“Maybe you got them from your dad,” Hanna suggested.
“My dad doesn’t have curly hair.” Hanna raised one eyebrow. “Maybe he does.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe your dad isn’t your dad.”
I decided that my hair was as good as it could get and stopped messing with it.
Hanna suggested that we should bike down to Holberg’s shop. And this time we had money. Holberg was pretty okay about the whole thing. He’d agreed not to press charges because he knows my parents. He knows Hanna’s parents too. Holberg knows everybody.
As we biked down Njaal Street I saw these two boys from my class, Kjetil Holmvik and Gjermund Moen. They were smoking by the pine trees a little off the road. Kjetil was laughing at something, so I could see his new braces. It’s funny, whenever you see someone with braces holding a cigarette, you know they’re too young to smoke. Or too old to have braces. Gjermund doesn’t have braces. He doesn’t need them. His teeth are perfect.
I guess I forgot to look where I was going. The truth is that I always have been a bit clumsy. So I ran my bike right into this big branch that was lying in the middle of the road.
I flew over the handlebars, dove towards the asphalt and landed on my right shoulder. I heard something pop. I waited for a couple of seconds before trying to get up, because I knew straight away that something wasn’t right. And then, when I tried to move my arm, it hurt really badly. In fact, any movement made my arm hurt.
“Malin? Are you okay?” Hanna said.
“My arm doesn’t work.”
Hanna tried to call my parents but neither of them answered their phone. We weren’t too far away from the middle of Haasund, so she asked me if I would be all right to walk down to the medical centre. “No,” I said.
Then I did it anyway.
Hanna walked ahead with our bikes. I walked behind with my left arm supporting my right arm. The wind kept blowing my hair in my face and I had no free hand to remove it with. Stupid curls. Even though I was supporting my arm, it still hurt to walk. With every step I took, pain shot through me.
It took us about twenty minutes to walk from Njaal Street to the medical centre on Berg Street. It normally takes five minutes. When we walked into the emergency department, there were a lot of people in the waiting room. Young people bleeding. Old people coughing.
I stopped this nurse walking by and said, “I need help.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
The nurse didn’t even need to examine me. She just glanced at me and said, “You have dislocated your shoulder.”
The woman behind the counter put all my information into the computer. My name, my address and my parents’ phone numbers.
She asked me if I had any ID.
I didn’t.
She asked me if I knew my social security number.
I didn’t.
She said that they would call my mom and dad, and they couldn’t do anything to help me before at least one of my parents was present.
Sit down and wait, she said. Have a cup of water, she said.
I had no free hand to hold the cup with. Hanna helped me get a drink of water before I took a seat.
Then I started crying. Sometimes when you don’t know what to do with yourself all you can do is cry. I cried so much that I started sobbing. But the sobbing caused more pain in my arm. Every tiny little movement hurt. So I stopped crying.
“It’s going to be okay,” Hanna said.
I wondered if my mom had forgotten that she was supposed to come to the emergency room. She has forgotten a lot of things lately.
One hour, forty-three minutes and twenty-seven seconds later, my mom finally rushed in. She was shouting at the staff and waving her arms with panic in her eyes. I wondered how she would react in a real emergency. My mom gave Hanna a lollipop and told her that she would take over now. She doesn’t realize how embarrassing she is.
The nurse showed us into the examination room and said that she would give me something for the pain. I sat down on a chair and she put a needle in a vein on my left hand.
She gave me a dose of something called morphine. I felt the medicine run through my blood, and the pain eased up instantly. I’d take this over a cigarette any day. Then the doctor came in and told me to take my shirt off.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t move my arm.”
“You have to do it anyway,” he said.
I didn’t do anything. I just looked at him.
The doctor turned to my mom. She was standing in the corner, holding her handbag in a tight grip. I think he was waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t. She doesn’t really get involved much these days.
The doctor looked at me again. “Okay,” he said. Then he got me to lie face down on a bed with my detached arm dangling at the side. Next he put a bucket of water on the floor and told me to grab hold of the handle. And then he started to increase the height of the bed. “Stretching your arm out should make your shoulder slip back into position,” he said. I waited for a pop that never came. But then suddenly the doctor said, “I think we’ve got it!”
No way, I thought. But then I tried to move it and he was right. My arm worked again! The nurse put a sling around my arm and told me to keep it on for a week. “If it ever happens again you could try this at home,” she said. Then she walked away. And then the doctor came over and told me never to try this at home.
Afterwards, I got to choose dinner. Anything I wanted. I chose Grandiosa frozen pizza and ate it in front of the TV. My mom told me that I could stay home from school the next day.
At 9.36 p.m. I was lying in bed thinking about the comment Hanna made about my dad and my curly hair. And so I played with the thought of my dad not being my dad. That somewhere out there, there was a man with brown curly hair who was my real father. A man who would hug me goodnight, and ask me how my day was. And care.
As I was thinking about my perfect dad, my actual dad walked into my room. The one with the straight hair and the moustache.
