Loveless

by Alice Oseman

  I owed her that.

  I ran to the club that we went to in Freshers’ Week, when she’d told me to search for someone I fancied while she went off to get with a guy. Years ago, that felt like.

  It was closed. Of course it was; it was a Saturday morning.

  I went to Tesco, like I might just see her browsing cereal options, and I walked around the square like she might just be sitting on a stone bench, scrolling on her phone. I crossed Elvet Bridge and stormed into the Elvet Riverside lecture hall building, not even sure if they opened it at the weekend but not caring, having no idea why she would be here on a Saturday morning but hoping, hoping. Praying. I went up to the Student Union to find it locked, and then I couldn’t run any more because my chest hurt, so I walked to the Bill Bryson Library, went inside, stood on the stairs and just shouted ‘ROONEY!’ once. Everybody turned round to look at me, but I didn’t care.

  Rooney wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.

  Were we not enough for her in the end?

  Was I not enough?

  Or had we just got through to her, only for something terrible to happen to her?

  I called her again. And it went to voicemail.

  ‘Did something happen?’ I asked.

  I hung up again. I had no idea what else to say.

  Back outside the library, my phone started to ring, but it was only Jason.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘I’m at the theatre and no one else is here except Sunil.’

  ‘Rooney’s gone.’

  ‘What do you mean gone?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll find her.’

  ‘Georgia –’

  I hung up and tried Rooney a third time.

  ‘Maybe the you from Freshers’ Week would have left us. But not now. Not after everything.’ I felt a tightness in my throat. ‘You wouldn’t have left me.’

  When I hung up that time, I realised my phone only had five per cent battery left, because I’d failed to put it on charge last night.

  The wind whipped around me on the street.

  Should I call the police?

  I started walking back towards the town centre, all the ‘what if’s circling around my head. What if she’d gone home? What if she’d fallen in the river and died?

  I stopped in the middle of the pavement, a memory suddenly flashing in my mind so hard I felt like I got whiplash.

  On that first night out in town, Rooney had put herself on Find My Friends on my phone. I hadn’t used it at all in the end, but … would it work now?

  I nearly dropped my phone in my haste to get it out and check, and sure enough, there on the map was a little circle with Rooney’s face in it.

  She was, apparently, in a field, by the river, maybe a kilometre away in the countryside.

  I didn’t even let myself think why. I just started running again.

  I hadn’t thought about what Durham might be like outside the city centre. All I’d known for the past six months was university buildings, cobbled streets and tiny cafés.

  But it only took ten minutes for me to find myself in big, endless greenery. Long fields stretched out ahead as I followed the small, worn footpaths and tracked the little Rooney dot on my phone, until my phone screen went black and I couldn’t any more.

  By that point, I didn’t need it. The dot had been by the river, next to a bridge. I just needed to get to the bridge.

  It took another fifteen minutes. At one point I was scared I was truly lost, with no Google Maps to help me, but I just kept going, following the river, until I saw it. The bridge.

  The bridge was empty.

  The surrounding footpaths and fields were too.

  I just stood there and looked for a moment. Then I walked across the bridge and back, like Rooney might be sleeping down on the riverbank or I might see the back of her head bobbing in the water, but I didn’t.

  Instead, when I reached the footpath again, I saw light glint off something on the grass.

  It was Rooney’s phone.

  I picked it up and turned the screen on. All of my missed calls were on there. Lots from Pip too, and even a couple from Jason.

  I sat down on the grass.

  And I just cried. From exhaustion, from confusion, from fear. I just sat in a field with Rooney’s phone and cried.

  Even after everything, I couldn’t help her.

  I couldn’t be a good friend to her.

  I couldn’t make her feel like she mattered in my life.

  ‘GEORGIA.’

  A voice. I looked up.

  For a moment I thought I might be dreaming. Whether she was a projection from my mind of what I wished was happening right now.

  But she was real.

