by Nick Hornby
Deduct the billions. Yes, she could see what I was thinking. But she wanted to use her superpowers for evil, not for good.
“Sorry if that sounded rude. But I hate it when my parents have parties. They make me want to watch TV on my own. I’m boring, aren’t I?”
“No. Course you’re not.”
Some people would say that she was. She could have gone anywhere in the world for those few seconds, and she chose her own home so that she could watchPop Idol without anyone bothering her. These people, though, wouldn’t have understood why she said what she said. She said it to wind me up. She knew I’d think, just for a second, that she was going to say something romantic. She knew I’d be hoping she’d say, “Right here, but with nobody else in the room apart from you.” And she left off the last three words to stamp on me. I thought that was pretty clever, really. Cruel, but clever.
“So you haven’t got any brothers and sisters?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Because if your parents weren’t having a party, you’d have a chance of being alone in the room.”
“Oh. Yeah, I suppose. I’ve got a brother. He’s nineteen. He’s at college.”
“What’s he studying?”
“Music.”
“What music do you like?”
“Oh, very smooth.”
For a moment, I thought she meant she liked very smooth music, but then I realized she was taking the piss out of my attempts to make conversation. She was beginning to drive me a bit nuts. Either we were going to talk, or we weren’t. And if we were, then asking her what music she liked seemed an OK question. Maybe it wasn’t incredibly original, but she made it sound as though I kept asking her to get undressed.
I stood up.
“Where are you going?”
“I think I’m wasting your time, and I’m sorry.”
“You’re OK. Sit down again.”
“You canpretend there’s no one else here, if you want. You can sit on your own and think.”
“And what are you going to do? Who are you going to talk to?”
“My mum.”
“Aaaah. Sweet.”
I snapped.
“Listen. You’re gorgeous. But the trouble is, you know it, and you think you can treat people like dirt because of it. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m really not that desperate.”
And I left her there. It was one of my greatest moments: all the words came out right, and I meant everything I said, and I was glad I’d said it. I wasn’t doing it for effect either. I was really, properly sick of her, for about twenty seconds. After twenty seconds I calmed down and started trying to work out a way back into the conversation. And I hoped that the conversation would turn into something else—a kiss, and then marriage, after we’d been out for a couple of weeks. But I was sick of the way she was making me feel. I was too nervous, too keen not to make a mistake, and I was being pathetic. If we were going to talk again, it had to be because she wanted to.
My mum was talking to a bloke, and she wasn’t that thrilled to see me. I got the impression that she hadn’t got on to the subject of me yet, if you know what I mean. I know she loves me, but every now and again, in exactly this sort of situation, she conveniently forgets to mention that she’s got a fifteen-year-old son.
“This is my son, Sam,” my mum said. But I could tell she’d rather have described me as her brother. Or her dad. “Sam, this is Ollie.”
“Ollie,” I said, and I laughed. And he looked upset and Mum looked pissed off, so I tried to explain.
“Ollie,” I said again, like they’d get it, but they didn’t.
“You know,” I said to my mum.
“No,” she said.
“Like the skate trick.” Because there’s a trick called an ollie.
“Is that funny? Really?”
“Yeah,” I said. But I wasn’t sure anymore. I think I was still all confused after talking to Alicia, and not at my best.
“His name’s Oliver,” she said. “I presume, anyway.” She looked at him, and he nodded. “Have you ever heard of the name Oliver?”
“Yeah, but—”
“So he’s Ollie for short.”
“Yeah, I know, but—”
“What if he was called Mark?”
“Not funny.”
“No? But, you know…Mark! Like a mark on someone’s trousers! Ha ha ha!” said Mum.
Never go to a party with your mother.
“Mark on your trousers!” she said again.
And then Alicia came over to us, and I looked at my mum as if to say, Say “Mark on your trousers” one more time and Ollie hears some things you don’t want him to know. She understood, I think.
“You’re not going, are you?” Alicia said.
“I dunno.”
She took my hand and led me right back to the sofa.
“Sit down. You were right to walk away. I don’t know why I was like that.”
“Yes you do.”
“Why, then?”
“Because people let you be like that.”
“Can we start again?”
“If you want,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether she could. You know how you’re not supposed to make faces because the wind might change and you stay like that? Well, I wondered whether the wind might have changed, and she’d be sulky and cocky forever.
“OK,” she said. “I like some hip-hop, but not a lot. The Beastie Boys, and Kanye West. Bit of hip-hop, bit of R&B. Justin Timberlake. Do you know R.E.M.? My dad likes them a lot, and I’ve got into them. And I play the piano, so I listen to classical sometimes. There. That didn’t kill me, did it?”
I laughed. And that was that. That was the moment she stopped treating me like an enemy. All of a sudden I was a friend, and all I’d done to change things was walk away.
