by Nick Hornby
“Ah, well,” said Rabbit.
“What does that mean?”
“Let’s face it, you’re not all that, are you?”
“No, I’m not. I know. But thanks for building up my confidence,” I said.
“Thinking about it, I reckon you might do better if you actually do smash your face up,” said Rabbit.
“How d’you work that out?”
“Well, see, say you go along with, you know, a couple of black eyes, or even a broken nose. You can tell her you look bad because of the skating. But if you go along looking just like that…What excuse have you got? None.”
I’d had enough. I’d tried talking to Rabbit, but it was hopeless. And it wasn’t just hopeless—it was depressing too. I was really nervous about going to the cinema with Alicia. In fact, I couldn’t remember ever feeling as nervous about anything, ever, apart from maybe my first day at primary school. And this fool was telling me that the only way I was going to stand any kind of chance was to make my face all bloody and swollen, so that she couldn’t see what I really looked like.
“You know what, Rabbit? You’re right. I’m not going to mess about. Acid drops and gay twists, all afternoon.”
“Top man.”
And then, while he was watching me, I picked up my board and walked straight out the gate and into the street. I wanted to talk to TH.
On the way home, I realized that I hadn’t even arranged anything with Alicia yet. When the bus came, I went up to the top deck and sat right at the front, on my own. Then I got her postcard out of my pocket and dialled her number.
She didn’t recognize my voice when I said hello, and for a moment I felt sick. What if I’d made all this up? I hadn’t made up the party. But maybe she hadn’t pressed against me the way I remembered it, and maybe she only said something about the cinema because—
“Oh, hi,” she said, and I could hear her smiling. “I was worried that you weren’t going to call.” And I stopped feeling sick.
Listen: I know you don’t want to hear about every single little moment. You don’t want to know about what time we arranged to meet, or any of that stuff. All I’m trying to say is it was really special, that day, and I can remember just about every second of it. I can remember the weather, I can remember the smell of the bus, I can remember the little scab on my nose I was picking at while I was talking to her on my mobile. I can remember what I said to TH when I got home, and what I wore to go out, and what she was wearing, and how easy it was when I saw her. Maybe some people would think that because of what happened later, it was all just tacky and grubby, typical modern teenager stuff. But it wasn’t. It was nothing like that at all.
We didn’t even go to a film. We started talking outside the cinema, and then we went for a Frappuccino in the Starbucks next door, and then we just sat there. Every now and again one of us said, “We’d better go, if we’re going.” But neither of us made any move to leave. It was her idea to go back to her place. And, when the time came, it was her idea to have sex. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I think before that night I was a bit scared of her. She was beautiful, and her mum and dad were quite posh, and I was afraid she’d decide that just because I was the only person of her age at her mum’s party, it didn’t mean we had to go out together. The party was over. She could talk to who she wanted now.
But she wasn’t scary, not really. Not in the posh way. She wasn’t really what you’d call a brainbox. Or maybe that’s not fair, because it wasn’t like she was stupid. But seeing as her mum was a councillor and her dad taught at university, you’d think she’d be doing better at school. She spent half the evening talking about the lessons she’d been thrown out of, and the trouble she’d got into, and the number of times she’d been grounded. She’d been grounded the night of the party, which was why she was there. All that stuff about wanting to meet me was bollocks, as I’d suspected.
She didn’t want to go to college.
“You do, then?” she said.
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“I dunno.”
I did know. But I didn’t want to go into all that stuff about the history of my family. If she found out that none of us—my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, nobody—had ever been to college, then she might not have wanted to spend any time with me.
“So what are you going to do?” I asked her. “When you leave school?”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll think it’s bigheaded.”
“How can it be bigheaded? If it’s nothing to do with being a bighead?”
“There’s more than one way of being a bighead, you know. It doesn’t have to involve passing exams and all that.”
I was lost. I couldn’t think of a single thing she could say that would make me think she was a bighead, if it didn’t involve passing exams, or maybe sport. Suddenly I wasn’t even sure what it meant, being a bighead. It meant showing off, right? But didn’t it mean showing off about how clever you were? Did anyone ever call TH a bighead because he could do loads of difficult tricks?
“I swear I won’t think you’re a bighead.”
“I want to be a model.”
Yeah, well, I could see what she meant. She was showing off. But what was I supposed to say? I can tell you, it was a tricky situation. I was going to tell you to avoid ever going out with anyone who says she wants to be a model, but let’s face it, that’s sort of what we all want, really, isn’t it? Someone who looks like a model, but without the flat chest. In other words, if you’re with someone who says she wants to be a model, you probably aren’t interested in me telling you she’s bad news. (Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they’re ugly, but because they’re mad.)
