How to Lose Everything Page 2

  “How much is that?” asked Sam.

  “About a half.”

  “A half? A half!”

  “Half an ounce,” murmured Schulz. “That'll last at least a week. If there's four of us . . . or maybe ten days, if . . . oh well, it doesn't matter.”

  With the foil unwrapped, a pliable brown bud came into view. Eric held the tip of it over the flame of his lighter, and just before it caught fire, he rubbed off small pieces with his thumb and spread them over the tobacco. He ran his fingers a few times through the tobacco, where little brown clumps were sticking. Finally he stuffed the whole thing into the vase-shaped bowl of the bong, lit it up, and inhaled. The smoke bubbled in the water and then rushed into him. After a massive plume of smoke rose from his mouth and floated into the late-afternoon sky, he handed the bong to Sam and leaned back against the concrete wall.

  Smiling, Schulz pulled his long, stringy hair back behind his ear, bringing his almost triangular face into view.

  “Hurry up,” he said. Sam could only manage a gurgled “Fuck you” because his mouth was already glued to the opening.

  After each of us had had our turn, things got quiet. No one said anything as the sun sank deeper into the sky behind us.

  Eric was resting against the wall and staring up into the sky. “Have you guys heard about the house?” he asked.

  It was a Sunday in the middle of May. The air was still chilly inside the concrete half-pipe, but the sun was definitely winning its battle against the persistent cold of winter. The train to Munich thundered by at twenty-minute intervals.

  We were hanging out that afternoon—the day our summer really began—because there was nothing better to do. Even if there was, we wanted nothing to do with it.

  Eric put on a serious face. It was an expression he'd perfected over the course of the month. I'd been watching him carefully and noticed that he used it whenever he thought he was saying something important or something that had an air of secrecy to it. First he looked each of us in the eye, one after the other (because he knew that would make us even more anxious to hear what he had to say), and then he began: “There's this house on Flower Street.” He paused. “This old, fucked-up house. No one lives in it anymore. It's been empty for years. I heard about it yesterday, from this little kid in my neighborhood.”

  I wanted to say “cool,” but something like “ghoul” came out instead. Whenever I smoked, my tongue got heavier than my thoughts and I started mumbling.

  “We should go!” said Eric.

  Schulz hesitated. “I'm meeting Lena later.”

  “Lena,” Sam countered. “It's always Lena, Lena, Lena. Y-y-you only hang out with her now. Every day.”

  Schulz didn't say anything. Lena flipped out whenever Schulz was more than fifteen minutes late, and we all knew it. Last week she'd suddenly appeared at the half-pipe and made a big scene because he'd forgotten their date.

  “It's not that far from here,” Eric said. “If we leave now, we'll be back in an hour.”

  Eric dumped out the water, wrapped the bong in a plastic bag, and stuffed it in between the clothes in his backpack. Sam finished his soda and tossed it onto the asphalt.

  We started off. Sam and I coasted slowly on our skateboards while Schulz and Eric went on foot. Schulz was telling Eric about the day before yesterday, when he and Lena had done it in the woods, and about the mosquito bite he'd gotten on his ass that was now itching like hell.

  I knew Flower Street from my newspaper route. It veered off from Main Street and was about a fifteen-minute walk past the train station. It was a little street, only about three hundred yards long. Halfway down, it curved and finally ended in a cul-de-sac, which was unusual because there were no other dead-end streets in the entire town. It was lined on both sides by two-story houses with dark wood facades, remnants of Germany's middle-class aspirations in the sixties and seventies. Not too small and not too big, they were comfortable enough for a small family, each with a garage, a front yard, a backyard, a balcony, and a brown roof. Chest-high hedges and dark green wire-mesh fences separated each lot from the next.

  The traffic on Main Street sounded much quieter here when we finally got to the house. I blinked. In the window of a house across the street, I saw an image of what seemed to be a woman ironing. Three times I looked up at her, and three times I saw her head bent over the ironing board.

