Free Doing It by Melvin Burgess

girls. All those lucky boys getting off with them, snogging with them, sleeping with them, feeling them up – and he couldn’t do it. As she’d said, Ali would find out somehow and give him hell. Ben was a popular and good-looking boy, there were any number of attractive girls who would have got into a clinch with him, but he didn’t dare. There wasn’t anyone he could talk to. Stupid though it was, for someone who was getting quality sex from an expert, he was feeling left out.
    Oh well, he thought. One thing anyway, at least the old harpy can’t come here. The thought made him shudder.
    Apart from having to watch one of his friends kiss a fat girl, Dino had ordeals yet to come: he spotted Jackie snogging Fasil in the kitchen. Suddenly, all the feel-good drained away out of the hole in his bottom. Out of order, or what?
    Dino didn’t mess about; he interrupted.
    Fasil did the right thing. He grinned meekly, abandoned all hopes of single number status for the rest of his life and scuttled off. But Jackie turned round and eyed him aggressively.
    ‘My girlfriend. My party,’ said Dino. ‘You snog me.’
    ‘I snog anyone I want.’
    The thing that really pissed Dino off wasn’t just that they’d snogged. It was that they’d snogged in public. There was his girlfriend snogging one of his friends in full view of everyone. It was all cut and dried. Except …
    ‘You were snogging Grace, you two-faced bastard,’ Jackie snarled. It was true. Dino blushed. He’d been a twat, but that just made him angrier than ever. The one thing he really couldn’t bear was to feel like a twat.
    He bent down and hissed in her ear, ‘Shut up, will you? Everyone’s going to think I’m a right twat.’
    ‘Is that all you’re worried about?
Looking
like a twat? You
are
a twat! Twat!’ she bellowed, and off she shoved, leaving Dino standing there feeling more twat-like than he had ever done before.
    Dino was furious. ‘Slut,’ he called after her. ‘Slapper,’ loud enough for everyone to hear.
    She turned round all little girlie and squeaked in a stupid voice, ‘Oh, Dino, I was only practising so I could kiss you better later on. Everyone knows you kiss soooooooooo goooooooood.’ And she said this in such a way that indicated – can you believe this? – that Dino was a crap kisser. Then she flounced off.
    He stood there like a bare arse. He could feel his cheeks flushing redder and redder. Everyone had heard the whole exchange. He began, ‘Don’t give me that bollocks, everyone knows I kiss like a …’ And then he had to stop because now he was putting his foot in it very badly indeed. Boasting about how well you kiss! God, that was so childish.
    Having no idea what else to do, he just turned round and walked out. Right out. Out of the room, out of the hall, out of the house. He was blind with rage and humiliation. Let them have fun! Let them enjoy themselves, the whole lot of them. He didn’t want anything to do with any of them.
    Dino got halfway home before he remembered that he’d been at home in the first place. There was nowhere else to go. For a moment he thought about going back to the party and throwing everyone out, but even as he thought it, he realised it was impossible. That would not be a very cool thing to do.
    He walked back. From outside it sounded as if the party was going like a bomb. He lurked, wondering what to do. It was a while before he realised the way out. Thank God! He’d been in the wrong! All he had to do was admit it. Admitting you were in the wrong was a cool thing to do. It made you more human, somehow. He’d been snogging people, so had Jacks. So what was the problem? Of course, he’d much rather not have stormed out, or lost his cool; and he’d
very
much rather Jackie had never snogged with Fas. But what was done was done.
    He hung around a bit longer, plucking up courage. He practised laughing at himself. Then he took the plunge and went to ring the doorbell. It really was pretty