Loveless. Alice Oseman
anyone else in Durham? Or are you here all alone?’
‘Oh, erm, well, my two best friends are here, but they’re in Castle.’
‘Oh, that’s so nice! Sad you didn’t get into the same college, though.’
I shrugged. Durham took your choice of college into consideration, but not everyone could get their first choice. I’d tried to get into Castle too, but I’d ended up here. ‘We tried, but, yeah.’
‘You’ll be OK.’ Rooney beamed. ‘We’ll be friends.’
Rooney offered to help me unpack, but I declined, determined to at least do this one thing by myself. While I was unpacking, she sat on her bed and chatted to me, and we learnt that we were both studying English. She then declared that she’d done none of the summer reading. I’d done all of it but didn’t mention that.
Rooney, I was quickly learning, was extremely chatty, but I could tell that she was putting on some sort of happy, bubbly persona. Which was fair enough – I mean, it was our first day of university. Everyone was going to be trying really hard to make friends. But I couldn’t get a sense of what sort of person she really was, which was mildly concerning because we were going to be living with each other for almost a full year.
Were we going to be best friends? Or were we going to awkwardly put up with each other before leaving for the summer and never speaking again?
‘So …’ I scanned the room in search of something to talk about, before landing on her Much Ado poster. ‘You like Shakespeare?’
Rooney’s head snapped up from her phone. ‘Yeah! Do you?’
I nodded. ‘Um, yeah, well, I was in a youth theatre group back home. And I did a lot of the school plays. Shakespeare was always my favourite.’
This actually caused Rooney to sit up, eyes wide and sparkling. ‘Wait. You act?’
‘Um …’
I did act, but, well, it was a bit more complicated than that now.
When I was in my early teens, I’d wanted to be an actor – which was why I’d joined the youth theatre group that Pip already went to and started auditioning for the school plays with her. And I was good at it. I got top marks in drama class at school. I usually got a pretty solid speaking part in the plays and musicals that I did.
But as I got older, acting just started to make me nervous. I got more stage fright the more plays I did, and eventually, when I auditioned for Les Misérables in Year 13, I was shaking so much that I got relegated to a role with only one line, and even then, come showtime, I threw up before every single performance.
So maybe a career in acting wasn’t for me.
Despite this, I was planning to continue with acting at uni. I still enjoyed figuring out roles and interpreting scripts – it was the audiences I had problems with. I just needed to work on my confidence. I’d join the student theatre society and maybe audition for a play. I needed to join one society, at least, if I was going to branch out and open up and meet new people.
And find someone to fall in love with.
‘Yeah, a bit,’ I said.
‘Oh. My. God.’ Rooney clapped one hand to her heart. ‘This is amazing. We can go join the DST together.’
‘The DST …?’
‘Durham Student Theatre. They basically run all of the drama societies in Durham.’ Rooney flipped her ponytail back. ‘The Shakespeare Soc is literally the main society I wanna join. I know most freshers do the Freshers Play but I had a look at what plays they’ve done the past few years and they’re all kind of boring? So I’m at least gonna try and join Shakespeare. God I’m praying they’ll do a tragedy. Macbeth is literally my dream …’
Rooney rambled on without seeming to care whether I was actually listening or not.
We had something in common. Acting. This was good.
Maybe Rooney would be my first new friend.
‘Oh, wow!’ said Jason later that day as he and Pip stepped into my – well, my and Rooney’s room. ‘It’s the size of my garden.’
Pip stretched out her arms and did a twirl on the spot, emphasising the unnecessary amount of empty space in the room. ‘I didn’t realise you’d joined the college of the bourgeoisie.’
‘I don’t understand why they couldn’t just … build a wall in the middle,’ I said, pointing at the gap between mine and Rooney’s sides of the room, which was currently only occupied by Rooney’s aqua rug.
‘How very Trump of you,’ said Jason.
‘Oh my God, shut up.’
Rooney had left a while ago with a group of people she’d befriended on our corridor. They’d invited me, but honestly, I needed some down time – I’d been trying my best to say hi to new people for most of the day, and I really, really wanted to see some familiar faces. So I’d invited Jason and Pip to come hang in my room for a bit before this evening’s freshers’ events at our separate colleges, and thankfully, they’d both finished unpacking and didn’t have anything else to do.
I’d already told them a little bit about Rooney – that she liked theatre and was generally quite nice – but her side of the room was a much better summary of her personality.
Jason surveyed it, then looked over my side. ‘Why does her side look like an Instagram influencer’s bedroom and yours looks like a prison cell? You brought so many bags with you!’
‘It’s not that bad. And a lot of the bags had books in them.’
‘Georgia, my dude,’ said Pip, who had slumped on to my bed. ‘Her side looks like Disneyland. Yours looks like a stock photo.’
‘I didn’t bring any posters,’ I said. ‘Or fairy lights.’
‘You – Georgia, how the hell did you forget fairy lights? They’re an essential element of university room décor.’
‘I don’t know!’
‘You’ll be sad without fairy lights. Everyone’s sad without fairy lights.’
‘I think Rooney’s got more than enough for both of us. She’s already letting me share a rug.’
Pip looked down at the aqua and nodded approvingly.
‘Yes. It’s a good rug.’
‘It’s just a rug.’
‘It’s a shaggy one. That’s sexy.’
‘Pip.’
Pip suddenly leapt out of the bed, staring at Rooney’s fern in the corner of the room. ‘Hang on – wait one fucking second. That plant …’
Jason and I turned to look at Roderick.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yeah. That’s Roderick.’
And it was at that moment that Rooney Bach returned to our room.
She swung the door wide open, kicked her Norton Anthology in front of it to act as a doorstop, and turned to face us with a Starbucks in her hand.
‘Guests!’ she said, beaming at the three of us.
‘Um, yeah,’ I said. ‘These are my friends from home, Pip and Jason.’ I pointed at each of them. ‘And this is my roommate, Rooney.’ I pointed at Rooney.
Rooney’s