The very ordinary smiley-face emoji and the single, sensible question mark were extremely not like Jason, which suggested that he, too, had been overthinking this conversation. How should I reply? Should I be grammatically rule-abiding and polite? Or should I just start sending him memes straight away, like normal? How was this supposed to work?
To be absolutely and completely honest, I didn’t want to go on a date with him at all.
But I did want to want to go on a date with him.
And that was the crux of my problem.
‘Why are you staring at your phone like you’re trying to make it explode with your mind?’ asked Rooney once we’d walked back to our room after the lecture.
I decided to be honest. Rooney would probably know how to approach this.
‘Jason messaged me,’ I said.
‘Oh!’ She dumped her bag on the floor and rolled on to her bed, kicking off her Converse and pulling her hair out of its ponytail. ‘Nice. What’s he saying?’
Sitting on my own bed, I held up my phone to her. ‘I kind of asked him out yesterday.’
Rooney leapt off her bed.
‘You did WHAT?’
I paused. ‘Um. I asked him out. Was that … wrong?’
She stared at me for a long time.
‘I don’t understand you at all,’ she said finally.
‘… OK.’
She sat back down, pressing her fingers to her lips.
‘OK, well … good. This is good.’ She took a breath. ‘How did this happen?’
‘I dunno, I was just thinking about it after what you said, and – I mean, I guess I just thought – like, I realised …’ I folded my arms. ‘I do.’
‘You do what?’
‘Like him.’
‘Romantically?’
‘Mm.’
‘Sexually?’
I made a spluttering noise because I was suddenly picturing having sex with Jason. ‘Who thinks about sex that quickly?’
Rooney snorted. ‘Me.’
‘Anyway, I do like him.’ I do. I did. I probably did.
‘Oh, I know you do. I saw this coming from the moment I met him.’ She sighed happily. ‘It’s like a movie.’
‘I don’t know what to text him back,’ I said. ‘Help me.’
I felt a little bit embarrassed. This was simple stuff, for Christ’s sake. This was twelve-year-old-level Dating Skills.
Rooney blinked. Then she got up from her bed, walked over to me, and gestured for me to budge up. I obeyed, and she flopped down on to the duvet beside me, taking my phone from my hands. She opened the message before I could stop her.
I watched her read it.
‘OK,’ she said, and then she typed out a message for me and sent it.
Georgia Warr
Yes for sure! You free at all this week?
‘Oh,’ I said.
She slapped my phone back into my hands.
I expected her to ask why I couldn’t accomplish such a simple task. I expected her to maybe laugh, in a nice way, about how much I had been panicking about this.
She gave me a long look and I waited for her to ask: Was that so hard? Why couldn’t you do that yourself? Do you even want to talk to Jason? Was your panic because you have a crush on him or are you panicking because you’re not even sure what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it, or whether you even want to be doing it? Are you panicking because if you can’t even want to do this, you might never be able to want to do this?
But instead she just smiled and said, ‘No prob.’
Jason and I arranged our date for that Saturday, which meant I had five whole days to panic about it.
Thankfully, my second week at university was a welcome distraction.
Both Rooney and I were now faced with actual university work – real lectures and tutorials and reading ten whole books in four weeks. And we were settling into our new life living together too. We’d always go to lectures together and go to lunch together, but she liked to go down to the bar in the evenings or go out to a club with other friends, while I preferred to sit in bed with biscuits and a fanfic. Sometimes Rooney would talk to me about ideas for her Shakespeare play, chatting excitedly about how she would do the set and the costumes and the staging, and other times we would just talk about whatever – TV shows. College gossip. Our home lives.
I didn’t really understand why Rooney had chosen me. Clearly, she could have anyone she wanted as whatever she wanted – friend, partner, hook-up, even someone to playfully banter with. But despite being able to befriend anyone, and having fifty acquaintances already, it was me she ate with, and walked through Durham with, and hung out with when she wasn’t partying.