“Let’s go to Åsö Street.”
* * *
I will find a way to get to Stockholm, Steffi decides as they exit the subway station at Medborgarplatsen. Karlstad will just be a stepping-stone on my path if I don’t get into the school here. But it won’t keep me from Stockholm.
The web of streets and tall buildings is bigger than she’d imagined, almost infinite, but if she gets a bike, she’ll be able to figure out how to get around.
She notices two tall Africans with dreadlocks standing around the station entrance. Another man, pushing a baby carriage, is heading off to the left while a woman with her hair dyed red and a hat heads off to the right. A few young men are laughing so loud they’re almost screaming. They’re all Asian or South American. One of them has tattoos all the way up his neck. Only two people look like they’d belong in Björke. Hundreds look like anything but.
140 Åsö Street is a yellow building with a rough stone facade. They needed to ask only one person where it was. Compared to Alvar’s difficult journey seventy plus years ago, the trip was nothing. Steffi stops to look at the entrance. It is arched and somewhat sunken into the building. Two stairways, one on each side, lead up to it. So that’s where Alvar walked inside and was met by an angry doorman with a fleshy lower lip before he entered paradise with its blackout shades. None of this can be seen, but Steffi feels his devotion. She takes out her camera and photographs the entrance, the facade, the windows all the way up, and the basement doors with their locks hanging outside. She walks up to the building and touches its walls. Then she asks her mother to take a picture of her standing in front of it. She studies the picture after her mother has taken it, nods, and says, “We can go now.”
Her mother doesn’t ask anything for a while, but as they are heading down the escalator back into the subway, she can’t hold back any longer.
“Is there something special about that particular address?”
“Yes.”
Mamma smiles, nudges her shoulder. “What’s so special about it?”
They’re walking through the gate, showing their tickets to the attendant. Real Stockholmers have cards they swipe in machines on their way through.
“Alvar used to talk about that address.”
Part of her wants to tell her mother all about Alvar, even if she wouldn’t understand it all. Her mother would never understand how it felt to walk down a staircase and find jazz music in the middle of the darkness in the middle of a war. Steffi decides to keep the story for herself.
“Are we taking the Green Line this time?” she asks instead.
She’s already figured out what the different subway lines are called.
* * *
The fifty-year-old wife of Steffi’s grandfather’s army pal gives Steffi a conspiratorial wink when Steffi decides to go speak on her phone instead of watching an episode of Dancing with the Stars.
“I can understand how important it is to talk to your boyfriend,” she says with a laugh.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Steffi says and blushes.
She can still hear the woman laughing at her own imagination concerning Steffi’s wild teenage life as she waits for the call to go through. Four rings and nobody picks up, but then she hears Alvar’s sleepy voice.
“Were you sleeping again?”
“It’s been a long time since ladies called me at this hour, so I’m not used to being up. So tell me, how did it go?”
“Terribly.”
“I see. What went wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just sure it was terrible.”
“What did the panel say?”
“That it was terrible.”
“Did they really say that?”
“No, well, they said it was good I wrote my own stuff. But I know it went all wrong.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
Then Alvar says, “Sometimes things go wrong, but then they go better again. As long as you don’t give up.”
“Did things get better for you?”
“After Anita had unburdened her love for Ingmar to me?”
“No, right after you failed to get the chance to play at Skansen.”
“Well, yes and no. The funny thing about goals is that you have to be aware of when to modify them, you see.”
* * *
Alvar had realized one thing about goals: you have to be aware of when to modify them. Goal: to be Anita’s guy and reason for living had now changed to Goal: make a living with music and be kissed by a girl. Alvar was a new man, with emphasis on man and not boy. With the one glaring exception that he had never kissed a girl.
With Brylcreem in his hair, possibly a bit too much, he looked like someone who’d kissed girls. In his suit and hat, he looked like he might already have gone so far as to touch a girl’s breasts or even more. Just the thought sent a shiver through him. He cleared his throat.
“The thing is, see, I can only let one girl in without a ticket.”
The girl in front of him in line turned slightly so she could see him. She looked puzzled. This was normal, just as Erling described how it would go. They were in the long line to get into Nalen. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought I heard you ask if you could come on Thursday.”
“Where on Thursday?”
The girl’s friend had also turned toward him. She cocked her head and her eyelashes fluttered like exotic fans. Alvar repeated to himself what Erling had told him—girls got nervous, too. It was difficult when they were standing so close he could smell their perfume.
“My swing band, Erling’s Trio. We’re jamming at the Monk. But as I said, it’s going to be full, so I can only get one girl a free ticket. Two max. But I’ve already promised one ticket to…”
He scratched his stiff hair to distract them from his blush. It really was not a lie, he told himself. Anita was a girl and she’d promised to come, even if he wasn’t the one who’d asked. And they were playing at the Monk.
“But if it’s your band…,” the second girl said.
