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Zöe Beck
“My parents are older.”
“So are mine.”
“And Silvana’s mother?”
“She actually looks pretty
good for a mother,” Cem
said, and I had to admit
he was right.
“If this comes out…”
“Maybe he was just being
nice, because her husband
had been fighting with
her,” Cem said.
I might not have ever
really done anything with
a girl, but I could tell the
difference between a
harmless and a not-so-
harmless hug.
“I don’t think we should
tell anyone,” I said. And
Cem nodded.
Obviously someone else
had seen Herr Schneider
and Silvana’s mother.
When Thorsten, Michael,
Cem, and I entered the
schoolyard the following
foggy
April
morning,
somebody had sprayed
red words on the ground:
“Schneider loves pizza.”
The
word
“pizza”
was decorated with a
sprinkling of little hearts.
Herr Schneider failed to
showup at the school after
that, supposedly because
he had come down with
a bad stomach bug. None
of us believed that for a
second.
Silvana seemed to have
fallen totally mute. The
teachers left her alone,
and the girls she normally
hung out with did as well.
During the long recesses,
she
started
regularly