King Bro! E-Book

Jenny Jägerfeld

• Herausgeber: Arctis US
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 141

Beschreibung

Marcus normally lives in Stockholm, Sweden, where everyone knows him and what he's about, how he now wants to be called Marcus instead of Michelle. But this summer he goes with his mom to Malmö, where no one knows his story and he can truly be himself. There, he meets Mikkel, who is into skateboarding, just like him, and they instantly connect and become blood brothers. Marcus couldn't be happier that this cool boy calls him "Bro." In fact, this summer seems to be the best in his eleven-year-old life! But what happens when your newfound friend thinks you've been lying—even though you've never been so honest?

Leseprobe

Jenny Jägerfeld

King Bro!

Translated from the Swedish by B. J. Woodstein

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

W1-Media, Inc.

Imprint Arctis

Stamford, CT, USA

Copyright © 2024 by W1-Media Inc. for this edition

Copyright © 2016 by Jenny Jägerfeld, by Agreement with Grand Agency.

First English edition published by W1-Media Inc. / Arctis Books USA2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

The Library of Congress Control Number is available.

English translation copyright © B. J. Woodstein, 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

ISBN978-1-64690-639-0

www.arctis-books.com

To Solen, Månen, Lynxen, Rosen, and Saile Äppleskrutt!

And to all my other beloved heavenly bodies and heavenly souls.

The Start of It All

When I closed my left eye, all the colors got brighter. The fields we were driving past turned more yellow, the sky got even bluer, and the grass became a more vibrant green. So then I closed my right eye instead. Yup. All the colors were suddenly a bit paler, waterier, more boring. It was like an old article from the newspaper that has been cut out and hung up on the refrigerator for too long and was faded. I tried again. Shut my left eye. Shut my right eye. Bright! Pale. I wondered which eye was correct, which eye showed the world as it was. Was the world so bright and intense? Or was it so pale and dull? Maybe it was something in between.

“What are you doing, Marcus?” my mom asked. She must have been watching me for a while.

“Nothing special.”

“You don’t need glasses, do you?”

I shrugged. How could I know that?

She put her hands together as if she was praying and looked up toward the ceiling of the train, where my skateboard and our enormous black duffel bags were sticking out from the luggage rack.

“Oh dear Jesus, I hope he doesn’t have a visual impairment!”

Mom doesn’t even believe in God. And yet she does this sometimes. Prays. Mostly she does it when she’s worried that something is going to be too expensive. “We aren’t exactly BATHING in money,” Mom usually says. Another thing she often says is: “It isn’t like it’s RAINING money down on us.” A third thing she also says is: “It’s not as if I’m CARVINGGOLD with a penknife.” I don’t even know what a penknife is. A knife you write with?

“What do you mean, a visual impairment?” I said.

“You know, when you can’t see so well. I really hope you don’t have that! Glasses are so expensive. And it’s difficult too. People tease you.”

“Tease? Did they tease you when you were little?”

“Yes!” Mom peered at me and hissed, “Four eyes!”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really? They said that? Hedvig in my class has glasses, and everyone thinks she looks cool. It’s when she’s NOT wearing her glasses that she looks strange.”

Mom appeared to be thinking about it.

I stared out the window and thought about how she didn’t understand that she’d been lucky to only be teased for wearing glasses. I knew things that were worse.

Mom took our passports out of her bag.

“Why do you have our PASSPORTS with you? Malmö isn’t exactly abroad.”

“Who knows? Maybe we’ll get in the mood to go to Copenhagen some weekend. Or even to Berlin!”

“You know I hate that picture.”

“No one likes their passport picture. Check out mine!”

She showed me her passport photo and imitated the picture, though she exaggerated a lot. She widened her eyes and made her mouth into a thin line, so it looked like she was scared to death. Sure. Maybe she looked a little weird in her photo, but I HATED mine.

A man in a suit walked past us. He looked at Mom.

“Am I embarrassing?” she whispered, putting the passports back in her bag.

“Hmm. Quite. By the way, Mom, what’s all that yellow stuff out there?”

“Those are rapeseed fields. They’re so beautiful! There’s nothing so lovely as the rapeseed fields down here in Skåne.”

I closed my left eye and looked at Mom with my right, and all the colors were vivid. Her eyes were a bright green-blue, and her long blond hair curled by one temple. She smiled at me and also closed one eye.

“That’s how you look!”

I smiled back. I looked out through the window, through my own faint reflection. Rapeseed fields. I didn’t know if I’d ever seen anything so yellow.

