It didn’t calm her down. If Don were suddenly old and, transfigured, wanted to look back at her life, this summer would have been the most intense period of it. The summer when she was alive in a way she was never again to experience.

Sex is probably only that way in the imagination. Quick, dangerous, destructive, and intense. Perhaps sex is only good when you don’t actually have sex. When you still believe that sex will change the world or that you can fuck someone to death. For Don there was nothing romantic or tender about puberty. It was about destruction, she just didn’t know whose destruction. Don wanted to be a boy. Wanted a cock. And despised boys. She wanted to be around girls, smell them, look at them, but girls embarrassed her. No idea why. There was nobody Don wanted to talk about her situation with. Or could talk to. Because she didn’t know what her situation was about. It was probably the same for the others. They were all suddenly grown, their voices and odors had changed. The children were uneasy and bored, they were waiting for the summer to finally pass. All with their smartphones, with dozens of apps that decorated their faces with funny masks and delivered their biometric data, watching grime videos. Rating Tinder photos, looking at snuff films, and laughing at naked classmates who’d been stupid enough to put their genitals on the cloud. A girl had tried to kill herself. With drain cleaner, after too many comments about her uneven-sized breasts had been posted. She’d survived. Well. Kind of.

Most children, no different than adults, were too dumb to understand what they were doing, but back then nobody understood what the internet really was. There was at least a little talk during that hot summer. It was perhaps the hottest on record. Somewhere, constantly, it was the hottest, the wettest, the coldest weather on record, the world outdid itself with superlatives, the oceans rose, ice melted, animals died off, and everyone just continued on as if it was all normal, which perhaps it was. It didn’t matter. There were devices. And nobody, not one person, had gotten encephalitis. Or a strange flu. But new lights were put up everywhere.

Don’s mother had begun to take sleeping pills. She slumped on the sofa with her mouth hanging open and the TV blaring. Another show about the effectiveness of emojis as a reward system. So-called reward systems were being propagated everywhere, meant to replace the old system of punishment. For a just world and all that. People like to be rewarded. It produces endorphins, it makes them happy, the people. Outside the heat shimmered

And

DON, PETER, HANNAH, AND KAREN

Met up every morning. They sat together outside each of their various homes in turn. Then they went to the old factories, sat around there, then went to the playground.