4
“I don’t think you should get to say you live in London if you live in Zone 6,” Emme is saying as we traipse the thirty minutes back to the closest tube station. The party ended approximately twenty minutes ago and we’ve been walking ever since.
Miles was one of the first to leave, after receiving a text from his friend, Mal, who was looking for support in carrying another, much drunker friend out. Apparently, Mal, Harry, and Miles all used to work together at that bar. I got a glimpse of Mal and I immediately felt sorry for Harry. He must have felt like such a nerd working with those two because Mal might have made Miles look like a dork—he was so cool. Far too cool for this gathering of weirdos, I can tell you.
Emme found me standing innocently in the kitchen a few minutes later, doing my best to act as if I had been there all along. She didn’t buy it for a second and she promptly told me off for leaving her to witness a proposal alone. Apparently, it happened at her feet.
Her face as she described the embarrassment of Harry dropping to his knees and barely missing her Converse made me laugh so much it hurt. I may have lost a friend in the process, but I did hurt my nose snorting so it’s sort of even, right?
“Agreed,” I murmur, trailing behind her as I open the browser on my phone. I plug in ‘florist urban dictionary’ and hit search. I click on the first result and whoop.
“Aha! I knew he was a fucking drug dealer,” I say aloud.
“Excuse me,” Emme says, slowing her pace and looking at me.
I ignore her, still reading the first entry on Urban Dictionary for ‘florist,’ which reads: Someone who deals marijuana.
“Who is a drug dealer?” Emme continues, now looking at my phone too.
I shake my head, “No one,” I mutter, exiting the tab and putting my phone in my bag. She doesn’t need to know that I spent the party hiding with a handsome drug dealer. She’ll ask why she wasn’t invited. In fact, Emme would probably have left with Miles’s number if she’d been in my position. He’s just the kind of cool guy she would date. Especially since dating a drug dealer would piss her parents off no end.
“You know, I like Daisy and Harry, I do,” Emme says, interrupting my thoughts, “But they’ve always known just what to do to make everyone else feel like total crap, haven't they? ”
I nod, putting Miles from my mind and thinking about how Daisy and Harry have been making even the most committed couples feel single as fuck since the third day of Freshers Week.
“I did always think it was a bit sus that Daisy never once got messy drunk while we were at uni,” I say.
Emme nods, “It is a bit of a rite of passage, isn’t it?” she says, “You’ve got to get so drunk that everyone fucking hates you at least once a year at uni, otherwise, did you really go?” She says, and I laugh. We’ve certainly all been messy drunk, even if some of us do try to forget it ever happened so as not to have to relive the shame all over again.
“I mean, I thought so,” I say, “Otherwise you’re too perfect,”
And Daisy always was perfect. She was one of those girls who always managed to be poised. She lived with people in our friendship circle in our second year and her room, in a student house I might add, was always clean, no doom piles of clothes, no empty vodka bottles. And I never once saw her in joggers, last night’s makeup and a pair of Crocs, hungover from a party three days ago. It was unnerving.
Emme frowns, “We probably should have always known she’d be the first of us to marry. I mean, you can’t be that mature at 18 and not,”
Daisy played the important role of the mother hen in our friendship group. She always made sure we were all together after a night out and she would feed us proper food the next day, along with copious amounts of water.
“Yeah, but, that Suzie who lived next door to us in halls is already married,” I say, “And she was a fucking state,”
Emme laughs, “Oh yeah. Now, she knew how to get messy drunk,”
“ She threw up in our kettle,” I say, scrunching my face up and remembering finding the boiled vomit in the very-broken kettle the next morning. I have such a visceral reaction to that memory that it takes me a minute to come back down.
“Oh Suzie,” Emme says, “I’m certain she existed just so we’d have really gross stories to tell people about our uni days,”
“Either that, or as a bar for measuring how much of a mess you are,” I say, “You know, you might have been drunk last night, but did you outdo Suzie?”
Emme laughs, “Yeah, like, you might have once drunkenly emailed your professor to tell him you were going to be ‘hungover as fuck’ in a seminar, but at least you’ve never snogged your best mate’s boyfriend in front of her and then outright denied it,”
My mouth drops open, “I can’t believe you brought up the email,” I say, “Do you know how long I’ve tried to bury the shame of having sent that email? ”
That email is one of my greatest sources of shame. I mean, it was compounded when said professor read it out in the seminar and everyone laughed. I was hungover and fragile and so close to tears it’s actually embarrassing. And then he spent the rest of the seminar asking me really hard questions about Heart of Darkness which I had, unfortunately, not even read. I still have nightmares and I’ve still not read Heart of Darkness. Eat your heart out, Joseph Conrad.
Emme cackles, “Didn’t you write it in all caps too?”
“I honestly fucking hate you,” I say, looking up at the deep blue sky and feeling overwhelmed with the embarrassment of having sent that fucking email. “Stop making me think about it,”
Emme snorts, “Is it like ‘The Game’?”
“And now I’ve lost the fucking Game too. Emme, you’re such an arsehole, you know that?”
“Hey, hey,” Emme says, as we finally approach the tube station, “You left me to get blindsided by a public proposal tonight, so who is the real arsehole?”
I snort as I fumble in my bag for my Oyster card, “Survival of the fittest, my friend,” I say, tapping her shoulder as we step into the fluorescently lit station.