[Subsection]

Frost, school, homework came round once more.

The earth echoed beneath his feet as he tramped off in the morning with his homework simmering in his head, like soup still on the boil. To be the first. That was what mattered at school.

Many things were painful, but when you knew your homework the best and wrote the best essay, then it was all a little less painful.

There was Åsne. She led the group because she was reckless and fun when they played pranks. She was the first to jump down from a wall of rock or climb up a boulder or slide down the frozen rivulets swollen with ice. He looked at Åsne with different eyes now. She wore a dress with three-quarter length sleeves, and when she wrote dictation, she pushed her sleeves even farther up her arms. He never tired of looking at her arms this year. He was full of strange wishes. Things were different this year.

There was Olav Bringa beside him. Didn't Olav notice Åsne's arms? Did Olav think as he did: Åsne's arms, Auntie's arms, girls' arms? He didn't say anything about it. But Per didn't say anything about it either. It was good to sit so close to Olav at the desk that he was nudged by the shiny elbow of his jacket. Olav was next best, and he could just try to be more.

Arms were curious. Something heavy sank to the bottom inside you when you looked at them. You had to look and look. Could they be the same arms he had held when he led   [p. 93]   Åsne through the warm, shallow river? They were rounded and quietly busy on the desk, while the dictation sprinkled down from the teacher's desk, dry and gray, like ant dust from an old tree-stump.