3

PRESENT

Three Girls

The three of them had known Swinemünder Street since they could walk and loved it dearly, for it was made to give children and families a place to relax. Actually, Swinemünder Street was less a street in the true sense and more of a garden avenue.

No cars drove here, and where the street was otherwise reserved for metal carriages, a long park with bushes, flower beds and blooming, fragrant shrubs stretched between the wide pavements.

Small, low walls made of red stone separated the flower beds from sandpits, table tennis tables, benches and small stools. In the evening, there was a lot going on here.

Groups of friends met and hung out together. During the day, mothers could let their children run free to play and romp around without having to watch out for cars. It was quieter here than elsewhere in the big city because the traffic noise that otherwise dominated everything was far away.

Annabell, Lara and Maya loved to daydream as they walked through the park on their way to school.

On the narrow stone paths, they walked between the flower beds, surrounded by curious bees and bumblebees buzzing around and under trees with singing birds. Here, the morning dreamt itself away in a fairytale-like way until the three of them reappeared, delighted, to conquer the new day.

It was a beautiful, sunny, warm day. Small white clouds drifted across the blue sky. The air smelled pleasant and was clear.

The morning freshness wafted around the little noses of three girls, who had no idea how surprising the day would turn out to be for them. But first, they had to overcome the first hurdle of the day.

»Today we have the long-awaited project day in politics and economics with Ms. Heidenreich«, said Maya, sounding distinctly bored.

»I can hardly wait«, groaned Annabell. »More theoretical stuff that no one is truly interested in.«

As usual, the three of them wanted to weave their way through the groups of older students from the twelfth and thirteenth grades who stood around so coolly every morning in front of the school building on Swinemünder Street that the younger ones always scurried past them quickly with respect.

The older students hardly moved.

They stood there like penguins on the Ice Age savannah, serene and mature, ready to take the next new step in their lives.

But here at Diesterweg High School, they were now the older ones, the experienced ones, the demonstratively bored ones because they had already seen and experienced everything in this place a hundred times over.

Even now, fifteen minutes before eight o’clock, nothing could disturb their calm. They just stood there and showed themselves off.

It was a case of seeing and being seen against the backdrop of the spacey orange-yellow school building from the elegantly flamboyant architectural era of the 1970s, with its rounded edges, interlocking cubes and raised row of windows, which were always shaded by shiny white metal blinds with a metallic finish when the sun was shining.

But their school building also towered like a protective castle. A place where the students were safe from the outside world, the adults and the idiots who l