Chapter 1

Our parents had a thing for French names.

They named me Michel (pronounced Mee-shell) Saunders, but after being teased mercilessly by my peers for having a girl’s name, I managed to persuade everyone to use an anglicised pronunciation, Mitch-ell. Even the parents had started to use it in informal situations.

They named my sister Elize. On her birth certificate, the final e has an acute accent and her name was supposed to be pronounced El-ee-zay. But, frustrated by the chronic inability of teachers to spell and pronounce her name properly, she eventually gave up the sisyphean task of correcting them and accepted the anglicised pronunciation, El-eez.

Don’t get me wrong; I loved Elize to bits. If she were in peril, I’d willingly have sacrificed myself to save her. She was the most beautiful girl I knew: naturally blonde, a stunning figure, and with a friendly, caring, generous personality. And she was a nerd! At the time my story starts, because the comprehensive school I still attended was woefully inadequate at preparing students for university, Elize had transferred to the local sixth form college where she was studying for five A-levels in Maths and Science. And she mostly hung out with a small group of similarly nerdish fellow girl students.

So what could possibly have been the problem? The answer was that Elize was two years older than me.

If the roles were reversed and she were two years younger, I was sure I’d be in teenage-boy heaven. The house would be filled with girls her age for studying and sleepovers etc, and to them, even a slacker like me would be attractive. But being gorgeous and older and more experienced in life meant that intentionally or otherwise, Elize was the ultimate cock blocker. Any girls I tried to get friendly with just didn’t measure up, and if I brought them home anyway, Elize would privately point out their clown-face excesses of make-up, or that they’d been through so many previous boyfriends that I ought to wear gloves and a mask in their company until they’d been tested.

The consequence of Elize’s well-intended interventions was that I had never developed the confidence to have relationships with girls and I’d never had a girlfriend. It was at the back of my mind that I ought to do something about it, but instead I did what slackers do best: I procrastinated.