Slam (3 page)

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.

 

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 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.”

“You're not supposed to be looking,” I said to Alicia.

“Who said I was laughing at what you were doing?”

“Either 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.

“Maybe I was laughing at something I remembered,” she said.

“Like?”

“I dunno. Loads of funny things happen, don't they?”

“So 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.

“What's the matter?”

“You think you're getting somewhere, don't you?”

“How 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.”

“OK,” I said. “Thanks.” I felt about three years old.

“I didn't mean it like that,” she said. “I just meant, you know, you've got to keep trying.”

“I might not want to keep trying.”

“I 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 forgive her for saying it. She seemed older than me, which I decided was because she spent a lot of time dealing with boys who fell in love with her in two seconds flat.

“Where would you rather be right now?” she asked me.

I wasn't sure what to say. I knew the answer. The answer was, there wasn't anywhere I'd rather be. But if I told her, I'd be dead.

“I dunno. Skating, probably.”

“You skate?”

“Yeah. Not ice-skating. Skateboarding.” I know I said I'd never use that word again, but sometimes I need it. Not everyone is as cool as me.

“I know what skating is, thank you.”

She was scoring too many points. Soon I'd need a calculator to add them all up. I didn't want to talk about skating, though, until I knew what she thought of it.

“How about you? Where would you rather be?”

She hesitated, as if she was about to say something embarrassing.

“Actually, I'd like to be here, on this sofa.”

For the second time, it was as though she knew what I was thinking, except this time it was even better. She had worked out the answer I wanted to give, and she was passing it off as her own. Her points score was about to go into the billions.

“Right here. But with nobody else in the room.”

“Oh.” I could feel myself start to blush, and I didn't know what to say. She looked at me and laughed.

“Nobody else,” she said. “That includes you.”

Deduct the billions. Yes, she could see what I was thinking. But she wanted to use her superpowers for evil, not for good.

“Sorry if that sounded rude. But I hate it when my parents have parties. They make me want to watch TV on my own. I'm boring, aren't I?”

“No. Course you're not.”

Some people would say that she was. She could have gone anywhere in the world for those few seconds, and she chose her own home so that she could watch
Pop Idol
without anyone bothering her. These people, though, wouldn't have understood why she said what she said. She said it to wind me up. She knew I'd think, just for a second, that she was going to say something romantic. She knew I'd be hoping she'd say, “Right here, but with nobody else in the room apart from you.” And she left off the last three words to stamp on me. I thought that was pretty clever, really. Cruel, but clever.

“So you haven't got any brothers and sisters?”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“Because if your parents weren't having a party, you'd have a chance of being alone in the room.”

“Oh. Yeah, I suppose. I've got a brother. He's nineteen. He's at college.”

“What's he studying?”

“Music.”

“What music do you like?”

“Oh, very smooth.”

For a moment, I thought she meant she liked very smooth music, but then I realized she was taking the piss out of my attempts to make conversation. She was beginning to drive me a bit nuts. Either we were going to talk, or we weren't. And if we were, then asking her what music she liked seemed an OK question. Maybe it wasn't incredibly original, but she made it sound as though I kept asking her to get undressed.

I stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“I think I'm wasting your time, and I'm sorry.”

“You're OK. Sit down again.”

“You can
pretend
there's no one else here, if you want. You can sit on your own and think.”

“And what are you going to do? Who are you going to talk to?”

“My mum.”

“Aaaah. Sweet.”

I snapped.

“Listen. You're gorgeous. But the trouble is, you know it, and you think you can treat people like dirt because of it. Well, I'm sorry, but I'm really not that desperate.”

And I left her there. It was one of my greatest moments: all the words came out right, and I meant everything I said, and I was glad I'd said it. I wasn't doing it for effect either. I was really, properly sick of her, for about twenty seconds. After twenty seconds I calmed down and started trying to work out a way back into the conversation. And I hoped that the conversation would turn into something else—a kiss, and then marriage, after we'd been out for a couple of weeks. But I was sick of the way she was making me feel. I was too nervous, too keen not to make a mistake, and I was being pathetic. If we were going to talk again, it had to be because she wanted to.

