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sex? Is that what we were going upstairs for? Was I about to lose my virginity? I felt like I was watching some film I didn’t understand.
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    I’d been close to having sex a couple of times, but I’d chickened out. Having sex when you’re fifteen is a big deal, if you’ve got a thirty-two-year-old mum. And this girl Jenny I was seeing kept saying that everything would be all right, but I didn’t know what that meant, really, and I didn’t know whether she was one of those girls who actually wanted a baby, for reasons that I could never understand. There were a couple of young mums at my school, and they acted like a baby was an iPod or a new mobile or something, some kind of gadget that they wanted to show off. There are many differences between a baby and an iPod. And one of the biggest differences is, no one’s going to mug you for your baby. You don’t have to keep a baby in your pocket if you’re on the bus late at night. And if you think about it, that must tell you something, because people will mug you for anything worth having, which means that a baby can’t be worth having. Anyway, I wouldn’t sleep with Jenny, and she told a few of her friends, and for a while people shouted things at me in the corridors and that. And the next boy who went out with her…Actually, I don’t want to tell you what he said. It was stupid and disgusting and it made me look bad, and that’s all you need to know. After that I started to take skating a lot more seriously. It meant I could spend more time on my own.
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    As we were going up the stairs to her bedroom, I had this fantasy that Alicia would close the door, and look at me, and start to get undressed, and to tell you the honest truth, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about that. I mean, there was a plus side, obviously. But on the other hand, she might expect me to know what I was doing, and I didn’t. And my mum was downstairs, and who was to say that she wouldn’t come looking for me at any moment? And Alicia’s mum and dad were downstairs, and also I had a feeling that if she did want to have sex, it was a lot to do with this boy she’d just dumped, and not so much to do with me.
    I needn’t have worried. We went into her room, and she closed the door, and then she remembered that she was halfway through this film called The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, so we watched the rest of that. I sat in this old armchair she’s got in there, and she sat on the floor between my legs. And after a little while, she leaned against me so that her back was pressing into my knees. That was what I remembered later. It felt like a message. And then when the film had finished, we went downstairs, and my mum was just starting to look for me, and we went home.
    But as we were walking up the road, Alicia came running after us in her bare feet, and she gave me this black-and-white postcard of a couple kissing. I stared at the picture, and I must have been looking a bit clueless, because she rolled her eyes and said, “Turn it over.” And on the back was her mobile number.
    â€œFor the cinema tomorrow,” she said.
    â€œOh,” I said. “Right.”
    And when she’d gone, my mum raised her eyebrows up as far as they would go, and said, “So you’re going to the cinema tomorrow.”
    â€œYeah,” I said. “Looks like it.”
    And my mum laughed, and said, “Was I right? Or was I right?”
    And I said, “You were right.”
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    Tony Hawk lost his virginity when he was sixteen. He’d just skated in a contest called The King of the Mount at a place called Trashmore in Virginia Beach. He says in his book that he lasted half as long as a run in a vert contest. A run in a vert contest takes forty-five seconds. So he lasted twenty-two and a half seconds. I was glad he’d told me. I never forgot those figures.
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    The next day was Sunday, and I went down