‘Is that a dig at my height?’
‘Just saying. I think you might be naturally at a disadvantage compared to most people.’
‘Ah, but I have the Short Person Anger advantage.’
Rooney smirked. ‘Can’t relate.’
‘Hey,’ I said loudly, and Pip and Rooney both looked at me. ‘We’re supposed to be having fun and getting to know each other.’
They blinked at me.
‘Isn’t that what we’re doing?’ said Rooney.
‘I need a drink,’ Jason said loudly, standing up. I stood up with him, giving him a supportive squeeze on the arm, and we left Rooney and Pip to their bizarre banter competition.
I knew that relying on alcohol to relieve anxiety was not great. On a physical level, I didn’t even enjoy the taste that much. Unfortunately, I had grown up in a place where almost everyone my age drank, and I’d accepted drinking as ‘normal’， like a lot of other things, even though often it wasn’t really what I wanted to do at all.
Jason ordered a cider and I ordered a double vodka and lemonade, and also two beers for Pip and Rooney.
‘I know she’s done the whole deflecting-feelings-by-being-angry thing before,’ said Jason grimly as we waited at the bar for our drinks. ‘But I haven’t seen her like this since Kelly Thornton in Year Ten.’
‘This is definitely worse,’ I said, thinking back to the time with Kelly – a lengthy feud over a stolen pencil – which had ended in Pip throwing a half-eaten apple at her head and getting two weeks of detention. ‘I just want everyone to be friends.’
Jason chuckled and nudged me with his shoulder. ‘Well, you’ve got me. We’re relatively drama-free.’
I looked up at Jason. His big brown eyes and soft smile were so familiar to me. We’d never had any drama. So far, anyway.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Relatively.’
I proceeded to get drunk in record time. Maybe because I’d skipped dinner in favour of reading fanfic and eating a bagel in bed, or maybe because I drank the equivalent of six shots in forty-five minutes, but whatever it was, by ten o’clock, I felt genuinely relaxed and happy, which was definitely a sign that I was not in my right mind.
To reiterate: I’m not advocating this sort of thing. But, at the time, I didn’t know how else to deal with what a long, stressful week it had been, and the prospect of many more long, stressful weeks I had to come over the next three years.
I suppose it’s fair to say I was not enjoying my university experience thus far.
We headed into town at around ten o’clock. Rooney was insistent. I would have protested, but I did want to see if clubbing was any better if you went with your friends. Maybe I would enjoy it if Pip and Jason were there.
Pip and Rooney were both at least a bit tipsy and had been dominating around eighty per cent of the conversation. Jason had been kind of quiet, which wasn’t unusual, and he didn’t seem to mind when I slotted my arm through his as we walked into the centre of Durham, to try and minimise the amount of swaying I was doing as I walked.
Rooney kept swapping between bantering with Pip, then turning round to me, her long hair flying about in the gusty October air, and shouting, ‘We need to get you a MAN, Georgia! We need to find you a MAN!’
The word ‘man’ grossed me out because it made me picture a guy far older than me – no one our age was a man yet, were they?
‘I’ll find one eventually!’ I shouted back, even though I knew that was bullshit and nothing in life is certain and I didn’t ‘have time to figure things out’ because I might just have a brain aneurism at any moment and then I’d be dead, without having fallen in love, without having even figured out who I was and what I wanted.
‘You don’t have to find a man, Georgia,’ Pip slurred at me once we were inside the club, queueing for the bar.
It wasn’t the dank, sticky club from the other day, but a new one. It was fancy, modern, and out of place in historic Durham. It was playing cool indie-pop – Pale Waves, Janelle Monáe, Chvrches – and we were surrounded by people dancing under neon lights. I had a bit of a headache, but I wanted to try and enjoy it. I wanted to push myself.
‘I know,’ I said, thankfully out of earshot of Rooney, who was talking intensely to Jason about something. Jason looked moderately overwhelmed.
‘I’ve already accepted that I’ll never find anyone,’ said Pip, and it took a moment for the full implications of that to sink into my brain.