Just Like You

by Nick Hornby

“Nope,” said Lucy. “But I can see that, of the three black faces available to you in your memory bank, he probably looks most like a young Denzel Washington.”

Emma was an occasional freelance interior designer, and Lucy would be amazed if she’d ever had a black client. All the other fields of endeavor that might have provided her with comparative options—sport, music, books, even politics—she had no interest in. Lucy had had enough conversations with kids and colleagues to understand how deep this sort of thing cut, but how did one even begin, with someone as oblivious and as unreflective as Emma? So she didn’t, and she wouldn’t.

All in all, he looked exactly like the kind of man she might have expected to be meeting on a blind date set up by a mutual friend: pleasant, damaged, harmless, and with a blind faith in the power of another woman to lead him out of his loneliness.

Ted pointed at her. She’d only met him five minutes ago and there’d already been the unfurled arm thing and a point. He’d make a good crossing guard, but that wasn’t necessarily what she was looking for in a partner.

“So she probably wasn’t that unhappy.” “How do you know?” “You seem like a reasonably sensitive guy. You’d have noticed. She was probably just medium. Neither happy nor unhappy. Like most people.” She didn’t know what she was talking about, but she was beginning to see that blind dates, especially unsuccessful ones with no promise of a future relationship, could offer all sorts of riches. You could provide uninformed and unasked-for opinion, and you could be as nosy as you wanted.

“Yeah,” said Joseph. “Here’s the thing. The moment you’re related to somebody else, you’re in trouble.” “We’re all related to someone else, from the moment we’re born.” He nodded. “That’s what I’m saying.”

Thierry Henry.”

European Union

On the way home she met a few people she knew, neighbors, parents of the boys’ friends, members of the book group she used to go to before she wanted to kill them.

But something in Cass had encouraged Petition Guy to believe that in this matter at least, he thought like her. And he was right. Did Joseph mind? He did, he thought. He hadn’t been invited by people he didn’t like much to a party he didn’t want to go to. The lack of invitation still stung.

(Lucy wondered what difference church made, and whether disapproval was easier to come by as a result of attendance. It could go either way, in theory, but the churchgoers she had known, mostly friends of her parents, didn’t seem to have had their minds stretched by their faith.)