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  “Ice cream sounds great,” you tell him and your heart starts to flutter loudly.

  Before you leave the foyer, you buy ice cream from the guy behind the counter. Of course you choose the most expensive one, you want to do this in style. The guy says Go for it and you laugh, and he laughs too, then you’re standing outside nibbling at your ice creams and glancing at each other. These are really flirty looks, they fall like a veil over your eyes and make your vision a little blurry. Leaving the cinema wasn’t such a bad idea after all. From a certain angle the guy looks like Alberto. Alberto wasn’t an Italian, you just wished he was. Alberto came from the East and his real name was Albert, but what sort of a name is that? Alberto sounded miles better. That guy, oh hell, he could really turn you on. He was wild about you. Wanna eatsch you up, he said. Stupid lisp, but at least it made you laugh. And you didn’t want to talk to him anyway. He made out with you wherever you were and nibbled away at your lips as if they were pink chewing gum. And once at the bus stop he shoved his hands down the back of your jeans and grabbed you by the ass. Alberto, what’re you doing? you asked him and he pressed himself closer to you so that you could feel his erection, massaging your ass as if it were an overripe peach and breathing heavily. I’m an ath fetishist, he muttered in your ear, almost blowing your head off. And you weren’t cool at all by then and murmured back: Whatever that is. You had no idea what an ass fetishist was and you didn’t have much time to think about it, because Alberto was pressing and kneading your cheeks till you thought: Help, he’s going to tear me in two! It didn’t come to that, though, because Alberto suddenly went quiet and rigid and stopped breathing at all while having an orgasm pressed against your belly, and that happened all at the bus stop on a lovely day in May.

  “… never seen it. I went to Berlin a lot as a child. My father lives in Friedrichshain, my half brother in Zehlendorf. But my mother lives in Hamburg, that’s where I grew up …”

  The guy talks and talks and smiles at you and you think: How long’s he been talking? You smile back and lick a bit of ice cream from your wrist and wonder if he’s an ass fetishist as well.

  “So you’re just visiting?” you say, picking up the end of his last sentence.

  “Right.”

  “Cool.”

  “What about you? Still at school?”

  You show him your wrist. There’s a little tattoo at the spot where they take your pulse. The writing’s tiny, one word, not more.

  “Gone?”

  “Right, gone.”

  “School?”

  You nod.

  “High school graduation?”

  “Nah.”

  You roll your eyes and laugh. Be honest, you don’t look like graduation. You look like a wildcat in a petting zoo. But don’t tell him that. And watch out, here comes the next question.

  “And what are your plans?”

  “We’ll see. Maybe I’ll open a beauty salon. Something like that. You?”

  “I don’t know where I want to go.”

  Funny answer, you think, and pretend to study the movie posters. Let the guy look at you in peace. Maybe he hasn’t got a girlfriend, you could be with him for a while. But guys like him always have girlfriends. One of those smoothies who never have to go to the bathroom and in the morning they smell like flowers. That’s the kind of girl he would have. He’s much too nice for this world—he speaks nice, he smells nice and seems to have money. Maybe he’ll lend you ten euros, then you’d have to see each other again so that you could give him the money back.

  You feel him looking at you. His eye wanders up from your platforms up to your worn bell-bottomed cord jeans, the belt pulled tight, narrow waist, blouse under your velvet jacket, long pause on your breasts—of course he lingers there, he paid for the ice cream, he can linger. Perhaps he’s noticed that your red hair makes you look a bit like the actress Kristen Bell, but he’s probably never even seen Veronica Mars or Heroes.

  “How old are you?” he asks and his eyes are on your mouth.

  “Seventeen,” you lie, adding a year. “You?”

  “Too old.”

  “Come on.”

  “How about twenty-seven?”

  “Definitely too old,” you say and laugh.

  He laughs too, takes a breath and tells you his name.

  “Nice to meet you, Neil. I’m Stink.”

  “Funny name.”

  You wave dismissively.

  “It’s because of the perfume.”

  “You named yourself after a book?”

  “What book?”

  “You know, the novel.”