  “Who would have thought,” said Eric, pointing back to the house. Its hedges stood twice as high as any of the others. I'd never noticed it before because the house itself looked like all the other perfectly normal single-family houses on the street. Only then did I notice how bedraggled the property was. The windows on the second floor were hung with old-fashioned curtains.

  “How do you know it's abandoned?” asked Sam.

  “I don't know. That kid from my neighborhood told me. He went inside three days ago. His friend lives on this street, and he said it's been empty for years. Supposedly two sisters used to live here. One of them died in the house.”

  “And w-w-what if he was lying? Maybe s-s-someone still lives there.”

  “Doesn't matter,” said Schulz, snickering. “We'll just tell them, ‘Sorry, wrong house.’”

  Eric walked across the paved driveway to the fence gate and pulled at the latch. The gate wouldn't budge.

  “L-l-look's like that's it then,” said Sam.

  Instead of turning around and leaving, Eric went to the left and crawled through a small clearing in the hedge that led around the house. We followed him. The front yard was overgrown, with knee-high grass, dandelions everywhere, and even some old lilac bushes spilling out onto the lawn. Sam tripped over a molehill. Once in the yard, the last distant sounds of the street disappeared. It was completely silent. The hedges hid the view from outside. We were standing in a secret garden.

  We went around to the back of the house. On the patio, the seat of a plastic lounge chair was covered in lichen. The glass panel of the patio door was muddy. Wind and rain had overlaid it with a veil of grime. Schulz pressed his face up to the glass.

  “What?” whispered Sam.

  “Nothing,” said Schulz.

  “Quiet, qu-qu-quiet!” Sam put a finger on his lips.

  “I can't see anything,” said Schulz, still loudly.

  We continued circling the house and found ourselves at the front door, which was on the side. Eric shook the lock. It didn't budge. He shook harder.

  “This doesn't make sense. That little dumbass told me he went inside.”

  “Maybe he was just bragging,” said Schulz.

  Eric grunted and picked up a piece of yellowed newspaper from the ground and wrapped it around his hand. He punched through the small pane of glass next to the door. It made a muffled tinkling as it shattered. Eric sucked the blood where a shard had cut his knuckle and reached inside with his other hand.

  “The key's in the lock!”

  The door creaked open. In the entryway, the air was cool and smelled like mildew. Schulz pulled the collar of his hoodie up over his nose. We were in.

  The windowpanes were covered with dirt, and the air was earthy. The hallway was bare except for a layer of dust, which coated the tiled floor, the unfinished walls, and the plywood doors like a fine snow on a January day. There was no furniture. Sam entered a big room on the left, which provided most of the light in the hallway. It was the room with the patio door we'd seen from the backyard. A clothesline hung across the room, on which a faded apron lethargically defied deterioration. Finally Sam whispered, “There's n-n-nothing here. It's totally empty.”

  Eric paced the length and width of the room as if measuring it. Schulz dug a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. He shivered. The four of us stood in a circle, took turns smoking the cigarette, and scanned the walls with our eyes. An ax sat in a corner.

  When we'd finished smoking, Eric said, “There's nothing in here. Let's keep going.”

  The other first-floor rooms were equally empty. In the bathroom, the toile
t seat was missing and pebbles and debris littered the tiled floor. Behind the bathroom, across from the living room, pipes protruded from the wall, apparently waiting to be connected to something. The walls were unfinished. And that was everything. Why was there no furniture? Why the hell would someone live in an unfinished house? I don't know why, but it seemed almost nightmarish to me—and in those blank rooms I started imagining all kinds of hellish scenarios. It made me think of the movie Nightmare on Elm Street, which I'd watched with Eric the year before, when he was still living at home, and we were all still in school together, and Sam . . .

  Schulz held a cigarette in front of my face. Sam and Eric wanted one, too. Schulz didn't usually give out cigarettes. When he did, he usually complained about how we were always mooching off him, which wasn't true at all. But this time he didn't say anything, just gave one to each of us.

  “This is awesome,” said Schulz in a throaty voice. “It'll be our secret.”

