by Alice Oseman
‘Could have gone harder with the pride flags,’ Sunil said, narrowing his eyes. I couldn’t tell whether he was joking.
We weren’t alone in the room – there was a small gathering of people putting a few final touches on the decorations. I quickly spotted the other third year I met on the stall, Jess, although her braids were styled into an updo. She was wearing a dress with tiny dogs on it. She waved, skipped over to Sunil, and swung her arm round him.
‘Oh my God, finally,’ she said.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Good, actually. We’re just arguing about whether to do place cards or not.’
‘Hm. People will want to sit with their friends, though.’
‘That’s what I think. But Alex thinks that’ll cause chaos.’
They discussed place cards while I stood slightly behind Sunil, like a toddler behind their parent’s leg at a family gathering. The students setting up all appeared to be third years. Some were dressed in bright, quirky outfits – sequins, patterned suits and big heels – while others wore more ordinary dresses and tuxes. I felt entirely out of place in my overalls, no matter what Sunil had said.
‘Oh, and I’ve brought Georgia along to help set up,’ said Sunil, interrupting my thoughts. He gave me a squeeze round my shoulders.
Jess smiled at me. I felt a little panicked – was she going to ask why I was here? What was my sexuality? Why hadn’t I come to any of their other events?
‘Can you blow up balloons?’ she asked.
‘Um, yeah.’
‘Thank God, because I literally can’t, and Laura is moaning about doing it because she’s apparently got a cough.’ And then she handed me a packet of balloons.
Sunil had to go off to assist with the evening’s preparations, and I quickly started to feel like I’d made a terrible mistake by coming and that I was going to be forced into talking to a load of people I really didn’t know. But Jess seemed happy for me to tag along, working my way through the balloons, as she caught up with her friends and acquaintances, and I even got to know her a little, asking her about the orchestra and playing the viola and her friendship with Sunil.
‘I honestly did not have a real friend here until I met him,’ she said, after we’d finished tying up the last cluster of balloons. ‘We got sat next to each other at orchestra and we just immediately started gushing about what each other was wearing. And we’ve been glued at the hip ever since.’ She smiled, watching Sunil chatting to some timid-looking freshers. ‘Everyone loves Sunil.’
‘Well, he’s really nice, so that makes sense,’ I said.
‘Not just that, but he’s actually a really good president. He won the Pride Soc election by a landslide. Everyone was really fed up with the president last year – he didn’t want to use anyone else’s ideas except his own. Oh, speaking of.’ Jess hopped over to Sunil and quietly said, ‘Lloyd’s here. Just a heads-up.’ She pointed towards the entrance.
Sunil glanced towards the door where a skinny blond guy wearing a velvet tux was standing. An expression I hadn’t seen on Sunil before flashed across his features – annoyance.
Lloyd looked over to him, unsmiling, then walked away towards a table on the other side of the room.
‘Lloyd hates Sunil,’ said Jess, as Sunil rejoined his conversation with the group of freshers. ‘So, that’s a bit of a thing there.’
‘Drama?’ I asked.
Jess nodded. ‘Drama.’
For some reason – pity, or genuine kindness, I wasn’t sure – I ended up sitting next to Sunil at his table throughout the dinner. By eight o’clock, the room was packed and lively, and waiters were serving drinks and starters.
Between courses Sunil made an effort to move around the room and talk to people on every table, especially the freshers. The newbies seemed genuinely excited to meet him. It was sort of wonderful to watch.
I managed to chat a little to the other people on my table, but I was relieved when Sunil returned for dessert, and I could get to talk to him properly. He told me that he was studying music, which he thought was probably a mistake, but he was enjoying it. He was from Birmingham, which explained the very slight tinge in his accent, which I hadn’t been able to place. He had no idea what he was doing after Durham yet, despite this being the final year of his degree.
I told him about our Shakespeare Society and how it was probably going to be a disaster.
‘I did a little bit of acting when I was at school,’ said Sunil when I told him about us needing a fifth member. He launched into a story of the time he played a minor role in a school production of Wicked, and concluded it by saying, ‘Maybe I could be in your play. I do miss the theatre.’
I told him that would be amazing.
‘I’m so busy, though,’ he said. ‘I just … have a lot on all of the time.’ And judging by the tired expression on his face, he wasn’t exaggerating, so I told him it’d be OK if he couldn’t.
But he said he’d think about it.
I hadn’t met a lot of openly queer people before. There’d been a crowd of people at school who Pip hung out with from time to time, but there could only have been about seven or eight of them, max. I don’t know what I expected. There was no particular type of person, no particular style or look. But they were all so friendly. There were a few obvious friendship groups, but mostly, people were happy to chat to whoever.
They were all just themselves.
I don’t know how to explain it.
There was no pretending. No hiding. No faking.
In this little restaurant hidden away in the old streets of Durham, a bunch of queer people could all show up and just be.
I don’t think I’d understood what that was like until that moment.
After dessert, tables were moved to the side and the real mingling began. The lights were dimmed and the music was turned up, and almost everyone was standing, chatting, laughing and drinking. I quickly realised my socialising reserves had been utterly depleted by what had honestly felt like the longest day of my life, and I’d also drunk enough alcohol to be in that weird space where everything feels like a dream, so I found an empty seat in a corner and huddled there with my phone and a glass of wine for half an hour, scrolling through Twitter and Instagram.
‘Hiding in the corner, college child?’
I raised my head, startled, but it was only Sunil, a glass of lemonade in hand. He looked like a celebrity in his tux, his hair pushed neatly back. I supposed he was a celebrity here.
He sat down in the chair next to me. ‘How are you doing?’
I nodded at him. ‘Fine! Yeah. This has been really nice.’
He smiled and gazed out at the room. Happy people having fun. ‘Yes. It’s been a success.’
