You

“Oh God,” sighs Eric, as you take him in your hand. He twitches, he presses himself harder against you, full with desire and the constant panic that he might come too quickly.

You look over his shoulder at your watch. You’ve got five minutes.

Your hand opens his zipper, you’re lethargic and lazy, it’s as if you’re moving under water. His knees tremble. You push him off you and onto his back. He’s so helpless, you could do anything you wanted with him. His boxer shorts are damp in two places. You touch him and he shrinks back a little. Eric said your face was too much for him, and you imagined him pleasuring himself while gazing breathlessly at the class photograph. Now his eyes are wide open, as if in terror. This isn’t love, you think, it’s something else. You pull down his boxers without breaking eye contact. You smell his cock before you see it. The scent, the expectation.

“Shut your eyes.”

Eric shuts his eyes, as quickly as if his life depended on it.

You lean down and kiss the head of his dick. His skin is hot to the touch and he tastes bitter. You insisted that he wash beforehand. You have principles. You take him gently into your mouth and feel him twitch and grow and let him fall out of your mouth. He comes in frantic spurts, it’s flowing out of him, onto your hand, his belly, the sheet. He whimpers. Sweet, you think, and put a finger on his bobbing cock and can feel his heartbeat. The twitching subsides, the fever has passed. You look up. Eric stares at the ceiling, he can’t look you in the eye, it’s been less than a minute.

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.

NESSI

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.

“So did you get that movie or not? Because I didn’t get any of it, nothing at all, cross my heart and die.”

Schnappi laughs and deliberately puts her hand on the wrong side, stops laughing in the middle and looks at you, really looks at you at last, and says, “God, Nessi, stop looking like this.”

You want to tell her that there is no other way to look right now. You have no idea what she wants to hear. Everything is a blur. You remember the movie as if you’d been blind and deaf for the last two hours. Everything that comes toward you flows around you and disappears without a trace, behind your back, lost and gone forever. But then your thinking apparatus clicks back in and you work out that this isn’t really about the movie; Schnappi’s language is a secret language, she says one thing and means another. She’s been asking you the same question all along and just wants to know what’s up with you and why you’re not saying anything, while she goes on talking and talking. And of course she’s right, you have to give her some kind of answer, but you can’t come up with a good one, so you turn the answer into a question and say weakly and quietly, “And what if I’m pregnant?”

SCHNAPPI

Rather a big mouth than no tits, was always your motto, but maybe now’s not the time to announce it. Nessi needs to hear something else. Something like: “Bullshit, you’re not pregnant!”

“Why not?”

“You don’t just get pregnant like that.”

“But—”

“Have you done a test?”

“No.”

“Without a test you’re not pregnant, okay?”

Nessi can’t reply to your logic, so you drag her up Bleibtreustrasse to Kantstrasse and then into the nearest pharmacy to buy her a pregnancy test, as if you were offering her a kebab, except that those tests are really expensive.

“Why are they so expensive?”

The pharmacist shrugs as if she didn’t think that it was expensive. You read the instructions and whisper to Nessi that the pharmacist is one of those people who never get pregnant, that’s why a test like that costs a fortune, and then you turn back to the pharmacist and say with a sugary smile, “Eight euros? Are you sure this really costs eight euros?”

The pharmacist puts the packet through the scanner again.

The price is right.

“We’ve got a double pack,” she says. “It’s 10.95.”

“Well, that’s a bargain, isn’t it?” you say, and look at Nessi. “Do we need two?”

“Two would be good.”

“We’ll take the bargain,” you say to the pharmacist and smile at her as if you’d pulled a brilliant trick on her.

From the pharmacy you go to the nearest café. Before the waiter can move, you tell him you just need to pee. In the bathroom both of you squeeze into one stall. Nessi is pale, it’s all going too quickly for her.

“Come on, girl, take a deep breath.”

Nessi takes a breath.

The sticks are wrapped in foil, you hold them up in front of Nessi.

“Now you pee on it and we’ll know, because as long as you don’t know, you’re not pregnant. It’s like math.”

Nessi looks at you as if you’ve been speaking Vietnamese. It’s a weird moment and you ask yourself for the first time why Nessi’s actually worried. In your eyes she’d be a great mother. You other girls are either too thin or too young or too stupid even to think of being mothers. Nessi seems like someone who’s experienced everything; in your opinion she can master everything if she wants to.

An old soul, you think with envy.

