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real name works for boys and girls. But I’ve never liked it, which is why I started
telling my teammates that people at school called me Panther and at school I said that people from basketball called me Panther, and soon people started calling me that, the name spread, and now
even my sister calls me that. She played basketball too, and even she was better than Samuel, people called Samuel “Chickadee” because he was so scared of the ball and he was way too
small to get rebounds. The first few times we saw each other outside of basketball we went to the Water Festival or hung around for hours at the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s on Hamngatan. And
I remember thinking that Samuel was different from other guys because it was like he talked because he liked talking and not because he wanted to fuck. He felt non-sexual somehow. We became brother
and sister; when things were rough at home I could crash at his place, his mom became my second mom, she understood without needing to know too much, she never asked why I needed to run away, I was
welcomed into his family and I will always be grateful for that. They saved me when I needed it the most and I— I’m sorry. Sorry. I’ll pull myself together.
    *
    I signaled to the bartender again and soon we had two new beers in front of us. Samuel hardly seemed to notice. He was in the midst of his description of the isopod parasite. He
described how it likes to live in certain kinds of water and when a particular type of fish approaches it gets inside the fish’s mouth and eats up its tongue.
    “Okay,” I said, checking over my shoulder to make sure no one was listening to our conversation.
    “Neat, huh?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “It eats up the fish’s whole tongue.”
    “Oh.”
    “And then—do you know what the best part is?”
    “Even better than eating up the tongue?”
    “Mmhmm. When the tongue is gone the parasite turns around and its body takes the place of the tongue. The fish starts using the parasite as a tongue, for crushing up food and stuff. Pretty
cool, huh?”
    “I hardly even knew that fish have tongues,” I said.
    “Me neither.”
    We took a few sips of the beer, the glasses were foggy, the drunks mechanically hit the buttons that made the symbols on the screen spin round and round. The biker gang pointed at the darts game
on the TV and seemed upset.
    “Do you come here often?” Samuel asked.
    “Pretty often. I live nearby.”
    “Big place?”
    “A one-bedroom.”
    “Rent or own?”
    “Rent stabilized.”
    “Wow. Congratulations.”
    “Thanks.”
    *
    Panther blows her nose and says that after upper secondary school she started the art school foundation course and Samuel studied political science at the university. We
didn’t have as much contact for a few years. I hung out with people in art circles and Samuel was surrounded by a bunch of people who wanted to study international relations and get jobs at
the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and work for the UN and save the world and that had definitely been Samuel’s thing at school. I thought he would feel one hundred percent at home. Instead he
pulled away from it. He took his exams and went to the required seminars, but in his free time he kept going on about how life is short and you have to fill up with new experiences so you
won’t die unhappy. He sounded like a fifteen-year-old version of me. One night he called to ask if I wanted to go to Tumba with him to watch an innebandy game.
    “Innebandy?” I said.
    “Yes! It’s the final of a tournament called Capri-Sonne.”
    “Do you know anyone who’s playing?”
    “No.”
    “So why would we—”
    “Aw, come on. It’ll be fun. Something to remember!”
    I said no. The same way I said no when he suggested we go to the Police Museum, take part in a medical study on insomnia at Karolinska, watch the horse races at Solvalla, or go to
Hellasgården to try ice fishing.
    “I’m a vegetarian,” I reminded him.
    “So? We