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so very special, not only because she had blue hair and six braids, but also because she only ever wore black. If my mom hadn’t kept on sabotaging it all by buying those garish clothes for me, I would have worn onlyblack too. As it was, I had to make do with one pair of black pants, two black T-shirts with funny slogans in English, and one black woolen undershirt that was still too warm to wear yet here at the beginning of September.
    But now it was all about Gerda.
    I swapped hair elastics with Gerda, whispered with her about boys, and confided to her that I had warmed a bit to Huge Hans (which wasn’t true in the slightest, but though you’re not supposed to lie, this was what my older brother referred to as force majeure , and even though I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, it definitely entailed that right now lying was okay).
    The first two days didn’t yield much. Gerda didn’t seem to be especially fond of anything. Or perhaps she had seen through me. There were some old paper dolls her grandmother had given her, but I knew she hadn’t played with them since we were in fifth grade. At one point she showed me a picture of Tom Cruise, who she was swooningover and kissed every night before going to bed. Then there was a whole stack of romantic novels, with doctors kissing nurses and living happily ever after. I admit I wouldn’t have minded borrowing them occasionally, and Gerda would probably have stifled a tear or two had she been made to hand them over, but it was still just trifles, nothing that truly mattered. Then on the third day I found it.
    It was while we were sitting in Gerda’s room drinking tea and listening to a tape her father had just given her that I discovered Gerda’s weak spot. We’d spent the two previous days at Gerda’s mother’s place, in the room she had there. It was filled with girls’ stuff, all sequins and tinsel. Now we were sitting in her room at her father’s place, where she stayed every other week. It wasn’t the stereo tape deck or the inflatable plastic armchair or the idol posters on the walls that made this room different from the one at her mother’s place, for she had a stereo tape deck and an inflatable plastic armchair and idol posters on the walls there, too.No, the thing that made the room at Gerda’s father’s place special was that in the corner stood a very large cage with a very small hamster inside.
    The hamster’s name was Oscarlittle, and Oscarlittle was what I declared the next day that Gerda had to give up to the heap of meaning.
    Gerda wept and said she was going to snitch about me and Huge Hans. I howled laughing when I told her it was just something I’d made up on account of force majeure . That made Gerda cry even more and say I was the cruelest of anyone she knew. And when she had cried for two hours and was still inconsolable, I started having second thoughts and thinking maybe she was right. But then I saw my green wedge sandals on top of the heap and wouldn’t budge.
    ————
    Ursula-Marie and I walked Gerda home to get Oscarlittle right away. We weren’t giving her any chance to get out of it.
    Gerda’s father lived in one of the new row houses. They were gray-brown and built in brick, at least the outer layer was, around the concrete, and all the rooms were fitted with large, easy-to-open windows. The row houses lay at the other end of Tæring, where until recently there had been meadows full of gray-brown sheep. The fact that the house was at the opposite end of Tæring made the walk long and exhausting, but the main thing was the large windows. Gerda’s father was home, and Oscarlittle had to be smuggled out.
    Ursula-Marie went with Gerda into her room, while I stood outside ready to receive. Oscarlittle was handed through the window, and I stuffed him inside an old rusty cage we had dug out for the purpose. Gerda herself just stood sniveling in a corner of the room and refused to lend a hand.
    “Shut up, Gerda!” I snapped