Page 24

24

W hen the burglar alarm goes off at the school early on Monday morning, the security company doesn’t call the police, because it could take them hours to get there. They call one of the teachers instead. Not any teacher, they call the one whose little brother works for the security firm, so that her brother won’t have to go to the trouble of fetching his own keys. Jeanette gets out of her car in the deserted parking lot, pulls up the collar of her coat, and blinks tiredly:

“Sometimes you’re so lazy I’m starting to think your kids must be adopted.”

Her brother laughs.

“Come on, Sis, stop whining, you’re the one who always says I don’t call you often enough!”

She rolls her eyes, takes his flashlight off him, and unlocks a side door to the school.

“It’s probably just snow that’s slid off the roof onto the sensors around the back again.”

They go into the corridor without turning the lights on, because if anyone has broken in, the lights will have come on automatically in that section. But what sort of idiot would break into a school on a Monday morning?

***

Benji is woken by a bright light, even though the lamps in the ceiling are already on. His back aches. His mouth tastes of moonshine and cheap beer nuts, which troubles him, because he has no memory of having eaten beer nuts. He blinks sleepily, holds up his hand, and tries to squint at the person who’s shining a light in his eyes.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” the teacher sighs.

Benji pushes himself into a sitting position on top of the two desks he’s been sleeping on in the classroom. He throws his arms out like the world’s most exhausted magician.

“The headmaster did tell me I needed to start showing up on time in the morning. So... ta-dah! Actually... what time is it?”

He feels his pockets. Can’t find his watch. His fractured memories of the previous night suggest that he may well have drunk that away too. Precisely what train of thought led him to conclude his little odyssey trying various substances with a break-in at his school is also a little vague in hindsight, but he’s sure it must have seemed a superb idea at the time.

The teacher leaves him without a word, and he sees her talking with a security guard out in the corridor. The guard will write this off as a false alarm, seeing as brothers do what their big sisters tell them, no matter how old they get. The teacher comes back into the classroom and opens two windows to air out the room. She sniffs at Benji’s jacket and makes a face.

“Please don’t tell me you’ve brought drugs into the school.”

Benji does a poor job of wagging his finger at her.

“It would NEVER even occur, occur... occur to me! Drugs in school are no good. I keep my drugs in my body. Do you want to dance?”

He falls off the desk with a giggle and lands on the floor on his back. The teacher crouches down beside him and looks at him somberly until he falls silent. Then she says:

“If I report this to the headmaster, he’ll have to suspend you. Maybe even expel you from school. And shall I tell you something, Benjamin? Sometimes I think that’s what you want. It’s as if you’re trying to prove to the whole world that there’s nothing in your life that you aren’t destructive enough to have a go at wrecking.”

Benji doesn’t answer. She hands him his jacket.

“I’m going to switch the alarm off, then I’m going to let you into the gym so you can have a shower. To be honest, you smell so terrible that I should probably call pest control as well. Have you got any clean clothes in your locker?”

He tries to smile when she helps him up.

“So that I look presentable when the headmaster arrives?”

She sighs.

“I’m not going to report you. You’re going to have to ruin your life on your own. I’m not going to help you.”

He meets her gaze and nods gratefully. Then his voice suddenly becomes adult, his eyes a man’s instead of a boy’s:

“I’m sorry I called you sweet cheeks. That was disrespectful. I won’t do it again. Nor will anyone else on the team.”

He rubs his neck, and Jeanette almost regrets telling the truth when she met up with Adri at the pub in Hed and was asked what his behavior in school was like. But she knows he’s telling the truth when he says that no one on the team will call her that again, and she wonders how he has come to have such authority over the others. That a single word from Benji can make any hockey player in the entire school start or stop doing anything. It almost makes her miss playing the game herself. She and Adri were childhood friends, and they used to play together over in Hed. Sometimes she feels that both she and Adri stopped too soon, and wonders what would have happened if there had been a girls’ team in Beartown.

“Go and shower,” she says, patting Benji’s hand.

“Yes, miss,” he smiles, his eyes a boy’s again.

“I’m not hugely fond of being called ‘miss’ either,” she grunts.

“What would you like to be called, then?”

“Jeanette. Jeanette will do absolutely fine.”

She fetches a towel for him from the gym bag in her car, and he follows her to the gym. After she’s switched the alarm off and unlocked the door for him, he stands in the opening and says:

“You’re a good teacher, Jeanette. You just had really bad timing, getting us in your class when we were at our best.”

At that moment she understands why the team follows his lead. The same reason why the girls fall for him. When he looks you right in the eyes and says something, no matter what crap he may have done immediately before, you believe him.

***

Kevin’s dad knots his tie, adjusts his cuff links, and picks up his briefcase. At first he considers calling good-bye to his son from the door like he usually does, but he changes his mind and goes out through the terrace door instead. He puts his briefcase down and picks up a stick. They stand side by side and take turns firing shots. It must be ten years since the last time.

“I bet you can’t hit the post,” his dad says.

Kevin raises his eyebrows, as if it’s a joke. When he sees that it isn’t, he pulls the puck back a couple of inches, flexes his wrists gently, and sends the puck flying into the metal. His dad taps his stick on the ground approvingly.

“Luck?”

“Good players deserve luck,” Kevin replies.

