Freak City (9 page)

5-1-0-1- I snapped the cell phone closed again. I had already started to send this text message three times. Somehow, I just didn’t dare to do it.

“Want to see a movie Friday night?” I started typing in Leah’s number one more time.

My cell phone vibrated. I had a text from Sandra. Why now?

“Still awake?”

“Yup,” I replied. Not two minutes later my phone rang.

“I can’t sleep,” she sighed into the receiver. It was one o’clock in the morning. My alarm was going to go off at seven.

“I’m wide awake, too,” I said. Next to my pillow was the biography of a deaf actress, Emanuelle Laborit. Her pretty face was on the cover. She had gotten into a lot of trouble when she was young. Taken drugs, subway surfed, shoplifted. Later, she had become a successful actress. She had played the main role in a German movie about deaf people.
Beyond Silence
. The movie had won awards. I wanted to borrow a copy when I could find the time.

“Are you still thinking about it?” Sandra whispered into the phone.

“About what?” I set the book aside and crept under the covers. I didn’t want my parents to find out that I was having crisis sessions on the phone in the middle of the night.

“Us, silly!” Sandra said. “We were a great team, actually.”

I could feel my heart start to beat faster. I couldn’t help it. When I heard Sandra’s voice, it always happened.

“Have you been thinking it over?” I asked breathlessly. She had completely thrown me for a loop.

If she were to say that everything was all right now, I would delete Leah’s phone number in a heartbeat. I would never, ever go back to Freak City and just send Sabine a short message saying that I’d changed my mind about the class. They would all be mad at me. But I didn’t care. Sandra was still the most important thing for me.

“Not yet,” she said. “Give me a little more time. Until after summer vacation.”

Why, dammit, did she need so long to decide? It was an eternity until the vacation was over.

“I’ve gotta go,” I said, hurt.

“Fine.” Sandra also sounded offended.

I hung up and pressed the “send” button. The text to Leah left my room and reached her in the same second. Where did Leah live, anyway? I had no idea.

I waited a while for an answer. But it was the middle of the night. She would see my text in the morning.

“Hola hijo! Hola, mi amor! Has adelgazado?”
Claudio’s mom looked at me with concern. I liked her a lot, even if I didn’t understand a thing she said.

“What did she say?” I exchanged looks with Claudio.

“She asked you to marry her,” he said with a shrug and a grin. Fortunately, he didn’t carry a grudge. He had gotten over the business with Leah and never mentioned it again after our phone call. Now it was the last day of school, and long weeks of sunshine lay ahead of us.

Claudio’s mom pushed me into her overfilled kitchen. Things hung everywhere: braids of fresh garlic, half a ham, and bunches of dried herbs. Cooking was her passion. It smelled like beef stew in red wine sauce, and my stomach growled.

Once again, the woman rattled on and on. “She should finally learn our language!” I whispered in Claudio’s direction and looked at my hostess helplessly.

“You know how that is,” he said with boredom. “She’s not good at languages. Since my father left and she’s been with that strange Spanish guy, you can completely forget it. She doesn’t like German, either. She says it’s a language for bureaucrats.”

I laughed. “You’re a strange Spanish guy yourself!” I said.

“But not like him!” Claudio protested. “That guy is completely nuts. I’ve been in his apartment; there are pictures of bullfights all over the place. José used to do that himself, when he was younger. But it’s probably not a bad way to train to deal with my mom!”

Claudio’s mom was a fiery woman who packed some extra pounds. She always wore deep-cut, flowing dresses and her black hair was piled into a towering hairdo. When someone got into an argument with her, sparks flew. Maybe Claudio was right.

Claudio’s mom set down a steaming portion of stew in front of me. “Tell her it looks delicious!”

“Tell her yourself,
hijo
!” My buddy looked at me and yawned. He hated translating for me.

“So what’s going on with your sweet little thing?” Claudio stuffed his mouth with the fabulous food and looked at me with distrust. “Holding hands? French kissing? Making out? How far have you two lovebirds gotten, anyway?”

It made me uncomfortable to talk about things like that in front of Claudio’s mom. Maybe she did understand something. You could never be sure. Apart from that, Claudio was rude to her. Sometimes he acted like his mom wasn’t even in the room.

“Absolutely nothing has happened yet!” I hissed bashfully. Carefully, I cut my meat into pieces and smiled politely at my hostess. Claudio shoved entire hunks into his mouth and chewed loudly. “We’re still in the getting-to-know-each-other phase. You know, that’s what comes before kissing and making out. Sorry if no one has told you yet. But that’s how things usually work between men and women.”

Claudio had already cleaned half his plate. “And what have you found out about her so far? Does she have big boobs?”

Claudio’s mom ate her dinner silently. That’s the way it usually was. At some point, the two of us would talk to each other, and she just sat there next to us, like a lump on a log. The only time it was different was when her new boyfriend, the former bullfighter, was with us. Then the two of them talked up a storm, and Claudio had to translate for me as fast as he could.

“Her name is Leah,” I offered Claudio a tidbit of information. “That’s kind of all I know about her. Oh, she can play pool. Pretty good at it, actually.”

“Really?” Claudio stuck a fork in his last bite of meat and wolfed it down. “Sounds great, man. You have to let me and Tobias meet her soon. When are you going to see each other again?”

