Lauren Holmes - Barbara the Slut and Other People

I started saving the seat on the bus for Benjamin instead, who got on at the stop after Brigitta. On the weekends I mostly looked at magazines at Lisa’s house, and sometimes Benjamin and I went on dates to the movies. Those dates weren’t really what I hoped for either. I wasn’t allowed to take the bus on the weekends so my mom would drive us, and Benjamin would ride in the backseat with my brother. One time we went to see Romeo + Julia but it was almost sold out and we couldn’t get seats next to each other. Benjamin wanted to see Independence Day instead, but I thought Romeo + Julia would be more romantic. So we got seats near each other but in different rows, and I sat in front of Benjamin. I thought that would be close enough to hold hands but it wasn’t.

Benjamin and I kept breaking up and getting back together, because he didn’t want to French-kiss me because he thought it was gross, and because I purposely flirted with other boys on the bus. I sort of tried to stop doing it, but not really. No boys had ever talked to me before, and now they did, older boys from the eighth grade. I liked that and I kind of enjoyed how mad it made Benjamin. There were also smaller problems, like that for Christmas I got him a stuffed dog and he got me a nose horn. He got one for himself too. You put the nose horn up to your nose and snorted, and it played a note. I never played it but my mom did. She thought it was hilarious and she played it all the time, even though it made me mad.

In January the twin who loved Benjamin (Viktoria) passed out in class, and the other one (Veronika) was stumbling around, and it turned out they were taking diet pills and not eating. When the teacher talked to them about it they said it was because of me, because they wanted to be skinny like me. If they had asked me I would have told them that I would have preferred not to be so skinny and not to have to wear elastic-waist jeans. But they didn’t ask. Our teacher talked to me about the problem, but I still didn’t understand German well, and I didn’t understand why I needed to know that they were taking diet pills because of me, or what he wanted me to do about it. A lot was getting lost in translation, in and out of class.

In the spring I broke up with Benjamin for good, and then tried to get him back a few days later when I remembered that no one else in my class talked to me. He didn’t want to get back together, so I made him a mixtape of the most romantic Backstreet Boys songs and rode my bike all the way to the next town and left it on his doorstep. When I called to see if he got it, his mom got on the phone and asked me in English to please leave her son alone.

After we broke up, all the girls wanted to talk to me to find out what happened and who I had a crush on now. They didn’t exactly decide we were friends, but they seemed to be softening. If I had realized the solution to my problem was as simple as breaking up with Benjamin, I would have done it earlier.

In June my parents got me Backstreet Boys concert tickets for my birthday, and I asked the twin who liked Benjamin (Viktoria) if she wanted to go. She was the biggest Backstreet Boys fan in the class, and I hoped that the ticket would be irresistible and would make her forgive me. She said yes, and on the morning of the concert my mom and I got up at five in the morning, picked up Viktoria, and went to wait in line to get in. We were finally let into the arena in the afternoon, and we made it into the section closest to the stage, which was what we were hoping for. We packed into the crowd at the front, with my mom right behind us. When the opening act started, the crowd pushed forward, and Viktoria started to panic and had to be lifted out by security and taken to the medic’s tent. My mom and I made our way out of the crowd to follow her, and when she was feeling better we went back to watch the rest of the concert from outside the crowd. On the way home she said thank you for inviting her, and from then on I was allowed to go to Breuningerland with the other girls in the class.

Ilona

By September I was starting to gain weight. I wasn’t trying to, because I had already reached my goal of being able to wear regular jeans, but I had gotten into the habit of buying snacks after school, before I got on the bus or after I got off, or sometimes both. Back home I had never even been in a grocery store by myself, but now I could stop anywhere and get anything I wanted, and my favorite thing was these soft pretzels with butter. Maybe because of all the pretzels I started to get boobs, but to cancel them out I got braces.

My dad was also getting fat because he also liked those pretzels very much. My brother was the same as always, and my mom was getting skinny. She didn’t really have anything to do while we were at school so she joined a gym and she went every day. Now she was even riding her bike to the gym because she couldn’t drive anymore. She got to use her American license for the first year but then she had to take the German driving test, and she failed because the right-of-way rules in Germany made absolutely no sense. Luckily my dad passed his test or we would have all had to ride our bikes or the bus. Anyway, now my mom was really thin and had a lot of muscles.

On the first day of school it turned out that the twins’ sidekick Ilona had somehow been dethroned. I didn’t know what had happened, but I didn’t care because Ilona asked me if I wanted to share a desk with her, and I obviously did. Ilona had really long black hair and she did her makeup like the older girls — she wore black lip liner on the outside of her lips and pale lipstick on the inside.

Natascha

Also on the first day of school, there was a new girl. Her name was Natascha, and Ilona and I saw right away that she was weird. Her clothes were different from everyone else’s — they looked healthy. They weren’t made of burlap but they were pretty close. Everything looked like it was made out of some kind of natural material and came from some kind of store that none of the rest of us had ever even been to. She had a high voice and spoke very quietly, and she moved in a funny way — her head bobbed when she talked. She was very thin and pale, and she wore thick glasses and had braces. She and her two older siblings rode their bikes to school every day, and she carried her helmet around with her. The food she ate was mostly really bad-smelling vegetables, like cabbage and brussels sprouts, and things my mom would say tasted like cardboard, like rice cakes and seed crackers.

At first no one knew what to do with her, so we didn’t give her any trouble. But soon she started following groups of us to lunch. We didn’t like it that she followed us without asking, and one day we decided to lose her on the way there. Ilona said she didn’t want her to come, and I made a plan. I told everyone to run in a different direction as soon as the bell rang, and when we lost her we would meet back up at Ikea. If she did follow someone, they had to have lunch with her, alone, and they couldn’t tell her where we were.

When the bell rang we took off, and I ran out the wrong door, around the building, and then to Ikea. When we all got there we were out of breath and laughing, and Natascha was nowhere to be seen. We ate our lunch and then went back to school, and I didn’t look at Natascha for the rest of the day.

• • •

At the end of the fall we took a class trip to the North Sea. It was a privilege that we earned for being in the seventh grade, and we had a fund-raising bake sale and our parents wrote checks and the teachers booked train tickets and a hostel. Our homeroom teacher and our religion teacher were going to come with us, since we needed a man and a woman. The religion teacher ( evangelisch , not katholisch ) was young, and she had the longest armpit hair I had ever seen. Ilona and I made jokes about it blowing in the wind, because it did.