Free Slam by Nick Hornby Page B

wasn’t pathetic about it. He didn’t like me because he had no other friends in the world. He liked me because I was OK, and I think because he didn’t know too many people who weren’t from the Nerd Kingdom, what with the violin and music school and everything.
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    Afterwards, Alicia and Rich and I went to Alicia’s room, and she put a CD on, and she and I sat on the bed and Rich sat on the floor.
    â€œWelcome to the family,” said Rich.
    â€œDon’t say it like that,” said Alicia. “I’ll never see him again.”
    â€œThey’re not that bad,” I said, but they were, really. And to be honest, it wasn’t just Alicia’s parents who were getting on my nerves either. When I left the house that afternoon, I wondered whether I’d ever go back.
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    Afterwards, I went down to The Bowl for a little while and messed about on my board. Whoever invented skating is a genius, in my opinion. London gets in the way of every other sport. There are tiny little patches of green where you can play football, or golf, or whatever, and the concrete is trying to eat them away. So you play these games in spite of the city and, really, it would be better if you lived just about anywhere else, out in the countryside, or the suburbs, or someplace like Australia. But skating you do because of the city. We need as much concrete and as many stairs and ramps and benches and pavements as you’ve got. And when the world’s been completely paved over, we’ll be the only athletes left, and there will be statues of Tony Hawk all over the world, and the Olympics will just be a million different skating competitions, and then people might actually watch. I will, anyway. I went to the wheelchair ramp that runs from the back door of the flats round the corner and messed about—nothing too flash, just a few fakie flips and heelflips. And I thought about Alicia, and her family, and started rehearsing what I was going to say to her about us not seeing so much of each other, or maybe not seeing each other at all.
    It was weird, really. If you’d have told me at that party that I was going to go out with Alicia, and we were going to start sleeping together, and I’d get sick of her…Well, I wouldn’t have understood. It wouldn’t have made any sense to me. Before you have sex for the first time, you can’t imagine where it’s ever going to come from, and you certainly can’t imagine dumping the person who’s providing it. Why would you do that? A beautiful girl wants to sleep with you and you’re bored ? How does that work?
    All I can say is that, believe it or not, sex is like anything else good: once you have it, you stop being quite so bothered about it. It’s there, and it’s great and everything, but it doesn’t mean you’re happy to let everything else go out of the window. If having sex regularly meant listening to Alicia’s dad being snobby, and giving up skating, and never seeing mates, then I wasn’t sure how much I wanted it. I wanted a girlfriend who’d sleep with me, but I wanted a life as well. I didn’t know—still don’t know—whether people managed that. Mum and Dad didn’t. Alicia was my first serious girlfriend, and it wasn’t happening for us either. What it seemed like was that I’d been so desperate to sleep with someone that I’d swapped too much for it. OK, I’d said to Alicia. If you’ll let me have sex, I’ll give you skating, mates, schoolwork and my mum (because I was sort of missing her, in a funny sort of way). Oh, and if your mum and dad want to talk to me like I’m some no-hoper crackhead, that’s fine by me too. Just…get your clothes off. And I was beginning to realize that I’d paid over the odds.
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    When I got home, Mum was sitting at the kitchen table with the bloke from Pizza Express. I recognized him straightaway,