 

My mum was talking to a bloke, and she wasn't that thrilled to see me. I got the impression that she hadn't got on to the subject of me yet, if you know what I mean. I know she loves me, but every now and again, in exactly this sort of situation, she conveniently forgets to mention that she's got a fifteen-year-old son.

“This is my son, Sam,” my mum said. But I could tell she'd rather have described me as her brother. Or her dad. “Sam, this is Ollie.”

“Ollie,” I said, and I laughed. And he looked upset and Mum looked pissed off, so I tried to explain.

“Ollie,” I said again, like they'd get it, but they didn't.

“You know,” I said to my mum.

“No,” she said.

“Like the skate trick.” Because there's a trick called an ollie.

“Is that funny? Really?”

“Yeah,” I said. But I wasn't sure anymore. I think I was still all confused after talking to Alicia, and not at my best.

“His name's Oliver,” she said. “I presume, anyway.” She looked at him, and he nodded. “Have you ever heard of the name Oliver?”

“Yeah, but—”

“So he's Ollie for short.”

“Yeah, I know, but—”

“What if he was called Mark?”

“Not funny.”

“No? But, you know…Mark! Like a mark on someone's trousers! Ha ha ha!” said Mum.

Never go to a party with your mother.

“Mark on your trousers!” she said again.

And then Alicia came over to us, and I looked at my mum as if to say, Say “Mark on your trousers” one more time and Ollie hears some things you don't want him to know. She understood, I think.

“You're not going, are you?” Alicia said.

“I dunno.”

She took my hand and led me right back to the sofa.

“Sit down. You were right to walk away. I don't know why I was like that.”

“Yes you do.”

“Why, then?”

“Because people let you be like that.”

“Can we start again?”

“If you want,” I said. I wasn't sure whether she could. You know how you're not supposed to make faces because the wind might change and you stay like that? Well, I wondered whether the wind might have changed, and she'd be sulky and cocky forever.

“OK,” she said. “I like some hip-hop, but not a lot. The Beastie Boys, and Kanye West. Bit of hip-hop, bit of R&B. Justin Timberlake. Do you know R.E.M.? My dad likes them a lot, and I've got into them. And I play the piano, so I listen to classical sometimes. There. That didn't kill me, did it?”

I laughed. And that was that. That was the moment she stopped treating me like an enemy. All of a sudden I was a friend, and all I'd done to change things was walk away.

 

It was better being a friend than an enemy, of course it was. I still had a party to get through, after all, and having a friend meant I had someone else to talk to. I wasn't going to stand there listening to Mum laughing like a drain at Ollie's bad jokes, so I had to spend it with Alicia. So in the short term, I was glad we were friends. In the long term, though, I wasn't so sure. I don't mean that Alicia wouldn't have been a good friend to have. She'd have been a fantastic friend to have. She was funny, and I didn't know too many people like her. But by that stage, I knew that I didn't want to be her friend, if you know what I mean, and I was worried that her being friendly to me meant that I didn't stand a chance with anything else. I know that's wrong. Mum is always telling me that the friendship has to come first, before anything else. But it seemed to me that when I first arrived at the party, she was looking at me as though I might be a possible boyfriend, which was why she was all sharp and spiky. So what I didn't know was, had she put away the spikes for a reason? Because some girls are like that. Sometimes you know you've got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn't so messed up, it wouldn't be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you would be a good sign, but in the real world, it isn't.

 

As things turned out, Alicia being nice to me was a good sign, so maybe the world isn't as messed up as I'd thought. And I understood that it was a good sign pretty much straightaway, because she started talking about things we could do. She said she wanted to come to Grind City to watch me skate, and then she asked me whether I wanted to see a film with her.

I was getting butterflies by this time. It sounded to me as though she'd already decided that we were going to start seeing each other, but nothing's ever that easy, is it? And also, how come she didn't have a boyfriend? Alicia could have had anyone she wanted, in my opinion. Actually, that might even be a fact.

 

So when she mentioned this possible cinema date, I tried to be as, you know, as blah as possible, just to see how she'd react.