Little Star (19 page)

Österyd 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
gravel pit
for no real reason.

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.

Everyone is actually called something else.

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.

How do you actually do this?

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
Pitbull Terrier.
It had a red cover showing a black monster dog, and was written by somebody called Kristian Lundberg. Teresa took it off the shelf and read the first lines of the first poem:

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
Pitbull Terrier
and cycled home.

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
He Who Does Not Speak Is Dead.

It seemed to be completely unopened. Nobody had read it before her.

The following day Teresa became acquainted with the term ‘troll’. She had thought no one would react to Sara’s comments. She was wrong. Caroline seemed to have a lot of fans on poetry.now, and eight people had commented on her comment, a couple of them at some length.

Every single comment, whether long or short, made it clear that Sara was a very bad person who had no feelings—
you come up with something better, then.
And so on. In two of the replies she was called a ‘troll’, and realised it was some kind of term. She looked it up and found that ‘troll’ came from
trolling:
dragging a baited hook through a shoal of fish and waiting for them to bite. Translated to internet forums: posting unpleasant or stupid comments just to get a reaction. A person who does this is a troll.

Teresa crossed her arms tightly over her chest and looked out of the window. She felt happy and peaceful. Lots of girls had read what she’d written and felt compelled to express their point of view. Because she was a troll.

I am a troll.

It suited her perfectly. She lived in the world of humans even though she had been swapped in her cradle, and really belonged to the dark, wild forest. A troll.

During the winter and the
spring she was a regular visitor to the library, reading her way methodically through the poetry section. When she got home, trolling took up a considerable amount of her time. She created several different aliases on various forums. She was Jeanette, aged fourteen and Linda, twenty-two. On a forum dealing with anorexia and bulimia she was My, aged seventeen, and received over thirty-five replies to her contribution in which she stated that all anorexics should be force fed and then have their mouths taped shut so they couldn’t run off and throw up.

By chance she ended up on a forum for people who enjoyed renovating old houses. For this she created Johan, twenty-eight, who absolutely loved vandalising, even burning down, houses like that. On a site for those who considered themselves environmentally friendly Tomas, forty-two, wrote about how much he adored his 4x4, and campaigned for a reduction in the tax on petrol.

But she tended to stick to forums like Lunarstorm, where young girls discussed their problems. Their indignant little comments would make her shudder with pleasure, and as time went by she discovered an even more effective weapon than cynicism, namely irony.

On a forum about animal rights, containing despairing accounts of cruelty towards the dear little furry creatures, Elvira, fifteen, wrote about an experiment in Japan where they had poked out the eyes of eight hundred baby rabbits just to see if it affected their hearing, then set fire to them to see if the little blind screaming bunnies could find
their way out of a labyrinth. Elvira got over forty replies, quivering with rage over the cruelty of man.

The only exception was the wolves. On a forum where the rights of wolves were discussed, her alias Josefin maintained a more reasonable tone, and put forward Teresa’s own views. She needed at least
one
place where she could be herself, or almost herself.

Trolling gave her a key insight: you don’t need much energy to provoke a powerful reaction, as long as you use that energy in the right way. Something as simple as a broken plastic fork stuck in the lock of a classroom door could lead to a circus lasting at least half an hour, involving the caretaker, a locksmith, teachers and relocated lessons, and it only took five seconds to do.

How long did it take to put a drawing pin on a chair, and how much chaos did that cause? It was just like on the internet: all it took was a few clicks, a few words in the right place and in seconds there were twenty people busy expending far more time and energy on responding than it had taken her to write the comment in the first place.

Teresa might not have looked like much to the rest of the world, but through her alter egos and her well-planned little tricks she, the troll, took up more of other people’s time and thoughts than pretty Agnes, for example, could ever hope to do.

Everybody loved Agnes, and Teresa just couldn’t work her out. She was so bloody nice. All the pretty girls Teresa had known had been full of themselves, stupid, and obsessed with their appearance. Not Agnes. She was nice to everybody, worked hard in school and didn’t seem to care at all about how she looked.

If she had her hair in plaits she looked cute, if she wore it loose she looked pretty, and if she tied a scarf around her head she was as beautiful as a movie star, but without seeming to notice. Teresa ought to have hated Agnes, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

One afternoon when Teresa was standing by the poetry section in the library flicking through some newly arrived collections, she heard a discreet ‘Hi’ behind her. She turned around and was met by a breath
of fresh air mixed with the scent of flowers, emanating from Agnes.

