How to Build a Girl

For someone who lives in a house without mirrors, seeing yourself talked about by others is exhilarating.

I’ve learned what my contemporaries will have learned in their first terms at college, or university—that the first friends you make in a new place are the ones you usually spend the next three terms trying to lose,

Why don’t you come back to mine, and let’s [putting hand down bra] talk about this further?”
“Where do you live?”
“Earl’s Court.”
“Sorry. I’m working a shift in a homeless hostel tonight, and I’d rather get laid there. Bye.”

As I’ve not been kissed before, I’m not really sure how you activate this function on a man. I think of all the kissing I’ve seen. I know that saying, “You may now kiss the bride!” has a 100 percent success rate—but that seems inappropriate here. Leia got Han to kiss her before they swung across a chasm in a spaceship on a rope together—but that’s going to take a lot more infrastructure than I have available.

Because I am well read, I know what a terrible cliché it is for a teenager to shout, “I hate you. I never asked to be born,” so I refrain.

The 1990s are a bad time to be poor, and not-famous.