He said, “How’s the arm?” “It’s all right.”
“I told you not to hang out with that girl.”
“It wasn’t her fault.”
He didn’t say anything so I said, “I’m seeing her again tomorrow.”
“No you’re not. Stay inside. Take it easy. Play some video games.”
As he walked out of my room he tripped over some dirty laundry on the floor and barged into the wall. I heard him cursing as he walked into the living room.
And I thought: That guy is definitely my dad. No doubt about it.
4
Domestic Silence
My dad told me to go down to the basement and shoot some people in the head so I did. But it was hard to hold the controller with my arm in the sling, so I turned off the Xbox after a few minutes. You never really know how much you need both arms until you have just one.
Sigve doesn’t like it when I touch his Xbox, so I tried to leave everything just the way I found it. The Xbox was exactly eleven centimetres from the back wall and it was rotated thirty-seven degrees to the left. And the controller was on top. Before I was born, Sigve had three whole years as an only child. Maybe he liked it that way. Maybe that is why he hates me.
My mom said I had to take a day off and rest. It was weird being in the house when everything was so quiet. My mom was answering phone calls at her office. My dad was making phone calls at his office. Sigve was at school. Quiet.
At 11.04 a.m. I went into the kitchen to get myself a glass of chocolate milk. As I walked through the living room I thought I saw a shadow passing by the window. By the time I turned around it was gone. And then, a couple of seconds later, I could feel someone staring at me through the sliding door that leads to the terrace. I slowly turned around and found myself looking straight into the
eyes of someone I knew well. It was Oscar. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. He just stared at me with his yellowish eyes, as if waiting for me to do something. And so I opened the door to let him in.
Oscar is my cat. He is black and fluffy and when I opened the door he ran in with his raggedy tail straight up in the air. Then he started rubbing his body against my legs while purring and meowing. He does that a lot these days to let us know he wants food. Oscar is on a strict diet because the vet said that he was too fat. He’s only allowed to eat fifty-five grams of dry cat food per day. But I figure Oscar wouldn’t be meowing so often if he wasn’t hungry, so I sneak him treats when no one is watching me. Which is more often than you’d think.
I opened a can of tuna for Oscar and poured myself a glass of chocolate milk. Then I went into the living room and turned on the TV. I didn’t want to watch anything, I just wanted some noise. When you’re used to yelling, silence is scary.
I rarely get the house to myself so I felt that I should make the most of it. I decided to sneak around and go through secret drawers and cupboards. Maybe I’d find papers that prove I’m adopted. Or the death certificate of my real dad. Or money.
The thing is, we don’t really have any secret drawers or cupboards. So I took my glass of chocolate milk and went into my parents’ room. I found a bottle of white wine in my mom’s sock drawer. And a photograph of Magnus in my dad’s bedside drawer. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Then I went into Sigve’s room. His clothes were all over the floor, and on his desk there were four empty Coke bottles and a plate with leftover pizza on it. I snooped around there for a while, but because of all the mess I got really nervous that I wouldn’t be able to put everything back exactly where I found it, so I left his room.
At 2.21 p.m. Hanna called me and told me she needed a favor. She said, “I have a date with Patrik on Saturday.”
Patrik is her boyfriend. He is one year older than her (he turns seventeen this year) and they have been together for a really long time. Over a month.
Hanna continued, “And the thing is, he is kind of stuck looking after his little brother. I mean he’s thirteen and all, but he is not allowed to be home alone after he tried to burn down their garage.” “Okay?”
“Yeah, so I was wondering if you might be willing to tag along and keep his brother company. You might even know who he is? Ruben Oftedal.”
I do know who Ruben Oftedal is. He is a year below me. Supposedly, someone paid him twenty kroner to eat a grasshopper when he was in the second grade, so I guess he’s a little bit weird. And also: he tried to burn down a garage. But last summer I saw him helping a little girl who fell off her bike, so he seems nice too. And he has the same haircut as Timothée Chalamet, which is kind of cool.
“He knows who you are anyway,” Hanna said. “He thinks you’re cute. So are you in?”
“Okay.”
“Thanks, Malin. Hey, make sure you have fresh breath on Saturday.” “What?”
Hanna laughed. “Hey, you’re going on a date. Doesn’t hurt to be prepared.” “What do you mean?”
Hannah laughed. “He might want to kiss you.” Most of the girls in my class had kissed boys already and I was thinking that I should know how to do this already, but I didn’t.
I went into the room that my dad calls his study, and sat down in front of the computer.
When I typed in How to kiss… Google came up with these suggestions:
How to kiss a frog
How to kiss a girl
How to kiss good
How to kiss a boy for the first time
How to kiss with tongue
Apparently, there are more people out there who want to know how to kiss a frog than how to kiss a boy. That’s weird. I mean, I’m pretty sure that the frog wouldn’t care either way.
I clicked on the link How to kiss a boy for the first time.
