by Maria Parr
“Are you going to come, Trille?” Birgit asked.
I coughed. It would be really embarrassing to turn up to watch when I’d been part of the team until just recently. But I imagined sitting next to Birgit in the stands. That would be quite something. If she was impressed by Kai-Tommy’s hard shots, I could just tell her that he had poor technical abilities. I agreed to go, very reluctantly.
When I was about to leave, Lena stopped me by the door.
“Will we be all right doing that presentation, then?”
I looked at the doorbell and bit the inside of my cheek.
“Of course.”
Hi, Trille. Are you injured?”
Axel, our old coach, plopped himself down next to me in the ramshackle soccer stands.
“Sort of,” I mumbled. “What about you?”
“No, I’m training the younger ones now,” Axel said cheerily. “Ivar wanted to take on your team. He’s pretty good, you know.”
I was about to protest, but then I spotted Birgit. She parked her bike over by the mini-field, where she met Ellisiv, who had probably been working. They walked together across the school playground. When Birgit spotted me, she waved, and a rocket burst inside my chest.
“Have you got a girlfriend?” Axel asked, nudging me.
“Um, no.” I could feel myself blushing all the way to my earlobes. “What about you? Are you spending a lot of time at the café these days?”
Axel laughed as he made space for Ellisiv and Birgit.
“My girlfriend dumped me, Trille. So I don’t have to go to the café anymore.”
“She dumped you?”
“Like a sack of potatoes. Hi, Ellisiv.”
So we sat there, Axel and I, both of us next to a girl who wasn’t our girlfriend, watching the game. It was incredible. Birgit asked me questions the whole time, and every so often she laughed her soft, pretty laugh. It was wonderful not playing soccer anymore. Lena was right. You can’t keep on doing things you hate.
And as if to make things even better, Kai-Tommy missed the goal by miles a couple of times and shouted nasty words across the field. I hoped Birgit had noticed that. But it didn’t look like she cared. Maybe she didn’t know enough Norwegian yet.
The warm sun shone down on us, and it would all have been perfect if it hadn’t been for one thing spoiling the mood: in goal, where once there had stood a skinny girl shouting herself hoarse, there now stood Halvor, strapping and silent. The more time that passed, the more uncomfortable I felt. Was Ivar going to bring Lena on at all?
“Is Lena injured too?” Axel asked.
I shook my head and tried to push aside the bad feeling I had seeing her sitting down alone on the bench. None of the boys were sitting there.
She wasn’t brought on after halftime either. Not even when Halvor let in a real howler of a goal. Eventually we were down three to nil. Ivar shouted and gave the boys instructions without losing his temper. It didn’t look like he cared what the result was. The boys on the field were struggling.
“But why isn’t Lena playing?” Ellisiv asked.
Axel said something about how it was a good idea to have two goalies, and that they probably wanted to let Halvor gain some confidence between the goalposts, in case Lena got injured. I gulped. I wasn’t having a good time anymore, no matter how nice it was to be sitting next to Birgit. My neighbor was sitting down there on the substitutes’ bench, with her cap low over her face, her goalkeeper’s gloves on, and a dark cloud above her.
Lena was brought on five minutes before the end. A shot came on target, which she easily saved, and then the game was finished.
I found Lena at home down by the barn. She was kicking a ball against the wall. The seagulls jumped into the sky with every shot.
“Halvor’s got to have a turn too, so it wouldn’t be a total disaster if you got injured,” I said cautiously.
Lena stopped shooting the ball and looked at me as if I were the stupidest person in God’s creation.
“Disaster? We lost the game! I’m better than him, Trille!”
Another crash against the barn.
“But —” I began.
“Halvor’s in goal because his dad’s the assistant coach!”
Lena gave the ball one last mad kick, sending it flying all the way down to the beach. The barn breathed a sigh of relief through the gap in the wall.
