Freak City (12 page)

I tilted my head. “She sings with the Colored Pieces,” I said to Kevin. He looked at me with excitement.

“I know them!” he said, and started humming their most popular hit.

I couldn’t believe a nine-year-old knew that much about music. But I also couldn’t believe he was sitting here with us translating our conversation.

Leah sat quietly next to us. Kevin hadn’t translated the last part of our exchange, and Leah was shut out of our conversation. She seemed to have withdrawn into herself, like she wasn’t even there anymore. Her entire appearance, her presence, had abruptly disappeared. The way she sat there now was the absolute opposite of what she had been ten minutes ago when she had been having a lively conversation with Marcel.

Kevin stood up. “I have to go meet the guys!” he announced as if he were fourteen rather than nine. Then he stretched his hand out. Leah sighed. She reached into her backpack and pulled out a wrinkled five euro bill. Kevin let the money disappear into his bag, grabbed his towel, and nodded at us.

“Maybe we’ll see each other again, dude!” he said to me. “Most of the guys I only see once. Leah is picky. But you’re nice. If you want me to translate for you again, let me know.” He stepped over my towel and took off.

Silence stretched out. Leah and I looked at each other uncertainly. Now that Kevin was gone, we had lapsed into our usual wordless state.

I would have liked to whistle for him to come back. Almost as soon as he went away, a thousand questions came to me that I wanted to ask Leah. More interesting questions than about family and school. But it was too late.

Leah pulled a pad of paper out of her backpack. Then she grabbed a pen. “I’m glad you came!” she wrote, and handed me the pad. I stared at the lettering. She had nice handwriting—small, clear letters. So our conversation wasn’t at an end.

“You look good in that bikini,” I wrote. Then I quickly scratched it out again. How stupid was that? If I started like that, she’d definitely think I was only after one thing. Besides, it was very bold.

“Do you always give Kevin five euros to translate?” I scribbled on the paper instead. “That’s a lot of money!”

Leah read my comments. “Normally an interpreter charges at least forty euros an hour,” she wrote underneath that. “And Kevin is much better than them. Besides, he’s sworn to secrecy!”

I asked myself what that little devil already knew about Leah’s life. “Franzi’s mom always flips out when she finds out we’re taking him to translate,” Leah wrote. “She’s afraid we’re talking about dirty stuff in front of him.” She made a smiley face next to the sentence, and I laughed.

“What do you like to do?” I wrote underneath that.

She leaned her head to one side. “Movies,” she wrote on the paper. “I like to travel. And I collect useless knowledge.”

“Useless knowledge?” I looked at her.

She grinned. “Did you know, for example, there are only three places in the world that still make top hats?” She drew a top hat next to the question.

I shook my head. There were probably only three people on the entire planet who still wore a top hat, too. My grandfather had worn one, handed down from his father. But my grandfather was dead and the top hat had been eaten by moths.

“Are you still a virgin?” Leah wrote. I stared at the question. For a moment, she had managed to throw me off balance. Did she always just blurt out whatever was on her mind? I should probably be thankful she hadn’t asked me that when Kevin was there.

Caught, I evaded her gaze. It surprised me anyway that she was constantly staring at me. As if she had absolutely no sense of personal space.

“I’m not a virgin anymore,” she continued writing, as if it were a perfectly harmless topic. “It was at a party in Cologne. Some cultural festival for deaf teenagers. The guy was deaf, too, but I forgot his name. Interesting experience, but nothing more.” Again, she drew a smiley face.

Leah was freaking me out. I thought of that moment in my room when Sandra had said that she wasn’t jealous. She would certainly draw her claws now if she were here watching this scene play out. Me lying next to the half-naked Leah at the swimming pool while she pried into the details of my sex life. How she just casually told me that she had done it with some total stranger. I noticed that I was getting excited and awkwardly turned over onto my stomach.

Then I reached for the pen. “Slept with my ex,” I wrote. “It was amazing.”

Leah nodded and took the pen from my hand. “Probably because you were in love with each other. That must be different. Next time, I’ll sleep with a guy I really like, too.”