  “It's f-f-fucking c-c-creepy, though,” said Sam.

  Schulz shrugged his shoulders.

  Eric tossed his cigarette on the floor and put it out with his foot. “We haven't been upstairs yet. Maybe there's something up there.”

  He started up the steps without waiting for us. We followed.

  “Quiet!” said Sam under his breath, but it didn't help. The stairs groaned beneath our feet. At the top, we found a plywood door with a padlock. The key was in it. Eric unlocked the door but it was still stuck for some reason, so he pushed it open with his foot.

  Our noses, accustomed to the odor of mildew, now smelled something different, something more like people: lavender, coffee, mold, even sweat. The floors were covered with Persian rugs, the walls with colorful old-fashioned wallpaper. There was a gray telephone on top of a dresser. I picked up the receiver; the line was dead.

  We went toward the sunlight, which was streaming in directly above the room with the pipes. We entered a fully furnished kitchen with an oven and stove, a small table and chairs, colorful pot holders, an apron, and a coffee machine with mold growing in it. Everything looked like someone had left the room abruptly, as if the life of the room had been frozen at a single moment and been at the mercy of the elements ever since.

  Eric opened one of the cupboards and discovered plates. He opened more cupboards and found cups, pots, and silverware. There was also an open package of cookies on the table. Some of the cookies were gone, and mold was growing on the ones that were left. Next to that was a stack of opened envelopes that had long ago turned from white to yellow. Sam picked up the pile and leafed through it, occasionally wiping the dust from his hands on his pants. Then he stopped. When Eric saw what was sticking out of the letters, he tore them from Sam's hands. Sam took them back, and then Schulz grabbed for them, and then Sam and I pulled them away.

  “No way!” cried Eric.

  He started to laugh, then I started to laugh along with him, and then we were all laughing. We threw the stack of envelopes in the air and five blue bills, like old fallen leaves, floated back down through the dust.

  It was money. Real money. Five hundred marks.

  “Sh-should we take it?” asked Sam.

  “What else would we do?” said Eric.

  “I j-just mean, m-m-maybe it b-b-belongs to som- som-someone . . .”

  “Of course it belongs to someone. They're probably just at the store. They'll be back any minute . . . Yeah, right!” Eric's sarcasm took on an exasperated overtone. “Dude, this house has been empty forever! No one lives here anymore. And if they had any family, they would've come to get it ages ago. This is our money because we found it.”

  “Y-y-you d-d-don't know that.”

  “What don't I know?”

  “Sam just means,” I said, “that we should be careful. Like, what if someone saw us.”

  Eric didn't answer. Instead, he pressed a bill into each of our hands and kept two for himself.

  We left the house; none of us wanted to see the other rooms. We wanted to get out as fast as possible before someone spotted us and called the police.

  We hurried through the yard, slipped through the opening in the hedge, and left. As the late-afternoon sun hit us on Flower Street, it was as though we were emerging from some kind of dream world. We ran. We were back in the suburbs—back in reality. But we had a memento from that other place. We had the money.

  At the half-pipe we said good-bye to Schulz (who had to hurry off to meet Lena), and then Sam, Eric, and I went to Frank's Pizzeria. Frank's fingers were as fat as sausages—which probably served him well in kneading dough all day. When we arrived, the place was packed with a soccer team, talking and celebrating and drinking pitchers of beer.

  We ordered three Cokes and three calzones. When we'd finished, Eric held out a blue bill to Frank.

  The hundred-mark bill was absorbed by his fat fingers and then disappeared into the cash register. As he counted out the change, Frank looked up and said, “Grandma come to visit?”

  Eric nodded.

  When I woke up, the sky was heavy with clouds. It was damp outside, and I felt like shit. We'd stayed at Frank's until eleven the night before, overdosing on calzones (plus Eric ordered an extra personal pizza; he always ate more than the rest of us) and drinking Coke.