She spun her body like a fashion model and peered at him with an entire amusement park of promise in her eyes. At him—Alvar from Björke! He was exhilarated and had to cough so as not to break out in laughter from sheer exuberance. He made his eyebrows sink in furrowed worry. Erling had told him it was important to keep cool. The slightest sign of weakness and he’d be lost. He measured them with his eyes and tried to ignore all the softness behind their blouses, their mouths, their white hips and thighs, and that perfume.…
“Let me see what I can do,” he said. “But I need your names.”
Alvar leaned against the wall at Nalen and contemplated his life. The huge crowd no longer frightened him. All of these people were now a backdrop to the most exciting evenings of his life. He knew many of the guys and they’d nod to each other and could toss comments back and forth in the Söder slang he now understood, though Aunt Hilda did not. He’d danced with many of the girls. He’d grabbed them by the waist and could throw the bravest ones into the air in a jitterbug he’d now mastered. He was eighteen years old, he had a good suit, he played in a band, and he had just shown he could chat up girls.
One girl peeped “Erling!” right beside him, but soon they’d be calling “Alvar!” in that same twittering voice.
He felt his hair and made sure it was still in the stiff wave demanded of every hepcat at Nalen. He drew his finger over his chin to check his shave. It was hard on his self-image that the hair on his chin was still more like peach fuzz and wouldn’t leave a manly stubble, but it was better to shave than to leave it and have people think he was just fourteen.
He glanced over to the band, raised high on the platform over the jitterbugs. He felt the longing in his stomach to be up there—he watched the bass player and followed his fingers.
“Erling!”
Someone touched his arm. The scent of perfume from earlier this evening intruded. It wa
s the girl with the eyelashes, and she was laughing. “What are you dreaming about? Dancing a jitterbug?”
Perhaps because he’d been philosophizing about his own life and how grown-up he now had become, or perhaps because she’d called him Erling and he became Erling for a moment—something made him not feel nervous in the least.
“One day I’m going to be up there,” he said and nodded toward the band.
She giggled. “Wouldn’t you rather be on the dance floor?”
He was still watching the bass player. The man behind the upright bass was the foundation of all the music and the reason everyone could dance.
“No.”
“Not even if you could dance with me?”
His gaze moved from the band to the girl in front of him. She touched her hair—why do girls always touch their hair and why does this make it hard for him to breathe—and she smiled with her rosy velvet lips.
What would Erling do?
“For you, then, let’s go.”
This dance was unlike any previous dance at Nalen. He felt it in her hand as she gripped his; he saw it in her look and that made his legs ready to leap. Her wide eyes made him want to tell her things, secret things, like this was the first time he’d danced with a girl he’d actually spoken to first.
“By the way, my name isn’t Erling,” he said as a swing brought her close.
She was panting, her cheeks red, her dark hair flying even though it had been set with hair spray.
“What is your name, then?”
“Alvar.”
“What did you say?”
The music had reached the middle bridge and the horns were blaring, so it was hard to hear.
“Alvar.”
“What?”
He yelled at the top of his voice at the moment the trumpets stopped. “ALVAR!”
Four or five pairs of dancers glanced at them and Alvar felt the blood rush to his face. The girl laughed and sneaked closer to him. He was sweaty. She had dimples. She let her body press into his as she said:
“And my name is Inga-Lill.”
As the band switched to a fox-trot, they kept standing on the dance floor. She stood on her toes and whispered into his ear that he was a good dancer. Her breath against his cheek had a different feel from the sweat. Her breath was for him alone. If he just moved his head slightly, his lips would meet hers. Just the thought made it hard for him to breathe: he finally would kiss a girl for the first time. In reality. Not in a dream with a vague image of Anita. He decided to do it.
Alvar kissed Inga-Lill as they stood on the large dance floor of Nalen.
Inga-Lill’s lips were thin, soft, and warm.
She was breathing quickly through her nose; she’d closed her eyes.
Her cheek was so soft that Alvar’s felt stubbly, in spite of his lack of thick beard growth.
The band was playing “A String of Pearls.”
Her lips parted slightly and the tip of her tongue met his. It was wet and rough. He had no idea it would feel like this.
He was holding her back and she turned up toward him and that feeling of her bending waist called him back to reality. She giggled at him and he started to giggle, but then he laughed a real, rough man’s laugh. He twirled her around so he could have the chance to compose himself. He was determined never to ask if she could tell it was the first kiss he’d ever given.
Inga-Lill. Her name was as sweet as a piano solo. He said it out loud every time he went to buy a drink or go to the bathroom. Each time he left, she was still there when he returned. She took his hand whenever he held out his own. Her hands were streamlined, with narrow fingertips, and she liked to use them to touch his face. Whenever they reached his neck, he shivered, swallowed, laughed, and he took her out to dance another jitterbug and then another fox-trot that ended with their mouths touching.
“So, do you think I’ll get in on Thursday?” Inga-Lill asked with a smile.
Behind her, coming inside Nalen’s entrance, another girl was walking with steps so familiar they could belong to only one person. She was taking off her hat with a sweeping gesture and her laugh could be seen but not heard over the music. Next to her, Ingmar clumsily draped his arm around Anita’s shoulders.
“Hello? Are you in there?” Inga-Lill was waving her streamlined hand. His gaze went back to her, the girl whose lips he’d kissed in reality.
