How to Build a Girl

Because I get paid by the word, and it’s a thrill when that word is ‘cunt’. Because I don’t run or swim or cycle, and I only dance in the dark, and so the adrenalin I get from hating these bands is the nearest I get to physical exercise.

It seemed to me that this was the real reason people wanted to fuck so much. To get here. To get to this tiny, quiet place where there was nothing else to do but be with each other. Just to be two humans who had – for a short while – stopped wanting. This is the beautiful, final destination. The end of things.

‘He’s the wrong kind of gay for me,’ I say.

It had never occurred to me that I might not be my brother’s favourite writer. It’s a bit of an awkward moment.

Another sad corollary of ‘SatanWankGate’ is that I’ve stopped being able to think of Satan while I wank. I now irrevocably associate The Great Lucifer with Krissi being tetchy – and that’s scary

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.