Loveless

by Alice Oseman

  I screamed. Tommy screamed. His entire arm was on fire.

  He rolled over and suddenly Pip flew out of nowhere, grabbing a blanket, and falling straight on top of Tommy, stifling the flames while Tommy was saying, ‘Holy shit, holy shit,’ over and over and I was just standing over him, watching him burn.

  The first thing I felt was shock. I felt frozen. Like this wasn’t really happening.

  The second thing I felt was anger about my jacket.

  That was my favourite fucking jacket.

  I should never have given it to some boy I barely knew. Some boy I didn’t even like.

  Jason was there too, asking Tommy if he was hurt, but he was sitting up and shaking his head, pulling off the ruins of my favourite jacket, looking at his unscathed arm and saying, ‘What the fuck?’ And then he stared up at me and said it again. ‘What the fuck?’

  I looked down at this person I had picked at random from a photo and said, ‘I don’t like you like that. I’m really sorry. You’re nice, but I just – I don’t like you like that.’

  Jason and Pip both turned to me in unison. A little crowd was starting to form, our classmates wandering outside to see what the commotion was about.

  ‘What the fuck?’ said Tommy a third time, before he was swarmed by his friends, coming to see if he was OK.

  I was just staring at him thinking, that was my fucking jacket and seven years and I never liked you at all.

  ‘Georgia,’ said Pip. She was next to me, pulling on my arm. ‘I think it’s time to go home.’

  ‘I never liked him,’ I said in the car as we pulled up outside Pip’s house and I cut the engine. Pip was next to me. Jason was in the back. ‘Seven years and I just lied to myself the whole time.’

  They were both being weirdly silent. Like they didn’t know what to say. In a horrible way, I almost blamed them. Pip, anyway. She’d been the one pushing me to do this. She’d been teasing me about Tommy for seven years.

  No, that was unfair. This wasn’t her fault.

  ‘This is my fault,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Pip, gesturing wildly. She was still fairly tipsy. ‘You … you’ve had a crush on him for years.’ Her voice got quieter. ‘This was your … your big chance.’

  I started laughing.

  It’s wild how long you can trick yourself. And everyone around you.

  The door to Pip’s house opened, revealing her parents in matching dressing gowns. Manuel and Carolina Quintana were just another of the perfectly-in-love, incredibly-romantic-backstory couples I knew. Carolina, who’d grown up in Popayán, Colombia, and Manuel, who’d grown up in London, met when Manuel went to visit his dying grandma in Popayán when he was seventeen. Carolina was literally the girl next door, and the rest was history. These things just happened.

  ‘I’ve never had a crush on anyone in my entire life,’ I said. It was all sinking in. I’d never had a crush on anyone. No boys, no girls, not a single person I had ever met. What did that mean? Did it mean anything? Or was I just doing life wrong? Was there something wrong with me? ‘Can you believe that?’

  There was a pause again, before Pip said, ‘Well, s’fine. S’fine, man. You know you’ll find someone –’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ I said. ‘Please do not say it.’

  So she didn’t.

  ‘You know, the idea – the idea of it is nice. The idea of liking Tommy and kissing Tommy and having some cute little moment by the fire after prom. That’s so nice. That’s what I wanted.’ I felt myself clench the steering wheel. ‘But the reality disgusts me.’

  They didn’t say anything. Even Pip, who’d always been a chatty drunk. Even my best friends couldn’t think of a single comforting word.

  ‘Well … This has been a good night, right?’ Pip slurred as she stumbled out of my car. She held the front passenger door open and pointed dramatically at me, the streetlamps reflecting in her glasses. ‘You. Very good. Outstanding. And you –’ she prodded Jason in the chest as he moved into the front seat – ‘excellent. Really excellent work.’

  ‘Drink water,’ said Jason, patting her on the head.

  We watched her walk up to her front door and get gently chastised by her mum for being drunk. Her dad waved at us, and we waved back, and then I started the engine and we drove away. It could have been a good night. It could have been the best night of my life, if I’d actually had a crush on Tommy.

