Freak City
Authors: Kathrin Schrocke
Our heads were close together and our shoulders touched. Leah smelled good, like vacation, summer, and suntan lotion. I closed my eyes again. Her scent soothed me, and all at once, I was completely relaxed. Our conversation had worked, and I could absolutely imagine being friends with Leah. Introducing her to my parents, talking with her in sign language, and getting to know a few of the thousand guys she had crushes on. The sun beat down on us; summer had finally arrived. I lay there, so close to Leah, and at some point, fell asleep.
When I woke up again, the park was almost empty. I had sunburn on my neck, and Leah was gone. Her blanket was gone; her backpack had disappeared. There was a note on my bag.
Will we see each other again? We could be friends! I think I really like you . . .
THE INTERSECTION OF TWO PEOPLE, TWO WORLDS, BY LOVE.
Mika's heart is broken, until he sees Leah. A smart, beautiful, and brave girl, Leah has been deaf since birth. When Mika meets her for the first time, he feels something electric. They cannot communicate, so Mika decides to take a sign language course. His family and friends are skeptical, and Mika soon grows weary, too. The world of deaf people is so much different from his own. Can their two worlds intersect? There is also Sandra, Mika's ex-girlfriend, who he cannot seem to get over. But Mika cannot shake that Leah has captured his heart. . . . Author Kathrin Schrocke tells the story of two teens and their tender, quirky love—a love so extraordinary it can bring two worlds together.
Kathrin Schrocke was born in 1975 in Augsburg, Germany. She studied German and psychology in Bamberg. Schrocke has received numerous prizes and nominations for her work, including the Nettetaler Youth Book Prize (2010), and the nomination for the German Youth Literature Prize (2011) and the Hansjörg-Martin Prize for the best German Youth Thriller (2010). She lives in Berlin and is the author of numerous stories and plays, as well as novels for children and young adults.
Award-winning translator Tammi Reichel studied theology and women's studies before moving to Germany for ten years, where she got involved in the publishing world. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her family. Her most recent literary translation,
My Family for the War
, received the 2013 Batchelder Award from the American Library Association.
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I see that you think.
I think that you feel.
I feel that you want to,
But I don’t hear you . . .
—From the song “Just One Word” by the band Wir sind Helden
Some clever man once claimed that you can build something beautiful even from stones that have been placed in your way.
That’s true. Let a sixteen-year-old guy with a college savings plan tell you all about it.
Still, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into when I walked through the city with my two best buddies, following the girl.
I should have known what was going on. It was literally out in the open. It was so obvious; there was nothing to debate. But I was so out of it back then. Lovesick and stupid. I didn’t understand a thing. So instead, I ran after her downtown like the other two and made a complete fool of myself shooting off my mouth.
I only saw what I wanted to see: her wild, curly hair. The yellow miniskirt that had hitched up a little too high. The tattoo that started at her neck and disappeared somewhere underneath her fire-red T-shirt. The green flip-flops she was wearing made a torturous sound on the pavement. It sounded as if she were begging for mercy with every step.
It was too hot for the season and the air around us shimmered. And out of this shimmering stepped her proud figure. I was blind to everything else. Maybe it was also because of the heat. My brain was practically burned up from all the sun. So I only saw the flirty black curls, the outfit, and her confident stride.
The stones that fell from the sky right next to me, on the other hand, I didn’t see.
I didn’t hear them, either. Or did I?
My pulse was racing—I probably thought the loud noise was the beating of my heart.
My name is Mika, and I was fifteen then.
My name is Mika, that’s Finnish and means, idiotically, “Who is like God?”
I most certainly am not.
I had no idea about women. And it was a Monday afternoon in July when this strange story began.
The girl was supposed to be Claudio’s. No idea why. That was an unspoken plan among us guys.
Maybe it was because Tobias had been going out with Ellen since the school trip. Deep love, thousands of text messages, silly groping in the bicycle shed. He was so Ellen obsessed there was nothing to be done about it.
And I . . . it was only recently that I had become a broken man. Two weeks, three days and five hours ago, Sandra had dumped me. Sandra, isn’t that the name of a prophet who foretold death for the ancient Greeks? Whatever. For me, at any rate, she had been a world of trouble.
