That night I crawled into Fatti’s bed again. She told me she was going to run away but I didn’t believe her. Where would she go? Sometimes girls from families like ours run away but I’ve never heard of anyone who didn’t eventually come back. Even the ones who commit suicide are brought back. But when I woke up the next morning the bed was empty. Fatti was gone. At first I thought she was in the bathroom or out on the balcony wrapped in a blanket, but she was gone. I peeked in all the rooms. Dad was snoring, Mum’s foot was hanging down on the floor. Fatti’s red coat was gone. She had not taken very much with her. The only bag that was missing was her little black backpack. I walked out on the balcony. It was still early. A bird somewhere was chirping, the sun was rising out of the mist, and I wondered where Fatti could have gone. I thought that I should have gone with her because Fatti and I are really the same person. Fatti is thinner than I am. That’s the only difference.
I will always remember when I stood on the balcony in Falun and realised that Fatti had run away, and I remember thinking that everything would be different from then on. They found Fatti in Sala four days later. She had fallen asleep on a park bench, or else she had fainted. The police drove her home and when they had left, Dad hit her so hard that she fell and got a deep gash in her neck. Dad wasn’t the only one who hit her, he wasn’t the worst, he only hit her that one time. My brother came down from Gothenburg and he didn’t even bother taking off his hat before he dislocated her shoulder. Fatti was no longer allowed to go out after that. She was nineteen, she wanted to be a nurse and she had been interested in the sport of orienteering. I don’t know why, but she was drawn to the idea of running around in a forest, looking for the most indecipherable clues marked out on maps.
