The Circle (Hammer) - By Elfgren, Sara B.,Strandberg, Mats Page 0,102

been there? Maybe she’d imagined it.

But he kissed me.

She thinks about it for the millionth time – it’s like a mantra she’s repeated so often it’s starting to lose its meaning. In dark moments she wonders if the evening at Max’s house was just a figment of her imagination, a psychosis brought on by the pressures of getting good grades, supernatural death threats and far too many dreams of losing her virginity to her teacher …

Minoo glances at Anna-Karin, who is sitting diagonally behind her and has just opened her envelope. ‘How’d it go?’ she can’t help asking.

Anna-Karin hesitates for a moment. Straight As. In every subject. Even PE.

How many did you deserve? Minoo wants to ask, but she bites her lip and smiles stiffly. ‘Congratulations,’ she says.

‘Thanks,’ Anna-Karin mumbles.

Her heart pounding, Minoo opens her own envelope, but everything is as it should be. Only her PE grade falls short of Anna-Karin’s.

Minoo is among the first to leave the classroom. She doesn’t even say ‘Merry Christmas’ to Max. She can’t handle another empty smile. When she steps out into the playground she sees her mother’s car parked by the gate and is struck by an intense longing for home. As soon as she gets there she’ll shut herself into her room, wrap Christmas presents and stuff herself with ginger biscuits …

Gustaf is at the gates. He’s standing stock still, staring straight at her.

Minoo looks for an escape route. Her mother beeps and Minoo waves. She has to pass Gustaf to get to the car.

He mustn’t know that you know. Act like nothing’s happened, she tells herself. He’s just Gustaf. Good old Gustaf Åhlander.

Who has made a pact with demons.

Minoo forces herself to walk normally, quickly, but not too quickly, yet her heart is racing as if she had just run a marathon.

Gustaf looks so ordinary in his black down jacket and white woollen hat. Somehow that makes her even more scared of him. This is the guy Rebecka had trusted more than anyone else in the whole world. The one who had thrown her off the school roof. This is exactly how he’d looked.

‘Hi,’ Gustaf says, and smiles as she walks past him. ‘Merry Christmas.’

‘Merry Christmas,’ Minoo croaks. She has to muster all her self-discipline to stop herself running the rest of the way to the car.

They celebrate Christmas, just the three of them – mother, father and Minoo – and the holiday is characterised by the same safe routines as always. On Christmas Day they have a good long lie-in. They play a Trivial Pursuit from the 1990s, and as usual her father is annoyed by the badly formulated questions. Afterwards Minoo goes up to her room and looks at her presents. The one she is most pleased with is a lavish book of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Exactly the one she’d wanted.

She sits at the head of the bed, semi-recumbent against the colourful pillows, and rests the book on her knees. She flips past the images of pale, serious women and men in clothes from bygone times and lingers on a painting of Ophelia from Hamlet – a girl in a white dress lying on her back in a stream, about to drown. The image makes her angry. Ophelia is filled with bliss and there’s something almost erotic about the painting – as if it was somehow delightful or sexy that Hamlet’s girlfriend had drowned herself when everyone she’d trusted had let her down or died.

Minoo keeps flipping the pages, and when she comes to Rossetti’s painting of Persephone, she is mesmerised.

So this is how she looked. The girl Max loved. The one who had killed herself. Minoo knows that the human psyche is complicated, that there are no simple answers or solutions, but part of her cannot understand how someone loved by Max could be so unhappy.

She puts down the book and closes her eyes. Once again she revisits the events of that evening at Max’s house, but she lets them take another turn. Max doesn’t break off the kiss, but continues, lets his hand slip underneath her shirt and over her breasts …

But it’s hard to relax and lose herself in the fantasy. She feels watched, as if someone is peering into her mind and can see the adult film being screened there.

Minoo listens. Her mother is clattering in the kitchen. She’s in a bad mood again –you can hear it in the way she’s emptying the dishwasher. Her parents have had a fight about how they think the