Freak City (7 page)

“So what was up with Sandra and Daniel?” I couldn’t keep my curiosity under check.

We went into the classroom, where Ms. Hot Bod was scribbling a problem on the board. Her skirt hugged her ass, and her braid bobbed up and down with her every move. “He couldn’t even stand up straight,” Claudio whispered. “He threw himself down on some air mattress and passed out. Sandra popped him one on the chin or something. Didn’t know she had such a strong punch. But the guy was so far gone he didn’t even notice.”

Inwardly, I applauded. The guy was an asshole; finally Sandra had figured it out.

Tobias shuffled in looking exhausted. As soon as he saw Ms. Hot Bod, his face brightened up.

“
Cama redonda
,” Claudio whispered, pulling his hat down even further over his eyes.

“What does that mean?”

“Something like group sex,” Claudio replied. “In Spanish.”

I turned red. I had thought the same thing at the same time. Did this end at some point? Did my dad think about sex every time he saw a female, too?

I thought about Aunt Vera, Tanya, my mom. Definitely not.

My father was old. He thought about climbing. No wonder we weren’t getting along lately. I chewed on the end of my pencil pensively.

“My mom wants to see you again, by the way,” Claudio remembered. “She’s always asking about you. Secretly, I think you’re her favorite!”

Claudio’s mother was an amazing woman. She was Spanish and really did have a thing for me. I was much more polite and nicer to her than Claudio. She had once told me I was like a son to her.

“I’ll come by sometime soon,” I promised.

“Really?” Claudio nodded. “Maybe on Friday, after we get our report cards. What are you doing during the vacation, anyway?”

I turned red again. At some point, I would have to say something about the sign language course. But this wasn’t the right moment for that.

“Please open your math books to page 132.” Ms. Hot Bod had put on her serious face.

“You think she always plays the dominatrix in private, too?” Claudio grinned.

What was Leah doing right then? Did she go to school like me? Was there a school for deaf kids? Group sex . . . there’s surely no way to say that in sign language. Being deaf must be frustrating sometimes!

“Is something wrong with your hearing?” Ms. Hot Bod glared at me. “You’ve daydreamed your way through math for months. Pull yourself together here at the end of the year and demonstrate this problem for us!”

“
Cama redonda
!” Claudio hissed at me.

“Giving away the answer doesn’t count!” Ms. Hot Bod looked at us accusingly. I stood up on shaky legs and went up to the board.

“What are you gonna do now? Tobias and I want to go to Meyer’s photo studio. He changed the display in his windows yesterday.” Meyer was a photographer near our school. He was known for his erotic photography. Twice now we had discovered photos of older girls who went to our school in his display window.

“I’ve got something else to do.” I looked away, feeling caught. During the lunch break, I had decided to go back to Freak City. Maybe Leah would be there. I couldn’t explain why, but I urgently wanted to see her again.

“You wouldn’t be starting up something sly now, would you? A new girlfriend you aren’t telling us about?” Claudio looked at me with distrust.

“Course not!” I shook my head. We had been best friends since the first grade. I had never had secrets from Claudio. The only thing I hadn’t told him about was the night with Sandra. Claudio had a lifelong subscription as an honorary virgin, and my news would only have made him depressed.

“Hey, guys, Ms. Hot Bod gave me a written warning!” Tobias joined us, out of breath. He had a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and lit it just outside the entrance to the school.

“Really? What for?”

“She found out that I signed that last note about staying home sick instead of my mom. She said if I do that again, she’ll write me up for forgery.” Ms. Hot Bod was not someone to mess around with.

“Mika’s working on something he doesn’t want to tell us about.” Claudio was still studying me with great concern. “Something is up with you. You’re acting so weird. I hope you haven’t decided you’re a homo.” Claudio and Tobias were constantly making jokes about gays.

“That’s bull, man!” I turned beet red. I couldn’t help it. Claudio must have thought he had hit the nail on the head. Alarmed, he and Tobias exchanged looks.