The article had four main points:
1. Before the kiss
2. Leaning into the kiss
3. During the kiss
4. After the kiss
Each point was explained in detail:
• Lock eyes with him and move your body closer to him to indicate that you want him to kiss you. Pucker your lips.
• Keep your eyes open as you lean into the kiss, and close them just before making lip contact. Tilt your head as you lean in to avoid bumping noses.
• Breathe in and out through your nose. For your first kiss don’t linger too long. Begin to pull away after five seconds.
• Open your eyes and smile at the boy you just shared a kiss with.
I guess I didn’t realize how complicated this kissing thing was until I googled it. I printed out a copy of the article so I could study it later. And then I also clicked on the link How to kiss with tongue just to be on the safe side. It doesn’t hurt to be prepared.
At 3.42 p.m. Sigve came home and went down to the basement.
At 4.36 p.m. my mom came home and got started on dinner.
At 4.42 p.m. my dad came home and went straight into his study.
At 4.46 p.m. my mom said, “Oscar is looking thinner already.”
At 5.11 p.m. Sigve started yelling at me for messing up his current game of Call of Duty.
At 5.17 p.m. my dad started yelling at me for googling How to kiss with tongue.
And at 5.21 p.m. I turned the TV off, because everything was back to normal.
5
Domestic Tension
I fell asleep in PE. I was sitting at the side, watching my class play dodgeball (I couldn’t play because I had to have my arm in the sling for another four days and sixteen hours). I was fine with watching, because no matter what game we’re playing (football, handball, field hockey, volleyball or basketball), I always seem to end up getting hit in the head with a ball.
I was really tired so I nodded off for a couple of minutes. And I woke up on the floor with my teacher, Haakon Krag, splashing water in my face because he thought that I had passed out. He smelled of garlic and Fisherman’s Friend. Some of my classmates laughed at me, but most of them were just annoyed because I held up the game. I told Haakon that I was okay, and then I went and sat on one of the exercise balls, because I figured it would be harder to fall asleep if I was sitting on a ball. Then I was so busy trying not to fall asleep that I forgot to pay attention and I got hit with the ball a couple of times. I wasn’t even playing and I still got hit in the head.
I couldn’t sleep last night because I was worried that I would wake up with Sigve standing over my bed holding a sharp object.
At 7.03 p.m. the day before, I was on my way to the toilet and suddenly Sigve jumped in front of me and blocked the entrance to the bathroom. He had murder in his eyes and a half-empty glass of chocolate milk in his hand. He held up the glass and said, “Forget something?”
I guessed I’d left my glass somewhere but Sigve isn’t normally too concerned about dirty dishes so I didn’t understand why he was so worked up. Then I realized that I must have left it in his room. I tried to think of an excuse for me to have been in his room, but it was hard to concentrate because I really had to pee.
But he didn’t ask me why I had been in his room. Instead he said, “So where is it?” His voice was calm, but he sounded really mad.
“Where is what?” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
But I didn’t. All I found in his room were dirty clothes and leftover pizza.
Then he said, “If you don’t give it back within the next few hours I will kill you in your sleep.” And then he walked off.
As I didn’t take anything from his room, I obviously couldn’t return it, so I tried to stay awake all night. I figured he couldn’t kill me in my sleep if I was awake.
My mom works part-time as a secretary down at Haasund Pipes. I knew she got off work ea
rly on Thursdays so I could go home straight after school without worrying about being alone with Sigve.
When I came home my mom had already started on dinner. She was making a venison casserole and she said it tastes better if you let it cook for a while. She stirred the pot and put some red wine in it. Then she poured some red wine in a glass and took a sip, while continuing to stir the pot. A glass of red wine is good for the heart, she says. My mom has a great heart.
At 2.35 p.m. Aunt Lillian, who is my mom’s sister, and Magnus, who is my cousin, came over. They live over on Knuds Street, which is just a ten-minute walk from our house. I don’t know who Magnus’s dad is and I don’t think Magnus does either. Magnus is sixteen and my favourite cousin. He always lets me tag along and he doesn’t yell at me or tell me to shut up. I think it’s because he doesn’t have any siblings. He doesn’t know how it feels to truly hate someone.
Magnus is a swimming champion. He’s got a lot of trophies in his room and he’s famous in all of Haasund. Recently he’s been practising swimming underwater, and when he arrived he asked me if I could help him with something. We went into the bathroom and he filled a bucket with lukewarm water. He put the bucket on the floor and kneeled down next to it. He pointed at my watch. “Time me.” Then he took a deep breath and put his head in the bucket and I turned the timer on. I watched the numbers on the display increasing: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…
It took for ever before Magnus came back up. I thought about Sigve and wondered if he was still mad. I thought about Ruben Oftedal and wondered what kind of music he listens to. I thought about Frida Berg and wondered how she got her hair to look so perfect all the time. Then I thought about Magnus, who had his head in a bucket on my bathroom floor, and wondered if he was okay. I said, “Are you okay?” But he didn’t answer, and I started wondering if I had to go and get help.
The Unpredictability of Being Human Page 2