I looked over at Leah. During the time I had gone out with Sandra, I had been practically fixated on her. I had almost never thought about sleeping with anyone else. But this blunt conversation Leah and I were having practically forced me to imagine it. For a moment, I imagined pushing aside Leah’s bikini and lowering my chest onto hers. I closed my eyes. The sunlight tickled my closed eyelids. What was I doing? In reality, I still wanted to get back together with Sandra. And Leah was infatuated with the deaf version of David Beckham. With Leah, the best I could hope for was to be friends. What I had just been thinking, however, had precious little to do with friendship.

When I opened my eyes again, Leah was holding the pad of paper in front of my face. “Do you still love your ex?” she had scribbled in a jittery hand.

“Yes,” I formed with my lips. A strange expression spread over Leah’s face. Pity? Regret? But just for a second. Then she threw the paper aside and lay down next to me. Our heads were close together and our shoulders touched. Leah smelled good, like vacation, summer, and suntan lotion. I closed my eyes again. Her scent soothed me, and all at once, I was completely relaxed. Our conversation had worked, and I could absolutely imagine being friends with Leah. Introducing her to my parents, talking with her in sign language, and getting to know a few of the thousand guys she had crushes on. The sun beat down on us; summer had finally arrived. I lay there, so close to Leah, and at some point, fell asleep.

When I woke up again, the park was almost empty. I had sunburn on my neck, and Leah was gone. Her blanket was gone; her backpack had disappeared. There was a note on my bag.

Will we see each other again? We could be friends! I think I really like you . . .

When I pushed open the door to my room, I almost had a heart attack. Claudio lay sprawled across my bed. He had stacks of old issues of
National Geographic
all around him and was leafing through them. The magazines belonged to my father, and he almost never let me borrow them. Iris sat on the carpet combing her Barbie and listening to “Benjamin the Elephant Saves the Beaver” for the eight hundredth time. I knew Carla Columna’s part by heart.

“Get out!” I said to my sister. She looked up, hurt. “Get out!” I repeated. I went over to the stereo, took out Benjamin the Elephant, and roughly slapped the CD into her hand.

Claudio glanced up from his magazines, looking bored. He didn’t seem to find it strange to not only spend the afternoon with my dad, but to take over the rest of my life, too. He lay there on my bed as if it were his room. As if that were his little sister, and as if those magazines belonged to his dad.

“Claudio is much nicer than you!” Iris said as she made her way past me, sobbing.

“You’re right,” I muttered and slammed the door shut behind her.

“Why are you in such a shitty mood, man?” Claudio yawned. “I like Benjamin the Elephant. Besides, your family is nice. You don’t always have to be such a jerk. Your dad said you’ve really changed recently.”

“Must be the contaminated tap water,” I said. “Or maybe it’s because I’m fifteen and not six anymore. That’s always hard for parents to take!”

Claudio threw the magazine aside. “Let’s stop fighting,” he said in a conciliatory way. “I want to hear the facts. Sex and crime. Whatever, as far as I’m concerned you can leave out the crime.”

“What facts?” I sat down next to Claudio. With the remote, I turned the radio on.

Before I had gotten together with Sandra, we had done this all the time. Me and Claudio, next to each other on my bed. We had listened to music and talked for hours, sometimes about incredibly private things.

It was only the last few weeks we hadn’t seen each other so much. I had stopped letting him in on stuff. Maybe because he just couldn’t understand a lot of things anymore. Because I realized that our lives were going in different directions.

“Where were you? Other than me and Tobias, you don’t have any friends, so that’s out. That means you spent the afternoon with a girl. Who was it? Are you together with Sandra again? Or were you with the hot pool hall broad?”

I turned the radio up louder. “Video Killed the Radio Star!” I loved that song. It was the first song MTV ever played on the air. I was somehow sorry that Leah would never be able to hear it.

“I was at the pool with Leah,” I said as casually as possible. “Sandra still hasn’t made up her mind. She needs more time. But I think my chances aren’t too bad.”

Claudio punched me in the shoulder. “Come on! Let me see your hickies!”

I shoved him away. “There’s nothing to see,” I said. “We aren’t that far along yet. Besides, that’s not up for debate. We’re friends, nothing else.”

