Free Freak City by Kathrin Schrocke

furrows in indignation—some words she formed soundlessly with her lips. It almost seemed like her expressions were part of the language!
    At some point, she smiled and tapped two fingers on her chin. The sign for sweet! I recognized it immediately.
    “Sweet,” I said slowly. Leah nodded at me and grinned. My enthusiasm returned.
    Tommek came out of the kitchen with three plates full of spaghetti. “Delicious canned food!” he said, and went back behind the bar. The two girls knocked on the table. Apparently, that was some sign. Franzi grinned and said aloud, “Guten Appetit!”
    I nervously shoveled the food into my mouth. Now I felt uncomfortable at the table with Leah and Franzi. With two girls who talked constantly, but I didn’t have the vaguest idea what it was all about.
    Leah and Franzi had also started eating. Now it wasn’t possible to keep signing. They ate their meal in silence, their eyes lowered to their plates. Now that the two of them had stopped communicating, I felt even more out of place.
    When I ate with my friends, the conversation never stopped for a minute. We just continued talking while we ate. With our mouths full. All of that was possible. But for deaf people, that was clearly a problem. They could talk or eat. Doing both at the same time was difficult. I kept my eyes lowered and shoveled the food into my mouth.
    I noticed the silence. That calmness at our table. As if we were all at a loss for words! I found the quiet incredibly unnerving. I started to sweat, and I had the urge to just get out of there.
    I was glad when I finished my plate. “Can I pay?” I called out, agitated. Tommek came over to me with his shabby brown money pouch.
    “In a hurry all of a sudden?” He put a pad of paper on the table and wrote down the two amounts. Apple juice. Spaghetti. A thick line underneath. “With a drink that’ll be six twenty-five,” Tommek said, handing me the slip.
    I shoved the money toward him. “I’m outta here,” I said, standing up much too quickly.
    Franzi looked at me uncomprehendingly. “I’m outta here,” she definitely couldn’t read that from my lips. I should have spoken slowly and without slang.
    “I’m going now,” I repeated slowly and felt like an idiot. Now I had caught the two girls off guard, and they looked at me uncertainly.
    Then Leah grabbed Tommek’s pad of paper. She scribbled something on it, tore off the top page, and gave it to me.
    A cell phone number and an e-mail address. Her phone number and her e-mail address. I blushed.
    Tommek’s expression became hard. He had glanced at the paper and then his eyes locked onto it. So he wasn’t such a good loser, after all. Self-consciously, I stuck the paper into my pocket. Franzi grinned. She bit her lips like she wanted to bite back some commentary. Her hands lay unusually calm on the table. She would bombard Leah with a flood of questions the second I was outside!
    I hurried out of the café. The paper was burning a hole in my pocket.
    Outside, the big city welcomed me. Cars, bicycle bells, and the barking of dogs. It was a wave of sounds that received me like an old friend. I had never thought about how comforting noise could be. The anxiety disappeared immediately. I slipped back into my old groove.
    I didn’t know if I would get in touch with Leah or not.

CHAPTER 8
    “All right, buddy, take it easy! The missing person just returned!” I hadn’t even pulled the front door closed behind me yet. My dad stood in the foyer and held the phone out toward me.
    Buddy.
I absolutely hated it when my dad did that, when he acted like he was a teenager himself and always in a good mood. Disgusted, I reached for the phone, and my dad disappeared into the kitchen, whistling.
    “Hey, Claudio.”
    “Your dad is the best!” Claudio promptly fell for Dad’s slimy attempts to get on his good side. “He asked me about going climbing again, just the three of us, like in the good old days!” Claudio used to go to