  I had a bowl of cornflakes and a cup of coffee, then I left for school. On the way I smoked a cigarette. I never really liked school, though, of course, anyone who says they like school is either a liar or crazy. Today, I felt totally indifferent. Sure, I wished I were back in bed, but I still went to school and, in fact, didn't even really think twice about it.

  That was the crazy thing: It didn't bother me either way. I might as well have been sitting in a knitting class or attending a church service. It wouldn't have mattered. I sat at my desk and felt nothing. In third period I raised my hand to ask to go to the bathroom. (You shouldn't need the teacher's permission to go to the bathroom; in my opinion, it should be a fundamental right.) I locked myself in a stall and studied the hundred-mark bill. I turned it around, rubbed it, and stared for a long time at the serial number, reading it backward and forward, scanning it as if it could tell me something about its previous owner. I made up number combinations, trying to read clues in the random arrangement of numerals. I didn't come up with anything, though one thing was clear. The bill was overwhelmingly real.

  After school, I went to Schulz's house. His little sister opened the door without a word and then sat back down in front of the TV in the living room.

  Schulz was lying in bed. I'd asked him once why he spent so much time in bed. He had laughed and said that he was tired. Schulz was literally always in bed whenever I came over. That's how Schulz was: Even having someone over wasn't enough reason to get up. He'd ask for a cigarette, wait for it to be handed over, and smoke it, never having moved more than an arm. In between drags he'd take sips from the can of Diet Coke that was always beside him. He said that diet tasted better than regular. (I was pretty sure he drank it because he was worried about getting fat—there's no way that diet tastes better than regular.)

  Lately Lena was always in bed with Schulz, and she acted just like him: asking for a cigarette, smoking it, and sipping Diet Coke. At first I had been sort of embarrassed to see them like that. It was too intimate—almost as bad as watching them have sex. I mean, they were in bed; he could have had a hard-on or something. But Lena and Schulz did what they could to make this arrangement seem normal. Now and then I'd find the PlayStation controllers strewn across the comforter (though Lena preferred watching TV). But whenever he and I had been playing too long, and Schulz hadn't paid enough attention to her, she would tell us we were being immature. Older guys wouldn't be interested in stupid video games.

  This time was different. Schulz was still in bed, but Lena was sitting on a chair in the corner. The air was thick with smoke—it was as if every high schooler in town had stopped by for a cigarette.

  “Hey,” said Schulz.

  Lena's blonde hair was dr
aped over her left shoulder. She was wearing a low-cut white top, and as she moved to tap her cigarette on a strangely old-fashioned metal ashtray, her black bra strap flashed. Through the fog I thought I saw her green eyes, and I wondered why I hadn't noticed before how green they were, and why I apparently never even thought about eye color. I realized that whenever I thought about Eric, Schulz, Sam, or anyone, I had no idea what color their eyes were.

  Then he laughed at me, in his rattling, old-man laugh. “What's up?” he asked. “Money gone to your head already?”

  “No,” I said. Of course not. I had no idea what to do with so much money, other than order pizzas at Frank's for twenty days straight.

  “It stays between us, you know,” Schulz said.

  I couldn't help glancing at Lena.

  “I talked to Eric on the phone a little while ago,” he continued. “He definitely wants to go back. He thinks we'll find more. If there were five hundred marks just lying out on the table, there has to be more somewhere else.”

  “You're such a liar!” said Lena. She jumped up and threw open the door to the balcony, which was near the head of the bed.

  “Come out here,” she said. She didn't mean Schulz, she meant me.

  I threw Schulz a questioning glance, but he just stared at a point in the distance, beyond the white wall of his room. Lena and I didn't know each other that well, but sometimes I had the impression that she wanted me to be her ally. She seemed to think I was likely to take her side in an argument or talk to her when she got worked up—which should have been Schulz's job, not mine.

  Lena leaned over the wooden rail and looked out past the fields and toward the woods. The pine trees were dark green, as always (which is why, in my opinion, pine trees are so boring). I tried hard not to look at Lena's ass, which, with her back stretched out, looked even more amazing than usual.