My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.

In a couple of days, at the start of Easter, obviously no one in the room will spare a thought for God, because then God won’t have anything interesting to sell to them. But the thing that’s so incredible about God is that God understands people’s needs, so there are always bathrooms in churches, so Louisa broke in through one of the bathroom windows, in full accordance with the plan.

She’s bad at pretty much everything, but good at being angry.

because

That’s why rich adults hate the sort of thing that Louisa paints on the walls of buildings, not because they love walls, but because they hate the fact that there are beautiful things that are free.

Because jellyfish, like guards, have neither backbones nor brains.

She doesn’t like her body because there’s too much of it, she doesn’t like her voice because it’s too deep, she doesn’t like her brain because it always tells her to talk when she’s nervous. Most of all she doesn’t like her heart because it’s always nervous. Stupid, stupid heart.

but the room is full of people busily trying to see their hairstyles in the reflection of their Champagne glasses.

someone else needs to think something first so they can know what they’re allowed to love.

Panic spreads through the group like pee in a tent.

The women hurry over to the men who are talking about golf to ask if it’s art. One of the men asks: “Is there a price tag?”

No price tag, no art, oh, wha...

because rich people love tiny food.

Everything else should be big, except for taxes and sandwiches.

she imagines everyone else there must be able to hear her stupid, stupid heart beating in her chest.

Next to the rope stands a small old woman draped in diamonds, looking very unhappy, which, in her defense, is probably the only way her face can look, seeing as it has had so much plastic surgery it looks like a sneaker that’s been tied too tightly.

You get used to so many strange things when you grow up without parents, you soon get so used to having one single person who you love that it’s impossible to shake the habit.

She fled from reality, down into bottles, out into the fog.

Adults always think they can protect children by stopping them from going to dangerous places, but every teenager knows that’s pointless, because the most dangerous place on earth is inside us. Fragile hearts break in palaces and in dark alleys alike.

Fish was murdered by reality. She was suffocated by the claustrophobia of being trapped on this planet, she died of being sad all the time.

That there is a speed at which a heart can beat that you can’t remember when you’ve stopped being young.

There is art that can be so beautiful that it makes a teenager too big for her body. There is a sort of happiness so overwhelming that it is almost unbearable, your soul seems to kick its way through your bones. You can see a painting, and for a single moment of your life, just for a single breath, you can forget to be afraid. If you’ve ever experienced that, you know how it feels. If not, there probably isn’t any way to explain it.

The secret to that is knowing that you don’t mean anything to anyone. That you’re worthless. The woman, who feels very important and is therefore very visible, also happens to be fully occupied at the moment, because she’s just caught sight of the men and women talking about investments, so she snorts: “Look, Charles! Apparently they let anyone in here these days, even those vulgar new-money social climbers. Look at them! No taste, no style!”

Maybe this is what it feels like to become a parent, she thinks: there are no words. Miss you, see you soon. —Mom, it says on the postcard in the backpack.

It isn’t the plan’s fault, it’s just that her brain sometimes gets a bit crowded with both the genius and the non-genius having to live there together.

It turns out, to his horror, that Louisa isn’t at all afraid of index fingers, because she isn’t an elevator button,

because she knows all too well what young people and backpacks mean.

Becoming a parent? Someone said it’s an invisible tidal wave that hits you with such force that you lose your breath and never quite get it back. You spend your whole life gasping, someone else said, because it’s a love so immense that it squeezes the air out of your lungs. Everyone else thinks you look like the same person afterward, a third said, but you don’t understand any of it, because there’s such a clear before and after. A completely new you.

Lady, Louisa thinks, if I’d wanted to destroy the painting, this entire building would be ashes by now. I’m insanely good at destroying things, lady. Everyone I love dies.

She hates it when adults touch her, that’s what happens if you’ve never met an adult you can trust.

They came from another country, Louisa remembered nothing about it. She never found out what they left behind, but it can’t have been good if this place was better.

Time is a strange concept once you’ve been abandoned.

Art is empathy.

“Deceased” meant dead. “Substance abuse” meant her mother had drunk herself to death. Drowned from the inside. A child’s brain is so imaginative, Louisa heard this but didn’t grow up afraid of alcohol, just horribly afraid of swimming.

She put it in her backpack and thought that one day she and Fish would see that painting in real life, and maybe then it would be like when superheroes discover their powers. If she ever got to the sea, maybe she wouldn’t be scared of swimming. She imagined it would be like in fairy tales, and that in some magical way everything would have a happy ending.

thinks about the sea. She always does that when she’s frightened, so she’s thinking about the sea almost all the time.

This is a painting of laughter, and you can only understand that if you’re full of holes, because then laughter is a small treasure.

They’ve never loved anything so much that it’s worth being beaten up by a guard just to get to see it once in your life.

If you’ve had people who can make you laugh like that, you never forget it. If not, words are pointless.

Either you have smelled a remarkable fart, or you become one of those adults who stands at an auction a quarter of a century later thinking it’s a painting of the sea simply because the painting is called The One of the Sea. Adults really are out of their minds.

The kids on the pier weren’t supposed to be anything at all, they were supposed to be born poor and die poor, because that’s how the world is constructed.

aren’t supposed to have any sort of future at all if you grow up that way, you certainly aren’t supposed to end up a world-famous artist, but one day that’s exactly what will happen to one of those teenagers.

Because in an ugly place, he was born with so much beauty inside him that it was like an act of rebellion. In a world full of sledgehammers, his art was a declaration of war.

The following morning he stood on the pier and explained the rules of the competition, which unfortunately wasn’t easy, seeing as he was surrounded by idiots.

“It’s a fucking competition for young artists, and anyone can send in a fucking painting, and they hang the best fucking painting up in a fucking museum!” he explained for perhaps the seventh time, possibly the eighth. “Now do you get it?” Naturally his friends understood perfectly well, sometimes they just enjoyed pretending to be idiots because it was so funny when Joar got angry.

“But you do! The rest of us are screwed, we’re going to have shit lives, but not you, do you hear what I’m saying? Because you’re a goddamn world-famous artist, the world just doesn’t know it yet!

“Do you think we’ll all still be best friends when we’re grown-up?” Joar replied calmly: “When we’re grown-up, I don’t think we’ll all be alive.”

Because it was Fish who promised that if they could just survive their damn childhoods, everything would be okay after that.

“But you were the one who was supposed to survive, not me, because you were the one who was good at being alone!”

That’s because her brain is a bit of a bully and always tells her that if everyone else is quiet, it’s probably because Louisa seems so weird, so she should definitely start babbling at once! So Louisa turns to the cat and says: “I like cats! I