Adventures with Waffles (9 page)

“You should walk at a steady pace,” said Dad. “Otherwise you’ll just get tired.”

But how could we walk at a steady pace when we were that excited? Our feet ran by themselves!

We soon came out of the forest and up onto the mountain itself. It’s almost flat there. Everything looks different, I mentioned.

“It’s because we’re closer to the sky,” said Lena’s mom, jumping from stone to stone with Lena and me. When we turned around, we saw our cove far, far below us. Now and then we spotted sheep. Sometimes they were ours, and sometimes they were other people’s. But we weren’t rounding them up today. First we were going to stay a night in the cabin.

Our cabin is really just a hut, without electricity or a toilet. But there’s space for lots of people if they sleep head to toe. I think it’s the best cabin in the world. It reminds me of Auntie Granny, because it seems so happy when we arrive. Soon there were mountain smells surrounding us on all sides. Mom and Uncle Tor were frying bacon on the gas stove inside, and outside, Dad was making coffee on the campfire.

Dad’s so happy when he’s up on the mountain. Then you can ask him about things that you wouldn’t normally dare to ask about, and he laughs almost the whole time.

“You can’t be angry up on the mountain,” he explained when I told him. “Do you know what I mean, Trille?”

I searched my feelings and nodded. Lena thought if that’s the way things were, then Dad should go up on the mountain much more often. She was sitting on the other side of him, staring into the fire. I wished I could have given Lena a bit of my dad right then, so she could feel what it was like to have one—one who makes campfires and who likes being in the mountains. Actually, she should get to borrow him now and then.

“Yes, every Wednesday afternoon or something,” she said when I mentioned it. “Then I could take him up the mountain to give him a walk.”

Then came rounding-up day. Lena and I were supposed to go with Uncle Tor over some hilltops called the Peaks. They’re flat on one side, but on the other side they go straight down. Dad pointed and explained. He’s been rounding up sheep every year since he was the same age as me.

“Take good care of the children!” he told his younger brother.

“Aye, aye,” answered Uncle Tor.

My uncle is someone who walks in long strides, and Lena and I were only just able to keep up. I think he thought we were too young to be there, and he wanted to prove that he was right.

“You’re not exactly taking good care of us!” Lena shouted angrily when she had to stop and empty her boot and Uncle Tor just kept on going.

He didn’t hear.

“Come on, Lena,” I said.

“No!”

“But we’re rounding up the sheep!”

“Yes!”

She stood completely still. I sighed and lowered my hood. And then I heard it too. A weak, frightened bleat that was almost not like bleating at all.

Lena and I followed the sound. It was coming from the edge. We lay down on our stomachs and snaked our way forward.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

A ewe was standing on a ledge farther down. She must have been there for a long time. She was so weak that she barely had the strength to bleat. Imagine if we hadn’t stumbled upon her! I crept farther forward and read her ear tag. The yellow clip said 3011.

“She’s ours.”

“I wonder how she got down there,” Lena said, crawling even farther forward.

“Over there, most likely,” I said, pointing at a small, steep crevice that went down to the ledge. I got up and looked across the Peaks for Uncle Tor. He had vanished. When I turned back toward Lena, she had vanished too.

My heart began thumping so hard that it hurt.

“Lena,” I whispered.

No answer.

“Lena!”

“Over here!”

In astonishment, I peered over the edge.

“Who do I look like now?” she shouted, looking at me excitedly from down below. She was hanging from a mountain birch in the crevice, her yellow boots resting against some tufts of grass on a little outcrop in the rock wall.

“Yourself.”

Lena rolled her eyes and reached even farther into the air with her free hand, as if she were trying to get hold of the sheep far below.

“I look like that Jesus—can’t you see?”

I tilted my head.

“Jesus didn’t have a red rain jacket. Come back up here.”

So then Lena tried to take off her rain jacket while hanging there.

“Lena, come back up here!” I shouted, frightened, edging my way forward so she could grasp my hand.

But as Lena took a step upward, the birch came loose from the rock face and, with the tree in her hand and a scream from her mouth, she disappeared.

Lena has fallen from high places quite a few times during my life, but I’d never been so scared that she was dead as I was then. I’ll never forget the terrible feeling I had in my stomach as I pulled myself as far toward the edge as I dared and peered down the very steep mountainside.

“Ow! My hand!” came a moan from far, far below. My best friend was sitting on a ledge just below the sheep, rocking back and forth. I was so relieved that I could have cried.

“Oh, Lena.”

“Oh, Lena, oh, Lena! I’ve broken my hand!” she shouted, furious.

I could see that she was really hurt. But Lena never cries. Not even then.

If only I could tell you how fast I ran that day! I was terrified that Lena would get bored sitting on her rock ledge and start climbing. That would have been just like her. I ran so fast that my mouth tasted of blood, and the whole time I pictured Lena, in her red rain jacket, in free fall, like an angry little superwoman. I realized suddenly that if anything happened to Lena, I wouldn’t be able to bear it. Where was Uncle Tor? Who would have thought an uncle could walk so far without looking back one single time? I shouted and ran and fell and shouted again. And ran. All the way to the last of the Peaks, where it starts to flatten out. I finally found my uncle there, and by then I was so frightened and angry that I just screamed.

“I should tumble down from the Peaks more often if they give you a helicopter ride every time,” Lena said when we were sitting in the cedar tree a couple of days later.

