Freak City Read Free Page A

print bikini with little glittering stones on it. Even her swimsuit looked like it was ordered from a catalog for future superstars. Where did the real, genuine Pink go when she wanted to swim, anyway? Could she just drive to the next public swimming pool? Throw on any old stylish bikini and swim laps of freestyle in peace? Definitely not. Pink probably had her own swimming pool in the basement. Where she splashed around with Christina, Paris, and all the other rich girls while bad-mouthing the guys they wanted to break up with.
    “What do you say?” Sandra’s voice catapulted me back into the here and now. The biting smell of chlorine filled my nose. Three old people who looked like hundred-year-old turtles swam past us in slow motion. Somewhere kids were screaming. Elevator music wafted through the speakers above us; I hadn’t even noticed it before. “Somewhere over the rainbow . . .” A shower was turned on.
    “What should I say to that?” I stared at her, dumbfounded. “We wanted to spend the afternoon together. And now it occurs to you that you actually want to break up. Kinda out of nowhere, if you ask me. I mean . . .” I stopped my senseless paddling around and let myself sink until the water closed above my head.
    Down here, everything was calm. No “Over the Rainbow” blaring from the sound system. No screaming kids. No Sandra throwing words at my head and me trying to dodge them.
    My lungs started to burn, and I swam up to the surface again. “You’re trying to avoid our conversation!” Sandra said. Now the mascara had suffered some damage after all. A tiny black drop welled up at the corner of her left eye.
    “I . . . I’m not avoiding anything!” I stammered. “I’m looking for the hidden camera. Since it’s not above us, it can’t be anywhere else but below us.”
    “Come on, we had a good year!” she said. “It’s a great time to end it. That way we’ll only have good memories.”
    I thought about the graffiti on the wall in my room. My desk all covered with red Sharpie. I thought about our sleeping bag near the rock in the park, and the string of lights we had bought at the Tollwood Festival. Our afternoons at the teen center. I thought about how a month ago, in a tent in her grandparents’ garden, we had slept together for the first time. A good year? For me it had been the beginning of a new era.
    “I just think we should split up before it gets boring.” Sandra had started to swim toward the stairs. I followed her.
    “But I’m not bored!” I protested behind her. “Not for a single second.” That wasn’t one hundred percent accurate. Sometimes I had been bored. When she dragged me along to stroll through the city or go shopping, and I had to wait for hours outside dressing rooms. When she gave a concert in some school cafeteria and discussed important things with the other musicians afterward without so much as acknowledging me with a glance. A few times she had stood me up, and I had sat around in some restaurant forever waiting for her.
    Sandra got out of the water. She sat down on the heated stone bench and drew her legs up to her chest. She was shivering. “Somehow I just feel like this can’t be all there is,” she said.
    I had no idea how I was supposed to reply to that. “We’re both still so young. Don’t you sometimes just want to meet someone else?” She nibbled at her purple fingernails.
    I shook my head. Sandra looked at me with pity. “Is there someone else?” My voice sounded oddly strained.
    Sandra smiled again. “Of course not.”
    I exhaled, even though that didn’t change the fact that she wanted to get rid of me. She was dead serious, that much I had grasped somewhere along the way from the center of the pool to the bench.
    She laid her cold hand on my arm. “Don’t take it personally, Mika,” she said. “I think you’re great. And we still get along great. We can still be friends.”
    Then she stood up and I was alone at the edge of the