tears with her sleeve and turns.
Someone is standing at the foot of the hill, gripping the handlebars of a bicycle. He or she is wearing a black hoody, similar to the one she has on, with the hood up. Rebecka can’t see the person’s face, but she knows they’re looking straight at her.
It feels like an eternity before the figure in black hops on to its bike and pedals off. Rebecka lets a few more minutes pass before she runs home.
*
When Rebecka comes in, Alma and Moa are stirring. It is nearly seven o’clock, and Rebecka starts to get breakfast ready, quietly so that she doesn’t wake her mother who came home in the small hours after her night shift at the hospital.
She puts milk, cereal, a loaf of bread and whey butter on the table. Since her father started commuting weekly to Köping, there have been many such mornings when she helps Anton and Oskar get off to school and takes Alma and Moa to nursery. Most of the time it’s okay. But sometimes she feels like Cinderella before her trans formation. Now, with the figure in the black hoody still haunting her, she’s glad to be doing something so mundane.
Rebecka goes into her brothers’ room. Oskar wrinkles his nose and groans as the light from the hallway falls across his bed. He has just turned twelve and has become taller and thinner over the summer. Even though his face is still that of a child, Rebecka has a sense of how he’ll look when he grows up. Anton, just a year younger, isn’t far behind. But when they’re asleep they look so small. Helpless.
She goes to the window and opens the blinds.
There are a thousand possible reasons why the figure in the black hoody might have been standing on the hill, he wasn’t necessarily stalking her. Rebecka doesn’t believe a single one of them.
‘Are you sure you should go to school today?’ her father asks, over breakfast.
He and Minoo are alone since her mother is at the hospital. Radio voices are reporting on world events. Her mother can’t stand having to listen to the radio in the morning, so her father takes the opportunity to do so when she’s not there.
‘The longer I wait, the harder it’ll be.’
He nods as if he understands, but he has no idea. If she were to stay at home today, rumours would immediately start to circulate. Maybe people would say she’d gone mad. Or committed suicide herself. Then when she finally came back to school, everyone would stare at her a thousand times more than they would if she went in today.
‘Might as well get it over with,’ she adds.
‘Want a lift?’
‘No, thanks.’
Her father looks at her with concern, and Minoo feels compelled to change the subject. ‘Have you made up your mind whether or not to write about it?’
‘We’re going to wait and see how things develop. There might be an investigation into the school’s responsibility in the tragedy. The boy’s parents might demand it. Then we’d find ourselves in a completely different position.’
Minoo is relieved. Mainly for selfish reasons. The sooner everyone forgets about it, the sooner she can go back to being anonymous.
She brushes her teeth and goes into her room to fetch her bag. She glances out of the window and shudders when she thinks of last night. Of the figure standing out there.
Her father waits for her in the hall, his hands clasped over his stomach, which has grown considerably over the last few years. ‘Are you sure you want to go?’
‘Yes,’ she answers, instantly regretting the irritation in her voice. She gives her father a hug.
Minoo often worries about him – he sleeps too little, works too hard, and eats too much junk food. Her grandfather, whom she never met, died of a heart attack when he was just fifty-four. Her father is fifty-three. Now and then he and her mother argue about it. These ‘discussions’, as they refer to them, are conducted in low, heated voices that Minoo isn’t supposed to hear, but sometimes her father loses his temper. ‘Save your diagnoses for your patients!’ he snaps.
At those moments Minoo hates him. If he won’t look after himself for his own sake, he ought to for theirs.
‘Ring me if you need anything,’ her father says. Minoo nods and hugs him again, extra tightly this time.
Minoo doesn’t need to hear the hushed voices in the playground to know that they’re all talking about the same thing: