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café with two of my friends. This isn’t such a good time to talk.” She listened again, and then laughed clear as a bell. My stomach cramped together.
    “Sure. We’ll talk later tonight.” She hung up. “That was him,” she said, as if she were high. “Isn’t that crazy? He figured out my cell phone number!”
    “And who, may I ask, are you two talking about?” Nadine sounded curious. Just then, you could hear the clatter of something falling on the ground. Someone at the table must have knocked over her glass.
    “Damn!” That was Nadine.
    Vanessa gasped exaggeratedly. “You blew the international blindness test with that move!”
    “Very funny.” Nadine sounded annoyed. “So come on, Sandra. Who was that? Won’t somebody please tell me what’s going on?”
    “That was Daniel, the guy who’s a DJ at the Waikiki Club. We bumped into each other yesterday at the movies. Now he wants to get together with me tomorrow, some party at the quarry. He asked if we want to spend the night together in a tent afterward.”
    Distraught, I leaned my head against the wall. Daniel. So that’s the new guy’s name. Sandra sounded excited.
    The empty spot I had left behind had already been filled. Sandra was still thinking about getting back together with me, that was true, but at the same time, she was scouting around on the market of lonely hearts.
    New, new, new.
    My throat burned.
    I thought about the little red tent in Sandra’s grandparents’ yard. I thought about Sandra’s face above me. It had been so beautiful, so different than I had imagined it. Our shared secret, the first time for both of us. In that moment, everything had been just been right.
    “Just so I get this straight,” Vanessa said, “didn’t you say it was a pain to sleep with a guy in a tent? Wasn’t there an ant invasion or something like that?”
    Nadine corrected her. “Sandra just said it wasn’t a good idea to do it for the first time in a tent. With this Daniel . . . well, that would be more of a repeat experience. Sex in a tent, that’s so romantic!”
    So even that Sandra had already discussed with her girlfriends in detail. Our shared night of love had been turned into an anecdote about ants. I turned around and went back the way I had come, carefully feeling my way through the rows of chairs toward the exit.
    “Ow!” I had stepped on someone’s foot.
    “Sorry,” I muttered. The air suddenly seemed stifling, and I felt like I was in a prison down here. When I reached the exit, I flung it open and fled through the curtain into the open.
    I took the stairs three at a time. I was breathing fast, and my heart pounded as if it would burst. “No,” whispered a voice inside me. “No, no, no!”
    When I reached the ground floor, I stopped. To the left was the exit, but I turned to the right instead. There was an open doorway to Freak City. Tommek squatted on top of a blinking pinball machine, and two guys with dreadlocks sat at a table playing chess.
    In the middle of the room stood a pool table and bent over it was a girl with long, dark curly hair. She looked up at the same moment that I stared over at her in disbelief. Her eyes were remarkably big and green, almost exotic. When she noticed the Hello Kitty autograph book in my hand, she broke into a wide smile. I grinned back bashfully.
    At the site of my greatest defeat, I had found the mystery girl.

CHAPTER 5
    Before I even realized what I was doing, I walked straight over to the girl. Apparently, I had lost my mind down there in that dark basement. Never in my life had I just started a conversation with a complete stranger. In that respect, I had always been more of the shy type.
    She was still smiling. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Mika.”
    She nodded and looked at me teasingly. The hint of a smile played around her eyes. She was pale but in an attractive way. With her dark curls, she almost looked like the stuffed Cinderella doll Iris had gotten for Christmas. But she