attempts to text exes and knocks to hurry up and hands reaching between stalls for scraps of toilet paper. With Erica’ s gratitude to us for ripping her from her flashcards for a night, though it better not mean her marks drop any lower than a first. Isa drops coins from her discoloured purse into her palm, because her single mother and four siblings means she actually has to stick to her budget. Sophie’ s slurs reveal her inner concern that we are her first best friends, that this reflects some inferiority about her; her ungrounded insecurity forces me to see my own, floating in a fictitious space below the damp bathroom ceiling. No one feels deserving of the serendipity that has brought us this, like echo-location or a polar pull.
On the dancefloor, the lyrics of the same songs we’ d danced to with the same carelessness at our childhood discos scattered across the country, spill out of our mouths like they had been held within us, waiting to be liberated. The only difference is that it takes a bit more wine and a few less tuk-shop sweets to feel this free, now we’ re ten years older.
And I’ m twirling again. My hand is in George’ s as we dizzily spin round and round until somehow our bodies are pressed together. I can feel our heat seeping into the other. We form a denser cloud around us than the blurriness of the wine, or the stench of the cigarette smoke did. My eyes are locked with vital green ones, sunken into dark black that blurts the secret of nights laid awake, trying to mentally deconstruct all that is impossible. They drag down to creases and chaps in pale lips, the teeth still crooked after three sets of braces, poking through. They continue to claw their way down to the small, flat breasts she always says she is so insecure about, and the empty, hollow stomach exposed in her low-rise jeans. She is real. Messy and alive. She moves against me, and I feel the gaping space between her soft thighs that exhibits the years she has spent fighting battles in her mind. I think she is fighting different ones now. We both are. Our breath mingles in the centimetre’ s worth of space between our mouths, and hands are in my hair, and the impossible feels possible in this third space.
But we don’ t kiss.
I feel her warm heart that will never hold me thrust and clang against her ribcage just before she grabs out for another friend and twirls herself across our circle. I move
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