“You’re cool with me, gay or not,” Tobias said and blew his smoke in my face.

“Me, too,” Claudio added in a conciliatory way. “But then you can forget about the four-way with Ms. Hot Bod. I don’t want you messing around with my backside and all that. Gay sex is only an option after I’ve checked out everything else!”

“I really have to get going.” These guys were really getting on my nerves. “If you see someone hot in the window, take pictures for me with your cell phone.”

“Will do.” Tobias hooked his arm in Claudio’s. “Come on, darling, let’s go.”

“Very funny!” I turned around, irritated, and went in the opposite direction.

I should have told both of them right away. It was absurd to make such a big secret of the whole thing, blowing it out of proportion. Nothing had even happened yet. And there was a good chance that nothing would come of it anyway. I bumped into the girl we had followed through the streets. So what? There was nothing special about it. They had said it themselves: it didn’t matter to them what I did. Who I hung out with was none of their business. Tobias and Claudio were jerks. But they were tolerant jerks. Me, gay—that was totally absurd!

I thought about Leah and couldn’t understand why I was so reluctant to talk about her. Was it because she was deaf? My buddies definitely wouldn’t give a rip about that. Leah was good looking; everything else was secondary. Maybe they would even think it was cool that Leah couldn’t hear. If we all got together sometime, we could keep up our typical comments about Ms. Hot Bod and wouldn’t need to be afraid that Leah would flip out about it and dump me.

Getting together . . . somehow I couldn’t begin to imagine how a meeting between Leah and my two best friends would go. Those two worlds didn’t seem to fit together very well.

The subway pulled up, and I rode toward downtown. Then I walked the same way I had shadowed the girls last Thursday. At least I didn’t have to keep hidden this time.

The park was full of people today. They lay on picnic blankets all over the place and soaked up the sun. Freak City looked like it was closed. When I tried the door anyway, disappointed, I noticed that I had been wrong. They were open, there was just nothing happening inside. A woman in a wheelchair sat at one of the tables. Tommek stood at the counter leafing through a magazine.

“Hi!” he said with surprise. “You came back!”

I nodded awkwardly and waved at him. “Can I have some apple juice?”

“Sure.” Tommek set aside the magazine and poured me a glass. He studied me. “Why are you here? The weather’s amazing out there. You should be with your friends at the pool.”

“Is Leah here?” I decided to come right out with it.

Tommek’s eyebrows came together. He almost looked jealous. “Not yet.” He glanced at the clock. “She always comes around one thirty and has lunch here. That’s kind of become her routine. If you want, you can wait for her here.”

I took my apple juice over to the pinball machine and threw in some coins. The machine started to blink.

I took a shot. Missed.

Shot. Missed.

Shot. Missed.

What was I doing here, anyway? I was waiting for a girl that I couldn’t even communicate with.

My cell phone went off. I had a photo text from Claudio.

I opened it. The guys had taken a shot of a picture of two twin sisters in their mid-fifties in almost see-through nightgowns. The photograph hung in a gold frame in Meyer’s display window. The two women’s hair was all curled into ringlets and in their weird poses, they looked like something you’d want to run away from. Were they going to surprise their husbands with that ugly picture? No wonder the divorce rate was constantly on the rise.

I rolled my eyes and deleted the picture. My hand reached for the lever on the pinball machine. Shot—and—scored!

In the background, I heard noises. Steps. Two people came into the room. Somehow I knew that it was Leah. I was overcome by panic. I stared at the blinking symbols on the pinball machine as if I were hypnotized and didn’t dare turn around.

“Two Cokes,” came from the direction of the bar. “Two lunches for me and Leah.” The voice sounded strange, monotone, as if it were a robot speaking. Curiosity won and I turned around.

