Freak City (3 page)

She laid her cold hand on my arm. “Don’t take it personally, Mika,” she said. “I think you’re great. And we still get along great. We can still be friends.”

Then she stood up and I was alone at the edge of the pool.

Someone tugged on my sleeve.

“Iris!” I was startled out of my thoughts. My room pulsated with Coldplay music. I had been staring hypnotically at the painted wall for at least ten minutes.

My sister chewed on a piece of pink gum and studied me with curiosity. Quickly, I rubbed my eyes.

“Are you crying?” Her gum let off an artificial strawberry scent into the room.

“No,” I said. “Boys don’t cry. They don’t have any tear ducts. Didn’t your biology teacher explain that to you?”

She shook her head. “We don’t have biology, just science. And we only talk about frogs all the time.”

I sat up. “And you’re supposed to knock before you come in my room!” I yelled at her much too harshly. “I’ve already told you that a thousand times!”

“I did knock,” she protested. “Three times!”

“When you knock, you wait until someone tells you to come in,” I lectured her. “And if no one tells you to come in, you get lost. That’s called being polite, get it?”

In my opinion, my parents had completely failed in raising their daughter. I turned the music down with the remote control.

“Can I listen to a Benjamin the Elephant story in your room?” She stuck a finger in her mouth and pulled out a strand of pink gum.

“No.” I knew I was being mean. But if she had her way, she would hang around in my room all day long. Drawing pictures on my desk, leaving her Barbies all over my bed, or torturing my new CD player with Benjamin the Elephant.

“What did you do in school today?” I asked her in an effort to make peace. I did want to be a good brother, just not at any price.

“Traffic safety,” she said, her feelings hurt. I thought about the girl with the curly hair this afternoon. How she had almost been run over by the truck. Something about her appealed to me, even though she was a completely different type than Sandra.

“What do you do when the light is red?” I asked.

“Stop!” popped out of her like a gunshot.

“And if the light is just changing?” That was a little trickier.

Iris thought about it. “Run across really fast?”

“No!” I looked at her sternly. The thought of Iris being my age one day was almost frightening. I imagined her in several years, how she would prance through the city and boys would call crass things after her. How maybe she would almost be run over by a car because she was trying to get away from a bunch of immature guys.

On the other hand, it had all been in fun. We weren’t really harassing the girl. We had just followed her for a bit . . .

“If some day a couple of guys are walking behind you . . .”

Iris looked at me with big eyes. “Boys are stupid,” she said.

“Yeah, of course. But someday you might not think that anymore. And if the boys are following you and yelling things like. . . . Well, they don’t necessarily mean what they say. They just want to annoy you a little.”

“Boys are stupid,” Iris repeated.

“Yeah, yeah.” I sighed. “And remember one thing: never, ever wear miniskirts!”

Clueless, Iris continued to chew her gum. “Did you already get me the autograph book?” She blew a gum bubble.

“What autograph book?”

“My birthday is on Saturday!”

It suddenly hit me. Iris would be seven on Saturday, and I had promised to get her an autograph book. “One with My Little Pony, Hello Kitty, or the Little Mermaid on the cover,” she rattled off.

“Mmhmm.” Weren’t there any normal autograph books anymore? When I was in elementary school, we wanted puppies or race cars on the covers.

“You can order it online,” Iris said, “from Amazon!”

I looked at her in astonishment. What had happened to her childhood innocence? “No,” I said, “I’m going to get it in town. Can I just pick one out, or does it really have to be one of those name-brand things?”

Iris sighed.

“You know, all the other kids probably have those Hello Kitty albums,” I tried to explain. “And Little Mermaid, too!”

“But I don’t have one yet!” said Iris. Then she left my room, and I turned the music up louder.

The woman behind the counter gave me an understanding smile over her crossword puzzle, and I quickly covered the Hello Kitty album with my hands. Oh, great. I should have gotten a bag at the stationary store. Now it looked like it was my autograph book.

“I love Hello Kitty,” she said. “I have a whole collection: postcards, stuffed animals, keychains . . .”

“It’s for my little sister,” I murmured awkwardly.

