Breathless Read Online Free Page B

couldn’t resist unscrewing from Rikard’s guitars, a porn magazine with pressed butterfly wings and chewing gum wrappers. And now the cigarette as a relic among the others in the dust.
    Until now I had been able to go from one to another of the family’s thirteen adults and pour out everything I wanted to without anyone tiring of me. Now I had fallen through the rabbit hole into a world I couldn’t speak about. Lukas had said that that night was a baptism of fire. I didn’t know what this meant, but he said it as though I would clearly understand. How he said it was all that mattered.
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    A few days after the fire, I walked down the gravel track to his house by the lake. Through the trees, with leaves as dry as sloughed snakeskin, I caught a glimpse of him with someone I assumed to be his papa. He was at the top of the roof, his papa down below on the step, appearing to give his son an order, though I didn’t hear what. I went closer, accustomed to bringing a smile to the faces of adults. The indifference in the man’s eyes when he turned made me feel uneasy in the ensuing silence, a quiet so stark that I could hear the snakeskin leaves rustle. Lukas shot me a quick glance before he turned away. I spun around and walked up the hill toward home without looking back.
    People around here are different, hard to make out, Mama’s father used to claim. And that wasn’t a good thing—to be different—it was preferable to be the same. Like us in our family. It was true that Lukas had said they weren’t from around here either, but they were from another foreign place and differed in another way.
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    Boy’s eyes, boy’s hands, boy’s smell. I wasn’t afraid of him. The feeling was more like the one brought on at the lake. Bottomless. So swampy you never knew if there was something under your feet or not. Not exactly frightened but disturbed by the fact that from the very first day at school he stood in one corner of the enclosed yard and looked at me as if I had something he wanted. It was obvious he didn’t intend to come up to me and take it, like the older boys, with a modicum of force. Not him. No threats from him—he just watched. As if he had all the time in the world to wait. His eyes were like suction cups—not moist and warm, but reserved and insistent. I kept far away from the spot he had earmarked for himself, but his gaze cut right through the schoolyard. He was alone like me. No, more alone, so alone that no one even quarreled with him. He didn’t look as though he kept to the wall because he was afraid of ambush, just that he had laid claim to the patch and sat on the back of one of the benches looking at nothing in particular. Or at me.
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    A few weeks later, when he happened to be behind me in the lunch line, I noticed that he still smelled of smoke. It was hard to believe it could be from the railway fire, but I hadn’t heard talk of any other since that one. Mama’s mother had bathed me of it in heavy-handed fashion and then thrown out my clothes, so impossible was it to get rid of the smell of sulfur pervading them. But then, she often flung things out and bought new, in thrall to a phobia of everything that didn’t smell immaculately clean. She used to scrub Grandfather Aron in a hot bath every afternoon when he came home from the leather factory. Clean clothes were lying ready for him on the bed, and then it was time for the afternoon shave, a custom that lived on from the past, from the north where he always had to have a protective layer of stubble when he went out into the harsh cold of the morning.
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    â€œYou have a strange accent. Where do you come from?” Lukas had asked me toward the end of the night of the fire. He spoke a husky, soft, slow SkÃ¥ne dialect that poured like maple syrup in the darkness between us. Outside the family I had hardly met anyone before starting school, but I knew