He learned that when he was little. His dad has never let him win so much as a table- tennis match in the garage.

“Did you see the statistics from the match?” the boy asks hopefully.

His dad nods and looks at his watch. Walks toward his briefcase.

“I hope you don’t imagine that the final is an excuse for you not to put one hundred percent into your schoolwork this week.”

Kevin shakes his head. His dad almost touches his cheek. Almost asks about the red marks on his neck. But instead he clears his throat and says:

“People in this town are going to try to stick to you more than usual now, Kevin, so you need to remember that viruses make you sick. You need to be immune to them. And the final isn’t just about hockey. It’s about what sort of man you want to be. A man who goes out and grabs what he deserves, or one who stands in a corner waiting for someone to give it to him.”

The father walks off without waiting for a reply, and his son stands there with scratch-marks on his hand and a heartbeat that won’t stop throbbing in his neck.

***

His mom is waiting in the kitchen. Kevin stares at her uncertainly. There’s freshly made breakfast on the table. A smell of bread.

“I... Well, it’s probably a bit silly... but I took this morning off,” she says.

“What for?” Kevin wonders.

“I thought we could... spend some time together. Just you and me. I thought we could... talk.”

He avoids her gaze. She looks a little too desperate for him to be able to handle eye contact.

“I have to go to school, Mom.”

She nods, her teeth biting into her lower lip.

“Yes. Yes. Of course... it was silly. I’m silly.”

She feels like going after him and asking a million questions. Late last night she found sheets in the dryer, and he’s never washed so much as a sock for himself before. There was a T-shirt there too, with bloodstains that hadn’t quite come out. When he was in the garden this morning firing pucks she went into his room. Found the blouse-button on the floor.

She wants to go after him, but she doesn’t know how to talk to an almost grown man through a closed bathroom door. She packs her briefcase and gets in her car and drives half an hour into the forest before stopping. She sits there all morning, so that no one at work will ask why she’s there so early. Because she told them she was going to be spending the morning with her son.

***

Kira is standing with her hand against the door of Maya’s room, but she doesn’t knock again. Her daughter has already said she’s ill, and Kira doesn’t want to be that mother. The nagging, uncool, anxious “helicopter parent.” She doesn’t want to knock again to ask if there’s actually something else wrong. You can’t do that; nothing makes a fifteen-year-old girl clam up more than the words “Do you want to talk?” You can’t just open the door and ask why she has suddenly started washing her own clothes of her own volition. After all, what is Kira? The secret service?

So Kira does the not-nagging, not-anxious, not-helicopter, cool-mom thing. She gets in her car and drives off. Forty-five minutes into the forest she stops the car. Sits there alone in the darkness and waits for the pressure on her chest to subside.

***

Lyt opens the door and looks like he’s just seen a cake.

“Kevin! Hi! Er... what...?”

Kevin nods at him impatiently.

“Ready?” Lyt asks.

“For... what? School? Now? With you? You mean... do I want to walk to school? With you?”

“Are you ready or not?”

“Where’s Benji?”

“Fuck Benji,” Kevin snaps.

Lyt stands there in shock with his mouth open, unable to think of anything to say. Kevin rolls his eyes impatiently.

“Are you waiting for Communion or what? Shut your mouth, for fuck’s sake. Let’s go.”

Lyt stumbles off and hurries to make sure he’s got his shoes on the right feet and his outdoor clothes at least relatively close to the appropriate body parts. Kevin doesn’t say a word all the way, until his outsize teammate grins and pulls out a hundred-kronor note.

“So do I owe you this or not?”

He starts giggling uncontrollably when Kevin takes it. Kevin tries to look nonchalant as he says:

“But keep your mouth shut about it, okay? You know what women are like.”

Lyt has never looked more euphoric than when he was given the chance to share a secret with his team captain.

***

Maya’s phone rings, and she wishes with all her soul that it might be Ana, but it’s Amat again. She hides the phone under her pillow as if she were trying to smother it. She doesn’t know what to say to him, and she knows that Amat will primarily be wishing he hadn’t seen anything at all. If she doesn’t answer the phone, maybe the two of them can find some way of pretending that nothing happened. That it was just a misunderstanding.

She removes the batteries from all the fire alarms and opens all the windows before putting her blouse on the floor of the shower and setting light to it. Then she sets light to a carton of cereal, letting the top burn before putting it out and leaving the remains on the kitchen counter. When her mom, a woman with the nose of a hungry grizzly bear, comes home and wonders why there’s a smell of smoke, the explanation will be that Maya managed to knock the carton of cereal onto a lit burner on the stove.

She carefully sweeps up the remains of the blouse from the shower and only then does she realize that the buttons have melted and stuck to the drain, and the synthetic material hasn’t turned to ash the way she had hoped. If Ana had been there, she would have said: “Shit, Maya, if I ever murder anyone, remind me NOT to ask you for help!” She misses her. God, how she misses her. For several minutes she sits on the bathroom floor crying and trying to make herself phone her best friend, but she can’t do that to her. Can’t drag her into this. Can’t force her to carry this secret.

It takes more than an hour to clean the bathroom and get rid of the remains of the burned blouse. She puts them in a plastic bag. Stands shaking in the doorway and stares at the garbage bin ten yards away. It’s light outside now, but that doesn’t make any difference. She’s scared of the darkness, in the middle of the day.