I didn’t know much about modelling then, and I know even less about it now. Alicia was very pretty, I could see that, but she wasn’t as thin as a rake, and she had some spots, so I didn’t know whether she stood a chance of being the next Kate Moss. Probably not, I reckoned. I also didn’t know whether she was telling me this because it really was her ambition, or because she needed to hear me tell her how much I fancied her.
“That’s not bigheaded,” I said. “You could be a model easily, if you wanted to be.”
I knew what I was saying. I knew that I’d just increased my chances with Alicia in all sorts of ways. I didn’t know who believed what, but it didn’t matter really.
We slept together for the first time that night.
“Have you got anything?” she said, when it was obvious that we might need something.
“No. Of course not.”
“Why ‘of course not’?”
“Because…I thought we were going to the cinema.”
“And you don’t carry anything around with you? Just in case?”
I just shook my head. I knew blokes at school who did that, but they were just showing off, most of them. They did it to look flash. There was this one kid, Robbie Brady, who must have shown me the same Durex box fifteen times. And I’m like, Yeah, well, anyone canbuy them.Buying them isn’t a big deal. But I never said anything. I’d always thought that if I needed anything, I’d know well in advance, because that’s the way I am. I never go out thinking, Tonight I’m going to shag someone I don’t know, so I’d better take a condom with me. I’d always hoped it would all be a bit more planned than that. I’d always hoped that we might have talked about it beforehand, so that when it happened we were both prepared for it, and it would be relaxed, and special. I never liked the sound of the stories I heard from kids at school. They were always pleased with themselves, but it never sounded like the sort of sex you read about, or saw in porn movies. It was always quick, and sometimes they were outside, and sometimes there were other people nearby. I knew I’d rather not bother than do it like that.
“Oh, you’re a nice boy,” said Alicia. “My last boyfriend, he al
ways carried a condom around.”
You see? That was exactly what I meant. He always carried one around, and he never got to use it, because Alicia didn’t like the way he was trying to put pressure on her. Sometimes condoms reallyreally stop you from making babies. If you’re the sort of kid that always has one on you, then no one wants to sleep with you anyway. At least I was with someone who wanted to have sex with me. Did that make me any better off, though? Alicia’s ex didn’t have sex with her because he always carried a condom around; I wasn’t going to have sex with her because I didn’t. At least she wanted to have sex with me, though. So on the whole I was glad I was me. Which was probably just as well.
“I’m going to go and steal one,” said Alicia.
“Where from?”
“My parents’ bedroom.”
She stood up, and started to walk towards the door. She had a vest on, and her knickers, and if anyone saw her, they wouldn’t need to be an incredible genius to work out what had been going on in her room.
“You’re going to get me killed,” I said.
“Oh, don’t be so soppy,” she said, but she didn’t explain why a fear of being killed was soppy. To me, it was just common sense.
So I had probably two minutes on my own in her bedroom, lying on her bed, and I spent it trying to remember how we’d got from there to here. The truth was, there wasn’t much to it. We came in, said hello to her mum and dad, went upstairs, and that was it, pretty much. We never talked about it. We just did what we wanted to do. I was pretty sure, though, that she wanted to go all the way because of her ex. It wasn’t much to do with me. I mean, I don’t think she’d have wanted to do it if she hated me. But when she’d said to me at the party that she might change her mind, I could see now that she wanted to get him back for something. It was like a joke on him. He kept asking her, and she kept saying no, and then he got pissed off and dumped her, and so she decided to sleep with the next person who came along, as long as he was half-decent. I had a bet with myself that if we did have sex that night, it wouldn’t stay a secret between us. She’d have to find some way of letting him know she wasn’t a virgin. That was sort of the point of it.
And suddenly I didn’t want to do it anymore. I know, I know. There was this beautiful girl I really liked, and she had just taken me up to her bedroom, and she’d made it obvious that we were up there for a reason. But when I’d worked out what was going on, it didn’t feel right. There were three of us in her bedroom that night, me, her and him, and I decided that because it was my first time, I’d prefer to keep the numbers down. I wanted to wait until he’d gone, just to make sure she was still interested.
Alicia came back in, holding a small square silver packet.
“Ta-ra!” she said, and she held it up in the air.
“Are you sure it’s, you know, all right? It hasn’t gone past its sell-by date?”
I don’t know why I said this. I mean, I know I said it because I was looking for excuses. But there were lots of excuses I could have used, and this one wasn’t a very good one.
“Why shouldn’t it be all right?” she said.
“I dunno.” And I didn’t.
“You mean because it’s my mum and dad’s?”
That was what I meant, I suppose.
“You think that they never have sex? So this has been lying around for years?”
I didn’t say anything. But that was what I must have been thinking, which was weird, really. Believe me, I knew that people’s parents had sex. But I suppose I didn’t really know what it was like for parents who were actually together. I was sort of presuming that parents who were together had sex less often than parents who were apart. I seemed to be very confused by the whole subject of condoms. If anyone had one, then I ended up thinking they weren’t having sex, and that can’t be true all the time, can it? Some of them had to be bought by people who actually used them.
