Looking for Group - Alexis Hall Page 0,30
a picture of a happy llama, he knocked and stuck his head in.
Tinuviel was the only person Drew knew who actually decorated their college room. He had a couple of posters and a duvet cover that didn’t look like he’d nicked it from a hotel but that was about as far as it went. Tinuviel had things like throw pillows and a lamp. She was lying on a pink sheepskin rug, fiddling away on one of those razor-thin MacBooks, the sort Drew wouldn’t have been able to afford in a million years.
She waved him in, and he collapsed gratefully into the beanbag chair.
“Ramen?” she offered, bouncing to her feet and heading over to her goodies shelf. “Wagon Wheel? Biltong?”
“Uh. Pass.” Drew’s stomach churned unhappily. “Fragile.”
Tinuviel tore open a packet of noodles, emptied them into a rainbow-patterned bowl, sprinkled a sachet of flavouring over the top, and stuck the kettle on. “Good night?”
“Yeah, I mean, no. I mean, kind of. I mean, that’s kind of what I want to talk to you about.”
She blinked. “It does sound confusing.”
“Don’t laugh, okay?”
“Okay.”
Strangely, that was one of the things Drew liked about Tinuviel. She had this habit of taking the oddest things completely at face value. “I’ve kind of met this girl on the internet.”
She poured water onto her noodles and mashed them down. “We do walk amongst you.”
One of the things Drew found slightly harder to take about Tinuviel was that he couldn’t always tell when she was joking. “I think I really like her, and she goes to Leicester, so she’s close, so it’s like possible, but . . . I only met her a week ago, and like on the internet, so I feel like a crazy person.”
“Why does that make you feel like a crazy person?”
“Well, it’s the internet. And I don’t really know who she is or if she really exists.”
“Do you know if anybody really exists?”
Drew sighed. “That’s kind of the opposite of helpful, T.”
She curled up on the rug, with her noodles cradled in her lap, like a strange, redheaded Yoda. “Well, I think what you’ve got to remember is that we all sort of construct ourselves based on the identity we want to present to other people, so, in a very real sense, nobody can ever know anybody.”
“Still not helping.”
“Okay, let’s put it another way. If you’d met this girl in a bar or a nightclub, the only thing you’d know about her was what she looked like, and the fact you had no idea what sort of food she liked or what music she listened to or whether she was a serial killer probably wouldn’t have been a problem for you. So, really, your problem can’t be that you don’t know anything about this girl. It must be that you’re worried she might be a munter.”
“Dude, how shallow do you think I am?”
“Well, if that isn’t your concern, I don’t see what you’re worried about.”
Drew thought about it for a moment. “She could be a serial killer.”
“Well, so could anybody. So could I. People on the internet aren’t more likely to be serial killers than people in general.”
“I get the feeling you’re not taking me seriously.”
Tinuviel pulled a pair of extendable chopsticks out of her top pocket and started on her noodles. “I’m taking this very seriously. I don’t understand why you think I’m not.”
“If you told me you’d fallen for someone you’d met on the internet, and especially if you’d met them in a video game—not, like, through a dating app—I’d be way more worried.”
“Why?” She frowned in a noodle-y kind of way. “The way I see it, when you meet someone in”—she did air quotes—“‘real life,’ all your initial assumptions about them are based on their physical appearance, but these are extremely likely to be ignorant, prejudiced, and misleading. When you meet somebody online, your initial impressions of them are based on what they say to you. This can’t be any more misleading, and it’s only social conditioning that makes you accept the validity of relationships initially based on nothing but physical response. Online relationships are based on intellectual and emotional connection. If anything, it’s a better way of doing it.”
This was all a bit much on a hangover. He worked through it like it was a particularly chewy piece of biltong. “Yeah, but what if what they say isn’t true?”
“My mum said she once had sex with a woman because she, the woman, not my mum, thought she, my mum, not the