I stood in front of the mirror, assessing myself. My collarbones jutted out of my halter-neck top. New black jeans sucked my waist in. It was Baltic outside, but I wanted to flaunt my new figure. Intense stress and fluctuating periods of starvation had melted away my layer of softness from Deliveroo dinners six nights a week and sedentary desk life. I was pleased with how little space I occupied.
“Wow.” Kit poked his head around the door. “You look gorgeous.” See what I mean? I smiled in the mirror at him as I fastened my necklace. He grazed a finger across my shoulder blades. Has he noticed I’ve dropped a dress size? Does he like that?
“Are you excited for tonight?” he asked.
“I guess.”
“What’s wrong?”
I spun round.
“Do we have to go? I’d much rather stay in and celebrate Genevieve’s offer with you.”
“I get that.” Kit stroked my hair as he spoke, which made me feel like his doll. “But what better way to celebrate than with all of our friends? Leo will be thrilled for you.”
I don’t want to get drunk in a room of people I don’t know. I also don’t want to be the one to say let’s not go. I want you to know that it’s uncomfortable for me.
“Come on.” Kit picked up my bag. “We’re going to be late.”
We arrived in Islington fashionably late. Leo was standing smoking by the door to the six-bedroom town house. Rumored to have cost in the realm of five million, the house was a classic Victorian building, maintained in its entirety, as opposed to having been carved up to make flats. Leo’s brother was gifted the property when their parents “needed to park some cash.” Leo was “couch surfing” here while he looked for his own place.
“You made it!” Leo’s girlfriend, Suzie, squealed. She swayed as she moved, clearly very pissed.
“Very glad to see you two,” Leo joined in, kissing me on both cheeks.
“Ugh, Jade, I love this top,” Suzie said, reaching forward and feeling the fabric of my halter-neck, inadvertently massaging my tit. Suzie was short, very busty, and always curled her hair into Hollywood film-star waves. I imagined her having the Andy Warhol pop art prints of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn in her bedroom. “You’re so lucky you can wear low-cut stuff. I can’t with these floaters.” She jiggled her chest. I adored Suzie. She’d been dating Leo for two years, and we quickly became allies on group trips or couple dinners. She always said rambunctious things like referring to her breasts as floaters.
I smiled weakly. The street was quiet, but the house was humming. The kitchen—or as Leo called it, the “cellar”—was at full capacity.
“Coming?” Kit said, hand on the small of my waist.
“Right behind you.” I smiled.
In no other arena was it clearer that we weren’t in the first blush of youth than the House Party. Proper adulthood was singing lullabies as it beckoned us. In one corner a nondescript woman was showing off her nondescript engagement ring, a glassy gumball in a gold claw. I heard her saying that Charlie saved up three months’ salary, before tax, for it. I ran away before they could tell me that surely I’m next to be taken off the market. They’d look at me with pity, as if I were the last mangy dog in the rescue center, patiently wagging her tail until Kit took me home.
In another part of the room, recent exes Daniella and Otis put in a herculean effort to show how fine, totally fine they were seeing each other for the first time since their breakup. Daniella convinced herself an hour ago that she was the bigger person and approached Otis, who acted surprised to see her there, as if he hadn’t spent all evening pretending not to notice her. The night would likely end with them locked in the bathroom together. There were people in established careers and people starting out on the bottom rung of their chosen industry. There were people shoehorning their ongoing home renovation into every conversation—it just made sense to do an attic extension—and people in sharehouses in Stoke Newington. There were people who didn’t know whether to respond with shit or congratulations to a pregnancy announcement. After an evening in the House Party, I had no idea what direction life was pulling me in, or what direction I should be pushing myself toward. There was one thing that brought this motley crew together: frenetically hovering around a plate of white lines. Because certain behaviors are only glamorous if displayed by the upper-middle class: being multilingual, tax avoidance, secondhand shopping, having financial support from family, and hard drugs.
By midnight, the party was in full swing, the house short of pulsating. I had carefully toed the balance between drinking enough to dull the anxiety, and not drinking too much to induce the panic attack that was squatting under my skin. It occurred to me that Kit hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t seen him in over an hour. When I felt my blood alcohol level rising a smidgen too high and the subsequent rise of dread, I confidently walked to the bathroom and bolted it shut. I panted against the door.
“You okay, Jade?”
I jolted at the voice and turned to see Suzie with her knickers around her ankles, having a wee in the dark.
“Jesus, Suze! You scared the shit out of me.”
She wiped, stood up and flushed.
“It’s all a bit much, isn’t it?” She grinned at me.
“I have no idea how you do it, Suze.”
She laughed as she rinsed her hands in the sink. “I love Leo but…” She waved her hand around her head and sighed.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that he has”—she picked up the ornate gold Hermès soap tray that sat on the sink, laughing—“all this. It’s crazy to have all this.”
“I feel you. Kit’s mum is lovely, but she does think she lives below the breadline because she’s had to do her food shopping at Waitrose instead of Fortnum’s.”
“Stooooop!” Suzie cackled. “Last week, I was round Leo’s grandparents’ place. They put out a cheese platter and I ate a chunk of the Stilton. The”—clap—“whole”—clap—“room”—clap—“gasped.”
“Why?”
“Got home and Leo starts getting cross with me for eating the nose of the cheese. You know—the pointy end of a wedge of cheese? Apparently, it’s an unspeakably rude thing to do.”