  The next stop was Jason’s. He lived in a house built by his dads, who were both architects. Rob and Mitch had met at university – they were doing the same course – and ended up competing for the same architecture apprenticeship. Rob won, which he claims he earned, but Mitch always claims he let Rob win because he liked him.

  When we arrived, I said, ‘Most people our age have kissed someone.’

  And he said, ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  But I knew it did. It mattered. It was not random that I was the one who was falling behind. Everything that had happened that night was a sign that I needed to try harder, or I would be alone for the rest of my life.

  ‘I don’t feel like a real teenager,’ I said. ‘I think I failed at it.’ And Jason clearly didn’t know what to say to that, because he said nothing.

  Sitting in my car on the drive of my family home, the ghost of a boy’s hand on my thigh, I made a plan.

  I was going to university soon. A chance to reinvent myself and become someone who could fall in love, someone who would fit in with my family, with people my age, with the world. I’d make a load of new friends. I’d join societies. I’d get a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend, even. A partner. I’d have my first kiss, and I’d have sex. I was just a late bloomer. I wasn’t going to die alone.

  I was going to try harder.

  I wanted forever love.

  I didn’t want to be loveless.

  The drive to Durham University was six hours long, and I spent most of it replying to Pip’s barrage of Facebook messages. Jason had already travelled up there a couple of days earlier, and Pip and I had hoped to go together, but it turned out that my bags and boxes had taken up the whole of my dad’s car boot and most of the back seats. We settled for messaging and trying to spot each other on the motorway.

  Felipa Quintana

  New game!!!!!

  If we spot each other on the motorway we get 10 points

  Georgia Warr

  what do we get if we have the most points

  Felipa Quintana

  Eternal glory

  Georgia Warr

  love me a sweet cup of eternal glory

  Felipa Quintana

  DUDE I JUST SAW YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!

  I waved but you didn’t see me

  Rejection

  A modern tragedy by Felipa Quintana

  Georgia Warr

  you’ll get over it

  Felipa Quintana

  I’ll need intense therapy

  You’re paying

  Georgia Warr

  i’m not paying for your therapy

  Felipa Quintana

  Rude

  I thought you were my friend

  Georgia Warr

  use your 10 points to pay for therapy

  Felipa Quintana

  MAYBE I WILL

  The drive was hideously long, actually, even with Pip’s messages for company. Dad was asleep for most of it. Mum insisted she got to choose the radio station since she was driving, and it was all motorway, flashes of grey and green, with only one stop at a service station. Mum bought me a packet of crisps, but I was too nervous about the day ahead to eat them, so they just sat in my lap, unopened.

  ‘You never know,’ Mum had said, in an attempt to cheer me up, ‘you might find a lovely young man on your course!’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. Or a lovely young woman. God, anybody. Please. I’m desperate.

  ‘Lots of people meet their life partner at university. Like me and Dad.’

  Mum regularly pointed out boys she thought I would find attractive, as
if I could just go up to someone and ask them out. I never thought any of her choices were attractive anyway. But she was hopeful. Mostly out of curiosity, I think. She wanted to know what sort of person I would choose, like when you’re watching a movie and waiting for the love interest to appear.

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said, not wanting to tell her that her attempt at cheering me up was just making me feel worse. ‘That’d be nice.’

  I was starting to feel a bit like I was going to be sick.

  But everyone probably felt this way about starting university.

  Durham is a little old city with lots of hills and cobbled streets, and I loved it because I felt like I was in The Secret History or some other deep and mysterious university drama where there’s lots of sex and murder.

  Not that I was particularly on track to experience either of those.

  We had to drive into a huge field, queue up in the car, and wait to be summoned, because Durham University’s colleges are all tiny and they don’t have car parks of their own. Lots of students and their parents were getting out of their cars to talk to each other while we all waited. I knew I should get out and start socialising too.

