Free Nothing by Janne Teller Page B

hurried on to school without mentioning what Pierre Anthon had yelled.
    Now I was standing here in the straightened-up sawmill, holding my nose in the sudden knowledge that Pierre Anthon was right: Something that smelled good would soon be something that smelled bad. And something that smelled bad was itself on its way to becoming something that smelled good. But I also knew that I preferred things to smell good rather than bad. What I didn’t know was how I was ever going to be able to explain it to Pierre Anthon!
    It was high time we got done with the meaning.
    Time! High time! Very last call!
    It wasn’t as much fun as it had been either.
    Certainly not for Jon-Johan.
    ————
    He was whining already on Friday while we were clearing up, and Otto telling him to shut up didn’t help.
    “I’ll snitch,” Jon-Johan replied.
    Everything went quiet.
    “You’re not going to snitch,” Sofie said coldly, but Jon-Johan was having none of it.
    “I’ll snitch,” he repeated. “I’ll snitch! I’ll snitch! I’ll snitch!” he kept saying, like a song with no tune.
    Jon-Johan was going to snitch and say that the story we’d worked out for him to tell his parents was all lies. That it wasn’t true at all that he’d just found his father’s missing knife and happened to cut his finger off when he yanked the knife out of the wooden post it had been stuck in.
    All his whining was more than anyone could stand, so Otto yelled that Jon-Johan could shut his trap or else get beaten up on. Not even that helped. So Otto was forced to beat up on Jon-Johan, butthat just turned his whining into a loud bawling, until Richard and Dennis took hold of Otto and said enough was enough. So we sent Jon-Johan off home and told him to come back the next day at one o’clock.
    “If you don’t turn up, we’ll beat you up all over again!” Otto hollered after him.
    “No,” said Sofie, shaking her head. “If you don’t turn up, we’re going to take the whole hand.”
    We glanced around at one another. None of us was in any doubt that Sofie meant what she was saying. Not least Jon-Johan. He bowed his head and ran as fast as he could down the road and away from the sawmill.
    ————
    Saturday, at ten minutes before one, Jon-Johan came back.
    This time he wasn’t running. He came walking, slowly, staggering almost, in the direction of the sawmill. I know because Otto and I werestanding at the end of the road, waiting, shivering in an icy wind, with our hands buried deep in our pockets. Ready to go fetch him if he didn’t show up of his own accord.
    Jon-Johan began whining as soon as he saw us. I recalled Sofie’s thin-lipped silence back then with the innocence and told Jon-Johan to shut his mouth and pull himself together. Crybaby!
    Crybaby! Scaredy-cat! Jonna-Johanna!
    It didn’t help.
    Jon-Johan’s whining only got worse when we got back to the sawmill and he saw the knife sticking up out of the plank that had been laid across the sawhorses where his finger was going to be guillotined . It was lady William who had provided us with this magnificent word for what was going to happen. Jon-Johan couldn’t care less. He was howling absurdly at the top of his voice, and it was impossible to understand the sounds that were stopping short of becoming words in his mouth. One thing we did comprehend, though:
    “Mom, Mom!” he wailed. “Mommy!” Jon-Johan threw himself down into the sawdust and rolled around with his hands in between his legs, and it hadn’t even started yet.
    It was pathetic.
    Crybaby! Scaredy-cat! Jonna-Johanna!
    No, it was worse than pathetic, because Jon-Johan was the class leader and could play guitar and sing Beatles songs, but all of a sudden he’d become a howling little baby you just wanted to kick. One Jon-Johan had become another Jon-Johan, and we didn’t care for this one. I thought maybe it had been this one Sofie had seen that night with the innocence, except that time it had been him on top, and