  Rooney was running across the bridge to me, a Starbucks in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other.

  ‘Oh my God, Georgia, why are you – what’s wrong?’

  Rooney collapsed on to her knees in front of me and stared at the tears flowing out of my eyes.

  Pip had cried in front of me dozens of times. It didn’t take much to set her off. Often it had been warranted, but sometimes she cried just because she was tired. Or that one time she cried because she made a lasagne and then dropped it on the floor.

  Jason had cried in front of me a few times. Only when really bad things happened, like when he realised how horrible Aimee was to him, or we watched really sad movies about old people, like The Notebook and Pixar’s Up.

  Rooney had cried in front of me a few times too. When she first told me about her ex. Outside Pip’s door. And when we moved the beds together.

  I’d never cried in front of her.

  I’d never cried in front of anyone.

  ‘Why … are you … here …?’ I managed to stammer out in between heaving breaths. I didn’t want her to see me like this. God, I didn’t want anyone to see me.

  ‘I could ask you the same thing!’ She dropped the flowers on the ground and placed her Starbucks cup carefully on the footpath, then sat down next to me on the grass. I realised she was wearing different clothes from last night – she was now in different leggings and a sweatshirt. When had she gone back to our room to change? Had I slept through her coming back?

  She wrapped an arm round me.

  ‘I thought … you were … in the river,’ I said.

  ‘You thought I’d fallen in the river and died?’

  ‘I d-don’t know … I was scared …’

  ‘I’m not dumb, I don’t just go around jumping in rivers.’

  I looked at her. ‘You frequently stay at strangers’ houses.’

  Rooney pursed her lips. ‘OK.’

  ‘You locked yourself out of college at five a.m.’

  ‘OK. Maybe I’m a bit dumb.’

  I wiped my face, feeling a little calmer. ‘Why was your phone here?’

  She paused. ‘I … walk out here sometimes. After nights out. Well … usually the mornings after. I just like coming out here and … feeling like everything’s calm.’

  ‘You never told me.’

  She shrugged. ‘I didn’t think anyone would really care about it. It was just my thing that I did to clear my head. So I came out here this morning and at some point I dropped my phone, and I didn’t realise until I was all the way back at college – you must have already left by that point – so I just got changed and ran back here and … now we’re both here.’

  She still had her arm round me. We stared out at the river.

  ‘Did Pip tell you what happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ I tapped my foot against hers. ‘Why’d you run?’

  She let out a deep breath. ‘I’m … very scared of … getting close to people. And … last night, with Pip, I …what we did – well, what we were about to do, I-I just started to think that I was doing what I normally did. Having sex to just … detach myself from feeling anything real.’ She shook her head. ‘But I wasn’t. I realised almost as soon as I left. I realised I … it would have been the first time with someone
I actually … cared about. With someone who cared about me too.’

  ‘She’s really worried about you,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should get back.’

  Rooney turned to me.

  ‘You were really worried about me too, weren’t you?’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen you cry before.’

  I clenched my teeth, feeling the tears welling up again. This was why I didn’t cry in front of people – when I started, it took me ages to stop.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she said. ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘I …’ I looked down. I didn’t want her to see me. But Rooney was looking at me, eyebrows furrowed, so many thoughts churning behind her eyes, and it was that look that made me start spilling everything out. ‘I just care about you so much … but I’ve always got this fear that … one day you’ll leave. Or Pip and Jason will leave, or … I don’t know.’ Fresh tears fell from my cheeks. ‘I’m never going to fall in love, so … my friendships are all I have, so … I just … can’t bear the idea of losing any of my friends. Because I’m never going to have that one special person.’

  ‘Can you let me be that person?’ Rooney said quietly.

  I sniffed loudly. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I mean I want to be your special person.’

  ‘B-but … that’s not how the world works, people always put romance over friendships –’

  ‘Says who?’ Rooney spluttered, smacking her hand on the ground in front of us. ‘The heteronormative rulebook? Fuck that, Georgia. Fuck that.’

