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 sowhite. 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?’

I felt myself go a bit red. ‘Uh, no.’

‘Good. I can’t imagine you kissing.’ She narrowed her eyes and looked off into the distance. ‘It’d be like … I dunno. Like seeing my siblings kiss.’

‘Well, we’re probably going to end up doing it at some point,’ I said. Definitely. We definitely were.

Pip looked at me again. I couldn’t read her. Was she annoyed? Did she just find it weird?

‘You’ve never really been interested in anyone before,’ she said. ‘I mean, the Tommy thing … that was all … you just made up that crush. By accident.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed.

‘But you … you just like Jason now?’

I blinked at her. ‘What? Don’t you believe me?’

She leant forward a little, then back again. ‘I’m not sure I do.’

‘Why not?’

She didn’t want to say it. She knew it’d be disrespectful to say it, to assume anything about my sexuality, but we were both thinking it.

We were both thinking that I probably just didn’t like men.

I didn’t know what to say, because I didn’t disagree.

I wanted to tell Pip that I didn’t feel sure about anything, and I felt so weird all the time, to the point that I hated myself, being a kid who knew all about sexuality from the internet but couldn’t even vaguely work out what I was, couldn’t even come up with a ballpark estimate, when everyone else seemed to find it so, so easy. Or if they didn’t find it easy, they got through the hard bit at school, and by the time they were my age, they were already kissing and having sex and falling in love as much as they wanted.

All I could manage to say was: ‘I don’t really know how I feel.’

Pip could tell I wasn’t saying everything that was in my head. She could always tell.

She grabbed my hand and held it.

‘That’s OK, my guy,’ she said. ‘That’s fine.’

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m … shit at explaining it. It sounds fake.’

‘I’m here to talk whenever you want, man.’

‘OK.’

She pulled me into a side hug, my face pressing against her collar. ‘Date Jason for a bit if you want. Just … don’t hurt him, OK? He acts all calm and collected, but he’s really sensitive after all that shit with Aimee.’

‘I know. I won’t.’ I lifted my head. ‘You’re really OK with it?’

Her smile was forced and pained, and it nearly broke my heart.

‘Of course. I love you.’

‘Love you too.’