Imagine a lively bundle of energy that can’t stay still for a minute. A girl that careens through life like a Ping-Pong ball, whose only goal is to have fun and turn the heads of helpless guys like me. She had short hair dyed platinum blonde that she shaped into a quiff with lots of gel. She had seen that in a photo of Pink and was clearly the prettier of the two. She had something else in common with her favorite singer, too: she was the lead singer in a band. Just a high school band, but it was a beginning. After graduation, she wanted to go to Mannheim, to the Pop Academy, where she could learn all about the music industry and major in rock performance. We had seen a report about it on television together.
Sandra was talented and looked fabulous. So to be honest, it was only a matter of time before she broke up with me.
Since she dumped me, some kind of neural switch in my head had been thrown. I thought about her twenty-four hours a day, without interruption. What we had done and hadn’t done. What we had planned and hadn’t planned. What we had said and hadn’t said.
Even if I didn’t think about her for a moment, I was thinking of her. Every single second I mulled over our shattered relationship. I was a wreck, ready for the funny farm, and other girls didn’t interest me at all.
If I saw a steak, I thought about how Sandra held a fork. If I saw a moving van, I thought of the old desk she had smeared every inch of with permanent marker just as a gag. If I saw the movie listing for next week, I thought about her favorite film.
The Holiday.
Doesn’t that movie also start with a blonde who gives her man the boot? I should have known.
I was trapped in an endless loop of thoughts.
So Claudio was the lucky guy. He ran between me and Tobias, his cap pulled down on his forehead. His hands were sunk deep in his pockets, and he was racing as if he were hunting a golden hamster.
For his sake, we had been chasing this girl through the downtown streets for at least five minutes. We took turns whistling after her and let loose with a couple of stupid catcalls like we were professional big-city cats.
“Where did you get that fantastic ass?” Tobias yelled. And Claudio clicked his tongue. But the girl was definitively a number too cool. She just kept moving with this rocking gait. Not once did she turn around to look at us idiots.
And then at the intersection it happened. She was a few yards ahead of us. The light had been green forever. “If it’s red and you stop, I get a kiss!” shouted Claudio, and a few middle schoolers hanging around the telephone booth looked after us enviously.
The light did, in fact, turn red, but the girl crossed the street at the last second anyway, even though you could hear the truck from a mile away. It came tearing along, going fifty miles an hour downtown, shot around the curve, and just managed to brake with its tires screeching. It looked like a scene in an action movie, not real, more like a life-threatening stunt. He only missed running over the girl by a hair.
The truck driver was about to have a heart attack. His face was ashen gray and his eyes popped out of his head. He honked like a madman. But the girl didn’t care in the least, just kept on walking as if nothing had happened, head held high. She ran her left hand through her dark curly hair once, while our adrenaline levels shot into the stratosphere in time with the honking.
Next to us was a mother with a stroller. The baby screamed its head off. The boys at the phone booth gaped at us like idiots. And we stood there frozen in place, our hearts racing, because the truck driver was still pounding the horn with his fist. The sound hung in the air like a siren, and for a moment, war broke out.
“Are you out of your mind?” The driver had rolled down his window and yelled after the receding girl. Was that a brief moment of hesitation I saw? No. Nothing. Apparently, she really was suicidal.
She disappeared around the corner while we stood awkwardly at the traffic light with the crazed truck driver and the mother with the screaming baby.
“Do you guys know her?” the truck driver screamed at us. “If I get my hands on her, I’ll take her to court!”
We shook our heads. The baby finally calmed down, and the truck driver pulled away, cursing.
“Well, I guess that’s the end of that,” Claudio said. I nodded, confused somehow. My gaze was still over there, across the street where the girl had disappeared around the corner.
“What are you looking at?” That was Tobias.
“I’m not looking at anything,” I muttered. We walked back the opposite way and headed for an ice cream shop.
“Crazy twit,” Claudio said. “Women like that are always bad luck. Throwing themselves in front of cars, rappelling down buildings, and putting nuclear power plants out of commission. Too much excitement for my taste. I’d rather get together with Tina again.”