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S ay what you like about Beartown, it can take your breath away. When the sun rises above the lake, when the mornings are so cold that the oxygen itself is crisp, when the trees seem to bow respectfully over the ice in order to let as much light as possible reach the children playing on it, then you can’t help wondering how anyone could choose to live in places where all you can see are concrete and buildings. Four-year-olds play outdoors on their own here, and there are still people who have never locked their front doors. After Canada, Maya’s parents were overprotective to a degree that might have appeared a bit unusual even in a big city, so in Beartown it seemed almost psychotic. There’s something very peculiar about growing up in the shadow of a dead older brother: children in that situation become either terrified of everything or nothing at all. Maya fell into the second group.

She parts from Ana in the hallway with their secret handshake. They were in their first year at school when Ana came up with it, but Maya was the one who realized that the only way to keep it secret was to do it so quickly that no one had time to see the different elements: fist up, fist down, palm, palm, butterfly, bent finger, pistols, jazz hands, minirocket, explosion, ass-to-ass, outbitches. Ana came up with the descriptions. Maya still laughs every time they bang their backsides together at the end and Ana turns her back on her, throwing her hands up in the air and yelling: “... and Ana is OUT, bitches!” and walks away.

But she doesn’t do it as loudly anymore, not when they’re at school, not when other people can see her. She pulls her arms in, lowers her voice, tries to fit in. Throughout their childhood Maya loved her best friend because she wasn’t like any other girl she had met, but life as a teenager seems to have acted like sandpaper on Ana. She’s getting smoother and smoother, smaller and smaller.

***

Sometimes Maya misses her.

***

Kira looks at the time, pulls some papers from her briefcase, and hurries off to a meeting, then straight on to another one. She’s running late as usual as she hurries back to her office, already behind schedule. There’s a label she used to love but which she loathes when it’s pronounced in a Beartown accent: “career woman.” Peter’s friends call her that, some in admiration and some with distaste, but no one calls Peter a “career man.” It strikes a nerve because Kira recognizes the insinuation: you have a “job” so you can provide for your family, whereas a “career” is selfish. You have one of those for your own sake. So now she’s dangling somewhere between two worlds, and feels just as guilty when she’s in the office as she does when she’s at home.

Everything has become a compromise. When she was young, she used to dream about criminal trials and dramatic courtroom showdowns, but the reality now is agreements, contracts, settlements, meetings, and emails, emails, emails. “You’ve overqualified for this,” her boss told her when she got the job, as if she had any choice. Her qualifications and skills could have given her a six-figure salary in plenty of places around the world, but this is the only major law firm within commuting distance of Beartown. Their clients are forestry companies and council-run partnerships; the work is often monotonous, rarely stimulating, yet always stressful. Sometimes she thinks to their time in Canada and what all the hockey coaches there kept banging on about: they wanted “the right kind of guy” for their team. Not just someone who could play, but someone who fit into the locker room, who didn’t cause problems, who did his job. Someone who played hard and kept quiet. She wonders what it would take for a woman to be the right kind of guy.

Her train of thought is interrupted by a colleague—Kira’s best work friend and the antidote to the sickness of boredom:

“I’ve never been so hungover. My mouth tastes like an ashtray. You didn’t see me lick one last night, did you?”

“I wasn’t with you last night,” Kira says with a smile.

“Weren’t you? Are you sure? After-work drinks. You were, weren’t you? It was after-work drinks, wasn’t it?” her colleague mutters, dropping onto a chair.

She’s over six feet tall and carries every inch with pride. Instead of trying to shrink when faced with insecure men in the office, she shows up in bloodred shoes with heels as sharp as army knives and the height of Cuban cigars. She’s a comic-book artist’s fantasy—no one dominates a room the way she does. Or a party.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Work. What are you doing?” Kira counters.

Her colleague waves one hand and holds the other over her eyes, as if trying to pretend it’s a chilled towel.

“I’ll do some work in a minute.”

“I need to get this finished before lunch,” Kira sighs, bending over her papers.

Her colleague leans forward and scans the documents.

“It would have taken a normal person a month to grasp all that. You’re too good for this firm, you know that, don’t you?”

She always says she envies Kira’s brain. In return, Kira is envious of her colleague’s middle finger, which gets regular use. Kira smiles wearily.

“What is it you usually say?”

“Stop whining, shut up, and send the invoice,” her colleague says with a grin.

“Stop whining, shut up, and send the invoice,” Kira repeats.

The two women lean across the table and high-five each other.

***

A teacher is standing in a classroom, trying to get a group of seventeen-year-old boys to be quiet. Jeanette is having one of those mornings when she asks herself why she puts herself through this—not just teaching, but Beartown itself. She raises her voice, but the boys at the back aren’t even ignoring her on purpose; she’s quite convinced that they genuinely haven’t noticed she’s there. There are other pupils in the class who want more than this, but they’re invisible, inaudible. They just lower their heads and close their eyes tightly and hope that the hockey season will soon be over.

