He avoids her gaze. She looks a little too desperate for him to be able to handle eye contact.

“I have to go to school, Mom.”

She nods, her teeth biting into her lower lip.

“Yes. Yes. Of course . . . it was silly. I’m silly.”

She feels like going after him and asking a million questions. Late last night she found sheets in the dryer, and he’s never washed so much as a sock for himself before. There was a T-shirt there too, with bloodstains that hadn’t quite come out. When he was in the garden this morning firing pucks she went into his room. Found the blouse-button on the floor.

She wants to go after him, but she doesn’t know how to talk to an almost grown man through a closed bathroom door. She packs her briefcase and gets in her car and drives half an hour into the forest before stopping. She sits there all morning, so that no one at work will ask why she’s there so early. Because she told them she was going to be spending the morning with her son.

*

Kira is standing with her hand against the door of Maya’s room, but she doesn’t knock again. Her daughter has already said she’s ill, and Kira doesn’t want to be that mother. The nagging, uncool, anxious “helicopter parent.” She doesn’t want to knock again to ask if there’s actually something else wrong. You can’t do that; nothing makes a fifteen-year-old girl clam up more than the words “Do you want to talk?” You can’t just open the door and ask why she has suddenly started washing her own clothes of her own volition. After all, what is Kira? The secret service?

So Kira does the not-nagging, not-anxious, not-helicopter, cool-mom thing. She gets in her car and drives off. Forty-five minutes into the forest she stops the car. Sits there alone in the darkness and waits for the pressure on her chest to subside.

*

Lyt opens the door and looks like he’s just seen a cake.

“Kevin! Hi! Er . . . what . . . ?”

Kevin nods at him impatiently.

“Ready?” Lyt asks.

“For . . . what? School? Now? With you? You mean . . . do I want to walk to school? With you?”

“Are you ready or not?”

“Where’s Benji?”

“Fuck Benji,” Kevin snaps.

Lyt stands there in shock with his mouth open, unable to think of anything to say. Kevin rolls his eyes impatiently.

“Are you waiting for Communion or what? Shut your mouth, for fuck’s sake. Let’s go.”

Lyt stumbles off and hurries to make sure he’s got his shoes on the right feet and his outdoor clothes at least relatively close to the appropriate body parts. Kevin doesn’t say a word all the way, until his outsize teammate grins and pulls out a hundred-kronor note.

“So do I owe you this or not?”

He starts giggling uncontrollably when Kevin takes it. Kevin tries to look nonchalant as he says:

“But keep your mouth shut about it, okay? You know what women are like.”

Lyt has never looked more euphoric than when he was given the chance to share a secret with his team captain.

*

Maya’s phone rings, and she wishes with all her soul that it might be Ana, but it’s Amat again. She hides the phone under her pillow as if she were trying to smother it. She doesn’t know what to say to him, and she knows that Amat will primarily be wishing he hadn’t seen anything at all. If she doesn’t answer the phone, maybe the two of them can find some way of pretending that nothing happened. That it was just a misunderstanding.

She removes the batteries from all the fire alarms and opens all the windows before putting her blouse on the floor of the shower and setting light to it. Then she sets light to a carton of cereal, letting the top burn before putting it out and leaving the remains on the kitchen counter. When her mom, a woman with the nose of a hungry grizzly bear, comes home and wonders why there’s a smell of smoke, the explanation will be that Maya managed to knock the carton of cereal onto a lit burner on the stove.

She carefully sweeps up the remains of the blouse from the shower and only then does she realize that the buttons have melted and stuck to the drain, and the synthetic material hasn’t turned to ash the way she had hoped. If Ana had been there, she would have said: “Shit, Maya, if I ever murder anyone, remind me NOT to ask you for help!” She misses her. God, how she misses her. For several minutes she sits on the bathroom floor crying and trying to make herself phone her best friend, but she can’t do that to her. Can’t drag her into this. Can’t force her to carry this secret.

It takes more than an hour to clean the bathroom and get rid of the remains of the burned blouse. She puts them in a plastic bag. Stands shaking in the doorway and stares at the garbage bin ten yards away. It’s light outside now, but that doesn’t make any difference. She’s scared of the darkness, in the middle of the day.

25

Ana is walking to school alone. Holding her phone in her hand like a weapon. Maya’s number on the screen, her finger on the button, but she doesn’t call. The most important promise they made was never to leave each other, not because of safety but because the promise made them equals. They’ve never been equals in any other way. Maya still has two parents. A brother. A home that doesn’t smell of cigarettes and vodka. She’s smart, funny, popular. Gets better grades. She’s musical. Brave. She can get better friends. And she gets guys.

If Ana left Maya alone in the wilderness Maya would die. But what she didn’t realize when she left Maya alone at a party was that it amounted to the same thing.

Ana keeps her finger on the button, but doesn’t call. In a few years’ time she’ll read an old newspaper article about research showing that the part of the brain that registers physical pain is the same part that registers jealousy. And then Ana will understand why she hurt so badly.

*

Amat and Fatima are standing at the bus stop as usual, but nothing else is the same. When Fatima was out shopping yesterday everyone said hello to her. When she went to the cash register, Tails, who owns the whole store, came over and tried to give her everything free of charge. She didn’t let him, of course, no matter how wealthy he was, and in the end the huge man threw up his hands and said with a chuckle, “You’re as stubborn as winter; I can see where Amat gets it from!”

His white car is coming along the road now, a couple of minutes ahead of the bus. He stops and says he’s been to one of his other stores and just happened to be passing. Fatima doesn’t know if it’s true. At first she declines his offer of a lift to the rink, but changes her mind when she sees the way Amat is looking at the car. Tails is driving, Fatima is sitting in the passenger seat, and in the rearview mirror she can see how proud that makes her son. That he has been able to make this happen.

As the boy practices on his own that morning, Tails sits in the stands alongside the A-team coach and the GM. When Fatima goes into the club president’s office to empty the trash can, the president stands and picks it up off the floor for her. Shakes her hand.