The Strangest Job in the World

Mom has the strangest job in the world. She’s not a teacher or a nurse or a bus driver, like other moms. She does voices. For animated men and women. In films. Animated films. First they make the film itself, draw it and animate it on the computer and all that. And then Mom has to come up with a funny voice for a character. Mom can change her voice in lots of ways. She can sound like a stressed bee, a bear with a cold, or a really grumpy, super-old lady.

It was because of one of these recording jobs that we had come down south to Skåne during the worst of the June heat. That was why we were standing on the train tracks in Malmö with our two enormous bags, trying to figure out where we should go. Mom was scrolling excitedly on her phone. She was going to call some guy named Flemming who was a friend from back when she worked in mime. You know, that sort of theater show where your face is painted white and your eyes are open really wide and you don’t talk but instead use your hands to show that you’re locked in a glass box. I’d rather not talk about it.

I looked around. The roof was white and almost as high as the sky and was held up by huge red columns. On a sign, it said MALMÖ in black letters on a white background. Some sort of bubbling expectation tingled inside me, because here, no one knew anything about me. I could be fully myself. I put the bag down on the ground and sat on my skateboard. I rolled a little, back and forth.

“Marcus, do you have to sit on the skateboard? It makes me worried when you go so close to the edge!”

I smiled and teasingly moved closer to the edge of the platform.

“Come on! I’ll take it away from you, Marcus! I’m serious!”

“But how likely is it that I’ll fall here? How clumsy do you think I am?”

I rolled my eyes. But because I didn’t want to risk anything, I rolled back.

It smelled different here, and people looked a little different, but it was hard to say how. Maybe their faces were a bit redder? And then there was the issue of their dialect. Honestly, it was sort of hard to follow what they were saying.

Anyway, for four weeks Mom was going to be doing the voice of a girl in an animated TV show. Maybe that sounds fun, but I wouldn’t say that. I’d seen some of it, and it was really boring. I mean, seriously, put-me-to-sleep boring. NOTHINGhappened in it. When I say “nothing”, I don’t mean just some teeny-tiny little thing happened. No. I mean absolutely nothing happened. People mostly walked around and ate and talked. Sometimes they went somewhere in the car. Once a guy bought some socks. See what I’m saying? SNOOOORE!

It was a show for adults even though it was animated. I don’t get why they didn’t have people fly or break in two or look like a monster when it’s animated anyway. You can do what you want in an animation!

Suddenly Mom started waving. “There he is! There’s Flemming!”

I saw a middle-aged man running down the escalator and toward us. Curly hair, glasses, light-blue jeans flapping around his legs. I didn’t recognize him at all even though I’d seen him in films and met him in real life. But of course that was a few years ago.

“Flemming, Flemming!” Mom shouted, jumping up and down in a way that ABSOLUTELY was embarrassing, but since I didn’t know anyone in Malmö, I didn’t bother to say anything to her. I just rolled a few feet away to distance myself.

“Heya, traysure!” Flemming said. I think he was trying to say, “Hiya, treasure.” His dialect was a little like another language. He hugged Mom for a long time, patting her on the back and rubbing her head, as if she were a child. Then he turned to me.

“Get up and say hello,” Mom said.

I got up.

“Hmm, wasn’t it something with an M . . . .” He hesitated. And something in his hesitation made my whole body tense.

“Marcus,” Mom said quickly.

“Marcus, right,” Flemming said. “I knew it!”

The Mother of All Embarrassments

Flemming was going to show us the apartment we were going to stay in, so we walked together from the station to an area known as Möllan, but which was actually named Möllevången. I mean, excuse me, you people from Malmö, but MÖLLEVÅNGEN? That means “Mill Meadow.” Is that really the best name you could come up with?

We walked and walked, for a hundred years. Well, I rode on my skateboard, even though my bag was so heavy on my shoulders that I couldn’t do much more than glide slowly in a forward direction. We passed canals and squares and cafés and shops. Mom and Flemming chatted on and on, and he strained to lift her bag and then carried it, even though Mom looked both bigger and stronger than him. The whole time, he had a cigarette dangling from his mouth that he puffed on and that waggled when he talked.

They were talking about the time when they’d traveled around Europe, putting on shows and performing mimes. Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris. I’ve seen films of some of those plays. The worst one was a film where Mom didn’t have any clothes on. Not even underpants. (I could almost faint from the shame just thinking about it.) Her body was painted black and her face was white. Unfortunately, it’s available on YouTube. Flemming at least was sensible enough to wear a pair of underpants, but his whole body was painted blue. Like, BRIGHTBLUE. Like a Smurf. No one can understand why. It’s been viewed over eighteen thousand times. I know it’s not that much when you think about how some videos have been watched, like, a billion times. But still. Eighteen thousand people have seen my mother pretend to walk down a set of stairs that doesn’t exist, catch a bull that doesn’t exist with a lasso that doesn’t exist, and get trapped in a cage that doesn’t exist. In the middle of Paris. Naked.