It was better being a friend than an enemy, of course it was. I still had a party to get through, after all, and having a friend meant I had someone else to talk to. I wasn’t going to stand there listening to Mum laughing like a drain at Ollie’s bad jokes, so I had to spend it with Alicia. So in the short term, I was glad we were friends. In the long term, though, I wasn’t so sure. I don’t mean that Alicia wouldn’t have been a good friend to have. She’d have been a fantastic friend to have. She was funny, and I didn’t know too many people like her. But by that stage, I knew that I didn’t want to be her friend, if you know what I mean, and I was worried that her being friendly to me meant that I didn’t stand a chance with anything else. I know that’s wrong. Mum is always telling me that the friendship has to come first, before anything else. But it seemed to me that when I first arrived at the party, she was looking at me as though I might be a possible boyfriend, which was why she was all sharp and spiky. So what I didn’t know was, had she put away the spikes for a reason? Because some girls are like that. Sometimes you know you’ve got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn’t so messed up, it wouldn’t be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you would be a good sign, but in the real world, it isn’t.
As things turned out, Alicia being nice to me was a good sign, so maybe the world isn’t as messed up as I’d thought. And I understood that it was a good sign pretty much straightaway, because she started talking about things we could do. She said she wanted to come to Grind City to watch me skate, and then she asked me whether I wanted to see a film with her.
I was getting butterflies by this time. It sounded to me as though she’d already decided that we were going to start seeing each other, but nothing’s ever that easy, is it? And also, how come she didn’t have a boyfriend? Alicia could have had anyone she wanted, in my opinion. Actually, that might even be a fact.
So when she mentioned this possible cinema date, I tried to be as, you know, as blah as possible, just to see how she’d react.
“I’ll see what I’m up to,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, you know. I’ve got h
omework some nights. And I usually do quite a lot of skating over the weekends.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Anyway. Do I have to find someone to come with me?”
She looked at me as if I was mad, or stupid.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to go to the cinema with you and your boyfriend,” I said. Do you see my clever plan? This was my way of finding out what was going on.
“If I had a boyfriend, I wouldn’t be asking you, would I? If I had a boyfriend, you wouldn’t be sitting here now, and neither would I, probably.”
“I thought you had a boyfriend.”
“Where did you get that from?”
“I dunno. Why haven’t you, anyway?”
“We split up.”
“Oh. When?”
“Tuesday. I’m heartbroken. As you can tell.”
“How long had you been going out?”
“Two months. But he wanted to have sex with me, and I wasn’t ready to have sex with him.”
“Right.”
I looked at my shoes. Five minutes ago she didn’t want me to know what music she listened to, and now she was telling me about her sex life.
“So maybe he’ll change his mind,” I said. “About wanting sex, I mean.”
“Or maybe I will,” she said.
“Right.”
Was she saying that she might change her mind about being ready for sex? In other words, was she saying that she might have sex with me? Or was she saying that she might change her mind about having sex with him? And if that was what she meant, where did that leave me? Was it possible that she’d go out with me, but at any moment she might decide that the time had come to go off and sleep with him? This seemed like important information, but I wasn’t sure how to go about getting it.
“Hey,” she said. “Want to go up to my room? Watch some TV? Or listen to some music?”
She stood up and pulled me to my feet. What was this, now? Had she already changed her mind about being ready for sex? Is that what we were going upstairs for? Was I about to lose my virginity? I felt like I was watching some film I didn’t understand.
I’d been close to having sex a couple of times, but I’d chickened out. Having sex when you’re fifteen is a big deal, if you’ve got a thirty-two-year-old mum. And this girl Jenny I was seeing kept saying that everything would be all right, but I didn’t know what that meant, really, and I didn’t know whether she was one of those girls who actually wanted a baby, for reasons that I could never understand. There were a couple of young mums at my school, and they acted like a baby was an iPod or a new mobile or something, some kind of gadget that they wanted to show off. There are many differences between a baby and an iPod. And one of the biggest differences is, no one’s going to mug you for your baby. You don’t have to keep a baby in your pocket if you’re on the bus late at night. And if you think about it, that must tell you something, because people will mug you for anything worth having, which means that a baby can’t be worth having. Anyway, I wouldn’t sleep with Jenny, and she told a few of her friends, and for a while people shouted things at me in the corridors and that. And the next boy who went out with her…Actually, I don’t want to tell you what he said. It was stupid and disgusting and it made me look bad, and that’s all you need to know. After that I started to take skating a lot more seriously. It meant I could spend more time on my own.
As we were going up the stairs to her bedroom, I had this fantasy that Alicia would close the door, and look at me, and start to get undressed, and to tell you the honest truth, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about that. I mean, there was a plus side, obviously. But on the other hand, she might expect me to know what I was doing, and I didn’t. And my mum was downstairs, and who was to say that she wouldn’t come looking for me at any moment? And Alicia’s mum and dad were downstairs, and also I had a feeling that if she did want to have sex, it was a lot to do with this boy she’d just dumped, and not so much to do with me.
I needn’t have worried. We went into her room, and she closed the door, and then she remembered that she was halfway through this film calledThe Forty-Year-Old Virgin, so we watched the rest of that. I sat in this old armchair she’s got in there, and she sat on the floor between my legs. And after a little while, she leaned against me so that her back was pressing into my knees. That was what I remembered later. It felt like a message. And then when the film had finished, we went downstairs, and my mum was just starting to look for me, and we went home.