We drunkenly began podging each other’s noses, cackling with the absurdity of draconian traditions that survived solely to demarcate who belonged and who didn’t. We fell into a gentle silence, before Suzie whispered as if others could hear us.
“Granny Cannon nearly had a conniption when she heard that her gorgeous grandson was dating an Essex girl.”
“Stuffy old bitch,” I muttered.
“STOP, JADE,” Suze wheezed between her snickers. “You’re going to make my mascara run.”
“I’m serious! She should cark it already and give the kids the inheritance they’re all gagging for.”
A rapping started at the bathroom door and we both jumped.
“Let’s do this again.” Suzie gave me a brief hug. “Next time let’s aim to be sober, and preferably not in the bog with no lights on.” She flung the door open and melted into the crowd.
“Hey, where have you been?” I purred as I approached Kit from behind. Bodies moved more loosely as the night grew murkier. He turned forty-five degrees to put his arm around me, pulling me in to his chest. The light was dim, but Kit’s pupils were giant licorice wheels. “Seriously? You’ve been getting coked up?”
He laughed with a manic pitch, not realizing that his lips were getting pulled back, his teeth baring like a feral animal.
“Hey there, stranger, where did you get to?” A girl I recognized from around the party, with dyed black hair and a harsh box fringe, approached Kit with an expectant smile. Her eyes darted at me, at Kit. Then at my hand on Kit’s chest. Then at Kit’s arm around me.
“Errr, hi?” she said, her voice suddenly an octave higher.
“Nell, this is my girlfriend, Jade.” If Kit was nervous, he didn’t let on at all.
I used to take pride in how much other women were attracted to Kit. We’d go to party after party, each with a different gorgeous woman stealing glances at him, running their manicured fingers innocuously over his forearm. He’d politely excuse himself, then, in their line of vision, ceremoniously kiss me. My coronation as his woman. His Chosen One.
I’ve known for a long time that Kit made it a routine of getting too close to single, attractive women. It was a key ingredient of his ritual that he appear available and interested, until the precise point he knew that his target was attracted to him. She could signal this by a bite of the lip, a self-conscious hair flick, or a nervous giggle. He’d then pull back, announcing that he had a girlfriend and walking away with the confirmation, the swell of validation, that he’s still got it. No lines were crossed: he didn’t lie about being single, he didn’t make any moves, there was no kiss, no actively inappropriate conversation. I partook in this game, this self-serving routine of lassoing women just to reject them, because the common thread through it all was the message that he could have other women if he wanted them. But he chose me. How lucky I was! How jealous these other women must be!
Tonight, my hand was cold and clammy against his chest. I felt sick. I no longer saw it as a dangerous, cool game. It was the most PG, watered-down, fucking narcissistic form of infidelity.
Am I really one to talk? I flirted with Josh because I enjoyed how attractive he found me. Why does it seem different tonight? It all feels like one massive show.
“Your girlfriend!” Nell said, with a sickly sweet smile. “You never mentioned!”
“What is she talking about, Kit?” I said, looking at him.
“Never mind, I was leaving,” Nell said, shaking her head and stalking away. Kit and I were still in a mechanical couple’s embrace.
“You going to tell me what that was about?”
“She’s just this girl who’s been hitting on me all night, it’s nothing.”
“Doesn’t sound like nothing.”
“Oh, come on, Jade—don’t get jealous!” He started laughing like the Joker.
“It’s not funny. How do you think it makes me feel when other women come up to you, thinking you’re into them?”
“What’s gotten into you?” Kit’s shoulders squared up and his body came alive. “The Old You used to love it!”
“You’re behaving inappropriately.”
“Baby, it’s a compliment.”
“Can we go?”
“Go where?”
“Home.”
“I’ve got a few more hours in me, I reckon.”
“You know I don’t like traveling alone at night,” I said weakly. I hated how needy it made me sound.
“I don’t know what to tell you, J.” Kit shrugged. “Get a taxi.”
At home—alone—I prowled around the house for painkillers for a headache, rifling through my catch-all drawers. I mined through used batteries, random tools, old receipts, until I spied the metallic flash of a blister pack. It was flat against the bottom of the drawer. I used my thumbnail to lift it up. It was a sledgehammer to my chest, the cavity filling with warm, liquid memories. The shiny material wasn’t a pack of ibuprofen, but the reflective surface of an old Polaroid. Living inside it were Kit and Jade. He was sitting on a camp chair in front of their tent at Glastonbury, and she was on his lap, her legs swung over the arms of the chair. Her arm was around his shoulder, and she was kissing his cheek. His eyes were closed, his face turned up to the clear skies with a smile across it. His hand around the bottle of Stella was relaxed, and her hair was swept up in a messy bun atop her head. Their Wellies were caked in mud, and they hadn’t showered in days, but they radiated bliss.
Who was that girl? The one who pretended she liked British indie rock bands with names like the Living Room Rug or the Rainy Bus Stop? Who played Mis-teeq and the Sugababes only when she was alone. Whose comfort meal was cup ramen with extra shredded cheese, but who says she loves a pub roast. Who heard Leo mention that 2010 was a great year for Bordeaux and has regurgitated it relentlessly since. Who let his friends think she was from an expensive part of London. Who kept her beloved parents away from university events because she worried they might feel out of place. My heart went to her.
I am still her.