“What can I get you?” The woman leaned over the counter of the snack bar and finally quit working on her crossword puzzle. The smell of stale French fries hung in the air.

“Coke with a shot,” I said.

“Are you eighteen already?” She gestured at me with her pen. Her neckline was too low and her bosom definitely too big; I stared at it. Embarrassed, I looked away.

“Do I look like it?” I asked. “Like I’m eighteen, I mean?”

She shook her head. “Not really. So Coke, Fanta, or Sprite? We aren’t allowed to serve alcohol to minors.”

Minor. That sounded like “unimportant,” and in my eyes, it was mockery. No one ever needed alcohol as badly as he did as a teenager. There was so much that begged to be drowned in the stuff. . . . In fact, a simple shot wasn’t nearly enough.

“Coke.” The woman’s breasts bobbed approvingly, and she turned around to the refrigerator cases. Lost in thought, my gaze wandered. Over there, in front of the display window with sale-priced leather handbags, stood Sandra with two of her best friends.

For a moment, I got dizzy. It was as if I were hallucinating in broad daylight. I hadn’t seen Sandra since the breakup. Her face reflected in the big window. She looked fantastic. The sunglasses she wore were new. Her hair was freshly colored and cut; her lip gloss glistened in the sunlight.

“Hey, you’re so pale all of a sudden!” The woman behind the counter seemed concerned. “Did you see a ghost?”

I shook my head agitatedly. The gang of girls started moving again. They hadn’t spotted me and wandered down the street.

“How much is that?” Now I was in a hurry. That must be how drug addicts feel when they’re going through withdrawal. You want to stay clean but still you fail over and over again. The biggest problem was that my drug had two legs and was in the process of disappearing from my sight forever.

“Two euros,” the woman said. I slapped the money on the table and ran off in pursuit of the group moving away.

“And your soda?” The woman sounded annoyed and waved at me. I had just left the Coke standing there. I held the Hello Kitty autograph book close to my chest.

Had I already lost them? No, there they were walking down the sidewalk, looking at the stores’ window displays. They strolled past the stores next to each other, with their elbows hooked. On the far left was Vanessa, who had never been able to stand me. She was always wearing too much makeup, as if she had robbed a cosmetics studio. On the right was Nadine, Sandra’s oldest friend. I liked her. She didn’t look like anything special, but she had a warm smile. In the middle was Sandra. She had not only bought herself a cool pair of sunglasses, but new clothes, too. Had she always been so thin? The studded jeans fit her perfectly.

And that was the difference: since we had split up, I had hardly changed my clothes at all. I was slowly going to seed in my dark gray sweatshirt, wrote aggrieved text messages, and stared at the ceiling of my bedroom, while she strolled through the city in a new outfit. The breakup seemed to have had the same effect on her as a weekend at a beauty spa.

I had walked too fast because now I had almost caught up to the girls. I definitely didn’t want them to notice me! I could just picture Vanessa’s face. Me sneaking around after Sandra like a nutcase fit perfectly with her negative impression of me.

“So how about the movies?” Vanessa had stopped walking. I stopped at the corner of the building and hid in the entryway. The girls thought about it, and Vanessa lit a cigarette.

“Too expensive,” Nadine said. “Let’s go to the Dark Café instead! You’ll like it. I was there once with my aunt.” The three swerved to the right and headed down a narrow side street. I had never been here before. The main strip with all its stores and bars was behind us now, and I wondered what the girls might be doing there. I vaguely remembered that Nadine lived somewhere nearby. But I had never heard of anyplace called the Dark Café.

The girls strolled through a park, and I followed them at a safe distance. Sandra stood still for a moment, crouched down, and tied her shoes. Even her tennis shoes were new. New, new, new. The only thing missing was a new boyfriend by her side.

The girls left the park. On the opposite side of the street was a yellow house that had a ramp next to the entrance. Above the entrance hung a sign that was clearly handmade: Freak City. The girls headed straight for it, and in less than a minute, they had disappeared inside.

I stood around aimlessly outside the front door. What was this supposed to be? A teen center? The outside of the house was covered with posters: “Don’t give AIDS a chance!” Underneath that was an announcement for a marathon. The remains of a classified ad were stuck on the left corner: “Anne from the ceramics class, get in touch with Ralph!” Next to that someone offered a room in a rainbow community house. What on earth was a rainbow community? And what was Sandra doing in this strange shack with her new sunglasses, trendy sneakers, and studded jeans?

