Sara is standing by a lamp-post on a long, straight stretch of the country road. It is late in the evening one day i December. She is wearing jeans and a red anorak. It is snowing, big white flakes.

She pulls the hood over her head and tightens it. Her blond hair is protruding. It is wet and cold and it glues to her skin above her cheekbone. Now and then she has to push it away from her eyes. She bends her head backwards and looks at the snowflakes swerwing down below the lamp. She tries to focus on a single snowflake, wants to watch it falling all the way to the ground, but she is unable to do it; the lamp dazzles her, and her eyes start to hurt. Her nosetip is cold. She puts her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans. She is angry with her self that she didn't bring mittens, Mom had said that she should wear mittens, but she wouldn't listen, and now she is standing here with her hands freezing.

She didn't check the watch until she had waved goodbye to her friend Venja. She felt her heart beating a little bit faster when she realized that that last bus had left ten minutes ago. Why didn't Venja say anything; warn her that she would be late. She couldn't remember the last time she had been been late for the bus or done something wrong, not having been attentive. She -- and Venja for that matter -- were among the most well-behaved girls in their class. Why am I like that? The boys just look right through me, she thought. She stood in the middle of the road below Venjas house and chewed the string of the hood on her anorak.

By the local store she went inside a telephone booth to call home and tell that she would be delayed, but the telephone seemed to be broken. She got the connection. The coins fell down the slot. She heard her mother pick up the receiver and say hello. "Who is this? Hello!" Then the connection was cut off.

Down on the country road, she placed her self on a spot where she thougt she would be visible and where it would be easy for the cars to stop.

She neither saw nor heard it coming, it must have appeared from one of the small gravel roads leading into the forest and the lakelet where she and Venja and some other girls sometimes would go swimming in the summer. She was kind of abruptly awakened by the sound of the engine, the sharp front lights and the yellow blinkers that flickered as the car slowed down and stopped right in front of her. A faint metallic shriek came from the right front wheel as the car was braking. It is silver gray, low, round shaped, italian. The engine runs silently with the heavy sound of a lot of horsepowers. The snowflakes are vacummed into the compartment as the driver rolls down the side window. He could be in his late twenties. He is dark haired with sharp facial features, low eyebrows, his long greasy hair of the head is swept backwards. She wouldn't have had the courage to ride with this car if it was only him, but in the other front seat sits a girl with a slightly pimpled face.

Sara pulls the wet hair away from her face, looks inside the compartment and asks if they will go in the direction of Moltegrenda. She points along the country road.

   "We are heading in that direction, yes," says the guy, somewhat sulky as he corrects the angle of the side mirror.

   "Could you give me a ride?"

   The driver half turns and lifts the lock button on the  door to the back. Sara tumbles into the back seat which is made of smooth light brown leather.

   "Oh God, you're wet. Have you been standing there for a long time?" says the girl in the front seat as she looks at Sara through the mirror.

   There is something unhealthy about her, Sara thinks to herself; the pale, slightly pimply and scarred skin, the eyes with make-up in an intense blue-green color.

   "Oh no," Sara says.

   The car turns out, the driver gears down. Sara can hardly hear the engine, she can only feel it as faint vibrations.

   The driver watches her in the mirror.

   "What's yor name, then," he says to her.

   "Sara."

   Nothing more is said in a long while.

Sara had expected that a guy in an italian sportscar would drive pretty fast. But the speedometer doesn't show more than thirty miles an hour, even though they are in a fortyfive zone. They slide aroud a rather sharp bend with high spruce-firs on both sides and go out on a long, straight stretch. He doesn't speed up much. Sara thinks that he might be afraid that the roads are slippery, but the asphalt is bare, it is as if the snowflakes evaporate before they reach the ground. She listens to the faint humming from the engine. She hears the whistling from the heater, the rhytmic slapping from the windscreen-cleaners while becoming sleepy. She gets back the sensitivity in her fingers and she's not freezing anymore. It feels good. She may have drowsed for a short time, she hears them talking with low voices, but not the words. Her thoughts float off. She imagines that the girl in the front seat is her best friend, not Venja, but a different, new and thrilling friend. It is summertime. They are on vacation, in Denmark or Northern Germany. She likes those flat landscapes with a lot of sky, corn fields and the clear yellow rape fields. The side windows have been rolled down. A warm wind blows in her hair. Beside her in the back seat there's this guy with a long dark hair of the head. He holds her hand and he has a blushing color on his cheeks. They turn in to this camping. Some mulatto children run around naked, playing with a hose.

Sara starts thinking about her mother who now maybe walks nervously back and forth on the living room floor, out into the entrance-hall, where she lifts off the telephone receiver and calls Venja.

   "No, Sara left half an hour ago. Hasn't she arrived yet? She said she would go straight home."

