Rooney had stopped crying by the time I returned to our room.

Instead, she was changing into going-out clothes.

‘You’re going out?’ I asked, shutting the door behind me and flicking the light switch. She hadn’t even bothered to turn the light on.

‘Yeah,’ she said, pulling a bardot top over her head.

‘Why?’

‘Because if I stay here,’ she snapped, ‘then I’ll have to sit and think about everything all night, and I can’t do that. I can’t just sit and be with my thoughts.’

‘Who do you even go out with?’

‘Just people in college. I have other friends.’

Friends who don’t ever stop by for tea, or come over for movie nights and pizza, or check in with you when you’re feeling rough?

That’s what I wanted to say.

‘OK,’ I said.

Her normal bullshit, was what I’d been telling myself. That was how I justified it all, really. The skipped lectures. The sleeping in until the afternoon. The clubbing every night.

I didn’t take any of it seriously, really seriously, until that night, when I woke up at 5 a.m. to a message reading:

Rooney Bach

can your let me in im outside coellge

Forgotmy key

It had been sent at 3.24 a.m. The college doors were locked between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. – you needed your key to get back into the main building.

I often woke up in the early hours and checked my phone, before very quickly going back to sleep. But this panicked me so much that I leapt out of bed and immediately called Rooney.

She didn’t pick up.

I put on my glasses, dressing gown and slippers, grabbed my keys, and ran out of the door, my mind suddenly filled with visions of her dead in a ditch, choked on her own vomit, or drowned in the river. She had to be fine. She did stupid stuff all the time, but she was always fine.

The main reception hall was dark and empty as I thundered through it, unlocked the door, and ran out into the dark.

The street was empty, apart from a figure sitting on a low brick wall a little way ahead, huddled into herself.

Rooney.

Alive. Thank God. Thank God.

I ran up to her. She was just wearing the bardot top and a skirt, despite the fact that it had to be like five degrees outside.

‘What – what are you doing?’ I said, feeling inexplicably angry at her.

She looked up at me. ‘Oh. Good. Finally.’

‘You … Have you just been sitting here all night?’

She stood up, attempting to be nonchalant, but I could see the way she was clutching her arms, trying to control her violent shivering. ‘Only a couple of hours.’

I wrenched off my dressing gown and gave it to her. She wrapped it round herself without question.

‘Couldn’t you have called someone else – one of your other friends?’ I asked. ‘Surely someone was awake.’

She shook her head. ‘No one was awake. Well, a couple of people read my messages, but … they must have ignored them. And then my phone died.’

I was so alarmed by this that I couldn’t even think of anything else to say. I just let us back into college and we walked to our room in silence.

‘You can’t just … You need to be more careful,’ I said as we entered the room. ‘It’s not safe to be out there on your own at that time.’

She started changing into her pyjamas. She looked exhausted.

‘Why do you care?’ she whispered. Not in a mean way. A genuine question. Like she honestly couldn’t fathom what the answer was. ‘Why do you care about me?’

‘You’re my friend,’ I said, standing by the door.

She didn’t say anything else. She just got into bed and closed her eyes.

I picked up her discarded clothes from the floor and put them in her wash basket, but then realised her phone was in her skirt pocket, so I fished it out and put it on charge for her. I even poured a little bit of water into Roderick’s planter. He really was looking a little perkier.

And then I got into bed and wondered why I cared about Rooney Bach, queen of self-sabotage, the love expert who wasn’t. Because I did. I really, really did care about her, despite how different we were and how we probably wouldn’t have ever spoken if we hadn’t been roomed together and all the times she’d said the wrong thing or made a mess of a situation.

I cared about her because I liked her. I liked her passion for the Shakespeare Society. I liked the way she’d get excited about things that didn’t matter very much, like rugs or plays or college marriage. I liked the way she’d always genuinely wanted to help me, even though she’d never actually known the right thing to say or do and had given much worse advice than I’d initially realised.

I thought that she was a good person, and I liked having her in my life.

And I was starting to realise that it was unfathomable to Rooney that someone could feel that way about her.

I was woken up again two hours later by the sound of Rooney’s phone ringing.

We both ignored it.

When it rang the second time, I sat up and put my glasses on.

‘Your phone’s ringing,’ I said, my voice croaky from sleep.

Rooney had not moved. She just made a grunting noise.

I rolled out of bed and stumbled over to where Rooney’s phone was on charge on her bedside table, and looked at the caller ID.

It read: Beth

I stared at it. I felt like I should know who this was, somehow, like I’d seen the name before somewhere.

And then I realised that it was the name of a person half a metre in front of me, in the only photo Rooney had put up on the wall next to her bed. A photo that was a little crumpled from all the times it had fallen off the wall and been trodden on.

The photo of thirteen-year-old Rooney and her best friend from school. Mermaid-hair Beth.

I swiped to answer the call.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi?’ said the voice. Beth. Was this Beth? The girl in the photo with dyed red hair and freckles?

Did she and Rooney still talk to each other? Maybe Rooney did have other friends who checked in with her, I just didn’t know about them.

And then Beth said, ‘I got some missed calls from this number last night and I just wanted to check who this was, in case it’s an emergency or something.’

I felt my mouth drop open.

She didn’t even have Rooney’s number saved.

‘Um –’ I found myself talking. ‘Sorry – this actually isn’t my phone. This is Rooney Bach’s phone.’

There was a pause.

‘Rooney Bach?’

‘Uh, yeah. I’m her uni roommate. She … she was pretty drunk last night, so … maybe she drunk-called you?’

‘Yeah, I guess … sorry, this is really weird. I haven’t seen her for … God, it must be like five years. I don’t know why she even still has my number saved.’

I stared at the photo on the wall.

‘You don’t still talk to her?’ I asked.

‘Uh, no. She moved schools when we were in Year Nine and we didn’t really keep in contact after that.’

Rooney had lied. Or … had she? She’d told me Beth was her friend. Maybe that had been true when she was younger. But it wasn’t now.

Why did Rooney have a photo of a friend she hadn’t spoken to for five years on her wall?

‘How is she?’ asked Beth.

‘She’s …’ I blinked. ‘She’s OK. She’s good.’

‘That’s good. Is she still into theatre?’

I didn’t know why, but I felt like I was going to cry.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, she is. She loves theatre.’

‘Aw. That’s nice. She always said she wanted to be a director, or something.’

‘You should – you should message her sometime,’ I said, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. ‘I think she’d like a catch-up.’

‘Yeah,’ said Beth. ‘Yeah, maybe I will. That’d be nice.’

I hoped she would. I desperately hoped she would.

‘Well … I’ll hang up then, as this isn’t an emergency or anything. I’m glad Rooney’s doing well.’

‘OK,’ I said, and Beth ended the call.

I put down Rooney’s phone. Rooney herself hadn’t moved. All I could see of her was the back of her head, her ponytail falling out, and the rest of her covered up by her floral duvet.