Teresa stuck the pin in her arm. A drop of blood welled up. She licked it off. Then she went and fetched a small cushion and lay down on the floor with the cushion under her head. She closed her eyes and pretended she was dead.
After a few minutes she had fallen asleep.
Osteryd usually had two classes in each year group at high school level, and the policy was to move children on from juniors to high school. Many children came in at that stage from village schools, and the aim was to break up the structure so that the new arrivals would find it easier to fit in.
Teresa’s class was joined by a strikingly pretty girl from Synninge called Agnes; Mikael, who from day one looked and behaved like a fight just waiting to happen, plus a number of others with less outstanding characteristics. Johannes ended up in the parallel class.
Everyone checked each other out, testing the waters, and Teresa did her best not to draw attention to herself in any way. After a few weeks she had established herself in the role of the quiet girl who minded her own business, but without appearing to be some kind of idiot who needed to be taught a lesson.
She carried on using Arvid and Olof’s computer when it was available, and on her thirteenth birthday she was allowed to take it over when her brothers bought a new one with a more powerful processor. The first thing she did with the computer that now belonged to her was to set a password. When she was asked to type in her password twice, she chose
When she logged on to poetry.now, she found a new poem written by a thirteen-year-old girl called Bim. Nothing good could come of a name like that, but to Teresa’s surprise she really liked the poem, which was called ‘Evil’:
where I am no one can be
inside the brain lies thinking
porridge is not good
talk misleads
the name does not mean me
the moon is my father
It was incomprehensible in a way that appealed to Teresa. Concrete and vaguely unpleasant. Entirely to her taste. Besides which it was nice to find someone of her own age who wrote like that.
Under the guise of her alter ego Josefin she wrote a comment praising the poem, and said she hoped Bim would write more. When she had sent the comment it occurred to her that Bim could have done exactly the same as her, but the opposite way round. She might be a much older girl, or even a boy.
She scrolled through several new poems without finding anything else she liked. Then she did what she hadn’t dared to do while the computer didn’t belong to her. She opened a blank Word document so that she could write a contribution of her own for poetry.now. Not one of the old poems in her exercise book, but something completely new. Something current.
The cursor flashed, exhorting her to key in the first word. She sat with her fingers resting on the keys. Nothing came to her. She wrote ‘I am sitting here’ and deleted it immediately. She wrote ‘talk misleads’ and stared at the two words for a long time. Then she deleted them.
She went and lay on her bed, buried her face in the pillow, folded the sides of the pillow over her ears and pressed hard. Everything was suddenly dark and silent, and patterns made of golden threads danced on the inside of her eyelids. The threads turned and twisted to form the word ‘everyone’. Suddenly a whole sentence was flashing at her.
She lay there breathing heavily, waiting for more. Nothing came, so with her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat she sat down at the computer and wrote, ‘Everyone is actually called something else.’
She didn’t understand what it meant, but it was true. Not only on the poetry forum, but everywhere. Inside every person there is another person. She wrote that down too. With a sudden burst of daring she put down the two words from Bim and added to them. Then she rounded it off with a final line.
She pushed back her chair and looked at the words she had written.
Everyone is actually called something else
Inside every person there is another person
Talk misleads and behind the words are other words
We can be seen only when it is dark
We can be heard only when there is silence
Before she had time to change her mind, she copied the poem into ‘make a contribution’ on poetry.now. She didn’t know whether the poem was any good, but it looked like a real poem, and what she had written was true.
She sat with her fingers on the keys and there was absolute silence inside her head. Nothing more came.
The following day she went straight to the library after school. There were three shelves of poetry, comprising perhaps two hundred books. She had no idea where to start. Under ‘new arrivals’ was a book called
Poems about
the month of April are all banal
We spit on poems like that
Poems like that are as predictable as death
Teresa sat down in an armchair and carried on reading. She hadn’t thought poems in books could look like this. There was a lot she didn’t understand, of course, but there were almost no difficult words and a lot of the pictures were very easy to get her head around. She particularly liked ‘the tide of death is rising’.
After an hour she had read the whole book, and had a slight headache. She looked along the shelf and found two more collections by Kristian Lundberg. After glancing around she pushed them into her school bag along with
When she logged onto poetry.now she saw that someone had left a comment about her poem. Bim.
‘good poem i am also other though i hear when there is sound write about porridge’
Teresa read these few words over and over again. ‘i am also other’ could mean that Bim, like Teresa, was a different person from the one she was pretending to be on the forum. Or perhaps the whole thing meant something else, just like her own poem.
There was, however, no doubt about one thing: those first two words. It was the first positive comment anyone had made about something she had written.
When she had finished staring at Bim’s words, she noticed that it actually said ‘Comments (2)’ below the poem. She scrolled down and found another reaction, this time from Caroline, aged seventeen. It said, ‘A completely incomprehensible poem about nothing. Get a life.’
Teresa stopped breathing. Her eyes prickled and the tears began to well. She clamped her hands together. Then she got up, fetched a hand towel and rubbed her eyes so hard that her eyelids swelled up. She scrunched up the towel and breathed into it, slowly and deeply.
She sat down at the computer again, went into Hotmail and got herself a new address, then created a new account at poetry.now. This time she was Sara from Stockholm, eighteen years old. She searched for Caroline, and found that she had written a number of poems. Most were about unhappiness in love. Boys who had betrayed her. The comments were very positive. Sara from Stockholm was of a different opinion. She said, ‘I have read several of your poems about unhappiness in love and it seems to me that you don’t really deserve anything else. You are a vile, self-obsessed person no one could ever love.’
She could hardly breathe as she pressed send. Then she lay down on her bed and took out one of the poetry collections she had stolen from the library. It was called
It seemed to be completely unopened. Nobody had read it before her.