  My running theory was that my shyness and introversion were linked to my whole ‘never fancying anyone’ situation – maybe I just didn’t talk to enough people, or maybe people just stressed me out in general, and that was why I’d never wanted to kiss anyone. If I just improved my confidence, tried to be a bit more open and sociable, I’d be able to do and feel those things, like most people.

  Starting university was a good time to try something like that.

  Felipa Quintana

  Hey are you in the queue

  I’ve befriended my car next door neighbour

  She brought a whole-ass fern with her

  It’s like five feet tall

  Update: the fern’s name is Roderick

  I was about to reply, or maybe even get out of the car and meet Pip’s acquaintance and Roderick, but it was then that Mum turned the engine on.

  ‘They’re calling us,’ she said, pointing up ahead at where someone in a high-vis vest was waving.

  Dad turned round to smile at me. ‘You ready?’

  It’d be hard, sure, and it’d be scary and probably embarrassing, but I would become someone who could experience the magic of romance.

  I knew I had my whole life ahead of me, and it’d happen one day, but I felt like if I couldn’t change and make it happen at university, it’d never happen at all.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied.

  Also, I didn’t want to wait. I wanted it now.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, standing outside the door of what would be my bedroom for the next nine months, and slightly dying inside.

  ‘What?’ asked Dad, dropping one of my bags on to the floor and pulling his glasses down from the top of his head.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Mum, ‘you knew there was a chance of this happening, darling.’

  On the front of my bedroom door was my photo and underneath it was written ‘Georgia Warr’ in Times New Roman. Next to that was another photo – of a girl with long brown hair, a smile that looked positively candid in its naturalness, and perfectly threaded eyebrows. Underneath that was the name ‘Rooney Bach’.

  Durham was an old English university that had a ‘college system’. Instead of halls of residence, the university was made up of ‘colleges’ spread around the city. Your college was where you slept, showered and ate, but it was also a place you showed your allegiance to through college events, your college sports teams, and running for the college’s executive student roles.

  St John’s College – the one that I had been accepted into – was an old building. And because of that, a few of the students living there had to share rooms.

  I just hadn’t thought it would be me.

  A wave of panic flooded through me. I couldn’t have a roommate – hardly anyone in the UK had roommates at uni. I needed my own space. How was I supposed to sleep or read fanfic or get dressed or do anything with someone else in the room? How was I supposed to relax when I had to socialise with another person every moment I was awake?

  Mum didn’t even seem to notice I was panicking. She just said, ‘Well, let’s get cracking, then,’ and opened the door for me.

  And Rooney Bach was already there, wearing leggings and a polo shirt, watering a five-foot fern.

  The first thing Rooney Bach said to me was, ‘Oh my God, are you Georgia Warr?’ like I was a celebrity, but she didn’t even wait for affirmation before casting her watering can aside, grabbing a large strip of aqua-blue fabric – which I determined to be a rug – from her bed, and holding it up to me.

  ‘Rug,’ she said. ‘Thoughts?’

  ‘Um,’ I said. ‘It’s great.’

  ‘OK, amazing.’ She whooshed the rug into the air and then laid it down in the centre of our room. ‘There. It just needed that splash of colour.’

  I think I was in shock a little bit, because only then did I take a proper look around our room. It was large, but pretty gross, as I’d expected it would be – bedrooms are never nice at old English universities. The carpet was a mouldy grey-blue, the furniture was beige and plastic-looking, and our beds were singles. Rooney’s already had bright, flowery bedsheets on it. Mine looked like it belonged in a hospital.

  The only nice part of the room was a large sash window. The paint on the wooden frame was peeling and I knew it’d be draughty, but it was sort of lovely, and you could see all the way down to the river.

  ‘You’ve done up the place nicely already!’ Dad was saying to Rooney.

  ‘Oh, d’you think so?’ said Rooney. She immediately started narrating a tour of her side of the room to Mum and Dad, showing off all the key features – her illustrated print of some meadows (she liked going on country walks) and one of Much Ado About Nothing (her favourite Shakespeare play), her fleece duvet topper (also aqua, to match the rug), her house plant (whose name was – I hadn’t misheard – Roderick), an aqua desk lamp (from John Lewis) and, most importantly, a giant poster that simply read ‘Don’t Quit Your Daydream’ in a swirly font.

