her, but she looks annoyed.
Vanessa is Minoo’s polar opposite: pretty, loud, bleached-blonde hair, voted sexiest girl in the school in year ten. She’s wearing white hot pants and matching trainers. The lace edge of her push-up bra is sticking out over the neckline of her top.
Evelina, one of Vanessa’s friends, runs up and jumps on to Jari’s back, throwing her arms around his neck. She holds out her phone and takes a photo of them. When Jari tries to shake her off she clings to him even more tightly, so that her breasts press against his neck. She shrieks with laughter and everyone in the corridor turns to see what’s going on.
Haven’t they had enough after nine years in the spotlight? Minoo hurries past.
First lesson is Swedish. Vanessa walks into the classroom with Evelina. Michelle has laid claim to a few seats at the back and is powdering her nose.
‘God, I’m, like, totally exhausted,’ Evelina says, and sinks down on the chair next to Michelle.
‘Me, too.’ Michelle yawns and examines her face in the mirror of her glittery compact. ‘I look like I’m fucking thirty today.’
Vanessa sighs. Michelle looks the same as she always does. She just has to hear how great that is a gazillion times a day. Now she adjusts her glistening dark hair and pouts at her reflection.
‘You’ve got, like, a five-centimetre-thick layer of powder on your face now. I think that’s enough,’ Vanessa snipes.
Slowly Michelle lowers her compact and stares at her.
‘What’s your problem?’ asks Evelina.
‘I was only joking.’
‘It didn’t sound like it,’ Michelle tells her airily.
‘Have you got PMS or something?’ asks Evelina. ‘Did you and Wille have a row?’
‘Yeah,’ answers Vanessa. ‘We did.’
It was easier this way. How could she explain what had happened to her this morning? ‘I was invisible for a while this morning – or maybe I just lost my mind.’ Boy trouble, on the other hand, is a language Michelle and Evelina understand. They look relieved. Everything’s back to normal.
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ Evelina says, and puts an arm around her.
Michelle nods in commiseration. Vanessa smiles gratefully and asks if she can borrow her makeup.
A group of boys are sitting at the very back of the classroom listening to hip-hop on a phone. Kevin Månsson is singing along in broken English. Minoo gives an inward smile of contempt.
She nods at Anna-Karin Nieminen in the front row, but gets no response. As usual, Anna-Karin is hunched over her desk with her tangled dark hair hanging like a veil over her face.
There’s something heart-wrenchingly hopeless about Anna-Karin. Minoo tried to speak to her a few times last year, but Anna-Karin just pressed herself mutely against the wall as if she wanted it to swallow her up. Her passivity seemed to demand provocation. Minoo feels an almost shameful sense of relief that at least she isn’t that far down the social pecking order.
She fishes out her maths book. So far she’s understood everything they’ve covered in class, but she’s still nervous. She’s always been the best in the class without much effort, but despite that – or perhaps because of it – her greatest fear is that one day she’ll be exposed as a fraud.
The bell rings for the start of class and she looks up.
Max is standing in the doorway, holding a cup of coffee. He’s twenty-four and moved to Engelsfors at the beginning of the summer. Though she can’t understand why anyone would come here voluntarily.
Max locks the door. Seconds later someone is pounding on it.
‘If you’re late, you’re too late,’ Max says, and sets his cup down on the desk.
‘Oh, come on! What if you’ve got a good reason?’ shouts Kevin, with the new voice he acquired over the summer.
Minoo can’t believe she has to put up with Kevin for another three years. Why did he choose natural sciences? In year eight he’d asked if a zebra was a cross between a horse and a tiger.
Max glances at Minoo as he opens the door. His expression tells her exactly what he thinks of Kevin. It’s as if he knows she’s the only one who can read the look on his face. She’s forced to lower her eyes.
People usually say they’ve got butterflies in their stomach when they’re in love. That’s not how it is for her. First her wrists tingle. Then her arms go limp and she turns into a rag doll.
The first time she saw Max an electric shock shot through her hands. How incredibly pathetic to get a crush on