“It’s rough at your age. It gets better, you’ll see. I remember when I was about your age—well, a few years older really, when I was more of a man, if you know what I mean—and I fell so horribly in love with this girl. Her name was Lies, and wow, was she a knockout. Big on top, big on the bottom, slim in the middle, unbelievable. My sole purpose in life was to see her naked. I had a friend who lived across the street from her, and he had a little spyglass. I used to go over to his house with a bunch of other guys and we’d try to see whether she was home, just waiting for her to show up in the window. And she’d show up all right. The thing is, she knew we were there. She’d lean over by the window and start slowly opening her shirt, like she was really going to take her clothes off right in front of us, but then, right when she got to about the third button, she’d pull the shades. Right then! Just to drive us nuts! Peter got her in the end, but boy, I would have killed for her.”

Willem swallows, picturing the Peter who used to spit at him at Montessori. Peters always spit at people, Willem thinks to himself. It figures that the ones who treat you like dirt end up with the girl.

He steps toward a urinal, two down from the guard’s, and opens his pants, terrified. A shameful lump of tortured flesh emerges, used for lewd thoughts at Jopie’s expense, late at night after his father’s women have gone home. In Willem’s new school, they teach the Bible—sort of like in his old school at Montessori, actually, except this Bible is only about half the size. Most of the time Willem passes school time staring at the ceiling, or flipping through textbooks to find interesting pictures in chapters the class hasn’t reached yet. The Bible the class uses doesn’t have any illustrations—Willem has checked. But once as he was flipping through looking for one, a line in the Dutch translation caught his eye, in something called the Book of Job. The line was so strange that he copied it into his notebook, and he was sure he had mistranslated it as he converted it into German in his head. But that evening he checked in the dictionaries and found that the verse really did mean what he thought it meant: “After my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God.”