Free Not a Star and Otherwise Pandemonium by Nick Hornby Page B

She really had no idea? Is she blind or stupid?’ And as the film was going on, and I watched these girls rolling their eyes in disbelief (that wasn’t all they did, but there was a lot of eye-rolling, and I was grateful for it), I tried to work out whether I’d missed any clues the last few years.
    And the first thing I remembered is that he didn’t like taking communal showers–there had been a thing about it at school, and in the end we’d had to write a note to his games teacher. Neither of us ever sat him down to ask him what the problem was; he’d just told us that he didn’t like them, felt funny about them. Dave was even worried that he might be queer, but we’d already found a couple of girly magazines under his bed, so that theory didn’t make much sense. And then I started to think about his thing with trousers. He’s always preferred baggy ones–he hasn’t ever worn jeans or anything like that, and we’ve always teased him a bit because he’s ended up looking so straight. He’s got more suits than any normal twenty-three-year-old–he buys them in the Oxfam shop and places like that–and he’s got endless pairs of what my mum would have called ‘slacks’, trousers with creases in them made out of flannel or whatever. He always said that other kids were all scruffy and dirty, and that no one knew how to dress properly any more, but now I could see that he’d invented his look to get himself out of a tight spot, as it were. His clothes never seemed to fit with the rest of his personality, or the music he liked, or the friends he knocked around with, so we could never really understand it, but that was because we didn’t have all the information we needed. Oh, plus: he stopped me buying his pants. He was clever about it, because he said I didn’t understand about things like that, pants and socks and vests, but, looking back, I can see it was the pants part of it all that he was worried about. He didn’t like slips much, and he didn’t like boxers; he’d only wear something he calls boxer briefs, which are sort of like trunks, but with a pouch to put it in. They look a bit show-offy, the sort of thing a male stripper might wear, and Dave went back to thinking he was gay for a little while. But Mark had moved away from girly mags and on to real girls by this time, and it seemed to me that Mark was going to an awful lot of trouble just to prove he was straight if he wasn’t. We didn’t waste a lot of time puzzling it all out. He just had his quirks, that was all. Who doesn’t?
    I turned the video off and sat there for a moment. Dave was due back any minute, and Mark after he’d had a drink with his five-a-side team, and I didn’t know what I was going to say to either of them. Maybe I didn’t have to say anything. Maybe I could just march up to bloody Karen bloody Glenister’s house, give her the film back and tell her that if she ever breathed a word to anybody about Mark’s wotsit, I’d bash her over the head with it. But in my heart of hearts I knew it was too late.
     
    Dave came in to find me sitting on the sofa staring at a blank TV screen.
    ‘You all right?’ he said.
    ‘I’ve just had a bit of a shock,’ I told him.
    ‘What’s up?’ He sat down with me and took my hand and looked at me. He was frightened, and just for a moment I could see that finding out your son had a huge penis wasn’t the same as finding out you had cancer, so I tried to smile.
    ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Really. It’s just…’ I reached down to my feet and picked up the video case and gave it to him. He laughed.
    ‘What?’ I said.
    ‘Who gave you that?’
    ‘Karen Glenister.’
    ‘I can see why. That’s funny.’
    ‘What’s funny?’
    ‘He looks just like him, doesn’t he? Have you shown him?’
    ‘Not yet. He’s at football. Dave…’ I took a deep breath. ‘It is Mark.’
    He looked at me, and then he looked at the video, and then he looked at me again.
    ‘How d’you mean?’
    I