The door opened and a guy with a mop of tomato-red hair jumped down the stairs right past me. He went straight to the compost bin and enthusiastically shook out the contents of a plastic bucket. A few apple peels fell to the ground, but he didn’t pay any attention to them. “Superman’s substitute” was written on his T-shirt.

“Peace, brother,” I said to the guy on his way back from the compost bin.

He raised his eyebrows and grinned. “You must be looking for the Dark Café.”

I wanted to go in there and kidnap my ex-girlfriend. I wanted to throw her over my shoulder like a Neanderthal, schlep her into the subway, and take her home with me. I wanted to lock her up in my room with the graffiti on the wall and only let her out again when the forever she had promised me had gone by.

The guy was still looking at me. “So what’ll it be? It’s a really interesting experience.”

I studied his worn-out corduroy pants and noticed he was wearing tennis shoes of two different colors. He must have thought I looked uptight in my average clothes and short brown hair.

“My name is Tommek, and I’m doing a year of volunteer work here.” He nodded at me.

“Volunteer work in a café?”

He shook his head. “The café is just a side business. I spend most of my time with the events. Charity concerts, fund-raisers, that kind of stuff. Like the Dark Café. Do you want to try it? All the profits go straight to the Association for the Blind.”

Association for the Blind? What did I have to do with blind people?

Tommek scratched his forehead. “Okay, I can see you have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s like this, a dark café is a completely normal café, except everything happens in pitch blackness. The waiters and waitresses are all blind, so for them it’s no problem at all to move around the room. The guests are average people like you and me. But this gives us a chance to get an impression of what it’s like not to be able to see anything at all.”

I looked at Tommek in disbelief. Dark Café. If Claudio and Tobias could see me now with this weird punk, they would laugh at me until they turned blue.

Tommek shrugged his shoulders. “You have to decide whether you want to expand your horizons. The project only runs until the end of the week. You should check it out. Just go inside and then follow the signs down to the basement. At the entrance, one of the blind people will meet you. If it’s too much for you, you can always come upstairs to the normal café. Freak City. We’re open all year round.”

Bewildered, I nodded. “Yeah, I think I will check it out.”

Tommek seemed glad. “I thought you looked like you’d be open to something new!” he said. “And have some of the cake. You know, because every penny goes to the Association for the Blind.”

I couldn’t have cared less about the Association for the Blind. But the thought of being in the same room as Sandra had made my decision easier. I followed Tommek inside and went down the stairs to the basement. The light was muted, and soft jazz music came from below. A thick, black curtain hung at the entrance to the basement. I slipped through it and knocked.

“Hello?” A man’s voice greeted me. I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face.

“Hi,” I murmured. “I wanted to have a look here.”

The man’s voice sounded amused. “Well, there’s not exactly a lot to see here, but we’re still glad that you came. Put your hand on my shoulder, and I’ll lead you to a table. Do you want to order something to drink right away? And today there’s Linzer Torte.”

With stumbling steps, I followed the waiter into the room. It was enveloped in the deepest darkness, and I could hear snatches of conversations from all directions.

“Do you really think . . . ?”

“ . . . and then of course the liability insurance. It would have surprised me if . . .”

“And here’s the funny part: they gave me an appointment in the late afternoon, and when I got there . . .”

We went farther. I hadn’t heard Sandra’s voice anywhere yet. Music flowed from speakers. It was weird—a party in the dark.

“I’ll have a Coke with a shot,” I said as the waiter pulled out a chair for me. I had lost my orientation in the room already.

“But you’re nowhere near eighteen yet!” I looked in the direction of my invisible waiter with irritation. “You can hear it,” the man explained. “We blind folks can guess people’s ages pretty accurately.”

“Then a normal Coke. And some of the Linzer Torte.” He moved away.

The space around me seemed to be small, as if I was stuck in an elevator with a bunch of strangers. But the room had to be fairly large. From the other end, far away, I could hear someone coughing.