How to Talk to Girls at Parties (eBook Original)

“You can buy chocolates, or sherbet lemons.”
    “I don’t think I can,” I said. “It’s too small. I don’t know if shops will take sixpences like these nowadays.”
    “Then put it in your piggy bank,” she said. “It might bring you luck.” She said this doubtfully, as if she were uncertain what kind of luck it would bring.
    The policemen and my father and two men in brown suits and ties were standing in the farmhouse kitchen. One of the men told me he was a policeman, but he wasn’t wearing a uniform, which I thought was disappointing: if I were a policeman, I was certain, I would wear my uniform whenever I could. The other man with a suit and tie I recognized as Doctor Smithson, our family doctor. They were finishing their tea.
    My father thanked Mrs. Hempstock and Lettie for taking care of me, and they said I was no trouble at all, and that I could come again. The policeman who had driven us down to the Mini now drove us back to our house, and dropped us off at the end of the drive.
    “Probably best if you don’t talk about this to your sister,” said my father.
    I didn’t want to talk about it to anybody. I had found a special place, and made a new friend, and lost my comic, and I was holding an old-fashioned silver sixpence tightly in my hand.
    I said, “What makes the ocean different to the sea?”
    “Bigger,” said my father. “An ocean is much bigger than the sea. Why?”
    “Just thinking,” I said. “Could you have an ocean that was as small as a pond?”
    “No,” said my father. “Ponds are pond-sized, lakes are lake-sized. Seas are seas and oceans are oceans. Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic. I think that’s all of the oceans there are.”
    My father went up to his bedroom, to talk to my mum and to be on the phone up there. I dropped the silver sixpence into my piggy bank. It was the kind of china piggy bank from which nothing could be removed. One day, when it could hold no more coins, I would be allowed to break it, but it was far from full.

Copyright
    “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” first appeared in Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman, published by William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, in 2006.
    This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
    HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES . Copyright © 2006 Neil Gaiman. Excerpt from OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE. Copyright © 2013 Neil Gaiman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
    EPub Edition JUNE 2013 ISBN 9780062293572
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