When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts at a new school. It’s not an easy age to do that – the social order of the school is already well established and he has some difficulty making friends. After a while he does make one friend, another solitary individual. They sometimes hang out together after school in the new Western- style shopping mall that has just opened in the town. 

‘Have you ever done it?’ his friend asks him. 

‘No,’ István says. 

‘Me neither,’ his friend says, making the admission seem easy somehow. He has a simple and natural way of talking about sex. He tells István which girls at school he fantasises about, and what he fantasises about doing to them. He says that he often masturbates four or five times a day, which makes István feel inadequate since he usually only does it once or twice. When he admits that, his friend says, ‘You must have a weak sex drive.’ 

It may be true, for all he knows. 

He doesn’t know what it’s like for other people. 

He only has his own experience. 

One day his friend tells him that he did it with a girl who lives on the other side of the train tracks. 

The news is disorienting. 

István listens while his friend describes, in some detail, what happened. He tries to work out if his friend is telling the truth or if he’s lying. Though he would prefer him to be lying, he thinks that he’s probably telling the truth. Some of the things he says seem too specific, too surprising, for him to have made them up. 

Then, a few days later, he says he talked to the girl and she said she’d do it with István as well. 

‘Seriously?’ István says. 

‘Yeah,’ his friend says. 

István doesn’t know if this means that the three of them will do it together, or just that he’ll do it with the girl on his own. 

He is too unsure of himself to ask.

After school the same day, they walk across the footbridge over the train tracks. 

It’s already getting dark. 

They go down the metal steps on the other side of the footbridge and walk for a while until they arrive at a housing estate. It’s not dissimilar to the one where István and his mother live, only here the buildings, although also made of prefabricated concrete panels, are taller. At the entrance of one of them his friend enters the doorbell number of one of the flats. 

A few moments later, without anything being said, the door unlocks and he shoulders through it. 

The lift smells of cigarette smoke. 

István stares at the wood-effect Formica of its interior as it goes up. 

It goes up very slowly, with a continuous creaking and a separate loud ticking sound as it passes each floor. 

‘You okay?’ his friend asks him. 

‘Yeah,’ István says. 

‘You look terrified,’ his friend says. 

‘No,’ István says. 

They leave the lift at one of the upper floors and his friend knocks on the door of a flat. It’s opened by a girl of about their own age. ‘Hi,’ she says. 

‘Hi,’ István’s friend says. 

She stands aside for them to step into the entrance hall. 

‘This is my friend,’ István’s friend says. ‘You know. The one I  

told you about.’ 

‘Okay,’ the girl says. 

She and István look at each other for a moment. 

‘Okay?’ István’s friend says. 

‘Yeah,’ the girl says. 

The three of them just stand there. 

The girl looks at István again. 

He doesn’t look at her. 

‘Okay,’ István’s friend says. 

‘D’you want to wait in there?’ the girl says to him, indicating a door. 

‘Yeah okay,’ István’s friend says. It’s possible that he seems disappointed, as if maybe he wasn’t sure himself whether or not they were going to do it all together, and had been sort of hoping that they would be. 

István is lighting a cigarette, having to work the lighter a few times to get a flame. 

His friend makes eye contact with him for a second and smiles. 

István doesn’t even try to smile back. He feels something almost like panic. 

He follows the girl along a short dark corridor and into a room at the end of it. 

He doesn’t really take this room in, except that there’s a lot of stuff in it, including what seems to be a small animal in a cage. 

The girl sits down on a bed that’s there. 

István sits on a chair. 

‘What’s your name again?’ the girl asks him. 

He tells her. 

She tells him her name. 

‘You alright?’ she says. 

‘Yes,’ he says. 

They talk for a few minutes. She talks anyway. There are also long silences, during which the sound of the small animal moving in its cage is sometimes audible. She asks him where he’s from. 

‘What’s that like?’ she asks when he tells her. 

‘It’s okay,’ he says. 

They sit there in silence. 

She lights a cigarette, maybe just to do something. 

After a while, without saying anything, she stands up and leaves. 

A few minutes later the door opens again. 

István looks up and sees his friend. 

He expected it to be the girl. 

‘What happened?’ his friend asks. 

‘What do you mean?’ 

‘What happened?’ his friend asks again. 

‘Nothing.’ 

‘She wants you to leave,’ his friend says. ‘What did you do?’ 

‘Nothing.’ 

‘Nothing?’ 

‘Yeah.’ 

They leave the flat and in the corridor outside his friend says, ‘Okay then, see you.’ 

‘Aren’t you coming?’ István asks him. 

‘No she wants me to go back,’ his friend says. 

‘Yeah?’ 

His friend nods. ‘See you round.’ 

‘Okay.’ 

Still not understanding what happened István takes the lift down on his own.

‘She said you weren’t sexy. That’s what she said.’ It’s a few days later and his friend is explaining it to him, what happened. 

István smokes. 

It’s horrible, to have that said to him, and about him, and yet he doesn’t know what to say in answer to it. It seems unanswerable. 

‘She said you didn’t seem up for it,’ his friend says. 

‘I was up for it,’ István says. 

‘She said you didn’t seem to be.’ 

‘I was.’ 

After that things aren’t the same with his friend.  

They spend less time together.  

His friend starts to hang out with other people. 

István spends more time on his own.