Loveless(75)

The reality of the situation with Pip and Jason only sank in when they both dropped out of the Shakespeare Society on the same day. The last day of term.

They didn’t even do it in person.

I didn’t have high hopes that they would attend our rehearsal on that Friday before Christmas, but Rooney and I went along anyway, unlocked the room, switched on the electric heater, and moved the tables to one side. Sunil turned up none the wiser, wearing a coat that was basically a blanket and a smile on his face. We didn’t know what to tell him.

Ten minutes after they should have arrived, Pip messaged the group chat.

Felipa Quintana

Hey so me and Jason have decided we’re not gonna be in the play any more, too much other work and stuff. Find some other people to replace us.

Sorry

I saw it first, then passed my phone to Rooney.

She read it. I watched as she bit down on the insides of her cheeks. For a moment, she looked furious. Then she passed my phone back to me and turned round so neither me nor Sunil could see how upset she was.

Sunil saw the message last. He looked up at us with a confused expression and asked, ‘What – what happened?’

‘We … we all had an argument,’ I said, because I didn’t know how to explain what an actual clusterfuck this small group of people had become while Sunil was an innocent bystander just wanting to take part in a fun theatre society.

And it was all because of me.

I have always felt lonely, I think.

I think a lot of people feel lonely. Rooney. Pip. Maybe even Jason, though he hasn’t said so.

I’d spent my teenage life feeling lonely every time I saw a couple at a party, or two people kissing outside the school gate. I’d felt lonely every time I read some cute proposal story on Twitter, or saw someone’s five-year-anniversary Facebook post, or even just saw someone hanging out with their partner in their Instagram story, sitting with them on a sofa with their dog, watching TV. I felt lonely first because I hadn’t experienced that. And I felt even lonelier when I started to believe I never would.

This loneliness – being without Jason and Pip – was worse.

Friends are automatically classed as ‘less important’ than romantic partners. I’d never questioned that. It was just the way the world was. I guess I’d always felt that friendship just couldn’t compete with what a partner offered, and that I’d never really experience real love until I found romance.

But if that had been true, I probably wouldn’t have felt like this.

I loved Jason and Pip. I loved them because I didn’t have to think around them. I loved that we could sit in silence together. I loved that they knew all my favourite foods and they could instantly tell when I was in a bad mood. I loved Pip’s stupid sense of humour and how she immediately made every room she entered a happier place. I loved how Jason knew exactly what to say when you were upset and could always calm you down.

I loved Jason and Pip. And now they were gone.

I had been so desperate for my idea of true love that I couldn’t even see it when it was right in front of my face.





I pressed a cold hand against my car, which was as far up the drive of our house as it could get. I’d missed my car.

There were three other cars on our driveway and four more parked on the pavement outside, which told me one thing: all of the Warr family had congregated at our house. This was not an unusual occurrence around Christmas at the Warrs’, but a family party on December twenty-first was a little premature, and it was not exactly the environment I wanted to return to after my university term from hell.

‘Georgia? What are you doing?’

Dad was holding open the front door for me. He’d picked me up from the station.

‘Nothing,’ I said, dropping my hand from my car.

There was a sort of cheer from the twenty-or-so members of my family socialising in the living room as I entered. I guess that was nice. I’d forgotten what it was like to be around that many people who knew who I was.

Mum gave me a big hug. My older brother, Jonathan, and his wife, Rachel, came over for a hug too. Then Mum wasted no time in making me take everyone’s tea and coffee orders and informing me of the hour-by-hour schedule for the next week, including the fact that my aunt, uncle and cousin Ellis would be staying here until Boxing Day. Like a big family sleepover.

‘You don’t mind Ellis sharing your room, do you?’ Mum asked.

I wasn’t thrilled by this turn of events, but I liked Ellis, so it wouldn’t be too bad.

My bedroom was exactly the same as I’d left it – books, TV, stripy bedsheets – apart from the addition of a blow-up mattress for Ellis. I flopped straight on to my bed. It smelt right.

Even by the end of term, university hadn’t felt like home.

‘Come on, then!’ Gran squawked at me as I squeezed on to the sofa next to her. ‘Tell us everything!’

By ‘everything’ she definitely didn’t mean how I’d utterly destroyed the very small number of friendships I’d had, begrudgingly realised that I wasn’t straight and was in fact a sexuality that very few people in real life have heard of, and realised that the world was so obsessed with romantic love that I couldn’t go an hour without hating myself because I didn’t feel it.

So instead I told her, and the other twelve family members listening in, about my lectures (‘interesting’), my room in college (‘spacious’), and my roommate (‘very nice’).