The Circle (Hammer) - By Elfgren, Sara B.,Strandberg, Mats Page 0,77

followed Jonte into my apartment? Or were you there already?’

‘No. I waited outside. I don’t know why I followed him in.’

Linnéa leans back in her chair and folds her arms. ‘Okay,’ she says finally. ‘I can understand it might have been tempting. But if you spy on me like that again, I’ll kill you.’

Vanessa nods. She’ll never put herself through something like that again.

They look at each other for a moment. The windows behind Linnéa are fogged up. Vanessa twists her silver ring a few times. Linnéa says nothing, just stares at the ring.

Vanessa wonders if she understands. ‘Wille and I are engaged.’

‘Congratulations. Really,’ Linnéa says.

Vanessa gets angry. ‘Why the hell are you sleeping with Jonte?’

‘What?’

‘I just don’t understand it. Seriously. He’s so old. And you’re so pretty.’

‘Thanks … I think,’ Linnéa says. She grins widely.

Vanessa can’t help smiling, too. ‘You know what I mean,’ she says.

‘It’s hard to explain the thing with Jonte. Or maybe it’s too obvious.’ She leans forward across the table. Vanessa does the same. ‘When I was eleven I got drunk the first time,’ Linnéa says, ‘Jonte sold me the booze. When I was thirteen, I started getting stoned. By then he was selling weed. When I moved on to harder stuff, he sold me that, too.’

Vanessa has heard much worse rumours about Linnéa, but she’s surprised that she’s talking so openly about it.

‘Then I stopped. But Elias … couldn’t stop. I got Jonte and Wille to promise not to sell to him any more. Then I found out they’d broken their promise just before … Elias died.’

‘I know,’ Vanessa says quietly. She’ll never forget that afternoon. Did you hear about the priest’s kid? … He probably wanted to be completely out of his skull when he did it.

‘That first night at the fairground,’ Linnéa says, ‘I’d been over at Jonte’s place to have a go at him. But I never got the chance.’ She shakes her head. Her eyes are glistening, but she grits her teeth. She won’t show more than she has to. Vanessa knows how that feels. No one takes a crying girl seriously.

‘I was so lonely after Elias died,’ Linnéa says quietly. She blinks away her tears. ‘I’m so fucking disgusting.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘You don’t know anything about me,’ Linnéa says harshly. ‘And you don’t know anything about Wille either. He calls me sometimes, wanting me back. I’m sorry I lied to you before. I didn’t want to hurt you, but now that I’ve seen that ring … You can’t trust him.’

For once Vanessa is dumbstruck. She feels empty, now that it’s been confirmed.

‘I don’t want him,’ Linnéa says, softer now. ‘Just so you know. And I don’t think he wants me either, really. He just wants to know he’s got a chance. For his ego’s sake.’

‘Maybe that’s how it was before, but he’s changed. He loves me,’ Vanessa says.

‘You deserve someone better.’

‘So do you.’

They look at each other, and Vanessa thinks she ought to feel depressed. What Linnéa has said should have laid waste to everything. Instead she feels relieved in some strange way. And, as so often where Linnéa’s concerned, she has no idea why she feels the way she does.

Anna-Karin stares intently at her maths notebook in which she’s solving problems on Pythagoras’s theorem. Grandpa is sitting on the other side of the living room, browsing through the newspaper. Now and then he glances at the kitchen. A frenetic rattling, clattering and pounding is coming from it. ‘What’s she doing?’ he says.

‘She was going to boil the silver,’ Anna-Karin says, ‘to sterilise it.’

Grandpa folds the newspaper neatly and lays it on the little table by the armchair. ‘I know I should be happy that she has all this new energy,’ says Grandpa.

Anna-Karin pretends to be absorbed in the relationship between the hypotenuse and the opposite side.

‘It’s just so odd,’ Grandpa continues. ‘Before she barely had any energy at all. Now you can’t get her to stop.’ He sighs and takes off his reading glasses. ‘But there’s no point in complaining,’ he says. ‘It’s like in winter we go around complaining that it’s cold, wet and dark, but when summer comes we complain that it’s too hot.’

Now you can’t get her to stop. Anna-Karin could get her to stop. As soon as she’s got Jari she’ll stop everything. What the principal had said about the Council had made up her mind for her.

If only her mother didn’t look so healthy. There’s strength in her footsteps. She laughs, and is filled