She’s on her way home to Holbæk. She spent the night with a guy she met at The Harlekin Night Club a week ago.
He’s nineteen and lives in a studio apartment.
She’s a boarding student at Stenhus School and didn’t make the last train.
There’s only a slight chance that the rector overlooked her empty bed.
It’s the first time she’s broken the rules, so it’s possible she’ll be allowed to stay, but they’ll certainly contact her parents.
They live in Barcelona.
Her father’s the supervisor of the local Vestas office there, and her mother writes serials for Home and Family under the pseudonym Jutta Federspiel.
The protagonists have names like Victoria Bak, Jack Holt, and Kassandra Bilde, and there’s no limit to the suffering they must endure in the name of love.
A few hours earlier, she lay against an ice cold wall observing the sleeping carpenter’s apprentice and his tattooed arm, the first man she allowed to penetrate her.
She’s lived at the boarding school for six months, and no one has bothered her.
No one has reversed her room while she was out partying.
Nor has she gotten the car wash everyone talks about.
They tie you down in an office chair, then push you back and forth through the showers, under alternating blasts of hot and cold water.
Actually she’s in love with a boy in her class who plays the sax, and actually he was at the night club that night.
Instead of approaching him, she started talking to the two guys beside her.
She pretended to be drunker than she was—a trick she learned from one of her girlfriends—and when one asked her if she wanted to dance, she said yes.
She positioned herself so she could see her classmate, but in between two songs, the carpenter’s apprentice said something that made her laugh, and when she looked over there again, he was gone.
At least she can say she did it before she turned sixteen.
