Work Text:
[Dec. 31st] Friday 16:28
Sascha didn’t want to be in Hamburg.
All this time, he’d thought that once he had made plans to spend New Year’s Eve with his dad, there was no reason good enough to keep him in Berlin. It just wasn’t how plans worked. Sascha had promised to be there; his dad expected him to come, and so did everybody else. He didn’t want to – obviously – but he didn't make decisions based on what he wanted in a given moment. He wasn’t impulsive.
He’d thought that just because he and Isi had been together every day for the past week, he couldn’t cancel on everyone to keep it going.
It actually had been less than a week, and sometimes, when he was by himself, Sascha still had to remind himself that it was real. He’d wake up smiling, without knowing why, and when he remembered, it felt too good to be true.
It took him a while to get used to it. He had been watching what he said and did around Isi for so long that he didn’t know how to stop now that he didn’t have to. He had never been a very spontaneous person. Anytime he kissed Isi, he had to make a deliberate decision to do it. Anytime he told her how he felt, he carefully weighed his words. Not because he didn’t want to be honest, but because he didn’t know how else to speak.
When they were together, there was always a moment – a split second – when Isi was gone, and Sascha was still stuck in his head, thinking. It made him nervous. In his head, he was always alone, wondering if it had been as serious for Isi as it was for him, if it could be, what it meant if it wasn’t. He wondered if it simply was the sort of thing that Isi did – would do with somebody else if Sascha wasn’t there. But then Isi would casually bring out his mother’s special porcelain, and be so sweet, that Sascha couldn’t help believing that it was real after all.
Every time he did something out of proportion – like surprise Isi and Umut at the kaufhaus, rather than wait until Isi came home – a part of him was scared that this would be the time that he’d be left feeling like an idiot. Isi wouldn’t notice that Sascha was there, and Sascha would realize that he might as well not have been – that he’d come all this way for nothing. But every time, that part of him had been wrong. In the end, he was always glad that he’d let Isi know how stupid she made him.
He felt as if something deep inside him that he had once stamped down was growing back.
Still: he went to Hamburg.
He didn’t like the city. He didn’t like his dad’s apartment, because it was always messy, and he didn’t like it when his dad acted as if cleaning up his shit didn’t fit with the post-divorce lifestyle he had imagined for himself. He hated it when his dad brought up mom, and made her out to be a control freak who had never let them have any fun. He’d say it as they were eating Chinese takeaway in front of the TV, something like, bet your mom wouldn’t like that, huh, and then he’d offer Sascha a beer. Sascha didn’t say that, actually, he liked eating at the table, and he didn’t watch football, and he liked the food he made himself better than anything he ever had at his dad’s, who never cooked, and used to call Sascha to ask how to microwave a ready-made meal from the store.
Once his dad really got going, he often ended up telling Sascha to be careful with women, or else they’d take over his life. “Sure, dad,” was all Sascha replied. He wasn’t going to come out to him. He had been accumulating leaflets, pins, and little paper flags from the Queer Youth centre at both of his rooms – his room at his dad’s, and his room back home. His mom had picked up on it, and his dad had not. Sometimes Sascha wasn’t sure if his dad realized that Sascha was, like, a fully developed person, and that he wasn’t going to grow out of being different from him.
But Sascha took it and never said anything, because he knew that he was never going to do what his dad wanted from him the most. His dad thought that it was his fault that Sascha hadn’t gone to a proper school: he’d been busy with work and he’d let Sascha’s mother take care of it, and look how that turned out. She had let Sascha waste his potential. It went to show that you couldn’t have a woman who’d chosen to be a primary school teacher making any decisions about other people’s futures. But he, he knew that Sascha was smart, a good hard-working kid, and if he’d only got the opportunity, he’d make something of himself. His dad was going to get him an internship at his company – filing invoices, taking calls, simple ground floor-level work, and once Sascha got the hang of it, he’d move up in no time.