‘Have you organised anything like this before?’
‘Never. I was part of the society’s leadership team last year, but events like this weren’t my call. Last year it was literally all bar crawls and club nights.’
I grimaced. Sunil saw, and laughed. ‘Yeah. Exactly.’
‘Is it stressful? Being the president?’
‘Sometimes. But it’s worth it. Makes me feel that I’m doing something important. And that I’m part of something important.’ He let out a breath. ‘I … I did things on my own for a long time. I know how it feels to be totally alone. So now I’m trying to make sure … no queer person has to feel like that in this city.’
I nodded again. I could understand that.
‘I’m not a superhero, or anything. I don’t want to be. A lot of the freshers see me as this, like, queer angel sent down to fix all their problems, and I’m not, I’m really, really not. I’m just a person. But I like to think I’m making a positive impact, even if it’s a small one.’
I suddenly got the sense that Sunil had been through a lot before he’d become this person – confident, eloquent, wise. He hadn’t always been the self-assured president of a society. But whatever he’d been through, he’d done it. He’d survived. And he was making th
e world a better place.
‘But I’m very tired all the time,’ he said with a small chuckle. ‘I think sometimes I forget about … looking after myself. Just … bingeing a show or, I don’t know. Baking a cake. I hardly ever do stuff like that. Sometimes I wish I could spend a little more time just doing something utterly pointless.’ He met my eyes. ‘And now I’m oversharing!’
‘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.’
Back in our home town, sometimes Pip had felt alone in a way that Jason and I just couldn’t make better. She often said she wished her family hadn’t moved out of London, because at least there she’d had her grandparents and a big community around her. When she moved to our tiny Kentish town aged ten, that community was gone. Pip was the only Latina in our school year.
With that, and figuring out that she was gay, Pip had definitely drawn the short straw in terms of people in her vicinity who she could relate to and bond with on a deep level due to shared life experiences.
‘I’d forgotten how good it felt to be surrounded by so many Latinx people, you know?’ she continued. ‘Our school was so white. And even being here in Durham – Durham as a whole is so white. Even Pride Soc is pretty white overall!’
She gestured around her, and when I looked, I realised how correct she was – with the exception of Sunil, Jess, and a handful of others, most faces in the room were white.
‘I’m starting to feel how much it affected me to just … be around white people all the time. Like, being gay and Latina meant that I just … didn’t know anyone like me. As good as it felt to finally have a few queer friends in sixth form, they were all white, so I just couldn’t fully relate to them.’ She chuckled suddenly. ‘But I met this gay dude at LatAm Soc and we had a massive chat about being gay and Latinx, and I swear to God I’d never felt so understood in my life.’
I found myself smiling. Because my best friend was thriving here.
‘What?’ she said, seeing the smile on my face.
‘I’m just happy for you,’ I said.
‘God, you actual sap.’
‘I can’t help it. You’re one of the very few people I actually care about in the world.’
Pip beamed like she was very pleased about this fact. ‘Well, I am a very popular and successful lesbian. It’s an honour to know me.’
‘Successful?’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s a new development.’
‘Number one, how dare you?’ Pip leant back on her stool with a smug expression. ‘Number two, yes, I may have got with a girl at the Pride Soc club night.’
‘Pip!’ I sat up straight, grinning. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’
She shrugged, but she was clearly very pleased with herself. ‘It wasn’t anything serious, like, it wasn’t like I wanted to date her or anything. But I wanted to kiss her – we both wanted to kiss, so, like … we just did.’
‘What was she like?’
We sat at the bar and Pip relayed the whole encounter to me about the girl in second year at Hatfield College who studied French and was wearing a cute skirt, and how it didn’t mean anything in particular but it had been fun and good and silly and everything she’d wanted from being at university.
‘This is so dumb, but it just … it just
gave me hope. Just a little bit.’ Pip let out a breath. ‘Like … I might not be alone forever. Like I might have the chance to … be properly myself here. To feel like being myself is a good thing.’ She laughed, then brushed her curls out of her eyes. ‘I don’t know if I ever felt like being me was … good.’
‘That’s a mood,’ I replied in a jokey way, but I guessed I sort of meant it.
‘Well, if you ever consider becoming gay, let me know. I could very quickly hook you up with someone. I have contacts now.’
I snorted. ‘If only sexuality worked like that.’
‘What, choosing it?’
‘Yeah. I think I’d choose to be gay if I could.’
Pip didn’t say anything for a moment, and I wondered if I’d said something weird or offensive. It was the truth, though. I would have chosen to be gay if I could.
I knew liking girls could be hard when you’re also a girl. It usually was, at least for a while. But it was beautiful too. So fucking beautiful.
Liking girls when you’re a girl was power. It was light. Hope. Joy. Passion.
Sometimes it took girls who liked girls a little while to find that. But when they found it, they flew.
‘You know,’ said Pip. ‘Straight people don’t think shit like that.’
‘Oh. Really?’
‘Yeah. Thinking shit like that is, like, step one to realising you’re a lesbian.’
‘Oh. Right.’ I laughed awkwardly. I was still pretty sure I wasn’t a lesbian. Or maybe I was and I was just really repressed. Or maybe I was just ‘X’ on the Kinsey Scale. Nothing.
God. I was regretting not ordering more alcohol.
We sat in silence for a moment, neither of us wanting to really push the issue. Normally Pip was nosy as hell whenever we started talking about deep stuff, but she probably knew there were some things that it wasn’t cool to be nosy about.
I wished she had been nosy.
I wished I could find the words to talk about all of this with my best friend.
‘So, you and Jason,’ said Pip, and I thought, oh no.
‘Uh, yeah?’ I said.
Pip snorted. ‘Have you kissed yet?’