Bright Midnight by Halle, Karina (ereader android TXT) 📕

“Anders. Cool,” she says again. It does sound cool when she says it.

She points at a closed door. “This is Mrs. Chaffey’s,” she says. “She’s not even Spanish, it’s so lame. You missed the first class, didn’t you?” I nod. “Well, anyway, don’t worry. She’s tough but she’s a lot nicer to boys than she is to girls.”

Shay opens the door and we go from our own private little world in the hallway to a classroom filled with tired, wired eyes, all staring at me.

They are strangers. I am stranger. My hair is long, my face scruffy, like some dog on the street. I wear mostly black. I have a lot of tattoos and I plan to have more. I look different, am different.

And this suits me just fine.

They put me in a role and I will play the part.

If they want me to be bad, then I will be worse.

I don’t even look at the teacher. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter.

All that matters is the girl with the yearning eyes and the shy smile and the small ears.

As I find an empty seat at the back of the classroom, I know that by the end of the week, I will be whispering in those ears, I will be telling her things she wants to hear, promises I may not be able to keep. I will be her savior.

And she will be mine.

1

Shay Present Day

My face is inches away from a flaccid penis and saggy pair of balls, the rain from earlier still glistening on the carved folds.

As if my day couldn’t get any weirder.

“Balls!” Michelle shouts out before erupting into rapid-fire giggles, and I spot her peeking at me from the other side of the hanging appendages. I’m tempted to take a picture for extra giggles, but taking a photo of a child framed by male anatomy is probably all kinds of wrong.

Of course, it helps that this is a statue, expertly sculpted out of granite by the renowned artist Gustav Vigeland and these remarkably realistic—and huge—statues are spread out along the middle of Oslo’s Frogner Park. Young and old men, women, children—everywhere you turn there’s a carved stone face staring at you in awe, boredom, or contempt.

Or, you know, a penis and a pair of hefty balls.

Aware that I’m leaning a bit too close to the statue for comfort, I step back and pretend to look elsewhere. I can feel the studious granite eyes of the statue watching me, maybe waiting for me to pay him a compliment over his junk.

“Michelle, come over here,” Michelle’s mother yells at her, waving at her to follow them down the steps and into the rest of the park, which looks dull under the oppressive grey skies. Michelle grins at me, half her face obscured by the blue hood of her raincoat, and I count two missing teeth. I’ve always been pretty bad with kids’ ages, but I’m guessing she’s around six or seven years old.

She runs over to her mother and the mom—again I’m forgetting her name—gives me a wary half-smile. She’s not sure what to do with me. Neither am I, to be honest, but here I am in naked people statue park, in the capital of Norway, with a family I don’t even know.

Yeah. So I’ve been having a rough couple of days. I’ll try not to bore you with the details, but hear me out first, and then I’ll get to the part why I’m tagging along in a foreign city with strangers.

For various reasons (okay, one reason, and I’ll get to that later), since I was a teenager I’ve been obsessed with the country of Norway. Maybe most sixteen-year-olds pine for Kpop stars, but I was researching Norway, learning about their food, culture, landscape (and then the show Vikings came around, oh Ragnar) and dreaming one day I would visit the country myself. I even tried to take out some “Learn Norwegian” audio books from the library, but I gave up on those after a few days.

It wasn’t until I decided to go to Europe with my then-boyfriend Danny that visiting Norway became a distinct possibility. The only problem at the time was that Danny had zero interest in Scandinavia and wanted to stay as close to the sunshine of the Mediterranean as possible, which is why we hunkered down on the gorgeous, magical island of Capri, in Italy.

To be honest, at first I wasn’t even all that sold on Europe in general. The year before I had just graduated college and was looking to find some kind of normalcy in my life, and in my head I thought that meant that Danny and I would go back to sharing an apartment in Brooklyn (depending on the job situation, I mean I’m a millennial and that whole situation is pretty bleak). Regardless, I thought that would be the start of the life I’d always craved and needed.

But Danny decided on Europe, and I wasn’t about to let him go without me. We saved up. We stayed in Capri for months. Made friends, got jobs bartending and getting paid under the table, lived la dolce vita.

And then…

He dumped me. Suddenly the whole “let’s go to Europe and have fun” decision from him became less about us having a new experience together, and more about him not wanting to settle down and commit. Suddenly it all made sense.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, I knew our relationship wasn’t perfect—I knew that over the months things between Danny and I had been strained, I had that niggling feeling at the back of my head that things weren’t quite right. It often came at me late at night when he was sleeping beside me. I loved him but…was this it? I had experienced butterflies and fireworks once upon a time—was that a thing of the past? Was it just going to be like this between him and I forever?

Naturally, the beauty of Capri was an easy distraction