Read You for Free Online Page A

mother, chop my head off, promise?”
    “I promise.”
    “Okay, what’s up now, are you coming to the playground or not? You’ve got nothing on at home, and then we might take a detour to the bar on Savignyplatz, or do you not want to because of Taja? I can see that, but you know what Taja’s like. She’ll come back if she feels like it, and till then none of us will hold our breath. Wait, let me just get rid of this for you.”
    She opens her backpack that looks like a weary panda, and takes out a blemish stick. You’re thinking about Taja and all the messages you left for her.
    “Stand still.”
    Schnappi’s half a head shorter than you, and has to stand on tiptoes. She dabs at your pimple, puts the blemish stick away again and says it’s perfect now. You look in the mirror.
    Perfect
.
    Schnappi takes your arm and steers you out of the ladies’ room and up the stairs and out of the cinema as only she can. She would be a great bodyguard, she always gives you the feeling she knows what she’s doing. There’s no one standing outside the cinema, just a few people sitting outside Café Bleibtreu.
    “So did you get that movie or not? Because I didn’t get any of it, nothing at all, cross my heart and die.”
    Schnappi laughs and deliberately puts her hand on the wrong side, stops laughing in the middle and looks at you, really looks at you at last, and says, “God, Nessi, stop looking like this.”
    You want to tell her that there is no other way to look right now. You have no idea what she wants to hear. Everything is a blur. You remember the movie as if you’d been blind and deaf for the last two hours. Everything that comes toward you flows around you and disappears without a trace, behind your back, lost and gone forever. But then your thinking apparatus clicks back in and you work out that this isn’t really about the movie; Schnappi’s language is a secret language, she says one thing and means another. She’s been asking you the same question all along and just wants to know what’s up with you and why you’re not saying anything, while she goes on talking and talking. And of course she’s right, you have to give her some kind of answer, but you can’t come up with a good one, so you turn the answer into a question and say weakly and quietly, “And what if I’m pregnant?”

Rather a big mouth than no tits
, was always your motto, but maybe now’s not the time to announce it. Nessi needs to hear something else. Something like: “Bullshit, you’re not pregnant!”
    “Why not?”
    “You don’t just get pregnant like that.”
    “But—”
    “Have you done a test?”
    “No.”
    “Without a test you’re not pregnant, okay?”
    Nessi can’t reply to your logic, so you drag her up Bleibtreustrasse to Kantstrasse and then into the nearest pharmacy to buy her a pregnancy test, as if you were offering her a kebab, except that those tests are really expensive.
    “Why are they so expensive?”
    The pharmacist shrugs as if she didn’t think that it was expensive. You read the instructions and whisper to Nessi that the pharmacist is one of those people who never get pregnant, that’s why a test like that costs a fortune, and then you turn back to the pharmacist and say with a sugary smile, “Eight euros? Are you sure this really costs eight euros?”
    The pharmacist puts the packet through the scanner again.
    The price is right.
    “We’ve got a double pack,” she says. “It’s 10.95.”
    “Well, that’s a bargain, isn’t it?” you say, and look at Nessi. “Do we need two?”
    “Two would be good.”
    “We’ll take the bargain,” you say to the pharmacist and smile at her as if you’d pulled a brilliant trick on her.
    From the pharmacy you go to the nearest café. Before the waiter can move, you tell him you just need to pee. In the bathroom both of you squeeze into one stall. Nessi is pale, it’s all going too quickly for her.
    “Come on, girl, take a deep breath.”
    Nessi takes