  The whole time, she was smiling. Her hair, up in a ponytail, swished around, as my parents tried to keep up with how fast she was talking.

  I sat down on my bed in the grey half of the room. I hadn’t brought any posters with me. All I’d brought were a few printed-out photos of me, Pip and Jason.

  Mum looked at me from the other side of the room and gave me a sad smile, like she knew that I wanted to go home.

  ‘You can message us any time, darling,’ said Mum, as we were saying goodbye outside the college. I felt empty and lost, standing there in the cobbled street in the October cold, my parents about to leave me.

  I don’t want you to go, was what I wanted to say to them.

  ‘And Pip and Jason are just down the road, aren’t they?’ continued Dad. ‘You can go and hang out with them any time.’ Pip and Jason had been placed in a different college – University College, or ‘Castle’ as it was commonly referred to by the students here, since it literally was part of Durham Castle. They’d stopped replying to my messages a couple of hours ago. Probably busy unpacking.

  Please don’t leave me here alone, I wanted to say.

  ‘Yeah,’ is what I said.

  I glanced around. This was my home, now. Durham. It was like a town out of a Dickens adaptation. All of the buildings were tall and old. Everything seemed to be made of lumps of stone. I could see myself walking down the cobbles and into the cathedral in my graduation gown already. This was where I was supposed to be.

  They both hugged me. I didn’t cry, even though I really, really wanted to.

  ‘This is the start of a big adventure,’ said Dad.

  ‘Maybe,’ I mumbled into his jacket.

  I couldn’t bear to stay and watch them walk away down the road towards the car – when they turned to go, so did I.

  Back in my room, Rooney was Blu Tack-ing a photo to the wall
, right in the centre of her posters. In the photo was Rooney, maybe aged thirteen or fourteen, with a girl who had dyed red hair. Like, Ariel from The Little Mermaid hair.

  ‘Is that your friend from home?’ I asked. This was a good conversation starter, at least.

  Rooney whipped her head round to look at me, and for a moment I thought I saw an odd expression cross her face. But then it was gone, replaced by her wide smile.

  ‘Yeah!’ she said. ‘Beth. She’s – she’s not here, obviously, but … yeah. She’s my friend. Do you know anyone else in Durham? Or are you here all alone?’

  ‘Oh, erm, well, my two best friends are here, but they’re in Castle.’

  ‘Oh, that’s so nice! Sad you didn’t get into the same college, though.’

  I shrugged. Durham took your choice of college into consideration, but not everyone could get their first choice. I’d tried to get into Castle too, but I’d ended up here. ‘We tried, but, yeah.’

  ‘You’ll be OK.’ Rooney beamed. ‘We’ll be friends.’

  Rooney offered to help me unpack, but I declined, determined to at least do this one thing by myself. While I was unpacking, she sat on her bed and chatted to me, and we learnt that we were both studying English. She then declared that she’d done none of the summer reading. I’d done all of it but didn’t mention that.

  Rooney, I was quickly learning, was extremely chatty, but I could tell that she was putting on some sort of happy, bubbly persona. Which was fair enough – I mean, it was our first day of university. Everyone was going to be trying really hard to make friends. But I couldn’t get a sense of what sort of person she really was, which was mildly concerning because we were going to be living with each other for almost a full year.

  Were we going to be best friends? Or were we going to awkwardly put up with each other before leaving for the summer and never speaking again?

  ‘So …’ I scanned the room in search of something to talk about, before landing on her Much Ado poster. ‘You like Shakespeare?’

  Rooney’s head snapped up from her phone. ‘Yeah! Do you?’

  I nodded. ‘Um, yeah, well, I was in a youth theatre group back home. And I did a lot of the school plays. Shakespeare was always my favourite.’