Sascha didn’t say anything when his dad gave him this speech, which happened every time he came to visit. He never agreed to his dad’s plan, but he never rejected it, either. He didn’t tell his dad when he’d finished the school and moved on to the apprenticeship. He never brought it up, because he knew that if he did, he’d only hear the speech again. He didn’t know when his dad was going to realize that Sascha had already committed. Carpentry wasn’t a weird hobby that he had, but something that he fully intended to do for the rest of his life. He didn’t know what would happen when his dad finally realized it was too late for Sascha to become a manager. He was afraid that they would be still talking about it when Sascha was forty, and his dad a trembling old man. In the meantime, he bit his tongue, and gave in to his dad on everything else. He loved carpentry, and he’d hate to do what his dad did, but he still felt guilty for denying him this.
Arriving in Hamburg two days before New Year’s Eve, Sascha knew that he was going to hear the speech again, but for some reason, after tolerating it for years, now he couldn’t stand to even think about it. He had felt so light and loose with Isi, and he’d given it up – and for what? His dad went to the office every day, and didn’t come home until late. Sascha was going to spend most of his time playing Switch or, if he came out of his room, cleaning his dad’s mess, because he was physically incapable of ignoring it. His dad wasn’t even going to notice. On New Year’s, they’d go together with his dad’s friends to the central square, and watch fireworks in a crowd of drunk strangers, and nobody was going to wear a mask. And Sascha couldn’t even complain – it was his idea to come. When his dad had asked if he wanted to visit, nobody had forced Sascha to say yes. He was going to spend the next three days absolutely miserable, and he only had himself to blame.
When Isi texted him to ask how it was going, Sascha said that it was going fine. What else there was to say? That he was an idiot and he should have stayed? What good would that do now? Isi already had a lot going on. Sascha saw that they’d added their pronouns to their bio on Instagram. He commented on her post. He’d call her, but he worried that if they talked for longer than five minutes, he’d just start venting, and he knew that he’d regret it afterwards. He still really wanted to call her, and he was thinking about it when his dad began his speech again, and he was thinking about it when he said, “I’m not going to do it.”
“What?”
Sascha realized that he had just snapped at his own father.
“Sorry,” he said. “But I’m not going to work at the company. Or move here.”
“Sascha, you don’t understand-“
“No, I do,” he interrupted him. He had never done it before, but he felt that if he didn’t say it now, his dad would never get it. “I really do. I want to be a carpenter.”
That was Thursday night. His dad hadn’t said a word to him since then. On Friday, he went to work, slamming the door shut behind him. Sascha wasn’t sleeping, anyway. He waited for the sound of the key turning in the lock before he went to get breakfast. He knew that his dad was upset because he was worried. He wanted what was best for Sascha, and Sascha was being stubborn and ungrateful. Sascha understood all that, and he understood that he hadn’t done anything wrong. It would have gone better if he’d been more careful with how he said it, but now that he had said it, he knew that he should have done it a long time ago. Still, he felt drained. He forced himself to finish his soggy cereal, and went back to bed. He sent Isi a good morning text and waited until she woke up and replied: a string of emojis. They were texting until Isi had to leave the house – he was meeting up with Lou for food and a pep talk before the show.
i’m sorry i can’t be there, Sascha texted.
its ok!!!
u have ur family stuff
i get it
Sascha stared at the screen.
you’ll be great
i know
lol
i mean
im not even that nervous anymore
i just think itd be nice if u were there to see it 🙈
Sascha was going to jump out of the window. Why the fuck did he go to Hamburg. He sent Isi a red heart and a tomorrow, and then he groaned into his pillow.
He was still in his boxers at one in the afternoon when he got a notification that somebody had sent him a DM on Instagram. This had almost never happened in the few months of Sascha having an account (which he’d set up in the first place only because Isi talked him into it), so it caught him off guard. He would have felt better if he had his clothes on.
It was Lou. She had followed him after the party and sent him a it was good to meet you! Sascha had replied with a likewise!, but that was it – they didn’t talk.