One of the plainest truths about both towns and individuals is that they usually don’t turn into what we tell them to be, but what they are told they are. The teacher has always been told she’s too young for this. Too attractive. That they won’t respect her. Those boys have been told that they’re bears, winners, immortal.

Hockey wants them that way. Needs them that way. Their coach teaches them to go hard into close combat on the ice. No one stops to think about how to switch that attitude off when they leave the locker room. It’s easier to pin the blame on her: She’s too young. Too attractive. Too easily offended. Too difficult to respect.

In a final attempt to get control of the situation, the teacher turns to the team captain; he’s sitting in a corner tapping at his phone. She says his name. He doesn’t react.

“Kevin!” she repeats. He raises an eyebrow.

“Yes? How can I help you, my lovely?”

The juniors around him laugh as if on command.

“Are you actually following what I’m teaching you here? It’s going to be on the exam,” she says.

“I already know it,” Kevin replies.

It irritates her intensely that he doesn’t say this provocatively or aggressively. His voice is as neutral as a weather forecaster’s.

“Really? You already know it?” she snorts.

“I’ve read the book. You’re just telling us the same things it says there. My phone could do your job.”

The juniors roar with laughter so loudly that the windows rattle, and then of course Bobo sees his chance, the biggest and most predictable boy in the school, always ready to kick someone who’s already down.

“Just calm down, sweet cheeks!” he yells.

“What did you call me?” she snaps, then realizes that’s exactly the response he wants.

“It’s a compliment. I love sweets.”

Howls of laughter wash over her. “Sit down!”

“Just calm down, now, sweet cheeks. I said you should be proud.”

“Proud?”

“Yes. In a couple of weeks’ time you’ll be able to go around telling everyone you meet that you once taught the legendary junior team who brought the gold back to Beartown!”

A large part of the class roars its approval, hands banging radiators, feet stamping the floor. She knows it’s too late even to try to raise her voice now, she’s already lost. Bobo stands up on his desk like a cheerleader and sings, “We are the bears! We are the bears! We are the bears, the bears from BEARTOWN!” The other juniors leap up onto their desks and join in. By the time the teacher leaves the classroom they’re all standing bare-chested, chanting, “THE BEARS FROM BEARTOWN!” All apart from Kevin, who just sits there quietly looking at his phone, as calm as if he were alone in a dimly lit room.

***

In Kira’s office, her colleague runs her tongue back and forth across her teeth in disgust.

“Seriously, it feels like I’ve eaten someone’s toupee. You don’t think I could have ended up sleeping with that guy in accounting, do you? I was planning to sleep with the other one. Whatever his job is. The one with the tight buns and scruffy hair.”

Kira laughs. Her colleague is single to the extreme, whereas Kira is fanatically monogamous. The lone she-wolf and the mother hen, doomed to envy each other. Her colleague lowers her voice to ask:

“Okay. Who would you pick from the office? If you had to pick one?”

“Not this again.”

“I know, I know, you’re married. But if your husband was dead.”

“HELLO?”

“Christ, it’s hardly that sensitive! Okay, if he was sick. Or in a coma. Better? Who would you sleep with if your husband was in a coma?”

“No one!” Kira hisses.

“If the survival of the human race depended on it? The guy with the buns and the hair, right? Not the badger, surely?”

“Remind me, which one’s the badger?”

Her colleague does what Kira has to admit is a fairly impressive impression of a man who has recently been appointed to management and happens to bear a striking resemblance to a badger. Kira laughs so hard she almost knocks her coffee over.

“Don’t be mean to him. He’s a nice guy.”

“So are pigs, but we don’t let them inside the house.”

Her colleague hates the badger, not as an individual but for what he represents. He got a position in management even though everyone knows it should have gone to Kira. It’s a subject Kira tries to avoid discussing, seeing as she can’t bring herself to tell her friend the truth: Kira was offered the job, but turned it down. It would have meant too much work in the evenings, too much travelling. She couldn’t do that to her family. And now she’s sitting here, not daring to tell her colleague because she doesn’t want to see the disappointment in her eyes. That Kira was offered the chance but didn’t take it.

Her colleague bites off a broken nail and spits it out into the wastepaper basket.

“Have you seen the way he looks at women? The badger? Those beady little eyes. I bet you a thousand kronor he’s the sort who’d want you to shove a pen up...”

“I’m trying to WORK!” Kira interrupts.

Her colleague looks genuinely baffled.

“What? It’s an objective observation. I have extensive experience on the subject of markers, but fine, sit on your high horse and pretend you’re morally untouchable just because your husband’s in a coma!”

“You’re still drunk, aren’t you?” Kira says, laughing.

“Does he like that sort of thing? Peter? Pens?”

“NO!”

