Why We Took the Car Read Free Page A

Psycho. But it didn’t last long and then I was back to being Mike again.
    When someone doesn’t have any nicknames, it’s for one of two reasons. Either you’re incredibly boring and don’t get any because of that, or you don’t have any friends. If I had to decide between one or the other, I’d have to say I’d rather have no friends than be incredibly boring. I mean, if you’re boring you won’t have any friends anyway, or you’ll only have friends who are even more boring than you are.
    But there is one other possibility: You could be boring and have no friends. And I’m afraid that’s my problem. At least since Paul moved away. Paul had been my friend since kindergarten, and we used to hang out almost every day — until his dumbass mother decided she wanted to live out in the country.
    That was about the time I started junior high, and it didn’t make things any easier. I hardly saw Paul at all after that. His new place was half a world away, at the last stop of one of the subway lines and then six more kilometers by bike from there. And Paul changed out there. His parents split up and he went nuts. I mean really crazy. Paul basically lives in the forest with his mother and just lies around brooding. He always had a tendency to do that anyway. You really had to push him to do anything. But out there in the middle of nowhere, there’s nobody to push him, so he just stews. If I remember right, I visited him three times out there. He was so depressed every time that I never wanted to go again. Paul showed me the house, the yard, the woods, and a hunting blind in the woods where he’d sit and watch animals. Except, of course, that there were no animals. Every few hours a sparrow flew by. And he jotted down notes about that. It was early in the year, right when Grand Theft Auto IV came out, though Paul wasn’t interested in that kind of thing anymore. Nothing interested him except wild critters. I had to spend an entire day up in a tree, and then the whole thing just became too idiotic for me. Once I also secretly flipped through his notebook to see what else was in it — because there was a lot in it. Things about his mother, things written in some kind of secret code, drawings of naked women — terrible drawings. Nothing against naked women. Naked women are awesome. But these drawings were not awesome. They were just messed up. And between the sketches, in calligraphy, observations about animals and the weather. At some point he’d written that he’d seen wild boars and lynxes and wolves. There was a question mark next to the word wolves , and I said to him, “This is the outskirts of Berlin — lynxes and wolves, are you sure?” And he grabbed the book out of my hand and looked at me as if I was the crazy one. After that we didn’t see each other very often. That was three years ago. And he’d once been my best friend.
    I didn’t get to know anybody in junior high at first. I’m not exactly great at getting to know people. And I never saw it as a major problem. Until Tatiana Cosic showed up. Or at least until I noticed her. She’d been in my class the whole time. I just never noticed her until the seventh grade. No idea why. But in seventh grade she suddenly popped up on my radar — and that’s when all my misery began. I guess at this point I should probably describe Tatiana. Because otherwise the rest of the story won’t make sense.
    Tatiana’s first name is Tatiana and her last name is Cosic. She’s fourteen years old and her parents’ last name is also Cosic. I don’t know what their first names are. They’re from Serbia or Croatia, you can tell from their last name, and they live in a white apartment building with lots of windows. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
    I could blather on about her for ages, but the surprising thing is that I actually have no idea what I’m talking