Alexis Hall

It was ridiculous. A skinny nineteen-year-old with his adolescence still written on his skin. I nearly said, You’re not a dom, you’re a child.

This is why I like Laurie so much—he has absolutely no culture.

Point is, my dad’s a dick who treated my mum like shit, and now he’s doing this big comeback where everyone’s acting like it’s okay, and it’s not okay, and it fucks me off.”

just sort of aware that anything you wanted to know about me you could Google.”

“Would it be the truth, though?”

I cringed. “Some of it. And not only the good stuff.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my line of work, it’s that ‘some of the truth’ is the most misleading thing you can hear. Anything I want to know about you, I’ll ask.”

You need to go back to being the sort of harmless sodomite that Waitrose shoppers can feel good about introducing to their left-wing friends

and I believe Bridget said you work with dung beetles.”
“I work for dung beetles.” Okay, that didn’t sound much better.

Leaving me to scrape the bottom of the barrel of my GCSE French, for which I’d received a D. “Um…um… Je voudrais aller au cinema avec mes amis? Ou est la salle de bain?”

There should really be a word for the feeling you get when you do a thing you don’t particularly want to do to support somebody else but then realise they didn’t actually need you and nobody would have noticed if you’d stayed home in your pyjamas eating Nutella straight from the jar. Anyway.

This was why I should never leave the house. Or talk to humans. Especially not humans I wanted to like me.

I drooped. “I’m sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just really bad at…” I tried to find a word that properly encapsulated my recent dating history “…everything.”