Borderliners Read Online Free PDF Page B

very strong and was excused from gym, so at first you did not notice anything.
Fredhøj asked her to fetch the
periodic table and gave her the keys. She went out into the corridor and opened the locker. Then she
closed it again and came in and took her seat and put the keys down. Then she threw up. She did it all over the desk, where
others might have tried to reach the sink or the wastepaper basket. But
she never got up without permission.
    Fredhøj must have realized that something was wrong. He stepped outside and lifted the
lid. It was just outside the door.
    In the locker sat Axel, looking
up as though he had been waiting for someone to come and lift the lid. He had tried to cut
out his tongue with
a razor blade. He had got pretty far. The details did not come out until later,
and then only some of them, but we saw

the razor blade. Later on, somebody said he had doped
himself up beforehand.
    What happened was that Fredhøj acted with assurance
and pre cision, as with anyone else who hurt
themselves, or needed first aid and
an ambulance at once. Only our class was sent home, and as early as the next
day it was announced at assembly that Axel was out of danger.
    We never saw him again. There was
no inquiry of any kind, it was never mentioned again. But everybody knew, three weeks later, when it was Easter and the
teachers' children did not come back to school after the vacation, that this
was the reason. It was absolutely obvious.
    I told August
about this, in the toilets, to explain the letter.
    "If it was so
obvious," he said, "then why is she asking?"
    He was a head shorter than me, besides which he was always hunched up, like now. All hunched up, he looked up at me,
across the toilet. He smoked a little bit at
a time, then he put out the cigarette by very carefully pinching the tip and
removing it, so as not to waste any
tobacco. A little while later, he lit it again.
    He smoked the way you only ever saw grownups smoke, and
then only very seldom. Hungrily. It was a weird sight.
The tiny body, and the hunger.
    He was two years younger than me, one year younger than
all the others in
the class, because I had been moved back a class when I came from Crusty House. They had
never said where he came from. It was clear that he had trouble keeping up, even though he picked everything up fast.
Even so, they had moved him up a class.
    There was no chance to answer
him. The outer door was opened, slowly,
as if by a teacher. We had been in there awhile and maybe we had been missed. We brushed away every speck of
ash, flushed, and left the toilets.

That evening he
asked for an extra Mogadon but it was refused.
    He said nothing and only walked
around for a short while, then lay down as though he was sleeping.
    It was not
convincing.
    Even so I almost did not hear him.
We had been lying there for an hour—I could see by the alarm clock—when the door opened. Not that
you could hear anything, but you felt the draft. He had moved very softly.
    The exit was left unlocked at night. He made his way
along the corridor to
the basement stairs. The kitchen was in the basement. I thought he must be
hungry, in which case he need not have both ered. There were padlocks on the refrigerators and
freezers.
    But that was not it. He did not switch on the light. It
was as though he
could see in the dark, like an animal. I stood at the top of the stairs. First there was
silence, then the oven was opened. Then I went down after him and
switched on the light.
    He had opened the oven door and stepped up onto it. He
looked like he was
asleep, with the side of his head resting on the grille over the stove top. He supported
himself with one hand, gripped the knob with the other. He had closed his eyes. At first he did not notice the light. While I stood
there, watching, he turned on the gas, just a little, and sort of drank from the tap. Then
he shut it off again.
    He opened his eyes
and looked at me.
    "I couldn't
reach," he said.
    "It's an industrial