and stood very still.

It was a utility room. Inside: six washing machines and six dryers.

One of the washing machines was on. It was making a rhythmic thumping sound against the wall.

Back in my room, I realised that it was only ten minutes until 6 a.m. – the time of the fabled ‘Survivors Photo’.

I’d just go and have a look. See how many people had made it.

The answer was not very many. Of the hundreds of students that had been bustling around college earlier, there could only have been about eighty left, and they’d all congregated in the dance hall. A tired-looking photographer was waiting for the drunk, sleep-deprived students to organise themselves into rows. I didn’t know whether to join them or not. I felt like a bit of a fraud, since I’d basically napped through the last five hours.

‘Georgia!’

I turned, scared that I’d face Jason or Rooney or Pip, but it was none of them.

Sunil approached me from the dance hall’s doorway. His tie was undone, his baby blue jacket was slung over one arm, and he looked unnaturally awake for 6 a.m.

He clapped his hands on to my upper arms and shook me a little. ‘You made it! You made it to six a.m.! I’m very impressed. I gave up at midnight when I was a fresher.’

‘I … had a nap,’ I said.

Sunil grinned. ‘Good shout. Got to be strategic about these things. Jess went for a nap a couple of hours ago but hasn’t resurfaced, so I think she’s failed again this year.’