# Read the first page of Slam by Nick Hornby Read the opening of Slam by Nick Hornby free, no signup. A sixteen-year-old skateboarder faces an unplanned pregnancy. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/slam-nick-hornby - Genre: Literary fiction - Year: 2008 - ISBN: 9781594484711 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780141902708&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781594484711 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781594484711 ## The opening So things were ticking along quite nicely. In fact, I’d say that good stuff had been happening pretty solidly for about six months. – For example: Mum got rid of Steve, her rubbish boyfriend. – For example: Mrs Gillett, my art and design teacher, took me to one side after a lesson and asked whether I’d thought of doing art at college. – For example: I’d learned two new skating tricks, suddenly, after weeks of making an idiot of myself in public. (I’m guessing that not all of you are skaters, so I should say something straight away, just so there are no terrible misunderstandings. Skating = skateboarding. We never say skateboarding, usually, so this is the only time I’ll use the word in this whole story. And if you keep thinking of me messing around on ice, then it’s your own stupid fault.) All that, and I’d met Alicia too. I was going to say that maybe you should know something about me before I go off on one about my mum and Alicia and all that. If you knew something about me, you might actually care about some of those things. But then, looking at what I just wrote, you know quite a lot already, or at least you could have guessed a lot of it. You could have guessed that my mum and dad don’t live together, for a start, unless you thought that my dad was the sort of person who wouldn’t mind his wife having boyfriends. Well, he’s not. You could have guessed that I skate, and you could have guessed that my best subject at school was art and design, unless you thought I might be the sort of person who’s always being taken to one side and told to apply for college by all the teachers in every subject. You know, and the teachers actually fight over me. ‘No, Sam! Forget art! Do physics!’ ‘Forget physics! It would be a tragedy for the human race if you gave up French!’ And then they all start punching each other. Yeah, well. That sort of thing really, really doesn’t happen to me. I can promise you, I have never ever caused a fight between teachers. And you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes or whatever to work out that Alicia was a girl who meant something to me. I’m glad there are things you don’t know and can’t guess, weird things, things that have only ever happened to me in the whole history of the world, as far as I know. If you were able to guess it all from that first little paragraph, I’d start to worry that I wasn’t an incredibly complicated and interesting person, ha ha. This was a couple of years ago – this time when things were ticking along OK – so I was fifteen, nearly sixteen. And I don’t want to sound pathetic, and I really don’t want you to feel sorry for me, but this feeling that my life was OK was new to me. I’d never had the feeling before, and I haven’t really had it since. I don’t mean to say that I’d been unhappy. ## Books with a similar feel - [The Best American Short Stories 2021 by Jesmyn Ward](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-best-american-short-stories-2021-jesmyn-ward.md) - [The Best American Short Stories 2019 by Anthony Doerr](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-best-american-short-stories-2019-anthony-doerr.md) - [F. Scott Fitzgerald by F. Scott Fitzgerald](https://uncovered.ink/read/f-scott-fitzgerald-f-scott-fitzgerald.md) - [The Story Prize by Larry Dark](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-story-prize-larry-dark.md) - [Here and Now by J.M. Coetzee](https://uncovered.ink/read/here-and-now-j-m-coetzee.md) - [Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson](https://uncovered.ink/read/where-the-dead-sit-talking-brandon-hobson.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.