  She stood up, flailing her arms and pacing as she spoke.

  ‘I know you’ve been trying to help me with Pip,’ she began, ‘and I appreciate that, Georgia, I really do. I like her and I think she likes me and we like being around each other and, yep, I’m just gonna say it – I think we really, really want to have sex with each other.’

  I just stared at her, my cheeks tear-stained, having no idea where this was going.

  ‘But you know what I realised on my walk?’ she said. ‘I realise that I love you, Georgia.’

  My mouth dropped open.

  ‘Obviously I’m not romantically in love with you. But I realised that whatever these feelings are for you, I …’ She grinned wildly. ‘I feel like I am in love. Me and you – this is a fucking love story! I feel like I’ve found something most people just don’t get. I feel at home around you in a way I have never felt in my fucking life. And maybe most people would look at us and think that we’re just friends, or whatever, but I know that it’s just … so much MORE than that.’ She gestured dramatically at me with both hands. ‘You changed me. You … you fucking saved me, I swear to God. I know I still do a lot of dumb stuff and I say the wrong things and I still have days where I just feel like shit but … I’ve felt happier over the past few weeks than I have in years.’

  I couldn’t speak. I was frozen.

  Rooney dropped to her knees. ‘Georgia, I am never going to stop being your friend. And I don’t mean that in the boring average meaning of ‘friend’ where we stop talking regularly when we’re twenty-five because we’ve both met nice young men and gone off to have babies, and only get to meet up twice a year. I mean I’m going to pester you to buy a house next door to me when we’re forty-five and have finally saved up enough for our deposits. I mean I’m going to be crashing round yours every night for dinner because you know I can’t fucking cook to save my life, and if I’ve got kids and a spouse, they’ll probably come round with me, because otherwise they’ll be living on chicken nuggets and chips. I mean I’m going to be the one bringing you soup when you text me that you’re sick and can’t get out of bed and ferrying you to the doctor’s even when you don’t want to go because you feel guilty about using the NHS when you just have a stomach bug. I mean we’re gonna knock down the fence between our gardens so we have one big garden, and we can both get a dog and take turns looking after it. I mean I’m going to be here, annoying you, until we’re old ladies, sitting in the same care home, talking about putting on a Shakespeare because we’re all old and bored as shit.’

  She grabbed the bunch of flowers and practically threw them at me.

  ‘And I bought these for you because I honestly didn’t know how else to express any of that to you.’

  I was crying. I just started crying again.

  Rooney wiped the tears off my cheeks. ‘What? Don’t you believe me? Because I’m not fucking joking. Don’t sit there and tell me I’m lying because I’m not lying. Did any of that make sense?’ She grinned. ‘I am extremely sleep-deprived right now.’

  I couldn’t speak. I was a mess.

  She gestured at the bunch of flowers, which had pretty much exploded in my lap. ‘I really wanted to do some grand gesture like you did for Pip and Jason but I couldn’t think of anything because you’re the brains in this friendship.’

  That made me laugh. She wrapped her arms round me, and then I was just half laughing, half crying, happy and sad at the same time.

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’ she asked again, holding me tight.

  ‘I believe you,’ I said, my nose all bunged up and my voice croaky. ‘I promise.’

  Neither of us were at the level of fitness where running all the way back to the city centre was a good idea, but that’s what we did anyway. Our play was due to start in under two hours. We didn’t have a choice.

  We ran all the way along the river, me with the flowers in my hands and stopping to pick them up every time I dropped one, and her with nothing but a phone, a Starbucks cup, and a grin on her face. We had to stop and sit down several times to catch our breath, and by the time we got to the town square, I truly thought my chest was going to implode. But we had to run. For the play.

  For our friends.

  When we got to the theatre, we were both soaked in sweat, and we burst in through the doors to find Pip sitting at a table in the foyer, her head in her hands.

