Chapter 1

In a way, you could say this story starts when I was just five years old. That’s when I met my best friend for the first time. Rosa’s parents had just moved to our city, and it was her first day at the kindergarten I attended. I don’t remember any of it, but her parents later told us that it was really cute. Within minutes of meeting we were playing together, and by the end of the day we were friends.

Back then, my father was still alive, and he would often bring me to her house so we could play together. More often than not he stayed there with me, and while I wouldn’t have understood it then I now believe that it was his way to get away from my mother for a while. If I’m right about that - well I wouldn’t blame him one bit. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant with me - accidentally she assures me - I’m sure he wouldn’t have made the mistake of marrying her or at least he would have corrected that mistake early on.

Not long after my ninth birthday, after another fight with my mother, my father drove off on his motorcycle. He accidentally drove onto the autobahn in the wrong direction. He accidentally forgot to turn the lights on. And he accidentally crashed into a freight truck. Total accident, just ask the insurance investigator. Back then I didn’t really understand why he did his investigating in my mother’s bedroom.

After my father’s death, Rosa was there for me. Her parents were there for me. My mother went and bought a new flashy sports car with some of the insurance money.

I do realize that all this makes me sound bitter, and maybe it should. But I don’t really want to use my energy for dwelling on my mother. She doesn’t care about me (or anyone else as far as I can tell), but at the same time I don’t care about her either. The woman who gave birth to me is still my mother to this day, but she’s not my family. On the other hand she was the reason I found my real family, even if she didn’t intend it.

Where my father brought me to Rosa’s family because I was happy there, my mother did the same just to get rid of me. I started to go there after school, would get fed, do my homework, talk to Rosa, and then go my house to sleep.

A few weeks later, my mother found out how rich my father had actually been and collected her inheritance. She never told me how much exactly she got, but it was enough for her to live in luxury for the rest of her life. It didn’t translate to me getting better clothes or anything, but I wouldn’t have expected that. She started traveling - for short periods of time in the beginning, but after a while we wouldn’t see her for months at a time. When she was away, Rosa’s parents would take care of me and in the first years I would usually sleep in a spare bedroom in their house.

During that time, Rosa became the sister I never had, and her parents became the parents I always wished I had. In my mind, that made me richer than my mother could ever be.

Rosa and I were a team, no matter what. If one of us had a problem, we could trust the other to help. We would trust each other with our deepest and darkest secrets. She was the only person in the world I would trust without reservation.

Of course that doesn’t mean we weren’t individuals. Maybe the most striking difference was that she started to discover the other sex much earlier than I did. I think it’s pretty normal for girls to enter puberty earlier than us boys, but I didn’t know it then. I didn’t understand why she suddenly wanted to do things with boys other than me, but as always it was out of question for me not to support her. She had her first serious boyfriend at age 14, the relationship held for about three months. After it ended, I was the one to console her. From then on, she had a seemingly never ending string of boyfriends.

On the other hand, when I started to get interested in girls ‘that way’, there was really only one girl I compared everyone else to - Rosa. By then I knew I wasn’t her type - she always dated the bad boys - and I would never endanger our friendship trying to start something with her. But she was perfect in my eyes, and nobody could compete against her sweet and loving personality, her smile, or her good looks. My first attempt to actually date a girl was at age 16 and it failed miserably. The girl realized I wasn’t in it with my whole heart and broke up with me.

After that attempt, I didn’t try again.

A few weeks after her 17th birthday - Rosa was almost three months younger than me - things began to change. It was the first day of the school year. The fist indication that something was different was that she wasn’t standing in front of her house so we could go to school together. It had been one of our many rituals for years and she would be there like clockwork. This time her parents told me she had already gone alone. At school she ignored me. Over the following weeks she went from ignoring to verbally attacking me. I didn’t understand what I had done wrong, so I talked to her parents only to find she was as unbearable to them as she was to me. They had no explanation for this change, either.

Over time she started to attack me, destroy things important to me, and try to get me into trouble. She would start rumors about me. And she would use all those secrets I told her over the years against me. Whenever I tried to talk to her, she would attack me in an especially mean way.

I went from confused and sad to angry. I didn’t care much about the friends she managed to turn against me. I didn’t even care much about the trouble she would get me in with the school. But I very much cared about the fact that she took away my family, and didn’t even offer an explanation. She took away my sister and best friend. She took away my parents. Yes, I would still talk to them sometimes when she wasn’t around, but the easy familiarity and trust was gone from that, too.

The only one who was still on my side was Rex, my dog. He knew he was mine, and I knew he would always love me unconditionally. He was a Germany Sheppard, a huge one at that, and looking at him one wouldn’t believe his playful and cheerful nature. No matter how bad my day might have been, I would always know that Rex would wait behind the door, tail wagging and demanding my attention. Without him, I might just have gone crazy.

In the middle of the school year, a second bright spot appeared in my live. Her name was Katharina, which was about all I knew about her. We shared a few classes, but I was pretty sure that I had never even talked to her. Then one day, she decided to sit down next to me during a break.

“Hi,” she said as she unpacked her sandwich.

“Hello, Katharina. Not that I don’t want you here, but you might not want to sit here. It would paint a target on your back.”

“Ah, the bitch can’t stop me. She doesn’t decide where I can sit. It’s a free country, you know,” she smiled.

“The bitch, huh? A fitting name. But she’s not the only problem, you know. The people in this school are by now convinced that I’m a horrible person. That might rub off on you.”

“You’re wrong. Well, some probably are, but they don’t matter. Most people don’t believe anything she sprouts off. They just don’t say anything against her because they are scared. Anybody who watches you for a while realized you are a good person, and I have watched you for a while now. I think you need some friendship, and I’m here to provide it. So stop trying to get rid of me already. You won’t succeed anyway.”

“Well, it’s your funeral. And I like to have you here.”

During the following weeks, Katharina would sit with me during break every day. Turns out, we were both right. I needed the friendship she gave me, and she made me realize how much I had missed it. And the bitch, which is how I started to think of Rosa, started to attack Katharina. I don’t know how she did it, but she never fought back. All she did whenever something happened, was give me a little smile. It just wasn’t possible to get her down. It seemed to me that she thought that any attack on her was one attack less on me.

I was thankful to have her in my life, but I was also appalled that I would bring those bad things over her.

At this point the anger I felt at the bitch slowly morphed into hate.

It took me three months to get the courage to ask Katharina to go out with me. I fretted for days about what to say. It didn’t matter, as I wasn’t even done asking the question before she said “yes, I’d love to”.