Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney

and me self-consciously holding my left wrist in my right hand, as if I was afraid the wrist was going to get away from me.

I didn’t have close friends and at lunchtime I read textbooks alone in the school library.

After school we used to lie in her room listening to music and talking about why we liked each other. These were long and intense conversations, and felt so momentous to me that I secretly transcribed parts of them from memory in the evenings. When Bobbi talked about me it felt like seeing myself in a mirror for the first time.

Her wrists were slender and she had long, elegant hands.

When I got back to my apartment I felt drunker than I had been at the house.

I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things.

At the same time I was exhilarated by the seriousness of my pain, like it might change my life in an unforeseen way.

You suffer, she said. Everybody suffers. Ah, Bobbi said. Profound.

I could perform each poem for a period of about six months after I’d written it, after which point I couldn’t stand to look at it, never mind read it aloud in public.

I sat staring at my laptop screen until it went black. Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go. I should experiment with drugs. These thoughts were not unusual for me.

I found this idea too intense to think about, like the glare of a bare lightbulb.

I’ll send you an email about it. If I compliment you now you’ll think I’m just saying it, but the email will be very flattering. Oh, that’s nice. I like getting compliments where I don’t have to make eye contact with the person.

It seemed as though what he was really saying was: there’s something beautiful about the way you think and feel, or the way that you experience the world is beautiful in some way. This remark returned to me repeatedly for days after the email arrived. I smiled involuntarily when I thought of it, like I was remembering a private joke.

Yeah, men love telling me I’m cool, I said. They just want me to act like I’ve never heard it before.

My mother was weeding and I was pretending to weed but actually just talking.

My heart was beating too quickly for my body.

For a while the persistent discomfort and mild fever felt psychologically appropriate and I did nothing about them,

He didn’t reply for a while. I guessed he had gone to bed, but the possibility that he hadn’t yet made me not want to work any more.

I’m a big hit with her, said Bobbi. I’m not sure it’ll go anywhere though, I think she’s married. Just to some actor, said Nick.

Louisa? Oh, you know. She was nice. I didn’t dream about her at night. Nick had definitely never told me that he dreamed about me at night, or even that he especially liked me. In terms of verbal declarations, ‘I didn’t dream about her at night’ was the first thing I could remember him saying that implied I had any special status to him at all.

He looked at me and I was afraid of what expression my face was making.

I was filled with an exuberant, practically spiteful sense of joy.

When the others came out of the shop, Bobbi was holding two ice-cream cones, one of which she gave to me. I felt a terrible gratitude that she had bought me an ice cream. I took the cone and thanked her, and she scanned my face and said, are you okay? Who was that on the phone? I blinked and said, just Dad. No news. She grinned and said, oh, okay. Well, you’re welcome for the ice cream. I’ll have it if you don’t want it.

We smoked a lot that night, and Nick was still kind of high when I got to his room, after everyone else had gone to sleep. He was fully dressed, sitting on the side of his bed and reading something on his MacBook, but he was squinting like he couldn’t see the text that well, or it was just confusing.

That was all he said. I didn’t really know what to add, and anyway it seemed clear that no matter how unsubtly I fished for his reassurance he wasn’t going to provide it.

I think I’m the one who should be flattered, I said. Not by him, he’s completely useless. Great taste in women, though.

Bobbi appeared in her bedroom window just as I turned around to look for her. She was opening up the shutters. That’s right, she said. Abandon me. Go have fun with your new friends in the supermarket. Maybe I’ll never come back, I said. Don’t, said Bobbi.

I felt my whole face wash over in a forceful blush.

I gathered that the story was intended, obliquely and perhaps not even consciously, to cheer Nick up by recalling nice things he had done in the past.

I tried to rearrange the flowers so that they weren’t injuring me but without calling attention to my continued presence in the room.

Bobbi always amused and delighted him, whereas I could see I had on balance probably caused him more distress than joy.

You can love more than one person, she said. That’s arguable. Why is it any different from having more than one friend? You’re friends with me and you also have other friends, does that mean you don’t really value me? I don’t have other friends, I said.

Well, marry young, that’s my advice, Valerie said. Men are very fickle. Cool, said Bobbi. But actually I’m gay.

Bobbi and I glanced at one another and looked away so as not to laugh or scream.

It seemed unlikely that Nick would be distressed by what Valerie had said. He’d probably just shrug it off, even if he did find out. My anguish on his behalf seemed to be unrelated to anything he might personally feel, a phenomenon I had experienced before. In

Eventually I heard the back gate open again and the clap of sandals, and Bobbi’s voice saying: you complete goose. What are you like? Come inside and have coffee. I couldn’t see her in the darkness at first and then I felt her arm slip under mine, the crackle of her raincoat. That was a nice little performance, she said. I haven’t seen you lose your temper like that in some time.

I could feel Bobbi’s breath on my face, the bitter aftertaste of unsweetened coffee, and then she kissed my lips. I gripped her wrist when she pulled away, trying to stare at her, but it was too dark. She slipped out of my grasp like a thought. We shouldn’t, she said. Obviously. But you are very lovable when you’re self-righteous.

I’m sorry, I said again. I just lost my temper. Yeah, I’m sorry I missed it, said Nick. I didn’t know you had a temper to lose.

I ran my finger along his collarbone and said: I can’t remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily. He nodded, looking at me. I did, he said. I just thought it would be worth it.

I kept returning to this thought every time I felt myself starting to panic, as if going insane and hallucinating an alternate reality was less frightening than what was really going on.

A searing anxiety developed inside me at this thought, in the same form it always took no matter what external stimulus triggered it: first the realisation that I would die, then that everyone else would die, and then that the universe itself would eventually experience heat death, a kind of thought sequence that expanded outward endlessly in forms too huge to be contained inside my body. I trembled, my hands were clammy, and I felt sure I would be sick again. I punched my leg meaninglessly as if that would prevent the death of the universe. Then I found my phone under my pillow and dialled Nick’s number.

The non-existent baby entered a new category of non-existence, that is, things which had not stopped existing but in fact had never existed. I felt foolish, and the idea that I had ever been pregnant now seemed wistfully naive.

water running from my hair down onto my back, and cried. It was okay to cry because nobody could see me, and I would never tell anyone about it. By the time I was finished, I was very cold.

Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.

They thought you were miscarrying a pregnancy, she said. That’s kind of intense, isn’t it? Is it? I don’t know, I didn’t know what to feel about it. She sighed audibly into the receiver. I wanted to explain that I didn’t know how much I was allowed to feel about it, or how much of what I felt at the time I was still allowed to feel in retrospect. I panicked, I wanted to tell her. I started thinking about the heat death of the universe again.

It comforted me to know that my friendship with Bobbi wasn’t confined to memory alone, and that textual evidence of her past fondness for me would survive her actual fondness if necessary.

I wanted to hurt myself again, in order to feel returned to the safety of my own physical body.

I laughed to myself although there was no one there to see me. I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document which we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke which nobody else could understand. I liked to feel that he was my collaborator. I liked to think of him waking up at night and thinking of me.

Bobbi: i don’t think ‘unemotional’ is a quality someone can have Bobbi: that’s like claiming not to have thoughts

Being dominated? Of course I would. That’s like foreplay for us. You say cryptic things I don’t understand, I give inadequate responses, you laugh at me, and then we have sex.