“Excuse me?”
“Thursday, silly! When your band plays at the Monk!”
Her laugh was simple and the way her lips moved as she called him silly—they were real, warm lips.
“Of course,” Alvar said. He stood as tall as his eighteen-year-old body would let him. “Trust Big Boy—I’ll make sure you get in.”
She closed her eyes and she kissed him. He closed his eyes as well.
— CHAPTER 18 —
The entire way home, Mamma keeps asking her strange questions. Steffi doesn’t really notice until after the train has passed Simrishamn Station. “What about the boys at music school?”
“What about them?”
“Well, you haven’t mentioned them, though I guess that’s not strange.”
“I only met them for, like, five minutes! The same thing with the girls, too, by the way. What are you talking about?”
“I mean, yes, well, I thought … it’s not so strange, I guess.”
“What? WHAT? Mamma!”
“You weren’t noticing them because you were focusing on your audition.”
“What do you want me to say about them?”
“What would you say about them?”
“WHAT?”
“Or the girls. If that’s what … I mean…”
Steffi stares at her mother, who seems to have gone off her rocker. Steffi will soon have to put her into the Sunshine Home with all the other dementia patients. She says this, too, which makes her mother laugh.
“I was just wondering,” Mamma says.
“I get it, but what are you wondering about?”
“If there’s anyone … in particular … that you like. Your own age, I mean. Not the man at the retirement home.”
“Oh.” She thinks for a moment about the boy with the beret at the music school, the one who liked her hat, the one who said that she wouldn’t be murdered even if she were a bass player. She thinks about Kevin and about Hannes, who likes how she plays bass. She shakes her head. “No, there’s nobody in particular.”
Not like she’d tell her mother if there was. If she was interested in the boy with the beret, she was not about to mention it. It would be her business, not her mother’s.
“Even if I did like someone,” she added, “it’s not like I’m going to tell you first thing.”
Mamma looks down at her book, keeping her eyes still.
“It’s not like teenagers go running to their mothers about stuff like that,” Steffi tries to clarify.
The tension between them starts to ease, and her mother starts to read her book for real.
* * *
The atmosphere at home is also strange. Something odd has come over the entire Herrera family, and now her father is looking at her the same way her mother had while they were on the train. Julia is not looking at her at all. After five minutes at the dinner table, Julia asks to be excused and heads off to talk to her friends. The only normal member of the family is Edvin. He’s trying to figure out if gold is just a metal or if gold is also a color or if gold is both a metal and a color. He finally stops talking only to ask why everyone else is silent. Steffi tells him that gold is also a color. Then Pappa asks how everything went at the audition, and finally things start to seem almost normal again. Except for that incomprehensible stuff.
* * *
After dinner, it’s too late to head over to the Sunshine Home, so Steffi sits down at her computer. She opens Word and writes a list.
1. MAKE SURE TO PASS ALL CLASSES. UTMOST IMPORTANCE!
2. Check out Avishai Cohen, Lee Rocker, other bassists.
&nbs
p; 3. Ask Alvar if he’s ever played bass guitar. Does he have any tips?
She can’t think of any more tasks to add to her list, so she decides to surf the Web. Stephanie Herrera is long gone. She has another life and is not ever going to return. She logs in as Hepcat. Immediately there’s a message.
From: Karro N
To: Hepcat
You’re quiet. What r you doing?;)
A winking smiley from Karro is so far from Steffi’s reality that it’s absurd. If Karro knew that she was winking at Steffi, she’d explode. She’d burst from shame, because Karro’s world is Björke School and nothing else. Steffi is still in Stockholm. She’s walking down the streets where Hepcat has been preparing the way for her for decades already.
From: Hepcat
To: Karro N
I’m thinking about the world. It’s like fog, you can only see what is directly around you and as soon as you take a single step to the side you are somewhere else, and there’s so much more than you thought. I’m going to get out of here as soon as I can, believe me.
She hits the send button, and releases it from her mind. Then her father knocks on the door.
Pappa is holding a sheet of paper. He’s looking at Steffi as if she were a baby bird he shouldn’t scare. He sits down on the bed and smiles at her. He unfolds the sheet of paper as if it weren’t all that important, almost nothing at all. But his trembling hand gives it all away. “Do you recognize this?” he asks as he waves it.
“How would I know? Can you hold still so I can read it?”
She sits down next to him and reads. It’s a printout from a Web forum. The title says: Am I a Lesbian? The questioner calls herself: Little Me. The writer says she’s trying to feel something for her boyfriend, but she finds she’s always fantasizing about the girls she sees in the shower. Ten people have written back to tell her to wait and see. Others say she should sleep with a girl and see what it’s like. Others say she shouldn’t bother to define herself as a lesbian before trying sex with a boy other than her boyfriend. A few write to say they have the same problem.
“I wasn’t meaning to pry,” Pappa says. “Julia found this lying on the floor and we thought that maybe you wanted us to read it. Julia didn’t want us to ask you about it, but I just don’t want you to feel afraid.”
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