Sometimes Flemming would say something to me, and I nodded and tried to look happy, because what else are you supposed to do when someone speaks so unclearly? I just hoped he wasn’t saying, “It’ll be fine for you to stay in a clay-filled hole in the ground with twenty vipers, won’t it?” Or: “Is it okay if you work as my little slave?” In that case, I was in trouble. But luckily it turned out that Flemming was DANISH and not from Sweden, even though he lived in Skåne with his daughter. That explained a lot. I guess some Swedes could understand his Danish, but I sure couldn’t. And that also meant that maybe I’d be able to talk to people down here after all, if they didn’t sound like him.

The apartment was on Amiralsgatan street in a light-yellow building. There was no elevator, so we had to drag our bags up three flights of stairs. Flemming panted like an injured seal. Mom teased him because he was in such bad shape. She said it was because he smoked too much. Flemming replied in Danish, “It’s worth it!” Even I could understand that.

The apartment had a green ceiling and maybe the world’s smallest toilet. I wondered if my dad would be able to get into it. He is even bigger than Mom, six and a half feet tall and rather broad. (My friend Oliver calls my parents ghasts. That’s a type of big monster from Minecraft that can shoot fireballs. Oliver is OBSESSED with Minecraft.) Dad was going to come to Malmö in a week or so. Maybe. It wasn’t definite.

The shower was in its own little room with some small square frosted windows, so you could look out into the hall. This way you could watch the entrance at the same time you got clean. Practical!

Mom looked happy. She went around smiling, basically stroking the walls, which was perhaps a bit extreme.

“Marcus, the apartment is really nice! Don’t you think? It’s not very big but . . . . nice!”

It was nice, definitely. The hall had checked flooring, just like our kitchen at home did, but otherwise the floors were wood. There was a little bedroom and then an open-plan living room that went into the kitchen. On the wall by the kitchen table, there was one ENORMOUS painting that showed a fat sparrow who looked dead. That was pretty ugly, if you ask me.

Flemming pointed out the kitchen window and said something to me, and I smiled and nodded, though I didn’t understand anything, but this time Mom translated.

“Flemming said there’s a courtyard down there, Marcus. Do you want to go look at it? We’re going to go through all the practical things, the rent, the contract, and all that. It will be a little boring for you to sit and listen to it.”

I sighed. A courtyard. Did she think I was five years old or what?

“We’ll be quick. Take your skateboard!”

Mom looked at me pleadingly. I shrugged, took my board, and went out. I guessed they were going to talk about more than the apartment, and I really didn’t feel like listening to that.

Me Kill!

I walked down the three flights of stairs and saw that I had to go down another half set of stairs to get out into the courtyard. It was dark all the way down the stairwell, with only a little light coming in from a dirty half-moon-shaped window high up in the door. I opened the door, which was heavy and hard to move, and then the sunlight suddenly hit me in the eyes. I turned around. The half set of stairs was perfect! I counted four steps. It could work. I stood the door open with a doorstopper made of metal that I found on the ground. Then I went up the half set of stairs again and got on my board. I got ready and then jumped down the four steps and straight out the door. I couldn’t stay on and had to jump off in the air, and my board shot away like a rocket at an angle over the grass.

Dad hates when I jump down stairs and that sort of thing, especially without a helmet. He thinks I could die. Okay, sure, one day we’ll all die, as Grandma usually says, but I’d be extremely surprised if that happened just because I skated down a stair or two.

The door started to slide shut behind me and the metal doorstopper scraped against the gravel. I went back to open the door fully, but when I pushed the doorstopper with my foot, the door shut before I could stop it. I pushed on the handle. TYPICAL! It had locked. Oh well. Mom would notice me missing after a while.

I looked around for my board, but it must have slid away farther than I thought. Suddenly my phone dinged. It was Oliver. He wrote: “I’ve just found a desert temple!!!”

I wrote back: “What? A temple with desserts?”

He wrote: “Haha, nah, you’re nuts. A desert temple! In Minecraft!”

I didn’t understand a thing, but of course it sounded totally cool to have a desert temple, so I wrote: “Aha, great, how cool!” Oliver is nice and is basically my best friend and all that, but we have quite different interests.