Free The Storyteller by Antonia Michaelis

evening …”
    “For those kinds of job, you have to be enrolled.”
    “I do have a student ID.”
    “I didn’t hear that,” Knaake said. “All right, I’ll ask around. I promise. But I can’t do more than ask. You need to be more flexible. It would be a lot easier to find something in the afternoons.” The voices were moving toward the door now, so Anna bent over her backpack again. “I know,” she heard Abel say. “If it was possible to work afternoons, I’d have …” He fell silent.
    “Anna!” Knaake stroked his graying beard in surprise. He looked a bit like an aging walrus in a knitted sweater. “What are you still doing here?”
    “I wanted to … to discuss the reading list with you,” Anna lied. “I …” She talked about the reading list for almost fifteen minutes, about which books she might not need to read for the final exams and those she absolutely had to read. As she spoke, she didn’t even listen to herself; she didn’t care which books she’d read or not before the final exams. There was only one story that really interested her. And it was a fairy tale.
    And it wasn’t on any list.
    During lunch break, it began to snow. It snowed in soft, heavy flakes that fell for a while before anybody noticed them. The sky was full of white snow clouds that pushed cold air down onto the city. Anna sat on the radiator in the student lounge, her hands wrapped around a paper cup full of coffee, trying to warm up. Behind her,the majority of the French class was desperately cramming for a test at two thirty—one of the last before the end of the semester, and before final exams. An oppressive silence filled the room.
    Life seemed to consist of collecting points, points that were tallied into your final grade, like dollar bills in a strange game of Monopoly. Anna imagined the points, like snowflakes, falling gently, slowly—yet still so hard to catch.
    Out the window, she caught sight of someone padding through the new snow, someone in a military parka and a black knit cap. It was Abel walking over to his bike. Abel took French, just like Gitta. Anna took music instead.. She glanced at her watch. It was two minutes past two. Abel unlocked his bicycle. She put the paper cup down, grabbed her backpack, and slid into her jacket. In seconds she was outside. The snow was slippery under her feet. Nevertheless, she started running.
    When she reached him, he was already sitting on his bike and shaking the earplugs of his old Walkman out to untangle the wires—she wanted to snatch those damn earplugs out of his hands. “Where …” She had to catch her breath after running. “Where … are you planning to go?”
    Abel looked at her. “That’s my business.”
    “Sure, right,” Anna said, angry. “Everything is your business. But you’re supposed to be taking a French test in fifteen minutes.” She narrowed her eyes. “Are you running away? From the test?”
    “Crap,” he said, putting the earplugs into his ears, laying his hands on the handlebars of his bike.
    “If you don’t take this test, you’ll get a zero, and you know it.”
    “Have you ever thought that maybe there are more important things in life than a checkmark next to your name?”
    “Yes,” Anna said. “A smiley face. But …”
    He grinned, though she saw he didn’t mean to. “A smiley face, huh.”
    “What’s the matter?”
    He took his hands from the handlebars. “I’m not running away from the test. I’ll be back. I’ll be late, but I’ll come back. I’ll take half of it.”
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Micha,” Abel said. “She forgot her key. I just realized it. I found it in my backpack. She put it in there or it just found its way in somehow. She usually walks home from school by herself. I don’t want her to wait outside all afternoon … people have seen her father around lately, and I don’t want … do you understand? And now just forget about it. Tell that friend of yours that I’m sick.”
    Anna