Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney

You’re twenty-one, said Melissa. You should be disastrously unhappy.

knew that no one was watching me, that no one cared what I thought or did, and I seemed to feel myself almost vibrating with the power of this perverse new freedom. I could scream or take my clothes off if I wanted, I could walk in front of a bus on my way home, who would know?

The Bible made a lot more sense to me, almost perfect sense, if I pictured Bobbi as the Jesus character. She didn’t deliver his lines entirely straight; often she pronounced them sarcastically, or with a weird, distant expression.

It made sense to me that she would befriend adulteresses, and also that she would have a pack of disciples spreading her message.

I tried to explain that I had felt vulnerable, but I did so without using the word ‘vulnerable’ or any synonyms.

I let myself become rigid and silent, waiting for Rossa to notice my rigidity and stop what he was doing, but he didn’t. I considered asking him to stop, but the idea that he might ignore me felt more serious than the situation needed to be. Don’t get yourself into a big legal thing, I thought. I lay there and let him continue.

Bobbi lifted her hand to her mouth, slowly, the hand flat and horizontal, and gave one tiny shake of her head. It was enough to signal to me that she was really freaked out and not playing a game.

I decided to drink as much milkshake as I could without taking a breath. When my mouth started hurting I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop when my head started hurting either. I didn’t stop until Bobbi said: Frances, are you planning to drown there? Then I looked up like everything was normal and said: what?

I was so relieved to see him that I wanted to make some kind of silly romantic gesture, like throwing myself into his arms. I didn’t. I sat at the table chewing my fingernails.

I opened my eyes then. He was frowning. Wait, are you okay? he said. Why are you crying? I’m not crying. Incidentally it turned out that I was crying. It was just something my eyes were doing while we were talking.

Somehow I hadn’t been conscious of it, or had forced myself not to be conscious, and now I remembered.

Whenever anyone tried to look after me I would push them away and say: I want Bobbi. Bobbi wasn’t even at the party. I’ll undress you in a very unsexy way, she said. Don’t worry.

but it didn’t make sense in the context of our relationship either. Bobbi didn’t relate to me in the ‘if I can’ sense. She related to me as a person, maybe the only person, who understood her ferocious and frightening power over circumstances and people. What she wanted, she could have, I knew that.

I sipped on the coffee Bobbi had bought me and said nothing, just wanting to hear her talk.

The idea of making images of a uterus that had nothing in it struck me as sad, like photographing an abandoned house.

He wanted to reassure me, I could tell, but I wasn’t going to let him.

What I seemed to want, though I didn’t like to believe this, was for him to renounce every other person and thing in his life and pledge himself to me exclusively.

Instead of thinking gigantic thoughts, I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of.

When I read the Bible I picture you as Jesus, so maybe fainting in a church was a metaphor after all.

You’re not just an idea to me.

Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving each other? I’m not drunk. Please write back. I love you.

That was a weird email, Bobbi said. But I love you too.

When I came home in the evening we ate dinner together. She moved some of her clothing into my room, some T-shirts and clean underwear. In bed we folded around each other like origami. It’s possible to feel so grateful that you can’t get to sleep at night.

Each of our gestures felt spontaneous, and if from the outside we resembled a couple, that was an interesting coincidence for us. We developed a joke about it, which was meaningless to everyone including ourselves: what is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?

His voice seemed to hit me somewhere behind my knees and travel upward in a flood of warmth, so that I knew I was blushing.

I laughed again, on my own this time. The phone seemed to be transmitting some weird radioactive energy into my body, making me walk very fast and laugh about nothing.

Well, she’s not my girlfriend as such. We’re sleeping together, but I think that’s a way of testing the limits of best friendship. I actually don’t know what we’re doing. It seems to be working okay.

The idea of forgetting anything about you is kind of horrifying to me.

If two people make each other happy then it’s working.