You (5 page)

Eric waits downstairs while you adjust your lipstick in the mirror and wonder what you’ll look like in fourteen years’ time. You
don’t plan on turning thirty, but neither did you plan to be licked by a frog when you were sixteen. Now you’re sixteen and standing in front of a mirror with a pony sticker in one corner and a black heart in the other and wondering why time has to go by so incredibly fast.

Taja painted the heart three years ago with a felt tip, when your girls were on a sleepover. “Forever,” it says below the heart. You don’t know who it was who came up with that. Nothing is forever, everything has a sell-by date.

And sooner or later I’ll turn thirty
.

You’re not a beauty. You’re what lies between beauty and boredom. Your eyes are like cloudy water, your hair is smooth and so pale that it’s almost white. You remind a lot of people of somebody, but no one can say exactly who. If it wasn’t for your friends, you’d probably be invisible.

Your girls are alike in many things, but what fundamentally makes you different is your hunger. None of your girls knows how you feel. There’s a hunger in you that never ends even when you’re full. The hunger makes you start awake at night. You want more. More music, more talks, more time and sex and most of all more life. Your room has fourteen square feet. You lust for more.

Your girlfriends don’t know anything about your plans. They think you’re going to spend the next hundred years moving around Berlin, sharing everything and never parting. You have no illusions. Take a look at yourself; you won’t get very far with your face, your mind will have to take care of the rest. And your mind’s not really bad.

The tattoo on your wrist is barely visible, even though it’s less than a month old. Needle and ink and a bottle of vodka. The writing’s tiny.
Gone
. If the girls knew you were working hard to erase your tattoo with soap every evening, they would never forgive you. And if they knew you wanted to go to senior class at grammar school after the end of the year, they’d definitely go nuts. Your girls have plans. Stink with her ridiculous beauty salon, as if polishing pensioners’ wrinkles was the crème de la crème. Schnappi just wants to get as far away as possible from her mad mother, who’s been planning for ages to take Schnappi back to Vietnam to find a
suitable husband for her. Schnappi in Vietnam is like you behind the register in Aldi. Nessi’s plan is the weirdest of all. She wants to live with the rest of you in the country. Doesn’t matter where. She’s your personal eco-freak and dreams of a commune where you’ll cook together every day and talk and be so contented that the outside world will dissolve. The artist among you is Taja. She inherited the gift from her dad and after school wants to travel with her guitar around Europe, which you find even stupider than opening some dumb beauty salon. Who actually likes those people who strum away on street corners? Or even worse, who likes it when you’re sitting in the U-Bahn and then some entertainer stumbles in?

You wish you could steal a tiny bit of each of your girls—Stink’s rage, Schnappi’s energy, Nessi’s warmth, and you’d especially like to have something from Taja, because she vanished just under a week ago and it doesn’t matter what bit you get, you’ll take it all—the gleam in her eyes, as if a storm was approaching, or her adventurousness, as if life was always dangerous and not just a tedious collection of school lessons.

You last saw Taja six days ago; there’s been radio silence since then. No returned calls, no answers to your texts, nothing. Stink even went up to see her in Frohnau, but nobody answered the door. Schnappi thinks Taja might be traveling somewhere with her dad, like she did at Christmas—packed her things and lay on the beach in Tahiti until New Year’s Eve.

Not this time, especially not just before the end of term.

Never
.

You really miss Taja, and you check your phone a hundred times a day to see if she has written. You wish you’d argued, then there would be a reason.

“I wish you were here,” you say quietly to your reflection and touch the black heart and think it’s really time to get out of here. You glance at yourself one last time, weary from hunger, before you go down to Eric, who’s already waiting impatiently for you.

The popcorn tastes like cardboard. The guy behind the popcorn machine says there’s nothing he can do about it. He promises you
a fresh portion next time. You ask him which next time that’s going to be. He turns red and Schnappi laughs and bumps you with her shoulder, making you spill half the popcorn over the counter.

Schnappi leads on and you find row 45 and squeeze in. Because you’re late the ads are on already and everyone groans and comments, particularly Jenni, and you give her the finger, tell her to be quiet or she’ll get Sprite on her ugly hairdo. And then at last you’re sitting down and Schnappi says, “We’re late, the ads are over.” And you say, “I’ve noticed that already.” Only Nessi keeps her mouth shut, sits there looking as if she’d rather be somewhere else. The trailers start and at that exact minute Stink comes running in and everybody starts groaning again while Stink squeezes down the row and stands on everyone’s feet, and as soon as she’s sitting down, as soon as everything’s quiet, Schnappi’s phone coughs, which always sounds funny, because Schnappi recorded her cousin coughing as a ringtone, but it’s only funny if you’re not at the cinema, so everyone groans again and Schnappi says, “Sorry, sorry,” and turns her phone off. At last the movie begins and you see a ship in the harbor and everyone on the screen cheers so much that you start yawning.

“Are we in the wrong movie?” asks Stink.

“Shut up.”

Stink slips down in her seat slightly and says she hates half-price Tuesday.

“So why do you come?”

“Why not?”

You drink from your Sprite; Schnappi bends down, takes some of your popcorn, and immediately spits it back out.

“Is this stuff cardboard, or what?”

Stink snorts with laughter and you can’t help it, the Sprite shoots out your nose and drips on your chest.

Well, thanks a lot
.

On the screen the people are looking forward to a boat trip, they’re wearing uniforms and they look the way you imagine Americans look on a Sunday. Eric turns around and winks at you, Stink asks him if he wants to take a picture, Schnappi throws popcorn at his head and you say, “That stuff tastes like old feet,” then Jenni kicks your backside from behind and goes
Shh
and you’re about
to turn around, when everything explodes and your heartbeat just stops, flames and more flames, the whole screen is burning up, one explosion after another. It makes your jaws drop so you girls can’t speak anymore. At least you’re a hundred percent sure that this is the right movie.