Her colleague apologizes at once, sounding upset:

“Sorry, is that a sensitive subject? Have you argued about it?”

Kira hustles her out of her office. She hasn’t got time for any more laughter today. She’s got a schedule to stick to, or at least try to. Then one of the bosses comes along and asks if she’s got time to “take a quick look” at a contract, which swallows an hour. A client rings with an urgent problem, which takes another hour. Leo rings and says his training session has been brought forward half an hour because the junior team needs more time on the ice, so she’ll have to get home earlier this afternoon. Maya calls and asks her mom to buy new strings for her guitar on the way home. Peter sends a text saying he’ll be late home tonight. Her boss comes in again and asks if Kira has time for “a quick meeting.” She doesn’t. She goes anyway.

Trying to be the right kind of guy. Even if it’s impossible to be the right kind of mom at the same time.

***

Maya can still remember the first time she met Ana. They held hands before they saw each other’s faces. Maya was six years old and was out skating on the lake on her own, something her parents would never have allowed, but they were at work and the babysitter had dozed off in an armchair. So Maya grabbed her skates and sneaked out. Perhaps she was looking for danger, perhaps she simply trusted that an adult hand would catch her before anything went wrong, perhaps she was just like most children: born to seek out adventure. Dusk fell sooner than she was expecting, she didn’t see the change in the color of the ice, and when it gave way beneath her the water paralyzed her before she even had time to feel frightened. She didn’t stand a chance, six years old, with no crampons or studs, and her arms so cold that she could barely cling on to the edge. She was already dead. Say what you like about Beartown, but it can take your breath away. In a single second.

She saw Ana’s hand long before she saw Ana. How one six-year-old girl managed to pull out another girl the same age, weighed down by a soaking wet snowsuit, Maya will never understand, but that’s what Ana was like. You can’t keep two girls apart after a thing like that. Ana, a child of nature who went hunting and fishing but didn’t quite understand people, ended up best friends with Maya, who was the exact opposite.

The first time Maya was over at Ana’s and heard her parents arguing, she understood that Ana was on thin ice in ways all her own. Ana has spent more nights at Maya’s than at home ever since. They came up with their secret handshake to remind each other that it was always “sisters before misters,” which Ana used to repeat like a mantra before she even knew what the words meant. She took every chance she got to nag Maya about fishing or hunting or climbing trees. It used to drive Maya crazy, seeing as she would much rather be at home playing her guitar, preferably next to a radiator. But God, she loved Ana!

Ana was a tornado. A jagged, hundred-sided peg in a community where everyone was supposed to fit into round holes. When they were ten years old she taught Maya to shoot a hunting rifle. Maya remembers that Ana’s dad always hid the key to his gun cabinet in a box on top of a cupboard at the back of the cellar that stank of mold. Apart from keys and a couple of bottles of vodka, the box was also full of porn magazines. Maya stared at them in shock. Ana noticed and simply shrugged her shoulders: “Dad doesn’t understand how the Internet works.” They stayed in the forest until the ammunition ran out. Then Ana, who always had a knife with her, made swords for them both out of tree limbs and they fenced among the trees until it got dark.

Now Maya watches her friend walk off down the corridor, sees her pull her arms down as if she’s embarrassed, without even daring to yell “OUT,” because all she dreams about these days is being as normal as possible. Maya hates being a teenager, hates sandpaper, hates round holes. Misses the girl who pretended to be a knight in the forest.

We become what we are told we are. Ana has always been told that she’s wrong.

***

Benji is slumped so low on his cushion in the headmaster’s office that there’s more of him on the floor than on the chair. They’re going through the motions. The headmaster has to tell him off for being late so often this term when all he really wants to talk about is hockey. Like everyone else. Any thought of expulsion or other disciplinary measures is out of the question.

From time to time Benji thinks about his eldest sister, Adri, the one with the kennels. The further the juniors have progressed in the tournament, the more Benji has realized how similar he is to the dogs: if you make yourself useful, you get a longer leash.

They hear Jeanette long before she storms through the door.

“THOSE ANIMALS... THOSE... I CAN’T BEAR IT ANYMORE!” she roars before she’s even entered the room.

“Calm down now, sweet cheeks,” Benji says with a smile, and is quite convinced that she’s going to punch him.

“SAY THAT AGAIN! SAY THAT ONE MORE TIME AND I SWEAR YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO PLAY IN THAT GAME!” she roars at him with her hand raised.

The headmaster lets out an anxious yelp and flies up from his chair, takes her by the arm, and leads her out into the corridor. Perhaps grabbing someone’s arm is the correct response. But both Benji and the teacher know that it should have been Benji’s.

***

In a classroom farther down the corridor Bobo slips off his desk and tumbles to the floor, still bare-chested and in the middle of “the bears from BEART ...” There are two types of seventeen-year-olds around him: those who like hockey, and those who hate it. The ones who are terrified that he’s hurt himself, and those who hope he has.