see or hear her. She grabs her towel and waves it. He doesn’t react, so she tosses it aside in frustration.
Wille almost falls over. He’s still not looking at her but at the towel on the lawn. ‘What the … What the fuck?’ he gasps.
‘What is it?’ Jonte asks, as he comes up to the window. Lucky tries to squeeze between them.
‘That towel,’ Wille says. ‘It just appeared out of nowhere. I swear! It wasn’t there before.’
Jonte and Lucky stare at him. Then they stare at the towel and back again. They burst out laughing.
‘Chill, Wille. You’re tripping!’ Lucky bellows.
Jonte says something and closes the window with a bang.
Vanessa stands in the sunshine for a moment. She sees her own hands clearly in front of her. Her tanned legs. But something’s missing. Something doesn’t feel right.
She almost starts crying when she realises what it is.
She’s not casting a shadow on the lawn.
The sweet-smelling smoke hits her as she sneaks into the house. Wille is sitting in an armchair, staring at the TV and smoking a joint. He’s lit from behind by the sun – his blond hair looks like a halo. Vanessa’s heart somer saults. Sometimes she’s taken by surprise when she looks at him.
She wants to go up and touch him but she’s too scared to try. She has to keep hidden the strange thing that’s happening to her. At least until she knows what it is.
‘Vanessa?’ Jonte asks.
She whirls round. Jonte scans the room but sees nothing. His eyes are unusually alert and focused beneath the dark blue woollen hat he’s pulled down over his eyebrows.
‘You’ve got the Noaidi, dude,’ Lucky mumbles pointedly.
‘There’s somebody’s here, he says. ‘I’m fucking sure.’ Lucky is lying half upright on the couch gripping the PlayStation handset. His fat belly is poking out beneath his T-shirt, which reads Pride of Engelsfors. Lucky, whose real name is Lukas, was in Vanessa’s class in year nine, but he never made it to year eleven. Instead he spends his days as Jonte’s errand boy, going out for beer, ordering pizza and helping with the plantation in the basement.
‘Did you hear about the priest’s kid?’ Lucky says, frantically punching away at the handset.
Vanessa sees how Jonte tenses, just slightly. Wille slowly releases the smoke he’s been holding in his lungs. ‘What?’ he asks.
‘Elias Malmgren. The priest’s son. He killed himself. At school. They found him today.’
‘Are you sure it was him?’ Wille asks. He tries to sound blasé, but Vanessa hears the unease in his voice.
Of course, she thinks. They knew each other. Elias used to come here to score weed. But that was ages ago, like the Christmas holidays in year nine.
‘Positive,’ Lucky says.
‘Shit,’ Jonte says. ‘He was here yesterday, buying weed.’
‘You think he had a bad trip or something?’ Lucky asks.
‘A bad trip?’
Jonte and Wille burst out laughing. Lucky smiles in his ingratiating way that makes Vanessa’s skin crawl.
‘He tried a few times before,’ Jonte says. ‘Probably wanted to be completely out of his skull when he did it.’
But he’s feeling guilty, Vanessa can tell. She wonders why. Jonte doesn’t usually care about anyone except himself.
‘He was, like, a total loser,’ Lucky says. ‘Cutting his arms and shit. I thought only chicks did that kind of thing.’
‘Shut up,’ Jonte says suddenly.
Both Wille and Lucky tense and stare at him.
‘There’s someone in the house,’ he whispers.
The others glance around. Vanessa holds her breath.
‘Maybe it’s Elias’s ghost, come to haunt us,’ Lucky says, and gets a smack on the back of the head from Wille’s open hand.
Vanessa feels the hairs on her arms stand up. Suddenly it’s as if the air billows around her, like a gust of wind. Jonte stares straight at her.
‘Where the hell did you spring from?’
Wille looks round and laughs nervously. ‘You shouldn’t sneak up on us like that, Nessa. You’re going to give your uncle Jonte a heart attack.’
Lucky laughs as well, for a bit too long. Vanessa does her best to smile indulgently.
She goes and sits on Wille’s lap. She needs to feel his arms around her. Needs to feel that she’s here. He nuzzles her neck. She presses herself hard against him.
Outside it starts to rain.
6
RAIN IS PATTERING against the kitchen window. Minoo likes the sound, the feeling it gives her of being cocooned inside a secure house. Billie Holiday’s voice is filtering through the speakers in the living room. The low-hanging kitchen lamp casts a warm glow over her parents’ tired, anxious faces.
‘How are you feeling, darling?’ her father