“What are you going to do about it, then?” I asked, feeling a bit worn out by her always getting angry about everything.
“I suppose I’ll have to become a boy,” she muttered furiously, heading off without even picking up her gloves.
You used to live in Africa?”
I looked around Birgit’s room in amazement. The last time I visited her I’d only been in the kitchen. Today we were finishing our book presentation. Lena was at soccer practice and was going to join us later.
I gazed at all the pictures of giraffes and elephants. On Birgit’s desk was a picture of her with summer hair almost as white as chalk. She had her arm around a girl who was as dark as Birgit was fair.
“Mom and some other people started a coffee roastery in Amsterdam,” Birgit said, going on to explain that the coffee beans came from small farms in Kenya. “We spent a year living there while she was arranging everything.”
The very thought of all she’d experienced made me feel light-headed.
“Why didn’t you say you’d lived in Kenya?” I asked, bewildered, remembering how Lena had gone on and on about a measly vacation to Crete.
Birgit shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t met many other people who’ve been to Kenya, so it feels a bit weird to talk about it, I suppose.”
I stared in fascination at the picture on her desk. Birgit looked so happy in it.
“That’s Keisha,” she said. “I miss her a lot. But we chat online.”
“I’d like to hear more about Kenya,” I said.
“OK,” Birgit replied happily, pulling out a big photo album from her shelf.
We sat down on her bed, and she showed me pictures and told me about them. Her words took me to a green and warm place that smelled of coffee. She told me about rainy mornings, about the big animals, and about the house they’d lived in. But most of all she told me about Keisha, the best friend in the world.
“We’ve decided that we’ll go and study together one day,” she said. “Maybe you’d like to come too?”
I suddenly felt all warm. “Mm-hmm,” I nodded.
Study? I always thought I would stay in Mathildewick Cove until my dying day. I even had my eye on a piece of land down by the sea where I would build my house. And then I’d imagined that I would be a fisherman, like Grandpa. Now it was as if the world had opened up in all directions. Could people just travel around and do whatever they wanted? Could I do that too?
Then Birgit put away the album. We had to get to work. We’d finished writing the presentation, and that evening we just had to practice in front of each other. Birgit and I took turns standing by the computer and talking. I spoke about Emil, and she spoke about the author, Astrid Lindgren, in her own beautiful kind of Norwegian. When we’d done it twice each, Lena sent a message to say she wasn’t coming. I pictured her sitting in the usual spot on the kitchen table, getting bandaged up again. Had practice been as awful as the game the day before?
“That’s all right,” said Birgit. “We’re finished anyway. I’m a bit nervous about it, you know.”
I nodded and felt a little as if I couldn’t breathe properly.
Before I left, Birgit’s mom asked if I’d stay to have something to eat with them. She served up a hot, bright-red soup that tasted pretty strong. Did they always eat dinner that late? We all sat around the table, just like at home. Birgit’s parents asked me about the farm and fishing and the mountains as if I were a grown-up. They wanted to hear about all the things I thought were ordinary and boring. I did my best to explain in a mixture of English and Norwegian, but it was difficult.
I felt complet
ely dizzy as I walked home. My head was bursting with new thoughts, and my stomach was full of new food. When I went to bed, I lay there, staring at the ceiling. What was I going to do? There was no way I could let Birgit find out I was too scared even to stand up in front of my own class. I couldn’t go to school the next day. I couldn’t face it.
Lena was the only person who knew I wasn’t really ill, but she didn’t say a word about it. She just gave me that raised-eyebrow look she’d started doing, and then told me about the book presentation when she came home. It had been a smash hit, according to her. People had, of course, long since heard about the flagpole incident, so it was a real highlight for the class to get to see it with their own eyes.
“You made a good impression, Trille,” she assured me.
The next day, Birgit seemed worried when she asked me if I felt better. I nodded and looked away. Did she realize what a little wimp I was?