The message Lou sent now was a picture of Isi, staring pensively out of window, chin propped on their hand.
she’s pining…
It made Sascha smile until he remembered that he wasn’t going to see Isi tonight because he’d be out with drunk middle-aged divorced men.
yeah me too
He didn’t expect Lou to message him again, but she did.
i can come get you
now that rudi is up and running again
haha
i’m serious
the offer is on the table if you want
Sascha paused. He checked the distance in Maps.
but it’s 3h each way
i know :)
Sascha had been miserable for the past day and a half, but now that he had the chance to get what he wanted, he hesitated. It felt like an objectively insane thing to do. He had a train ticket for early afternoon tomorrow. He couldn’t ask Lou to spend six hours in a car. He barely knew her.
But she offered. And Sascha wanted to go.
i’ll need to check with my dad
okay
let me know how it goes
Sascha closed the app and dialled his dad’s number. After several rings, he picked up.
“Sascha.”
“Hi. Sorry.” God, this was stupid. What if his dad just said no? “Would it be alright if I came back to Berlin for New Year’s?”
“Came back?”
“Yes. My friend has a car, she can pick me up.”
“You’ll do what you want,” his dad said shortly. “I need to get back to work.”
“Right. Sorry.”
The call ended.
So that went fine.
i did it, he texted Lou. i can go
yes!
i’m leaving in 30
Sascha sent her his phone number.
you can send me a pin on whatsapp
will do!
Sascha put his phone down. He couldn’t believe that it was happening. He could have changed the train ticket he had for tomorrow – he could have looked for a new one, he had enough savings to afford a ticket – but he hadn’t thought about it practically, like it was a real thing that he could do. He’d thought that he was stuck here.
When Lou arrived, delayed by the roadworks on the way to the city, Sascha had been already waiting at the curb. He had left the apartment half an hour earlier, because once he showered, dressed, and packed, all he did was pace and watch Lou’s pin crawl along the highway. She saw him standing outside, but she still blasted the car-horn when she stopped.
“What music do you listen to,” she asked once he’d got inside the car.
“Anything,” Sascha said, relieved that they wouldn’t have to make small talk for three hours.
“Anything. Okay.”
She picked up a small carton box from the floor and rifled through the cassette tapes inside it. The one she picked and slid into a cassette-player sounded like eighties heavy metal – or at least how Sascha imagined it. He wasn’t an expert.
“They are my dad’s,” Lou explained. Sascha hadn’t said anything. “I can’t really stick my phone into this,” she motioned towards the player, which did look pretty old, “so I have to make do with his tapes.”
“It’s okay,” Sascha said.
“It grows on you,” she reassured him.
Sascha was prepared to believe her.
He felt light-headed. He rarely acted on an impulse, so when he did, the sensation was so unfamiliar that it felt wrong. But then it passed. Sascha considered Lou, focused on the road. She looked like a good driver – a natural.
When they got to the roadworks on the outskirts of the city, she asked him to read the navigation to her. Sascha continued to read even after they’d moved onto the highway. It gave him something to do.
Sometime after the sunset, when Lou turned on the headlights, her phone rung. It was Constantin. Lou tapped the screen to pick up and put him on the speaker-phone.
“I can’t talk right now, I’m driving,” she said. “I’ll call you in a bit, okay?”
“…Okay.”
He hung up. Lou didn’t say anything. Sascha wondered how it was possible for Constantin to be a human being with Lou while he was a terrible asshole to everyone else.
They stopped at a gas station soon afterwards, because they were running low on gas, and Lou needed to pee. Sascha stayed inside the car and watched her disappear inside the store, the lights blinding against the dark. He leaned back and looked around the car. It had been decorated very carefully. Sascha couldn’t see its ceiling from behind the stickers. Bands he didn’t know, clenched fists, antifa, shouting women… A rainbow flag. Sascha looked out of the window. Lou was in front of the store, talking on the phone.
“I brought dinner,” she said when she came back, showing off packets of mini-pretzels and sour patches. She stacked the pretzels and patches together in her hand, and put that in her mouth.
Sascha had forgotten that he was hungry. He took a pretzel.
“Nice sticker,” he said after a while.
“Which one?”
Sascha pointed at it.
“Ah,” Lou said, looking up. “My ex got it for me.”