“Not that far?” Claudio laughed. “Man, you’re almost sixteen. Every other preschooler is fighting some sexually transmitted disease these days, and you’re not far enough along to kiss the girl? With Sandra, you did plenty more than just making out at the pool. Is this Leah a prude or what?”

“She’s deaf,” I said.

Claudio didn’t say anything and looked over at the graffiti with Sandra’s name. I wasn’t sure if he had even understood what I said.

“You’re shitting me,” he finally said.

I slowly shook my head. Somehow, I had feared he would react this way.

“She’s really . . . deaf?” Claudio had turned to face me. “You have a thing for a handicapped girl, bro? That’s unreal!”

“She isn’t handicapped,” I defended Leah, “she just can’t hear. That’s all.”

Claudio let the air escape from his lungs. “But that is handicapped,” he said. “Why are you getting upset about it?”

“Because I hate that word!” I snapped at him. “I don’t talk about how you’re a spastic when it comes to sex all the time.”

“Thanks, man.”

“Besides, I don’t have a thing for her. I like her. I want to be friends with her, that’s all.”

Again, we lapsed into silence. Finally, Claudio punched me in the shoulder again. “Mika. You’re going out with a woman who can’t talk! Men around the world have been dreaming of that for millions of years!”

I couldn’t believe it. Why did my best friend have to be such a Neanderthal? “She can talk,” I corrected him. “It just sounds strange.”

“So she’s handicapped,” Claudio said.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Does Sandra know about it?” Something about Claudio’s voice had changed. I couldn’t really say what it was. Did I hear something like hopefulness?

I half nodded. “Sandra knows that we met each other, but she has no idea I got together with her again. She thinks there’s no danger because Leah’s deaf.”

Claudio scratched his forehead. “And? Is she right?”

My face started flushing unpleasantly. “No idea. We’ll see.”

“How do you talk to each other?”

I sighed. The song was over and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana came on next. “We had an interpreter with us at the pool today who knows sign language,” I explained.

“You’re pulling my leg, right?” Claudio looked at me like I had totally lost my mind.

“Why?”

“You two meet to mess around, and then an interpreter comes with? Some guy with a suit, a recorder, and a brief case?”

“We didn’t want to mess around. We wanted to get to know each other.” I noticed the conversation was starting to get on my nerves. “Besides, it wasn’t a real interpreter, it was a little kid. A nine-year-old, actually.”

Claudio broke out in loud laughter. “Sorry, but that’s just freaky. I don’t know what to say. Do you think she’ll bring him along when you guys eventually land in the sack? I mean, she has to tell you what you should do somehow. How do you say ‘fuck’ in sign language, anyway?”

“You are such an asshole,” I said. I took my pillow and clobbered him over the head with it. For a while, we horsed around like we sometimes used to do. But then all at once the situation got uncomfortable, and we immediately stopped. Awkwardly, we scooted apart.

“So, seriously,” Claudio said, completely out of breath. “What’ll you do when she wants to do more than just talk? When she wants to get at your balls, you know what I mean?”

The guy could really make you see red. “You know, Claudio, you don’t have to blabber the whole time when you’re having sex.” I took the pillow and threw it off the bed. “You can also just shut up and concentrate on what’s happening. There are people who talk about sex constantly, and then there are people who just do it. I’d rather know how to do it than constantly rack my brains about how to talk about it.”

“Says the expert,” Claudio jeered.

I hunched my shoulders. “I did sleep with Sandra. Wanted to tell you a long time ago but the time was never right.” No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I regretted having said it. I jumped off the bed and went over to the stereo. I shoved a CD my dad had given me for my last birthday into the stereo. Patti Smith. Pretty good, actually.

“I’m out of here.” Claudio had stood up. He seemed to be offended. The old familiarity was a thing of the past. I was sorry about my direct attack, but there was no way to undo it. I knew perfectly well how much Claudio suffered because he had never even touched a girl. He’s never done anything more than kissing. Besides, I had just made it obvious how little I was telling him about my life. In just a few weeks, we had become light years apart.

“I’ll clean up the magazines,” I said quietly as he started to stack them up.

“Thanks.” He grabbed his backpack and went for the door. He sounded angry. I was frustrated that things had ended on such a bad note. There was plenty I would have liked to talk about with Claudio. Truth be told, I really needed someone to talk to.