Free The Circle by Mats Strandberg Sara B. Elfgren

might be pretty, she thinks. Or all right at least.
    Then she’s unsure again. How is it possible to spend so much time in front of the mirror every day and still not know what you really look like?
    She thinks of when she was alone in the classroom with Max. The warmth from his hand. She feels it again and it spreads throughout her body. Why did she run away? What would have happened if she’d stayed?
    The door is thrown open with a bang. Minoo spins around. Linnéa’s standing there.
    ‘Hi,’ Minoo says, wondering if what she was thinking might be printed across her forehead.
    ‘Hi,’ Linnéa answers, and walks in.
    She’s wearing black jeans and a long black hoody. She looks Minoo up and down. ‘Hiding again?’ she asks, with a hint of a smile.
    Minoo ought to be angry with her, but she can’t be. The harsh words that were said yesterday don’t count: too petty in view of what happened.
    ‘Can we forget what I said yesterday?’ Linnéa asks, as if she had just been thinking the same thing.
    ‘Sure.’ Minoo tries to shrug with a degree of indifference. ‘How are you doing?’ she blurts out. Not the most sensitive question to ask someone who had found their best friend dead in a toilet.
    Linnéa looks as if she’s about to say something sarcastic, but then her face softens. ‘I wasn’t going to come in today,’ she says quietly, ‘but I felt I had to, for Elias’s sake.’
    Minoo thinks of her own selfish reasons for not staying at home, and is happy that Linnéa isn’t looking at her. Her gaze is directed somewhere else, almost as if she’s looking inside herself. She nibbles the tip of her bright pink thumbnail.
    ‘I wish more people had known him,’ she says. ‘He could be so funny. And considerate.’
    Minoo is uncertain how to answer. ‘Shall we go?’ she says, after a moment’s hesitation.
    Linnéa nods and walks out ahead of her.
    The entrance hall is now empty, except for a few stragglers hurrying towards the auditorium.
    ‘Are you all right?’ Minoo asks, before they go in.
    The murmuring from the auditorium sounds like a gigantic beehive.
    ‘No,’ Linnéa answers, with her hard little smile. ‘But I never am.’

8
     
    REBECKA AND GUSTAF are sitting next to each other in the penultimate row. The auditorium has remained essentially unchanged since the school was built: a big hall with a raked floor leading down to a wood-panelled stage. The sun falls in through the high, dirty windows and casts a shadow pattern on the opposite wall. A lectern has been placed on the stage, and the rows of seats are packed with students.
    Rebecka turns her head and sees Minoo Falk Karimi and Linnéa Wallin slip in and sit in the row behind her. She smiles at them uncertainly. Linnéa doesn’t appear to see her, but Minoo smiles back.
    Rebecka has always liked Minoo but it’s difficult to get close to her. She comes across as so grown-up that she makes Rebecka feel childish and at a disadvantage. Besides, Minoo is so damn smart. She was unstoppable during class discussions last year. She would put forward one crystal-clear argument after another. No one stood a chance against her, not even the teachers. Once a lesson was over, Rebecka sometimes saw holes in Minoo’s reasoning. But when Minoo had presented her arguments they’d sounded so feasible that you just had to accept them.
    It must be nice to be like that, Rebecka thinks. To never doubt yourself.
    ‘The whole school’s here,’ Gustaf says, in a low voice.
    ‘It’s so awful,’ Rebecka whispers. ‘Everyone cares all of a sudden.’
    ‘I guess they all want to show they weren’t one of the people who were bullying him,’ Gustaf says.
    Rebecka looks at his serious expression, his straight profile and ruffled blond hair. A lot of people see Gustaf just as a good-looking football hunk. But they don’t know anything about him. He’s clever – cleverer than almost anyone else Rebecka knows. And by that she doesn’t mean academic: he