She was excited about everything that had happened—most of all because she had been winched up by a helicopter.

“Then Mom and Isak and I went to a café after I’d had the cast put on. I’ve been to the doctor’s so many times that it called for a celebration, they said.” Lena laughed and tapped her cast. “Don’t you wish you’d fallen down from the Peaks too, Trille?”

I smiled but didn’t say anything. I don’t think Lena realized how scared I’d been. I wasn’t able to tell her either. But when I went to bed at night, I couldn’t help thinking a slightly sad thought: Lena definitely wouldn’t have been as worried about me if I’d been sitting on that ledge.

O
ne day Isak suddenly came to visit when nobody was ill. He turned into the farmyard on his motorcycle while Lena and I were playing croquet. Lena was so stunned that she hit the ball into the hedge. I could tell she was really annoyed—she hates losing.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she told Isak gruffly.

Isak said it was good that nothing was wrong with Lena. It was unusual, he said, but very good. And then he told us that he’d brought a part for the half-finished motorcycle in the utility room.

“Mom’s not home yet. Did she order it?” Lena asked him skeptically.

“No, it’s a surprise,” said Isak.

He looked a little nervous and embarrassed. I imagined I would have been the same if I’d come on a surprise visit and the first thing I’d seen was Lena with a croquet mallet.

“Why don’t you play with us until she comes back?” I blurted out before Lena could say anything else.

Isak was glad to join us. Lena fell completely silent for a moment, but then I saw that she’d found the ball in the hedge.

“Ha, now we’ve got to start again,” she mumbled in satisfaction as she picked it up.

Isak began to visit more often. The half-finished motorcycle at Lena’s gradually started to look like a finished one. Lena didn’t say anything about their visitor for the first few weeks. It was as if she were pretending that Isak didn’t exist.

But then one day, when we were sitting in the cedar tree watching him and her mother putting spruce branches in the flower beds, Lena said, “He doesn’t like boiled cabbage.”

I leaned forward so I could see through the branches better.

“Does it really matter that much about the cabbage, Lena?”

Lena shrugged. I could see that she was thinking carefully.

“But what use are they otherwise, Trille?”

I couldn’t come up with anything this time either and felt a bit guilty for Dad.

“My dad eats boiled carrots too,” I said after a while, just to say something.

So did Isak, a beaming Lena reported the following day. She’d got him to eat three of her carrots in addition to his own. Grandpa laughed and said, “Poor creature.” And then Lena ran off again, because that poor creature was still visiting. I watched her disappear through the hole in the hedge.

“I think Lena has more fun with Isak than with me,” I said to Grandpa.

Grandpa was sitting there trying to darn a hole in a sock. He looks like an owl when he’s wearing his glasses.

“It’s good for Lena to have an Isak.
Ouch!
So you’ll just have to put up with it, Trille lad.”

“Yes,” I said after thinking for a while.

Grandpa’s usually right.

I don’t know if it was the thing with the carrots that did it, but Lena was so happy then, it was like having some kind of butterfly as a neighbor. Things like that are strange when you’re not used to them.

Then suddenly, one Wednesday at the end of November, she was back to the same old Lena. But even angrier. I noticed it as soon as we met to walk to school. She didn’t say hi, which is always a danger sign. It was almost good to see she could still be like that. It’s more normal. I didn’t say anything, though. It wouldn’t have been a good idea. Nobody should say anything to Lena when she’s like that. But Kai-Tommy did. As always. And this time he regretted it.

It was at recess. Most people had finished eating and were heading outside. Ellisiv was sitting at her desk, writing. When Lena walked past Kai-Tommy, he said, so quietly that Ellisiv couldn’t hear it, “Oh, can you imagine what it’d be like if we got rid of the girls in this class?”

Lena turned around sharply. I felt a tingle begin to go up my spine. The other boys also realized that something was about to happen, because suddenly everyone was looking at Lena and Kai-Tommy. Lena stood there, as thin as a piece of crispbread, with her pigtails out of line, and so angry that I held my breath.

“If you say that one more time, I’m going to thump you all the way to Nerdvika.”

Kai-Tommy smiled nastily, leaned a little closer, and said, “Oh, can you imagine what it’d be like if we got rid of the girls in this class?”

Then came the blow. Lena Lid, my best friend and neighbor, thumped Kai-Tommy in the middle of his face, sending him flying in an arc up to the desk where Ellisiv was sitting. It was like in a movie. Like in a PG-13, which I’m not allowed to watch but I’ve seen some anyway. And it was Lena who did it. She struck him with the hand that had just come out of the cast, dealing a blow that people spoke about for weeks afterward.

Apart from Kai-Tommy whimpering on the floor, the room was completely silent. We were all in shock—even Ellisiv. I wasn’t surprised: a whole entire student had almost landed on her head. But when Lena went toward the door, about to leave the room, our teacher shouted in an angry voice, “Lena Lid, where do you think you’re going?”

Lena turned around and looked at Ellisiv. “To the principal’s office,” she said.

By the time we had shuffled off home that day, Lena had been thoroughly reprimanded, but she hadn’t said sorry to Kai-Tommy. She had apologized to the principal, she said, and that would just have to do. She had a letter to take home, which she clutched in her sore hand, hidden under her jacket.

“Everyone thinks it’s great that you’re in our class, Lena. They think you’re the toughest and the coolest girl in the whole school. They said so themselves,” I told her.