  She looked up at us as I literally fell on to the ground, sounding like an astronaut running out of air, while Rooney did her best to adjust the mess that was her ponytail.

  ‘Where,’ said Pip, very calmly. ‘The fuck. Have you been?’

  ‘We …’ I started to say, but then I just let out a wheeze.

  So Rooney spoke for us.

  ‘I panicked after last night and Georgia tracked my phone but I’d lost my phone in a field and she ran all the way there and then I went back there because I knew I’d dropped it somewhere near the field and then I ran into her and I had these flowers because I wanted to tell her how much I appreciated her and everything she’s done for me this year and then we talked about everything and I told her how important she is to me and also –’ Rooney stepped forward towards Pip, who was staring, wide-eyed – ‘I also realised that I really, truly like you and I haven’t felt like that for anyone in a long time and it really scared me and that’s why I ran away.’

  ‘Um … O-OK,’ Pip stammered.

  Rooney took another step forward and put one hand on the table in front of Pip.

  ‘How do you feel about me?’ she asked, completely straight-faced.

  ‘Um … I …’ Pip’s cheeks went red. ‘I … I also … really like you …’

  Rooney nodded vigorously, but I could tell she was getting a bit flustered. ‘Good. Just thought we should be clear about it.’

  Pip stood up, her eyes never leaving Rooney. ‘Right. Um. Yeah. Good.’

  I had, by this point, managed to get to my feet, and my lungs no longer felt like they were about to explode. ‘We should go and find Jason and Sunil.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rooney and Pip simultaneously, and the three of us started walking into the backstage area of the theatre, Rooney and Pip just slightly behind me.

  As I turned a corner, I said, ‘Are they in a dressing room, or …?’ and when I got no answer, I glanced back, only to find Rooney and Pip vigorously making out, Rooney having pushed Pip up against a dressing-room door, both of them seemingly unbothered that I was literally right there.

&nbs
p; ‘Hey,’ I said, but they either didn’t hear me or chose to ignore me.

  I coughed loudly.

  ‘HEY,’ I repeated, louder this time, and they reluctantly broke apart, Rooney looking a little irritated and Pip adjusting her glasses, looking like she’d just been punched. ‘We have a play to perform?’

  Jason and Sunil were sitting on the edge of the stage, sharing a packet of salted popcorn. As soon as they saw us enter, Jason raised both his arms in triumph, while Sunil said, ‘Thank God.’ Jason then ran over, picked me up, and carried me all the way on to the stage while I laughed hysterically and tried to escape.

  ‘We’re doing it!’ he said, spinning us around. ‘We’re doing the play!’

  ‘I feel like I’m going to cry,’ Sunil said, and then stuffed three more pieces of popcorn into his mouth.

  Rooney clapped her hands loudly. ‘No more time for being happy! We need to get changed before people start arriving!’

  And so we did. Jason and Sunil had already arranged all our costumes, props and set backstage, so we all got changed into our first set of costumes, then spent ten minutes arranging the set we’d managed to craft with our limited resources – my papier-mâché pillar, which we placed on the centre-left, and a garland covered in stars that we somehow, after much deliberation between Jason and Rooney, managed to attach to one of the backdrop rails. When we hoisted it up, it looked like little stars were raining down from the ceiling.

  We also had a chair in many of our scenes, but the best thing we could find was a red plastic thing in the wings. ‘I have an idea,’ said Rooney, and she leapt off the front of the stage to grab the flowers that I’d left on a front-row seat. She brought them up on to the stage and started sellotaping flowers to the chair.

  By the time she’d finished, the chair had been transformed into a throne of flowers.

  It was ten minutes until our performance when I started to wonder who was actually going to attend this show.

  Obviously Sadie had been invited, since she was judging it. And I could guess that Sunil would have invited Jess. But would that be it? Two audience members?

  I peeked out from behind the curtains and waited, and soon I was proven very, very wrong.