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fifty?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBloody hell. So how old’s her daughter, then? Like, thirty or something? Why would I want to hang out with a thirty-year-old?”
    â€œSixteen. I told you. That’s normal. You have a baby when you’re thirty-four, which is what I should have done, and then when she’s sixteen you’re fifty.”
    â€œSo she was older than you are now when she had this girl.”
    â€œAlicia. Yes. And like I said, it’s not weird. It’s normal.”
    â€œI’m glad you’re not fifty.”
    â€œWhy? What difference does it make to you?”
    She was right, really. It didn’t make an awful lot of difference to me.
    â€œI’ll be thirty-three at your fiftieth.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œI’ll be able to get drunk. And you won’t be able to say anything.”
    â€œThat’s the best argument I’ve ever heard for having a kid at sixteen. In fact, it’s the only argument I’ve ever heard for having a kid at sixteen.”
    I didn’t like it when she said things like that. It always felt like it was my fault, somehow. Like I’d persuaded her I wanted to come out eighteen years early. That’s the thing about being an unwanted baby, which is what I was, let’s face it. You’ve always got to remind yourself it was their idea, not yours.
    Â 
    They lived in one of those big old houses off of Highbury New Park. I’d never been in one before. Mum knows people who live in places like that, because of work and her book group, but I don’t. We only lived about half a mile from her, but I never used to have any reason to go up Alicia’s way until I met her. Everything about her place was different from ours. Hers was big and we lived in a flat. Hers was old and ours was new. Hers was untidy and a bit dusty, and ours was tidy and clean. And they had books everywhere. It’s not that we didn’t have books at home. But it was more like Mum had a hundred and I had thirty. They had about ten thousand each, or that’s what it looked like. There was a bookcase in the hallway, and more going up the stairs, and the bookcases all had books shoved on top of them. And ours were all new, and theirs were all old. I liked everything about our place better, apart from I wished we had more than two bedrooms. When I thought about the future, and what it was going to be like, that’s what I saw for myself: a house with loads of bedrooms. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, because I wanted to live on my own, like one of the skaters I saw on MTV once. He had this ginormous house with a swimming pool, and a pool table, and a miniature indoor skate park with padded walls and a vert ramp and a half-pipe. And he had no girlfriend living there, no parents, nothing. I wanted some of that. I didn’t know how I was going to get it, but that didn’t matter. I had a goal.
    Mum said hello to Andrea, Alicia’s mum, and then Andrea made me walk over to where Alicia was sitting to say hello. Alicia didn’t look like she wanted to say hello. She was sprawled out on a sofa looking at a magazine, even though it was a party, and when her mum and I came up to her, she acted like the most boring evening of her life just took a turn for the worse.
    Â 
    I don’t know about you, but when parents do that pairing-off thing to me, I decide on the spot that the person I’m being set up with is the biggest jerk in Britain. It wouldn’t matter if she looked like Britney Spears used to look, and thought that Hawk—Occupation: Skateboarder was the best book ever written. If it was my mum’s idea, then I wasn’t interested. The whole point of friends is that you choose them yourself. It’s bad enough being told who your relations are, your aunts and uncles and cousins and all that. If I wasn’t allowed to choose my friends either, I’d never speak to another person