I was thinking more and more about Birgit. It was almost as if a gentle and gracious bird had landed in the middle of our class and was able to see beyond all the stupidity and daftness. For example, one day we were working in pairs, and Birgit was with Andreas. In the first few years at school, Kai-Tommy used to mimic Andreas every time he opened his mouth, because he stammers. When we got Ellisiv as our teacher, the bullying stopped, but it was already too late. Andreas hardly ever said another word. But the day he worked with Birgit, I was surprised to hear him chatting away. In another lesson, she might chat the same way with Kai-Tommy, as if he were a totally normal and pleasant person. Was that what he was like when he was with Birgit?
I was crestfallen every time I saw the two of them together. He liked her; there was no doubt about that. And I was nothing compared to Kai-Tommy.
I soon became an expert at finding ways to spend time with Birgit outside of school. Dad was stunned by how many salt licks I was willing to carry up the mountain, and when the sheep had been brought down for the winter, I went up with the hedge clippers instead. Birgit liked being up the mountain and thought doing the trimming along the track was great fun. The same went for her Norwegian homework: she often needed help with it, and Kai-Tommy certainly didn’t have anything to offer there. A gifted child like me, on the other hand, could teach her all about grammar and sentence construction until the sheep came home, so to speak.
I didn’t mean to spend less time at sea with Grandpa. That’s just how things went. I didn’t mean to spend less time with Lena either. That’s just how things went too.
As autumn tightened its grip and I went gallivanting around Hillside with Birgit, Grandpa went out to sea alone. I would see him doing his usual rounds from the house to the boat shed, and from the boat shed to the pier. Some days I would run down to him, sit on a fish box, and have a little chat, but I never stayed for long. Grandpa didn’t mention it. But sometimes I noticed he’d be looking for me after I’d gone.
As for Lena, she was fighting for her life on the soccer field. And she was all alone too. Our team played game after game, but she was only ever sent on to play for the last five minutes. She argued and got angry, but she kept going to every single practice. Three times a week she came home covered in gravel and scraped all over. I often popped through the hedge and over to the Lid family kitchen on those evenings. It was good for Lena to have somebody to shout at: that much was clear.
Usually Isak would be sitting there, patching her up while the rage flew around him. I would pull up a chair too and listen with half an ear. But Ylva thought things had gone too far.
“Can’t you just give up soccer?” she asked one evening when Lena was sitting again on what had become the official medical station, the kitchen table.
“Give it up?”
“All you do is moan about it, Lena. If it’s that terrible, then aren’t there other things that would be better?” Ylva tried suggesting.
“What would those be? Keyboard lessons?” Lena’s voice was so sharp you could cut yourself on it.
Ylva replied that she hadn’t said a word about keyboard lessons, but now that Lena mentioned it, it wouldn’t hurt to practice a bit more.
“Or, to put it another way,” she said, correcting herself, “it wouldn’t hurt to do any practice at all.” Then she continued, “Look at Trille.”
I felt like I’d been caught red-handed. Not only had I started hovering around Hillside all the time, but I’d also started practicing the piano. I wouldn’t admit it even at knifepoint, but I was only doing it to impress Birgit and her family. I didn’t want to sound like an idiot at the music school’s Christmas concert.
“You’ll never be good at something if you don’t practice,” Ylva added.
After that, Lena stopped complaining. She kept going to soccer practice, looking like a shadow of her usual self, but she never said a word when she came home.
And then she broke her hand.
“How on earth can you break your hand in an English lesson?” Magnus wanted to know.
Lena explained that there was no telling what terrible things might happen if you were bored for long enough, and that our English lessons were so boring they’d been a risk to her health for some time now.
I was there when it happened. Lena was trying out one of her ruler stunts. She’d developed a technique that involved sticking a ruler into the wall like a sword, then tipping her chair in such a way that the ruler is the only thing holding her up. While Ellisiv was reading out a long text about the school day in Australia, I could see Lena was daring herself to tip even farther back in her chair, until she was almost horizontal. The ruler quivered under the strain. It certainly looked impressive.
