I had somehow asked out one of my best friends, and there was absolutely no way for me to take that back, which meant that I probably needed to follow through and actually go on a date with Jason Farley-Shaw.

He ended up messaging me about it the day after the DST meeting.

Jason Farley-Shaw

Hey so how’s about that movie/food?

I got the message while Rooney and I were in an intro to poetry lecture, and instead of listening to the lecturer drone on about Keats, I spent the hour analysing this message. I didn’t open it, but I could read all of it from my home screen. I didn’t want to open it, because I didn’t want him to know that I’d read it, because if he knew I’d read it, I’d have to reply so he didn’t think I was ignoring him, and for some reason, the idea of continuing this incredibly new and incredibly weird flirtation with Jason was making me want to abandon my degree and become my brother’s plumbing apprentice.

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.’