That reminded me of our embarrassing text exchange. Going to the movies, how did I come up with such a stupid idea? The only films we could see were the ones with subtitles, and Leah had already seen the few that were playing in the theaters.

We had decided to meet at the town pool on Sunday. Sometime we could get together and watch DVDs. They had subtitles, as many as you wanted. Watching DVDs . . . when, and where?

I definitely wasn’t ready to introduce Leah to my parents yet. “We’re getting together Sunday,” I said quickly. “You know . . .” I had to come out and say it. It wasn’t such a big deal. Deaf. What was so difficult about saying it out loud? “Leah . . . well, she’s . . .”

The phone rang, and Claudio jumped up. I was left at the table alone with his mom. She said something to me in Spanish. I just nodded.

When the elevator didn’t come, I took the stairs. The entire stairway smelled like some chemical cleaning solution. On the third floor, a sweaty man came running toward me. He was out of breath, his face beet red, and he seemed to be in a big hurry. I found the door and rang the bell.

“Get out of here!” I heard Sabine scream. “Get out of here and don’t you dare come back!” Downstairs, the door to the building opened and closed. Sabine must have been yelling at that guy.

Feeling shy, I knocked on the door. “It’s me, Mika. I’m here for the class.” Sabine tore the door open. Her eyes were swollen and red, and her hair stood out in every direction.

“Men are pigs,” she said. I looked awkwardly down at the tips of my shoes. When she was right, she was right.

Sabine grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into her apartment. It was filled with classy furniture, and on the walls hung modern prints in colored frames. “Did you see an ancient, ugly guy in the stairway?”

“Well, ancient might be a little exaggerated,” I replied. “And ugly . . . I don’t know.”

“You men always stick together!” Sabine said. She washed her face in the bathroom and then started to put on makeup. She wasn’t doing a very good job of it. She slapped a blob of makeup on her face and smeared it angrily.

Without an invitation, I sat down in the living room. I had pictured my first afternoon learning sign language differently. In the middle of the room stood a black lacquered table and a pink candleholder gently swayed above it. The sofa I sat on was red leather. To the left of it was a slanted CD shelf. It was supposed to be tilted like that.

“Interesting furniture,” I muttered when Sabine returned. She looked somewhat put together again.

“I sell furniture for a living,” she explained. “The interpreting is something I do on the side. And then I’m teaching the beginning sign language course, but that’s an exception. Usually the classes are taught by deaf people, but the deaf man who usually teaches it is in the hospital.”

“A deaf person can teach?” That seemed impossible to me.

“Sure! Learning from a native speaker is always the best way. You’d be amazed how well it works.”

I couldn’t stop looking at the kitschy, crown-shaped candleholder. “That guy before, he was a client.” Sabine had gradually calmed down. “Ordered a sinfully expensive custom kitchen for his wife last winter. After we planned everything and drew up an estimate, we agreed to meet up again.”

I nodded.

“Idiotically, I jumped right into the sack with him!” Sabine blurted. “As if I needed it! But what did I expect? Why should a guy leave his wife after he buys her a custom kitchen for eleven thousand euros?”

Eleven thousand euros! With prices like that, it might be smarter to rob a kitchen design studio than a bank!

“Men who buy kitchens for their wives are always suspect,” Sabine complained. “Either they have something to hide, or they’re planning something underhanded. Otherwise, they’d invest the money in some amazing trip for two!”

I sat on the designer couch with my face on fire. No adult had ever talked to me like that, as if we were on the same level, and I would understand the problems he or she was talking about.

“First, he swore that he would leave his wife,” she continued. “But of course that never happened. In the beginning, it was because she was in a deep depression, then they couldn’t afford to get divorced. And just now he admitted that she doesn’t even know about it yet. He’s never told her about me, even though three months ago he claimed he had come clean at home! I can completely forget about it. Those two will never break up! For him, I’m just some insignificant affair.”

I continued to say nothing.

“And what about you?” Sabine asked breathlessly. “Do you have some kind of relationship drama going on? Or am I the only one that this unbelievable garbage happens to?”

“I had a girlfriend,” I said awkwardly. “We were really happy, at least I was. But then she got bored. She broke it off suddenly. In a swimming pool.”

“In a swimming pool?” Sabine looked at me in amazement. “What style. Someone once broke up with me by text. That was the pits, too. Wolfgang. A ridiculous name for a coward! What’s your ex-girlfriend’s name, anyway?”

“Sandra.”

“Sandra,” Sabine repeated. “Were you two really close?”

“We slept with each other,” I said. It was weird saying that aloud. Sabine was the first one I had shared that with. “A month ago. It was really great. I wanted to go to Mannheim with her when we are done with school. She’s really talented and wants to be a singer. There’s some kind of Pop Academy there.”

“Oh, God, you poor thing! Women can be so heartless! You never forget your first love. The first breakup is always the worst. Everything after that is just routine.” Suddenly, Sabine jumped up. “We have to get going!”

“Where to?”

“To class, of course! You came for the sign language class, right? Wait a minute. What are you doing here, anyway?” Only then did it seem to occur to Sabine that something wasn’t quite right.

“I thought the class was here in your apartment,” I said. “You sent me the time and your address.”

“Really?” Sabine looked embarrassed. “The course is held at the university, of course. Here in my apartment, there’s only the intensive seminar in catastrophic relationships. But that lasts several semesters and it’s always full.” The discomfort I had felt at the beginning vanished, and I laughed.