A few days ago your mother took you aside again and told you about the little village she grew up in. You know the stories inside and out and you know there’s no point interrupting her. This time you found out that she can see things that other people can’t. Souls. Your mother is full of surprises. She told you: Some people have young souls and others have old ones, and then there are people without. You asked what “without” means in this context, because your mother can’t feed you any bullshit. Being without a soul is impossible, you know that. That’s like someone coming into the world without a heart. Your mother tapped your forehead with her index finger and you had to promise her that you would never, never get within ten feet of one of those soulless people. You will recognize them anywhere, because they have cold in their eyes, and when they look at you they steal your breath away. Promise me that you won’t let one of those soulless get ten feet near you. Of course you promised, otherwise you’d still be sitting beside her right now. Your mother also told you that your soul is young and inexperienced, and that your life will be a long and joyless journey.

Thanks, Mom.

You would like to know what your mother would say about Nessi, who now stands in front of you, confused and hopefully not pregnant, and asks, “Why is it like math?”

“What?”

“You said it’s like math. Why is it like math?”

“If you think about it for a long time it makes sense,” you tell her, and quickly go on talking: “Don’t think about that right now, just concentrate and pee on this. And don’t hold it the wrong way around. My neighbor held it the wrong way around, but she’s kind of retarded. And don’t pee on your hand, because that’s disgusting. Even though lots of people say urine therapy’s fantastic, I can’t imagine washing my face with my own pee, it would be—”

“Schnappi!”

You raise both hands in apology.

“Okay, I am quiet.”

Nessi tears at the packaging and can’t get it open. You take it from her and peel the test stick out of its foil. You liberate the second stick as well so that it’ll go more quickly. Now you only hope that Nessi can pee, because if she can’t pee …

“It’s working,” you say with all the positivity you have.

Nessi shakes the stick dry and looks at it.

“How long?”

“Two minutes.”

You pass her the second stick.

Afterward you both lean against the wall of the stall, each holding one of the sticks, and wait. Last year you caught your mother in the bathroom. She was sitting on the edge of the tub gnawing at a fingernail. Her skin was almost transparent, like one of those jellyfish you saw when you were at the North Sea coast. Your mother was holding the pregnancy test just as Nessi’s holding it now—vertical and pointing upwards, as if it were important to hold the stick vertical and pointing upwards. You knew your mother didn’t want any more children. She’s in her late thirties, she has her hands full looking after you. You’ve never talked about it, but it’s clear to you that she had an abortion. Since then you’ve been wondering whether it would have been a brother or a sister. You wouldn’t have minded a brother.

“Look,” Nessi says quietly.

You look, then you look at the stick in your hand, then back at Nessi’s.

“I’m not going to cry,” says Nessi, and bursts into tears.

STINK

It feels as if you’re being dragged down the street on your ass. Except that it doesn’t hurt. It is a weird feeling to sit so low. Glance to the right and you could scratch people’s kneecaps. The Jaguar purrs. You don’t say much, that’s a good feeling too, just driving around and not having to say much, understanding each other without words, drifting through the city with an empty head and a cigarette between your lips. Pure luxury.

“Hungry?” asks Neil.

No, you’re not thristy either, you’re just more content than you’ve been for ages. Your heart is still fluttering, as if someone had placed one of those hummingbirds into your chest. Flutterflutter. You give Neil a sideways glance and without thinking you place your hand on his thigh. Neil doesn’t react, doesn’t look at you, doesn’t say anything, goes on driving, hands on the wheel, wind in his face. You just have to ask, “Where are we going?”

“What?”

You are shouting it.

“Dancing,” he replies.

“Good,” you say, and leave your hand on his thigh.

The bouncer doesn’t want to let you in, Neil waves a few banknotes, the bouncer still doesn’t want to let you in, Neil draws him aside. He’s exactly the same height as the bouncer, but only half as wide. He talks in a lowered voice. Very controlled. Then the bouncer looks at you again, rubs his forehead as if someone’s hit him, and waves you in. No problem now. He even smiles at you. The asshole couldn’t get close to you if he was the last guy in the world.

“What did you say to him?” you ask.

Neil makes a gun out of his thumb and forefinger, holds it to your temple and laughs.

“I threatened him.”

You push your way through the crowd, the flickering lights are dazzling, the people are jostling each other, it smells of cigarettes and artificial smoke and very faintly of limes. A gap appears at the bar, you lean against it, shout into each other’s ears, laugh loudly. There’s a mirror hanging above the bar, at least thirty feet long, and for one terribly long moment you can’t see yourself. Your palms are clammy. You see Neil, you see the people around him, light and smoke and fog, but you yourself aren’t there. Like a vampire. Invisible. Then you spot your piled-up hair, your sulky mouth, and you meet your own eye and wonder if you’re really as small and insignificant as the mirror is trying to tell you. You’ve never seen yourself like that before. You’re a sektschbeascht, Alberto used to say. But he said lots of things.