Lena was concentrating so hard that she didn’t notice everybody, including Ellisiv, starting to peer in her direction. Then, just as the schoolchildren in Australia had gone home for the day and Ellisiv was about to say “Lena Lid” in the way only she can, we heard a sharp crack as the ruler broke, and a much louder crash as the chair slipped away and Lena slammed to the floor.
“Do you know what my mom said, Trille?” Lena grumbled the next day on the way to our music lessons.
“No.”
“She said: ‘What bad timing with the music school concert coming up.’”
Lena waved her plaster cast around in agitation. “Floundering flatfish, never mind about the concert!” she shouted. “Now I can’t play in goal!”
I closed my ears. I couldn’t stand to hear any more about soccer.
“Why are you going to your music lesson today, then?”
“To show Mr. Rognstad my plaster cast. He’s going to be relieved, I bet.”
I shuddered. The music school concert in December stood out like a dark spot on the calendar. It was exactly the same as with the book presentation. I’d have to do something in front of loads of people. But this time I wasn’t going to chicken out. I couldn’t. If I was ill again that day, then Birgit would work it out. So I was going to practice, practice, practice.
It was the only way to survive.
And practice I did. “Für Elise,” the piece that had looked utterly impossible when I’d first seen the notes on paper, eventually turned into music. My improvement put Mr. Rognstad into a kind of positive state of shock. He didn’t know that I was being driven by pure fear. I might sit by the piano wishing for a drum kit until my head ached, but still I gritted my teeth and got my fingers to sweep over all the right keys. I wanted to be able to play “Für Elise” in my sleep, with my eyes closed, and even if my mind went blank. It was the only way to get through the concert. Birgit and her family had to see that I could do more than build rafts and gut fish.
Every afternoon, I sat at the piano while Grandpa puttered around in the boat shed and Lena was down by the barn with one broken hand and a soccer ball. I could see her from the window. Sometimes she just did keepie-uppies, and other times she went down to Grandpa and fetched some fishing buoys, which she set out in the field. She’d drawn a line that was supposed to be the edge of the six-yard box. She put
the ball down there, and then she aimed and took long goal kicks toward the fishing buoys.
That’s how we went on all through November and half of December. Grandpa in the boat shed, Lena outside the barn, and me at the piano.
By the time the Christmas holidays and the music school concert were approaching, I could play “Für Elise” without so much as peeking at the notes. Grandpa had fixed and mended every single net he could find, and Lena’s ball was slamming into the fishing buoys with ever-growing precision. She’d managed a dizzying 1,011 keepie-uppies in a row too. Strangely enough, she didn’t boast about this to anybody — not even to the boys in our class. She’d stopped talking about soccer.
“I’ll come and listen,” Lena came to say through the window, the day before the concert. “I’ll clap even if it’s a complete racket.”
“It’s not going to be a complete racket,” I said.
“No, but if it is. You’ve got to squeeze out the whole of ‘Für Elise’ on that thing.”
In any case, she promised to drum her plaster cast on the back of the chair in front and whistle along. She also wanted to savor all the other performers’ nerves. Especially Kai-Tommy’s.
“Although . . . I almost hope it goes well for him.”
“What?” I’d never heard Lena say anything nice about Kai-Tommy before, and deep down I didn’t like it.
“Well, it’s just . . . Ivar’s not fair to him,” Lena mumbled.
I thought she was going to start whining about her goalkeeping career again, but instead she said that the person who got yelled at the most at practice was Kai-Tommy.
“The other boys are just as bad, you know, except perhaps Andreas. He’s good at reading the game . . .”
She didn’t say any more after that. It was as if she’d forgotten herself for a moment.
“Are you looking forward to Christmas?” she asked instead, resting her chin on the windowsill.
