You Read Online Free PDF

below the heart. You don’t know who it was who came up with that. Nothing is forever, everything has a sell-by date.
    And sooner or later I’ll turn thirty
.
    You’re not a beauty. You’re what lies between beauty and boredom. Your eyes are like cloudy water, your hair is smooth and so pale that it’s almost white. You remind a lot of people of somebody, but no one can say exactly who. If it wasn’t for your friends, you’d probably be invisible.
    Your girls are alike in many things, but what fundamentally makes you different is your hunger. None of your girls knows how you feel. There’s a hunger in you that never ends even when you’re full. The hunger makes you start awake at night. You want more. More music, more talks, more time and sex and most of all more life. Your room has fourteen square feet. You lust for more.
    Your girlfriends don’t know anything about your plans. They think you’re going to spend the next hundred years moving around Berlin, sharing everything and never parting. You have no illusions. Take a look at yourself; you won’t get very far with your face, your mind will have to take care of the rest. And your mind’s not really bad.
    The tattoo on your wrist is barely visible, even though it’s less than a month old. Needle and ink and a bottle of vodka. The writing’s tiny.
Gone
. If the girls knew you were working hard to erase your tattoo with soap every evening, they would never forgive you. And if they knew you wanted to go to senior class at grammar school after the end of the year, they’d definitely go nuts. Your girls have plans. Stink with her ridiculous beauty salon, as if polishing pensioners’ wrinkles was the crème de la crème. Schnappi just wants to get as far away as possible from her mad mother, who’s been planning for ages to take Schnappi back to Vietnam to find asuitable husband for her. Schnappi in Vietnam is like you behind the register in Aldi. Nessi’s plan is the weirdest of all. She wants to live with the rest of you in the country. Doesn’t matter where. She’s your personal eco-freak and dreams of a commune where you’ll cook together every day and talk and be so contented that the outside world will dissolve. The artist among you is Taja. She inherited the gift from her dad and after school wants to travel with her guitar around Europe, which you find even stupider than opening some dumb beauty salon. Who actually likes those people who strum away on street corners? Or even worse, who likes it when you’re sitting in the U-Bahn and then some entertainer stumbles in?
    You wish you could steal a tiny bit of each of your girls—Stink’s rage, Schnappi’s energy, Nessi’s warmth, and you’d especially like to have something from Taja, because she vanished just under a week ago and it doesn’t matter what bit you get, you’ll take it all—the gleam in her eyes, as if a storm was approaching, or her adventurousness, as if life was always dangerous and not just a tedious collection of school lessons.
    You last saw Taja six days ago; there’s been radio silence since then. No returned calls, no answers to your texts, nothing. Stink even went up to see her in Frohnau, but nobody answered the door. Schnappi thinks Taja might be traveling somewhere with her dad, like she did at Christmas—packed her things and lay on the beach in Tahiti until New Year’s Eve.
    Not this time, especially not just before the end of term.
    Never
.
    You really miss Taja, and you check your phone a hundred times a day to see if she has written. You wish you’d argued, then there would be a reason.
    “I wish you were here,” you say quietly to your reflection and touch the black heart and think it’s really time to get out of here. You glance at yourself one last time, weary from hunger, before you go down to Eric, who’s already waiting impatiently for you.
    The popcorn tastes like cardboard. The guy behind the popcorn machine says there’s nothing he can do about