   "Yeah, yeah. Someone called earlier tonight. It must have been Sara. She'll be home soon," her mother says, trying to control the tone og her voice. But she puts back the receiver with a worried expression. She thinks that she should have asked Venja, once she had her on the phone, if she hadn't noticed something about Sara lately. Did she not act "changed" in a way? She wasn't really distant, not in a bad mood. She found no other word than "changed". It was an impotent word, for something she was unable to grasp, deal with.

   Sara's mother walks back into the living room. Albert sits on the sofa. He is Swedish, a truck driver. One day he was just there. Sara came home from school and saw a pair of paint-stained boots standing in the entrance hall. In the sofa, a man sat, with a long pory nose and big hands. He was dressed in an acrylic sweater with a rhombic pattern on it. Mom said she had met him one night when she went dancing in the tavern. He has yellow fingers on his right hand. The ashtray is almost unused. He smokes his own-rolled cigarettes all the way in. They just disappear between his fingers. Sara watches carefully when he takes the last puffs from his cigarette. She thinks it is weird that he does not burn himself. The skin on his hands must be like thick leather. One day she said that he could perform in a circus with that.

   "What do you mean?" he said with his swedish accent, looking up.

   "Nothing," Sara says.

   He smiles.

   Albert hardly ever talks. When Mom talks to him -- it may be that she mentions a beautiful sofa she saw in the furniture mart, that she has been thinking of buying brand new curtains for the living room window, or she talks about something that has to be done in the garden -- he answers with one-word-sentences, sometimes just "oh" or "yeah", always in a mild tone.

   "Albert is a kind man. He could't cause annoyance to anyone," mom says.

   "Cause annoyance" makes Sara think about something biblical, something from the old days, the education before the confirmation, the vicar.

   She suddenly realizes where she is when they meet this big truck. The windscreen is suddenly sharply enlighted, like a flashlight. The car shakes a little bit as the enormous vehicle passes by.

   The girl in the front seat turns around and looks at Sara.

   "How are you back there," she asks.

   "Fine," Sara says.

   "I think you fell asleep."

   "Oh."

   One day, Alfred came into the kitchen while she was doing the dishes. Sara hadn't heard him come, the noise from doing the dishes may have drowned the sound of his footsteps. He may have been standing like that in the doorway for quite a while. She had had this feeling that someone was watching her. When she turned around she saw Albet standing there looking at her.

   "What are you staring at?" she had asked in a hostile tone.

   "I was just standing here, and I looked at you and I was thinking that you really resemble your mother. She must have looked exactly like you when she was young. And you ..." he said. Then he had smiled, lifted his eyebrows end let them fall down again, and then he poked his way back to the livingroom.

   Sara thought she had never heard him say that much at once. She felt a sudden urge to tear one of those rubber gloves off, run after him, abuse him and slap him in his face. She got tears in her eyes and hurried with the rest of the dishwashing. A small bowl slid out of her hands and broke to pieces on the kitchen floor. She swept up the shards with a broom. Then she went up to her room, fell down on the bed and wrapped the pillow around her head.

   She is in the backseat of a car. Her eyes are closed, her mouth is half open. She awakens. She sees the neon signs from a gas station ahead. They are already near the tavern, a couple of miles past the turn that would lead to Moltegrenda.

   The driver tilts the blinker control and slows down.

   "We gotta have something to eat. We are going far tonight," he says.

   The girl in the front seat clicks her powder-box closed and adjusts the back mirror. She turns around with a faint smile and nods to Sara.

   "We'll drive you home. Right now, if you want."

   The engine hums. The exhaust blows past the side windscreens together with the snowflakes. Sara doesn't know what to answer.

   "By the way; my name is Wenche. You can come with us inside if you want to. Or we will drive you home right away," she repeats.

   "Oh no," Sara says.

   She feels this tension in her stomach, just like when she realized that she was late for the bus. She has a feeling that it derives just as much from excitement as from worry.

   The driver turns off the engine and pulls the handbrakes. They walk out into the snow, make clear footprints in the thin snow-layer on the ground. They enter the tavern and get a table by the window.

   They order hashed-meat-cake with mashed peas. They both eat hurriedly, the knives and forks clink against the plates. A tuft of hair lifts itself from his head. It falls down to his face. It reaches all the way down to his nostril. He sweeps it away with a quick movement of his hand as he throws his head backwards. Sara wants to say something but can't think of anything.

   "Where are you going?" she asks.

   The look at each other and smile. Wenche's mouth is full of food. She swallows.

   "Away," she says, she glances at the guy and laughs.

   He grins.

   "Here," Wenche says and spits a meat cake with her fork. "Do you want some?"

   She holds the fork with the hashed-meat cake towards Sara. Sara leans across the table and bites off a big piece. She likes it, it pleases her very much that Wenche feeds her in this manner.