Three girls stood out among the thirteen-year-olds starting at the school in autumn 2006. Ivana had an emo style, dressing completely in black. Ela wore oversized Red Hot Chili Peppers and KISS T-shirts. Ayan wore turquoise shawls, large earrings, and skinny jeans. All three had jet-black hair.
Their outsider status drew them together. They were known as the immigrant gang. Ivana was a refugee from Croatia. Ela’s parents had come from China, and Ayan was, as in primary school, the only African in her class. The girls spoke Croatian, Mandarin, and Somali at home. Ivana was Catholic, Ela was a member of the Chinese congregation in Oslo, while Ayan regularly attended Koran school. They discussed their faiths, the similarities and differences. God. Life after death. Heaven and hell. Sex. Homosexuality. Abortion. Those kinds of things. When Ela had her confirmation, Ayan and Ivana were invited to the family gathering as a matter of course. All three would say they owed their lives to Norway; Ayan and Ivana had fled from civil war, while Ela had eluded China’s one-child policy. The youngest of three, she would not have come into the world had her parents not left. Her father had been a masseur at a Beijing hotel when one day the Norwegian billionaire Stein Erik Hagen was a customer. The supermarket magnate was so pleased with the treatment that he arranged for Ela’s father to move to Norway.
All three girls were certain, however, that when they grew up they would leave Norway. “I want to live in Australia,” Ivana said. “Norway is cold and boring.” She disliked the winters intensely. As did Ayan. “The sun in Norway is like a flashlight,” she said, “only light, no heat!” She wanted to be a diplomat, work at the UN, and fight injustice and poverty. Ela, whom the class referred to as “our little Christian Chinese piano player,” wanted to sing in a rock band and tour the world.
Everything they did for the first time, they did together.
They went to parties.
They developed crushes.
They squeezed pimples. Ate tortilla chips. Put on weight. Began jogging. Measured their waistlines. Synchronized periods. Shared lip gloss, feelings, and the details of their romantic conquests.
They went from thirteen to fourteen to fifteen together.
* * *
The Juma family belonged to the lowest economic tier in Bærum and lived in council housing. Sadiq worked at times, before returning to the welfare rolls and training courses, all the while dreaming of becoming an engineer. Sara had been enrolled in a Norwegian course but couldn’t focus. When Isaq began kindergarten, she was still at home and had not learned the language.
But Ayan had discovered books. Knut Hamsun was her favorite author. “In neo-romanticism the first-person takes center stage,” she wrote in an essay about Hunger. “Everything is about what I think, what I feel, and the human psyche is all-important. Neo-romanticism is not concerned with religion or nationality, but with imagination, with matters mystical, irrational and inexplicable.” She describes the end of Hunger, where the main character lingers around in Kristiania, that later changed its name to Oslo. “He views himself as a loser, then on impulse boards a ship to escape the misery of Kristiania, the city that no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him.”
Ayan was impatient, as well as prone to acting on a whim, which came through in her writing. Punctuation and spelling were secondary to making her opinion clear. She could produce the wildest compositions, like the time they were to write “a short story where a change for the better occurs.” The first sentence was supplied in the assignment: “Finally! Her eyes shone!” Ayan called her story “Heart Beat,” a title the teacher “corrected” to “Heartbeat.” It was about Oda, who had once had “eyes like a beautiful night sky filled with sparkling stars, but that now more closely resembled two bottomless holes,” because Oda had become a prostitute. A man employed at the local mortuary becomes a customer. “They were supposed to have sex on one of the examination tables at his workplace the first time she was with him. But things got a little hot and heavy, causing a corpse to fall down on top of her, prompting him to ask her to have sex with it. He paid her very well so she went along with the idea and has met him once a week since.” One night Oda sleeps over at the customer’s place and “lies thinking about how nice it is to wake up in the arms of a man you love. A man I love, she mouthed quietly to herself, and realized they had in a way a good relationship. He had been kind to her from the beginning and she had stayed over with him several times when she had no place else to go. Just the thought that she was in love with him made her whole body tingle, and a warm, peculiar feeling built up and grew the more she thought about it. A life with him would not be so bad, he had a job and earned good money.”
The short story ended with the customer taking a business trip to Germany and asking Oda to come along. “The offer left her stunned, then he came out with the most shocking thing of all: I love you, Oda, come with me. She thought about it carefully—did she have anything to lose? No, there was nothing for her in Norway, so why not take the chance?”
Ayan received a B–. Her teacher said the piece was “well thought out with good depictions as well as the use of literary devices to underscore the plot” but gave it a “minus for a load of homonymic errors, incorrect punctuation for quoted