At the counter stood Leah and another girl. Leah’s friend had short hair, a piercing in one eyebrow, and wore a bright blue Adidas jacket. Tommek nodded and gestured toward an empty table. So that’s what Tommek had meant. Of course deaf people can talk, but it sounded a little off somehow. Leah had resolutely remained silent the whole time. As they moved to the table, Leah spotted me at the pinball machine. Feeling shy, I smiled at her.

Leah poked her short-haired friend, and the two of them started a conversation in sign language. Their hands flew through the air, and the two girls stared over at me the entire time. They were clearly talking about me, and yet I couldn’t understand a word of it. The girl with the short hair laughed. She laughed, and unlike her spoken voice, her laugh sounded completely normal.

“Sweet!” she said aloud once, as if Leah could understand her. She tapped two fingers on her chin as she said it, then they both sat down.

Sweet. What did she mean by that? Were they talking about me?

“Do you want to sit with the girls? There’s spaghetti with tomato sauce. No worries, I’m not cooking it.” Tommek gave me a wide grin. If he did have a thing for Leah, he was a generous loser.

I smiled back gratefully. I still had eight euros in my pocket. That should be enough. “Sure. Do you think they’ll mind?”

“Ask them!” Tommek said and headed off toward the tiny kitchen. You could hear a can opener. Tommek cursed under his breath. That guy was hilarious. Sit down with two girls who didn’t understand a word I said!

I grabbed my glass and mustered all the courage I could. Then I went straight to their table and pointed to the empty chair next to Leah. The girls looked at each other. The one with short hair giggled. Leah didn’t giggle. She looked at me, sizing me up, and then finally gave me a merciful nod. At the same time, she made a short sign with her right hand. She made a fist and moved it up and down quickly. Apparently, that was the motion for
yes
.

So I could already understand
yes. Yes
and
sweet.
What kinds of sentences could I form with those two words?

Are you an idiot? Yes.

Are you about to make a complete fool of yourself? Yes.

What’s the opposite of sour? Sweet.

I was frustrated. I was sitting here and yet I was about 7 million light years away from a normal conversation with Leah.

“I’m Franzi,” Leah’s friend said in her flat voice. She pointed to herself and made a fluttering sign with both hands. Then she pointed to Leah. “That’s Leah!” Her hands moved through the air somewhere near her forehead.

It was all Greek to me. Tommek came back over to the table and set two Coke bottles down in front of the girls.

“Come on, it’s easy!” he said when he noticed my confusion. “Franzi just showed you her name sign.”

“Name sign?” I looked at Tommek for an explanation. “What’s that supposed to be?”

Tommek shrugged his shoulders. “Well, when people who hear talk to each other, we use our names. But for deaf people it’s a little harder. They would have to spell out the name each time, right? So they give each other name signs. They look for a simple gesture that stands for someone. That makes it easier to talk about people they both know.” What Tommek said astonished me. I looked at the two girls with curiosity.

“Franzi,” Franzi said slowly. Her hands repeated the fluttering motion. “Leah.” She tapped her forehead with her middle finger, and then turned her hand outward.

“The name sign for Franzi is the sign for butterfly,” Tommek patiently explained. “When she was a kid she collected butterflies. Back then, you could still buy them at flea markets, mounted behind glass. Now Franzi is into protecting the environment and would never buy something like that anymore. But the sign stuck with her. And it’s somehow fitting.”

I nodded in amazement. “And Leah?”

“Leah’s sign means intelligence. Leah is quite an ace at school. She has perfect command of grammar, for example, which is often difficult for deaf people. And she’s clever. You’ll find that out yourself, sooner or later.”

I thought back to the moment when she had let her hand tremble. That was probably what Tommek meant by clever. He was right.

“And every deaf person has a name sign like that?” I asked.

Tommek nodded. “Not only every deaf person. The deaf also give each hearing person a signed name. They want to talk about people who hear, too, after all. Leah gave me the name sign for red hair!” He moved his index finger across his lips and then grasped a piece of his hair. It made sense, actually! Maybe sign language wasn’t so hard after all.