Shorter Days Read Online Free Page B

disappointed when it hardened in her hand, cutting into her precious and far-too-brief sleep time by at least half an hour.
    Lisa’s fingers, moist and hot with excitement, lead Leonie across the yard in front of the building. Her eyes search out the bigger girls, who have already secured prized places by the bonfire. A thick yellow soup simmers in a kettle over the fire, smelling of garlic. The circle contains pointy witch's hats, necklaces of plastic bones, long rustling skirts, and green-painted faces. Only on close inspection does Leonie recognize the teenagers, who usually spend their time playing ball or practicing dance moves from music videos, but have now been transformed into witches, vampires, and dead princesses. She’s proud of Lisa, who marches right up to the fire and sits down quietly among the older kids without hesitation. Leonie and Simon exchange a parental look. Felicia examines a lump of dirt. Before she can stick her discovery into her mouth, Leonie shouts, “Simon!”, and he bends down as if he had all the time in the world and brushes some dirt from the corner of her mouth. But he doesn’t get any closer. Leonie has the feeling that he doesn’t want her sticky fingers to endanger his office clothes.
    Leonie still gets a bit of a thrill from seeing Simon dressed in a suit. The greenish-gray fabric shimmers under his short black coat. The white shirt and bright orange tie are chosen with taste—his, not hers. She’s glad he no longer needs her advice. They first went shopping together after he finished business school and officially joined the company where he’d been freelancing. Since she was a child, she had gone to the same venerable department store downtown, standing behind the dressing room curtains year after year as her mother carried over piles of clothes: from her first miniskirt to the gown for her graduation ball. Leonie let Simon sit in his boxer shorts under the neon light, wordlessly hanging her selections on the rod from outside the dressing room: solid-colored shirts in classic cuts and inconspicuous fabrics, ties and socks that didn’t have cartoon figures romping all over them. Only the clanging of the wire hangers betrayed her anger at the world Simon came from, a world that would stand in his way whenever he failed to completely abandon its habits. It was the world of No-Name sneakers and the flip-flops they called “rubber slippers” in the eighties, the emblems not of casual summers in the city but of aggressive proletarianism, the world of cheap synthetic pants, flower-print leisure shirts, “Drinking Team” T-shirts, and self-drawn tattoos inked by friends. These were the insignia of a contemptible, wayward background that Leonie took care never to get any closer to in all the years of their life together.
    Yet Simon had escaped, naked and ready to be civilized, like Robinson’s Friday. The illegitimate son of a perfume store salesclerk from Hohenlohe had the fierce desire to make money, which even in his school days made him tougher and more determined than the kids in Leonie’s milieu. Her set planned as far as civilian service or the next Interrail trip, at best. Only when they fight—when their screaming pushes them away from each other, when he grabs her arm and leaves a mark that’s still visible hours later, or insults her with words that are as crude as the exhaust-blackened concrete blocks on the main roads of the “Bronx of Swabia” where he grew up—does she sense that Simon will never fully belong to her.
    Leonie literally ran into Simon’s arms on one of her last days of school, dizzy from sweet champagne and slightly hysterical over a graduation prank that had gotten out of control—the school building stuffed up to the ceiling with balloons, finger-painted graffiti on the teachers’ cars, strawberry-flavored condoms passed out to freshmen. She had seen him crossing the