Guilt Read Free Page B

away.
    His mother packed everything into his cupboard. It was all strange; the sheets and pillowcase had nothing to do with home and all the noises sounded different. Henry was still hoping it was all a mistake.
    His father was bored. He sat next to Henry on the bed and both of them watched as Henry’s mother unpacked the three suitcases. She talked without pause, saying she wished she’d been to a boarding school, and she’d loved holiday camps when she was young. The singsong in her voice made Henry feel tired. He leaned against the head of the bed and closed his eyes. When he was awoken, nothing had changed.
    A fellow pupil came and said he’d been told to “show the parents around.” They saw two classrooms, the dining room, and the kitchenette; everything dated from the seventies, the furniture had rounded corners, the lamps were orange, it was all comfortable and nothing looked as if it belonged in a monastery. His mother was enchanted by everything, and Henry knew how stupid the other pupil thought she was. At the end, his father gave the boy two euros. It was too little, and his mother called him back and gave him more. The boy bowed, holding the money in his hand, and looked at Henry, and Henry knew he’d already lost.
    At some point his father said it was late already and they still had the long return drive ahead of them. As they headed down the allée, Henry saw his mother turning back towards him one more time and waving. He saw her face through the window and he saw her saying something to his father; her red mouth moved silently, it would move forever, and he suddenly grasped that it wasn’t moving for him any more. He kept his hands in his pockets. The car got smaller andsmaller until he could no longer distinguish it from the shadows in the allée.
    He was twelve years old now and he knew that all this was premature and much too serious.

    The boarding school was a world unto itself, more constricted, more intensive, devoid of compromise. There were the athletes, the intellectuals, the showoffs, and the winners. And there were the ones who were ignored, who were mere wallpaper. No one made his own decision as to who he was, it was the others who judged and their judgment was almost always final. Girls could have provided the corrective, but the school didn’t admit them, so their voices were missing.
    Henry was one of the inconspicuous ones. He said the wrong things, he wore the wrong clothes, he was bad at sports, and he couldn’t even play computer games. No one expected anything of him, he was one of the ones who went along, people didn’t even make fun of him. He was also one of the ones no one would recognize at future class reunions. Henry found a friend, one of the boys in his dorm room, who read fantasy novels and had wet hands. In the dining hall they sat at the table that got served last, and they stuck together on class outings. They got through, but when Henry lay awake at night, he wished there were something more for him.
    He was an average student. Even when he really tried, it made no difference. When he turned fourteen he developedacne, and everything got worse. The girls he met in his little town during the vacations wanted nothing to do with him. If they bicycled to the quarry pond on summer afternoons, he had to pay for the ice cream and the drinks in order to be allowed to sit with them. And in order to be able to do this, he stole money from his mother’s wallet. The girls kissed other boys all the same, and all he had left at night were the drawings he had made of them secretly.
    Things went differently only once. She was the prettiest girl in the clique; it was during the summer vacation when he had just turned fifteen. She had told him he should come with her, just like that. He had followed her into the cramped changing cubicle; it was a wooden shed by the lake with a narrow bench and no window, full of junk. She undressed in front of him in the semi-darkness and told him