She looked at the wrapper.
“21/05/09, it says.”
(If you’re reading this in the future, then I should tell you that all this was happening long before May 21, 2009. We had plenty of time to use that condom, years and years.)
She threw the condom over to me.
“Come on. We haven’t got forever.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Because it’s getting late, and my mum and dad know you’re up here. They’ll start banging on the door soon. That’s what they usually do if I’ve got a boy in here and it’s late.”
I must have had some kind of a look on my face, because she knelt down by the side of the bed and kissed me on the cheek.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“How did you mean it, then?”
I was just saying anything that came into my head. I wanted it to get even later than it was, so her mum and dad would start banging on the door and I could go home.
“You don’t want to do this, do you?” she said.
“Yeah, course,” I said. And then, “Not really, no.”
She laughed. “So you’re not confused or anything, then.”
“I don’t know why you want to do it,” I said. “You told me you weren’t ready for sex with your ex-boyfriend.”
“I wasn’t.”
“So how come you’re ready to have sex with me? You don’t even know me.”
“I like you.”
“So you didn’t like him much, then?”
“No, not really. I mean, I did at first. But then I went off him.”
I didn’t want to ask any more questions about all that. None of it made much sense. It was like she was saying that we ought to sleep together quickly, before she stopped liking me—like she knew she wouldn’t like me the next day, so we had to do it that night. If you look at it another way, though, everyone is like that. I mean, you sleep with someone because you’re not sick of them, and when you’re sick of them, you stop.
“If you don’t want to do anything, why don’t you just go?” she said.
“OK. I will.”
And I stood up, and she started to cry, and I didn’t know what to do.
“I wish I’d never said that thing about wanting to be a model. I feel stupid now.”
“Oh, it’s nothing to do with that,” I said. “If anything, I think you’re out of my league.”
“‘Out of my league’?” she said. “Where did that come from?”
I knew where it came from. It came from having a mum who was sixteen when I was born. If somebody knows about the history of my family, then it’s all they can see, and it’s all they can hear. I didn’t tell her any of that. I sat down on the bed and held her, and when she’d stopped crying she kissed me, and that was how we ended up having sex even though I’d decided not to. If I broke TH’s record of twenty-two and a half seconds, it couldn’t have been by more than that half-second.
I told TH when I got home. I had to tell someone, but talking about that stuff is hard, so absolutely the best way is to say anything you’ve got to say to a poster. I think he was pleased. From what I knew of him, he’d have liked Alicia.
CHAPTER 3
I dreamed my way through school for the next few weeks. I dreamed my way through life, really. It was all just waiting. I can remember waiting for a bus in that first week, the 19 that took me from my house to hers, and suddenly realizing that waiting for a bus was much easier than anything else, because it was all just waiting anyway. When I was waiting for a bus, I didn’t have to do anything else but wait, but all the other waiting was hard. Eating breakfast was waiting, so I didn’t eat much. Sleep was waiting, so I couldn’t sleep much, even though I wanted to, because sleeping was a good way of getting through eight hours or whatever. School was waiting, so I didn’t know what anyone was talking about, during the lessons or at break times. Watching TV was waiting, so I couldn’t follow the programs. Even skating was waiting, seeing as how I only went skating when Alicia was doing something else.
Usually, though, Alicia wasn’t doing anythi
ng else. That was the incredible thing. She wanted to be with me as much as I wanted to be with her, as far as I could work out.
We never did much. We watched TV in her room, or sometimes downstairs, especially if her parents were out. We went for walks in Clissold Park. You know that bit in a film when they show couples laughing and holding hands and kissing in lots of different places while a song plays? We were like that, a bit, except we didn’t go to lots of different places. We went to about three, including Alicia’s bedroom.
We were in Clissold Park when Alicia told me she loved me. I didn’t know what to say, really, so I told her I loved her too. It would have seemed rude not to.
“Really?” she said. “You really love me?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I can’t believe it. Nobody has ever said that to me before.”
“Have you ever said it to anyone before?”
“No. Course not.”
That explained why nobody had ever said it to her, I thought. Because if someone tells you she loves you, then you’re bound to say it back, aren’t you? You have to be pretty hard not to.
And anyway, I did love her. Someone like my mum would say, Oh, you’re just a kid, you don’t know what love is. But I didn’t think of anything else apart from being with Alicia, and the only time I felt like I was where I wanted to be was when I was with her. I mean, that might as well be love, mightn’t it? The kind of love my mum talks about is full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that. It’s not a lot of fun, that’s for sure. If that really is love, the kind my mum talks about, then nobody can ever know if they love somebody, can they? It seems like what she’s saying is, if you’re pretty sure you love somebody, the way I was sure in those few weeks, then you can’t love them, because that isn’t what love is. Trying to understand what she means by love would do your head in.