‘I don’t mind!’ I blurted. I really didn’t. I liked deep chats and I felt like I was getting to know Sunil properly. I knew that he, as my college parent, was supposed to be my mentor here at Durham, but I already wanted to know him better than that. I wanted us to be friends.
But that was when I heard the voice.
‘Georgia?’
I looked up, though I didn’t need to, because I knew the voice almost as well as my own.
Pip, wearing a black tux not dissimilar from Sunil’s, was staring down at me with a baffled expression.
‘What are you doing here?’
I looked at Pip. Pip looked at me. Sunil looked at Pip. Then he looked at me. I looked down at my hands, struggling to know what to do or how to explain why I had attended a Pride Soc formal when I was supposed to be dating Jason and Pip had no reason to believe I wasn’t straight.
‘I-I ran into Sunil,’ I said, but didn’t know where to go from there.
‘I’m her college parent,’ said Sunil.
‘Yeah.’
‘So …’ Pip smiled awkwardly. ‘You just … decided to come along?’
There was a silence.
‘Actually,’ said Sunil, sitting up in his chair, ‘I asked Georgia to come along to help out. We were a bit short on numbers for setting all this up.’ He turned to me with a smile that looked a tiny bit sinister. Probably because he was lying out of his ass. ‘And, in return, I’m going to be in Georgia’s play.’
‘Oh!’ Pip immediately brightened, her eyes widening. ‘Shit! Yes! We really needed a fifth member!’
‘You’re in it too?’
‘Yeah! Well, I was sort of forced into it, but yes.’
As soon as I had processed the fact that Sunil had just volunteered himself to be in our play, he had been called over by another group of people, had given me a pat on the shoulder, and bidden farewell to both of us.
Pip met my eyes again. She still seemed a bit confused. ‘Shall we … go to the bar?’
I nodded. I’d had too much wine and I needed some water, badly. ‘Yeah.’
It actually took us around twenty minutes to get to the bar, because people kept stopping to talk to Pip.
Pip had made a huge number of new friends here at Pride Soc, which shouldn’t have surprised me. She’d always been good at making friends, but she was selective, and back in our home town, there hadn’t actually been many people she’d wanted to hang out with. There’d been the other girls in our form when we were in the lower school, and she’d had a handful of queer mates in the sixth form, but there was no Pride Soc at our school. Rural Kent didn’t have any sort of queer areas or shops or clubs like in the big cities.
She came out to me when we were fifteen. It wasn’t the most dramatic, or funny, or emotional of coming-outs, if films or TV were anything to go by. ‘I think I might like girls instead,’ was what she’d said while we were scouring the high street shops for new schoolbags. There’d been some build-up. We’d been talking about boys who went to the all-boys school. I’d been saying how I didn’t really understand the hype. Pip agreed.
It goes without saying that Pip had a shit time, generally. And while Pip had many, many other acquaintances who she could definitely have deepened friendships with, she always came to me to talk about difficult things. I don’t know if that’s because she trusted me or just because I was a good listener. Maybe both. Either way, I became a safe place. I’d been happy to be one then, and I still was now.
I was happy to give that to her.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said, once we’d finally sat down on the bar stools and had ordered two glasses of apple juice, neither of us particularly in the mood to continue drinking alcohol. She was smiling.
‘No you’re not.’ I grinned back. ‘You’re extremely popular.’
‘OK, you got me.’ She crossed her legs, revealing stripy socks peeping out from underneath her trousers. ‘I’m extremely popular now and I am loving it. Don’t worry; you and Jason are still my joint number ones.’
I looked back at the little crowds of Pride Soc members, some just standing and chatting, others dancing, others sitting in corners with drinks, whispering intimately.
‘I’ve been going to LatAm Soc as well,’ Pip said. ‘They had a welcome social a few days ago.’
‘Oh! How was it?’
Pip nodded excitedly. ‘Actually awesome. My mum basically forced me to go, because, like, I wasn’t super enthused about it. I didn’t really know what you’d actually do in it. But it was really nice to make some friends there. And they genuinely do so much stuff. Like, I met this other Colombian girl, and she was telling me about this little gathering they did last December for Día de las Velitas.’ She smiled. ‘It made me feel like … I dunno. It reminded me of when I lived in London.’