Just Like You

by Nick Hornby

Lucy knew lots of people who sent their kids to private schools, and they never failed to make a mess of explaining how they had arrived at their decision. The reasons usually involved some kind of complex, barely comprehensible sensitivity that prevented the child from attending the local comprehensive, so even though the parents would have loved to send them up the road, it just wouldn’t work in this particular case, what with the shyness, or the undiagnosed dyslexia, or an extraordinary talent that needed the kind of excavation and nurture the state was in no position to provide. Lucy decided that she would have sex with the first father who said, simply, are you fucking kidding me? That school is full of psychopaths, gangsters, kids who don’t speak English, teachers who don’t speak English, twelve-year-olds who stink of weed, eleven-year-olds who will beat my daughter up simply because she reads Plato in her lunch break.