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our class. And he had a new one every week after that. These days he’s with a Turkish girl who looks like Salma Hayek. He was sniffing around Tatiana for a little while too, and it drove me nuts. For a few days they were talking to each other constantly — in the hall, in front of school, in the schoolyard. But in the end they didn’t get together, I don’t think. That would have killed me. At some point they stopped talking to each other, and shortly afterward I heard André explain to Patrick why men and women don’t get along — crazy scientific theories about the Stone Age, saber-toothed tigers, and childbirth and all that. I hated him for that too. I hated him from the very first moment, though it wasn’t easy for me. For one thing, even though André’s not the brightest bulb, he’s not a complete waste of space. He can be nice too, and he’s pretty laid-back. And, like I mentioned, he’s decent looking. But he’s still an asshole. And just to make it worse, he lives only a block away from me, at 15 Wald Street. The house is full of assholes, by the way. The Langins have a giant place. His father’s a politician, city councilman or something. Of course. And my father says, “Langin thinks he’s Mr. Big Man!”
    But to get back to the story I meant to tell, when André was brand-new in our class, we took a field trip to go hiking somewhere south of Berlin. Just a standard nature walk in the woods. I trailed way behind the others and actually tried to take in the nature. This was around the time we had planted an herb garden, and I was genuinely interested in nature for a while there. Interested in trees . I was thinking of becoming a scientist or something. But not for long, and it probably had something to do with that field trip, where I hung back so I could examine the leaf patterns and growth forms in peace. That’s when it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t give the slightest crap about leaf patterns and growth forms. Ahead of me everyone was laughing and having fun, and I could make out Tatiana Cosic’s laugh from the rest; two hundred meters behind, Mike Klingenberg was traipsing through the forest looking at fucking leaf patterns in nature. Which wasn’t even really nature. It was just some crappy woods with educational plaques posted every ten meters. Hell.
    At some stage we stopped at a three-hundred-year-old white beech tree that had been planted there by Frederick the Great. The teacher asked who knew what kind of tree it was. Nobody knew. Except me, of course. But I wasn’t so crazy as to admit in front of the whole class that I knew it was a white beech. I might as well have said, “My name is Psycho and I have a problem.” It was depressing that we were all standing around the tree and not a single person knew what it was. I’m getting to the point now. Beneath this white beech tree Frederick the Great had also put a few tables and benches so people could sit and picnic. Which is exactly what we did. By coincidence I ended up at a table with Tatiana Cosic. Opposite me was André, handsome André, with his arms stretched out right and left around the shoulders of Laura and Marie. As if he were best friends with them. Except that he wasn’t friends with them at all. He’d been in our class for maybe a week at that stage. But the two of them didn’t object. On the contrary, they seemed to be frozen with excitement and didn’t move a muscle. It was as if they were afraid his arms would, like skittish birds, get spooked if they moved their shoulders. André didn’t say anything at all. He just looked around with his bedroom eyes. And then he glanced at me and, after thinking for a while, said to nobody in particular but definitely not to me, “Why is this guy called Psycho anyway? He’s totally boring.” Laura and Marie laughed themselves silly over this top-quality