But as we were walking up the road, Alicia came running after us in her bare feet, and she gave me this black-and-white postcard of a couple kissing. I stared at the picture, and I must have been looking a bit clueless, because she rolled her eyes and said, “Turn it over.” And on the back was her mobile number.
“For the cinema tomorrow,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
And when she’d gone, my mum raised her eyebrows up as far as they would go, and said, “So you’re going to the cinema tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Looks like it.”
And my mum laughed, and said, “Was I right? Or was I right?”
And I said, “You were right.”
Tony Hawk lost his virginity when he was sixteen. He’d just skated in a contest called The King of the Mount at a place called Trashmore in Virginia Beach. He says in his book that he lasted half as long as a run in a vert contest. A run in a vert contest takes forty-five seconds. So he lasted twenty-two and a half seconds. I was glad he’d told me. I never forgot those figures.
The next day was Sunday, and I went down to Grind City with Rabbit. Or rather, I saw Rabbit at the bus stop, so we ended up going together. Rabbit can do tricks I can’t—he’s been doing gay twists for ages, and he was right on the edge of being able to do a McTwist, which is a 540-degree turn on a ramp.
When I try to talk to Mum about tricks, she always gets muddled up by the numbers. “Five hundred forty degrees?” she said when I was trying to describe a McTwist. “How the hell do you know when you’ve done five hundred forty degrees?” As if we spend our time counting the degrees one by one. But a 540 is just 360 plus 180—in other words, it’s just a turn and a half. Mum seemed disappointed when I put it like that. I think she hoped that skating was turning me into some kind of mathematical genius, and I was doing calculations in my head that other kids could only do on a computer. TH, by the way, has done a 900. Maybe if I tell you that’s basically impossible, you’ll start to see why he should have a country named after him.
McTwists are really hard, and I haven’t even begun thinking about them yet, mostly because you end up eating a lot of concrete while you’re practising. You can’t do it without slamming every couple of minutes, but that’s the thing about Rabbit. He’s so thick that he doesn’t mind how much concrete he eats. He’s lost like three hundred teeth skating. I’m surprised the people who run Grind City don’t put his teeth on the tops of walls to stop people getting in at night, the way some people use bits of broken glass.
I didn’t have a good day, though. I was distracted. I couldn’t stop thinking about the evening at the cinema. I know it sounds stupid, but I didn’t want to turn up with a big fat bloody lip, and statistics show that fat lips tend to happen to me more on a Sunday than on any other day of the week.
Anyway, Rabbit noticed that I was just messing around with a few ollies, and he came over.
“What’s up? Lost your bottle?”
“Kind of.”
“What’s the worst that can happen? That’s how I think about it. I’ve been to casualty like fifteen times because of skating. The worst bit is on the way to the hospital, because that hurts. You’re lying there all groaning and moaning, and blood everywhere. And you think, Is it worth it? But then they give you something to take the pain away. Unless you’re unconscious. Then you don’t need it. Not for a while.”
“Sounds good.”
“It’s just my philosophy. You know. Pain ca
n’t kill you. Unless it’s really bad.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Something to think about there.”
“Is there?” He seemed surprised. I don’t suppose anyone had ever told Rabbit he’d given them something to think about. It was because I wasn’t really listening.
I wasn’t going to say anything, because what’s the point of talking to Rabbit? But then I realized that it was killing me, not telling anyone about Alicia, and if I didn’t talk to him, I’d have to go home and talk to Mum or to TH. Sometimes it doesn’t matter who you talk to, as long as you talk. That’s why I spend half my life talking to a life-sized poster of a skater. At least Rabbit was a real person.
“I met this girl.”
“Where?”
“Does that matter?” I could see that it was going to be a frustrating conversation.
“I’d like to try and picture the scene,” said Rabbit.
“My mum’s friend’s party.”
“So is she like really old?”
“No. She’s my age.”
“What was she doing at the party?”
“She lives there, “I said. “She—”
“She lives at a party?” Rabbit said. “How does that work?”
I was wrong. It was much easier explaining things to a poster.
“She doesn’t live at a party. She lives in the house where the party was. She’s my mum’s friend’s daughter.”
Rabbit repeated what I’d just said, as if it was the most complicated sentence in the history of the world.
“Hold on…Your mum’s…friend’s…daughter. OK. I’ve got it.”
“Good. We’re going out tonight. To the cinema. And I’m worried about getting my face all smashed up.”
“Why does she want to smash your face up?”
“No, no. I didn’t mean I was worried abouther smashing my face up. I’m worried about getting my face smashed up here. A bad slam. And then, you know. I’ll look terrible.”
“Gotcha,” said Rabbit. “Is she pretty?”
“Very,” I said. I was sure that was true, but by then I couldn’t remember what she looked like. I’d spent so much time thinking about her that I no longer had a clear picture of her in my mind.