  “No, it’s because I always smell so nice. Here.”

  He bends forward and sniffs your wrist.

  “Smells good.”

  You look at each other. He knows there is more to this name.

  “And because I’m mostly in a bad mood,” you admit. “Mostly always.”

  “A real stinker, then.”

  “Better believe it.”

  He thinks for a moment, he looks to his left, he looks to his right.

  “I have an idea,” he tells you. “Will you come with me?”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  Now it is your turn to look around. Your girls will be gone for more than an hour. You could die of boredom or you could go on an adventure.

  “You lead, I will follow,” you say to Neil.

  So he leads you down the street and stops next to a Jaguar, smart and red and with Hamburg plates.

  “Wow, where’d you get that?”

  “Swiped it off my mother,” says Neil and opens the door for you.

  Once upon a time there were five girls and I was one of them. The fairy tale could start like that. One of them. That’s exactly how you feel, lying on your back, above you the moss-green ceiling that you painted one afternoon with your girls because the pink was getting on your nerves and you needed a change. You’re living with your parents in an old stylish apartment block they bought when you were born. Your top bunk is six feet up. Every morning it’s like waking up in a forest. Now the green reminds you of the sea that you saw while traveling around the Bahamas with your parents. Of course you had to dive, and it nearly happened there in the water. You lost yourself for a moment. You were part of the deep and you didn’t know what was up and what was down. It was the best experience you’ve ever had, and since then you’ve been wondering what would have happened if you’d made the wrong choice and gone on deeper. How do you lose yourself? Do you disappear or do you become part of the water?

  Now you’re lying on your bed, and the moss-green ceiling is within reach of your hands. Even though you’re sure no one can just go missing like that, you’re not so sure what’s happening between your legs. Is it his tongue or is it his finger? You look down, his head is moving, so it must be his tongue. God, he’s taking his time. You’re sorry it has come to this. Why did you just let yourself go like that?

  He asked so nicely.

  That’s all?

  That’s all.

  You tug gently on his hair. Eric looks up. His lips glisten. He gives you a quizzical look, and you wish he would make another face.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What does it feel like?” he asks back and disappears between your legs again.

  You wish it was his finger and not his stupid tongue, then you’d definitely be more aware of it. There are boys who don’t know how to kiss. They swap gallons of spit with you and want to hear you gasping with passion. You want to be kissed so that your lights flicker. Flicker and not go out. Boys should learn from girls. Nessi kissed you once. It was New Year’s Eve, you were sitting drunk on Taja’s bed, and suddenly someone suggested making out and your mouth landed on Nessi’s mouth and it was the hottest french kiss you’ve ever had.

  Eric definitely doesn’t know how to kiss, and you’re annoyed with yourself for not telling him on the very first day. Now you are in the second week and he goes at it like a heartsick frog. T
aja warned you, and this is what you’ve ended up with—a guy who busies himself between your legs as if he is working with his tongue on a scratch card.

  You count the books on the shelf, you tense your belly and admire your belly button with its little ring. You wonder which pizza you’ll have afterward and whether the movie will really be as weird as everyone says. Then you say the alphabet backward and at F you’ve had enough and drag Eric up to you by the ears. After a certain point enough’s enough. You kiss him, and he does his frog face again, but it’s better than all that fumbling. You taste yourself on his tongue, and your own arousal arouses you even further, and it’s like something coming full circle. Eric’s leg slips between your thighs, the pressure is good, you push back, your lower body twitches and it happens so fast that you have to grip the back of his neck so that you don’t lose yourself completely. His mouth lands on your neck, you want to warn him that if he gives you a love bite he’s dead, but you can’t warn him, because all your lights have blown out, no flickering, just lights out, as the orgasm glides through you like a red-hot knife through a block of butter, without getting stuck once, and that happens twice in a row.

  Eric isn’t aware of any of that, he’s too aroused to notice anything. He kneads your breasts and breathes in your ear. You let go of his neck and sink back. The knife has disappeared, now you’re nothing but melting butter. It would be perfect if you were alone now.

  “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.

  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.