Teresa said, ‘Hi,’ and felt a blush spread over her cheeks. As if she were about to sit an exam and hadn’t done a stroke of work. She stood there like a lump, saying nothing. Agnes seemed uncomfortable too, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Then she pointed to the shelf behind Teresa. ‘I was just going to…’

Teresa moved to one side and surreptitiously watched Agnes, who was glancing over the thin spines of the books. When she was apparently unable to find what she was looking for, she began to move slowly along the rows, reading every single title.

‘Were you looking for anything in particular?’ asked Teresa.

‘Yes,’ said Agnes. ‘It said on the computer that they had several books by Kristian Lundberg, but I can’t find them.’

‘Do
you
read Kristian Lundberg?’

‘Why?’

‘No, I just…nothing.’

‘Do you?’

‘I might have read the odd thing.’

Agnes carried on peering at the section where the books should have been, and pulled out a volume of Kristina Lugn’s collected poems instead. She flicked aimlessly through it and said, ‘It was Mum who said I ought to look at that Lundberg guy. But I don’t know, I mean he’s not much fun, is he?’

‘No, well, not like Kristina Lugn anyway.’

Agnes shook her head and smiled the smile that could probably bring down trees. ‘I think she’s good, because her poems are like really really sad and really really funny at the same time.’

All Teresa could come up with was, ‘Right.’ She didn’t understand what somebody like Agnes could get out of Kristina Lugn’s splenetic humour. But she crouched down and pulled out
Close to the Eye,
Anders Bodegård’s translation of poems by Wislawa Szymborska. She held it out to Agnes and said, ‘Try this. It’s quite funny too.’

Agnes opened the book at random and started to read a poem. It took Teresa a few seconds to realise she was standing there holding
her breath. She exhaled silently and slowly as she contemplated Agnes, whose plaits lay on either side of the book, framing the picture and creating an image that could have been used in advertising to promote literacy.

Agnes giggled, closed the book and looked at the front and the back. ‘She won the Nobel Prize, didn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

Agnes gazed at the shelves full of poetry, and sighed. ‘Do you read a lot?’

‘Quite a lot.’

‘I don’t really know where to start.’

Teresa pointed at the book in Agnes’ hand. ‘Start with that one, then.’

Now it was just the two of them, Teresa was beginning to suspect that Agnes wasn’t quite so clever as she appeared to be in school. Agnes probably needed clear directives and the chance to go over things if her intelligence was going to shine.

Agnes fingered the Szymborska book, mumbled, ‘Cool, thanks,’ and went over to the issue desk. Teresa pretended to be reading Kristina Lugn, but secretly watched Agnes as she handed over the book Teresa had recommended, then got it back. Teresa had the unusual sense of being on home ground. She had read at least forty of the books on the shelves behind her, and they carried her like a silent cheer squad.

She could easily have made a fool of Agnes, with the home crowd behind her, but she hadn’t done it.

The encounter in the library didn’t make Teresa and Agnes friends—far from it. But it created a kind of secret mutual understanding. A week before the summer holidays Agnes told Teresa during the lunch break that she had now read everything by Szymborska. She wondered if Teresa had listened to Bright Eyes? Teresa said she hadn’t, and the next day Agnes brought in a CD of
Lifted
that she’d burned.

That was all it was. And perhaps that’s all there could be with
Agnes. Even though she was popular, there was a kind of remoteness about her, a sense of distance between her and those around her which had nothing to do with superciliousness. It was as if she arrived in every moment three seconds after it had happened, and you never saw her sitting whispering with another girl, their heads close together. She wasn’t really
there.
It was impossible to say whether this was down to absent-mindedness, insecurity or something else. Teresa often found herself secretly studying Agnes. It didn’t make her any the wiser.

To Teresa’s amazement, not only did she like Bright Eyes—or Conor Oberst, as she discovered he was actually called—she thought he was absolutely brilliant. That fragile voice and those dark, well-written lyrics.

For the first time in her life she bought a CD, even though she already had the copy Agnes had burned for her. Bright Eyes was the first artist she thought deserved that respect. He became her constant companion during the long summer holiday.