They get up and go outside, they look at their phones, talk, forget their crushed popcorn boxes and empty cardboard cups and call out to each other. They yawn, they grab each other’s butts and have long forgotten what movie they were just watching. They’re as superficial as a puddle at the roadside, looking at their phones as if they were navigational devices without which they wouldn’t know where to go after the movie. They have too much, and because they have too much, they want more and more, because it’s all they know. Greedy, never satisfied and never really hungry, because they get fed constantly before they can even feel the slightest hunger.

You wish you weren’t part of it. They’re so far removed from you that you could call to them and they wouldn’t hear you. Your voice, yes; the words, no. And when they have left, peace settles in as if the cinema is holding its breath. The only sound is the murmuring from the corridors, then the door falls shut and it’s completely still. The cinema breathes out and it sounds like a sigh. The world has been switched off. You are the world and you wish you were someone else. A tear in the curtain is a tear in the screen is a tear in your life. You look at your wrist, the tattoo gleams dully.
Gone
. You can’t take your eyes off those four letters and wonder what would happen if you saw all the things in your dreams that you didn’t want to see in real life. Things you close your eyes to. Things you don’t want to imagine because they’re so terrible. And what if all those things stepped out of your dreams and suddenly appeared in real
life—and it doesn’t matter if you want to see them or not, they’re there and you have to see them. What then? Would you stop living and go on with dreaming?

I don’t know
.

“Sorry, I’d like to leave you sitting here, but I can’t, I’ll get into trouble.”

She’s standing at the end of the row, she’s the same age as you. Short hair and those round glasses. You’d never dare go out of the house like that. She looks like she listens to Beethoven and bakes Advent cookies with her family. You’d like to ask her if she just feels like screaming sometimes. You’d also like to smell her skin and let her know she’s definitely as real as you are. Even though it sounds nuts, that’s exactly what you’d like to say to her. You’re sure she doesn’t know what she’ll be one day, but she knows she’ll be something. And who can say that with any certainty? Not you, just for the record.

“Sorry,” she repeats, and you look at each other and you can’t get up, you’re bolted to the seat, however much you might try, right now you can’t budge from the spot. Perhaps she sees that, or perhaps she knows the feeling, because she leaves you alone. Respect. She goes out of the cinema hall, the door shuts and again there’s this silence, for one wonderful moment the world is switched off. You’re sitting in row 45, seat 16. The movie is over, and the things from your dreams crouch growling on your shoulders and want to be real. You lean your head back, because whatever you do, your only option is to cry.

Everything about you is crooked; however you stand it all slips away. Your T-shirt, your jeans, your hair, your earrings, even your mouth is askew. You look as if Picasso’s had a bad day. There’s a pimple beside your nostril, and you know if you try to do anything about it it’ll turn into a war zone. You lick your fingertip and dab crumbs of mascara from your cheek.

It could be worse
, you think, when there’s the sound of flushing behind you and one of the stall doors opens.

“I bleed like a pig!”

Schnappi chucks a tampon wrapped in toilet paper in the bin, then joins you at the basin, holds her hands under the tap and meets your gaze in the mirror.

How can her eyes be so beautiful?
you think.

Schnappi’s mother is called San and she’s from Vietnam, her father’s called Edgar, and he’s been a subway train driver in Berlin for thirty years. He met Schnappi’s mother on vacation. Schnappi insists on that version. She doesn’t want anyone to think her father ordered her mother from a catalogue.

Schnappi soaps her hands and asks if you understood the movie. You don’t like just her eyes, you like everything about her, particularly the fact that she’s so incredibly energetic. No one in the crowd is more loyal. It would be ideal if she talked less.

“What kind of killer was that guy? I mean, didn’t he play Jesus one time? Can someone who played Jesus suddenly become a killer? Nah, don’t think so. You remember? Jesus had to drag his cross around the place and then he got tortured for two hours? I mean, somebody was trying to make us feel really guilty, right? Fucking church. Stink fell asleep in the middle, she hardly missed anything, we covered our eyes the whole time because it was so disgusting and all the time I was …”

Schnappi can talk as if there were no tomorrow. If you keep your mouth shut for long enough, she automatically starts over again, as if every conversation has to come full circle.

“… mustn’t think I’m not joining in. But I’m not decorating any gym! As soon as school’s over you won’t see me close to this prison, or were you going to the party? Let’s do our own party. Maybe Gero will come, I could eat him up with a spoon. Look at this. I think my hair’s looking tired. Maybe I should dye it. I think I’m getting old. If I end up looking like my mother, chop my head off, promise?”

“I promise.”

“Okay, what’s up now, are you coming to the playground or not? You’ve got nothing on at home, and then we might take a detour to the bar on Savignyplatz, or do you not want to because of Taja? I can see that, but you know what Taja’s like. She’ll come back if she feels like it, and till then none of us will hold our breath. Wait, let me just get rid of this for you.”

She opens her backpack that looks like a weary panda, and takes out a blemish stick. You’re thinking about Taja and all the messages you left for her.

“Stand still.”

Schnappi’s half a head shorter than you, and has to stand on tiptoes. She dabs at your pimple, puts the blemish stick away again and says it’s perfect now. You look in the mirror.

Perfect
.

Schnappi takes your arm and steers you out of the ladies’ room and up the stairs and out of the cinema as only she can. She would be a great bodyguard, she always gives you the feeling she knows what she’s doing. There’s no one standing outside the cinema, just a few people sitting outside Café Bleibtreu.