CHAPTER FOUR

The Briefing

Whatever YoYo might have feared it actually turned out to be much worse.

A magical moment of family life, Bo thought to himself as he sat at the dinner table. Mom had served one of her infamous eco-specialties: a casserole made from mixed wholegrain with celery, together with radish and low-fat curd. She d cooked nothing but vegetarian food for years. In her view meat made you sick and stupid, and sugar was pure poison. It was a simple rule: The better it tasted, the more toxic it was.

Today, the food was exceedingly healthy, his father s bad mood served as a perfect side dish. Throughout the whole meal not a single word left his lips. Only now and then he let out a humming noise, which was probably meant to give the impression that he was participating in the conversation. In reality he was miles away.

Mia, in contrast, was jabbering nonstop. She didn t seem to notice how depressed the mood around her was. She blithely rambled on about her favorite subjects: who had a crush on whom in her class, and which boys she found cute, and what great things her friend Melanie had been wearing, and where they came from and how much they cost. At some point she inevitably returned to the topic of the poster boy in her teeny magazines what an awesome video of him she d discovered and what a hard time he was going through, because his girlfriend had kissed someone else. When Bo made an ironic remark, she went totally ape: You have no idea how much he s suffering!

The crowning, but predictable conclusion of the meal was that Mom forced him to clear the table. And that meant, of course, that he had to empty the dishwasher first, and then wipe the table. The whole deal. He protested cautiously: In his opinion Mia could also lend a hand for once, but he knew it was basically useless. Mia has a lot of homework today, would be Mom s reasoning. As ifhe didn t have any. The problem was that Mom was on her fem