Lou’s tone was entirely neutral, so Sascha wasn’t sure how to respond. “Do you still keep in touch?”
“Nah,” she said, taking a wide turn. “She blocked my number.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is. We broke up when I was moving. I mean, we weren’t really dating, but we had this huge fight about it. Anyway. I thought with guys there’d be less drama in my life.”
“Hah.”
“I know.” Their eyes met in the rear-view mirror.
“Isi never said anything,” Sascha said, because it surprised him: Isi told him everything, and for a solid month, Lou had been all he talked about.
“I never told him,” Lou replied. “I didn’t want him to think… I don’t know. It got so messy anyway.”
Sascha remembered that he hadn’t been looking at the navigation.
“There’s a roundabout three kilometres ahead,” he said.
Lou nodded.
“That’s why I wanted to do this,” she went on. “I haven’t always been a good friend to him.”
Sascha considered reassuring her – it was what he did – but he suspected that she was right. He wished that she hadn’t brought it up. He wanted to like her, because Isi adored her, and because she was self-assured and direct, and had a way of speaking that made Sascha feel as if they had never been strangers. It seemed as if she had no need to censor herself, and didn’t expect others to be embarrassed of themselves, either. Sascha appreciated it. But when he thought back to the month Isi had spent obsessed with her – their fight in the stairwell after she had posted the story – Sascha remembered thinking, furious, that Lou treated Isi like a toy. Now, she was nearing the end of a six-hours long drive she’d gone on because she wanted to make Isi happy. This had to be more important than what Lou had or had not done in the past.
They got stuck in the traffic on the way to the city, the lines of cars stretching to the barely visible intersection. Sascha checked the time on his phone. It was almost 7 PM, and the show was starting at 8.
“We’ll make it,” Lou said.
“Mhm.”
“Come on. Want to send them a selfie? At least they’ll know we’re on our way.”
Sascha looked up at her. “No,” he said. “I want to surprise them.” He wanted to see the look on Isi’s face when they saw him.
The lined moved slightly. When they stopped again, Sascha passed Lou a small black leather backpack that had been rolling on the floor under the backseat for the previous two and a half hours and she did her make-up, checking that it was right in the rear-mirror. It reminded Sascha of Isi like nothing else had. He had to be getting ready now, too. Sascha had sometimes watched him put his make-up on if Isi was meeting his fancy friends afterwards. Sascha felt oddly privileged to be let in on what felt like such a private moment, but even more, he felt that Isi didn’t care if Sascha saw him or not. Sascha had been like air. But then, Sascha remembered watching Isi take his make-up off the night after the Christmas dinner. That was different.
He realized that they were out of the traffic jam and pushing 50 kilometres per hour. Lou was grinning, her glittering hoops flashing with the reflection of the streetlights. Sascha felt himself grin back. He looked at the navigation. They would be at Isi’s in less than ten minutes.
Lou parked her car near a stand with New Year’s party junk. Fireworks, those stupid novelty glasses, cat ears, tiaras, party hats, tinsel boas, multi-coloured beads, foil-horns, blowout trumpets. Sascha stopped, because in the middle of the stand, there were bee headbands.
“Give me a sec,” he told Lou, and left to spend the last seven euro he had in cash. The antenna was made of paper and covered in silver spray. “It’s our thing,” he explained. Lou only shook her head.
“So how do we do this,” she asked after Sascha punched in the code to open the door to the staircase. “Do you go first, do I go first…”
“You go. I’ll wait.”
“Okay. And I’m not telling her that you’re here.”
“Yeah.” Sascha looked at her. “Is this stupid?”
“What? No!” They were at Isi’s door. “Now put your headband on.”
Lou went in. Sascha put his headband on and took a deep breath. It was stupid. If he was being honest, it was one of the most stupid things he had ever done. He had got into a fight with his dad, and made his mom worry on New Year’s Eve, and wasted a train ticket his dad had bought for him. All he had to eat today was a bowl of cereal and a handful of pretzels, so if he had as much as a single beer at the party later, he’d be out long before midnight.
But he wanted to be here - and now he was.