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again, probably. I’d rather live on a desert island on my own, as long as it was made of concrete, and I had a board with me. A desert traffic island, ha ha.
    Anyway. It was all right if I didn’t want to speak to someone, but who did she think she was, sitting there pouting and looking the other way? She’d probably never even heard of Tony Hawk, or Green Day, or anything cool, so what gave her the right?
    I thought about outsulking her. She was sitting on the sofa, sunk down low, her legs stretched out, and looking away from me towards the food table on the wall opposite. I sunk down in the same way, stretched my legs out, and stared at the bookshelf by my side. We were so carefully arranged that we must have looked like plastic models, the sort of thing you can get in a Happy Meal.
    I was making fun of her, and she knew it, but instead of sulking harder, which would have been one way to go, she decided to laugh instead. And when she laughed, I could feel some part of me flip over. All of a sudden, I was desperate to make this girl like me. And as you can probably tell, my mum was right. She was officially gorgeous. She could have got a certificate for gorgeousness from Islington Council, if she wanted, and she wouldn’t even have had to get her mum to pull strings. She had—still has—these enormous grey eyes that have caused me actual physical pain once or twice, somewhere between the throat and the chest. And she’s got this amazing straw-colored hair that always looks messy and cool at the same time, and she’s tall, but she’s not skinny and flat-chested like a lot of tall girls, and she’s not taller than me, and then there’s her skin, which is whatever, like the skin of a peach and all that…I’m hopeless at describing people. All I can say is that when I saw her, I was angry with Mum for not grabbing me by the throat and shouting at me. OK, she gave me a tip-off. But it should have been much more than that. It should have been, like, “If you don’t come, you’ll regret it every single minute for the rest of your life, you moron.”
    â€œYou’re not supposed to be looking,” I said to Alicia.
    â€œWho said I was laughing at what you were doing?”
    â€œEither you were laughing at what I was doing or you’re off your head. There’s nothing else here to laugh at.”
    That wasn’t strictly true. She could have been laughing at the sight of her dad dancing, for a start. And there were loads of trousers and shirts that were pretty funny.
    â€œMaybe I was laughing at something I remembered,” she said.
    â€œLike?”
    â€œI dunno. Loads of funny things happen, don’t they?”
    â€œSo you were laughing at all of them, all at once?”
    And we went on like that for a bit, messing around. I was starting to relax. I’d got her talking, and once I’ve got a girl talking, then she is doomed, and there can be no escape for her. But then she stopped talking.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?”
    â€œYou think you’re getting somewhere, don’t you?”
    â€œHow can you tell that?” I was shocked. That was exactly what I thought.
    She laughed. “When you started talking to me, there wasn’t a single muscle in you that was relaxed. Now you’re all…” And she threw out her arms and legs, as if she was doing an impression of someone watching TV on the sofa at home. “Well, it’s not like that,” she said. “Not yet. And it might not ever be.”
    â€œOK,” I said. “Thanks.” I felt about three years old.
    â€œI didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “I just meant, you know, you’ve got to keep trying.”
    â€œI might not want to keep trying.”
    â€œI know that’s not true.”
    I turned to look at her then, to see how serious she was, and I could tell she was half teasing, so I could just about