In the beginning is the pain. Sharp and spiky, it bores into my guts. It takes my breath away. I double over, whimper, groan. Then it’s over. The pain is gone. Suddenly I am free. I sit up again. I breathe in. I try to go back to sleep. But the cramps come back. The pain hollows me out. My moaning wakes my mother. She looks at me blearily. I’m lying on the sofa, in the dark. When the cramps come, I forget myself. You’re becoming a woman, my mother says. I can’t catch a breath now. The pain constricts my throat. My mother tries to hold me and rock me, but her hands are too clumsy. As if she were wearing boxing gloves. Help, I want to cry, please help me. What my mother would prefer to do is make her excuses and step away from this imposition, or keel over herself. Instead she frantically tips tablets onto the table, fumbles for her phone, asks for advice. The woman on the other end thinks we should come in. My mother says to me: Darling everything will be fine. Her boyfriend will drive us to the hospital. I give a loud groan. My mother quickly changes tack. She fetches the hot water bottle, makes tea. I feel the pain tugging at the skin on my face. My mother doesn’t wait for her boyfriend. She calls a taxi. The hospital admits us.

Appendix, the doctor in the emergency ward says, couldn’t be more obvious. My mother says: But my daughter had it out two years ago. The doctor scribbles on his notepad. He’s not receiving on this frequency. My mother chirps again: Can’t you see the scar? But the doctor’s pupils are reflected on the screen of his smartphone. My gaze roams around the room, looking for something to hang on to. An elephant on a poster. My eyes trace its folds, its tusks. The pain is sneaking up. From behind, like thunder behind clouds. My belly goes rigid, it is threatening to burst. A worm pushes its way through my guts. It threatens to blow me up. I can’t think any more, I can only feel. That’s what it will be like when you’re older and have children, the doctor in the emergency ward says. I’m only a child myself. At least in the eyes of the law. I haven’t played with dolls for a long time. The only thing I speak to my mother about is empty yoghurt pots and heaps of clothes. I whinge at her. Since she found this business informatics guy on the internet, she has lost her mind. I call him Hugo, although his name is Adam. He smiles and ignores it. I have stopped hoping he will leave my mother. There’s nothing I hope for any more. If anything, I hope that I’ll grow breasts finally. That would be a step in the right direction. Those mounds give you power. I’m flat and angry. Sometimes I imagine waking up in the morning, transformed into a beetle. Ideas like that make me laugh. That makes time pass faster. I’m tired all the time. Only the pain wakes me. It returns with a vengeance. It rams into my belly.

The doctor hooks me up to the drip and puts me on the list for an operation. He wants to remove my appendix. My mother says again: Your colleague already took it out. The doctor prods my rigid belly. My mother stops fighting. She gives my name, our health insurance details. She called me Almut because of the north. Because of the stiff breeze on the island of Sylt, where she has never been; because of the tall blond boy that she never kissed, because she doesn’t like tall blonds; because of the seagulls, whose cries make her melancholy; and because of the seaweed and the salt which no longer cling to her legs: now it’s dark stretchy jeans with all their poisonous dyes instead. I’m also called Almut because it contains the German for courage, Mut, and my mother believed the name would give me some. I’m meant to grow big and strong. My mother looks at me and sees herself lying in the hospital bed. She strokes my hair. I shrink away from her hand. The doctor puts the cannula in my arm. The coldness of the anaesthetic runs into me. The lights over me glare. The anaesthetist counts backwards. Ten, nine, eight. I don’t even hear seven.

I’m still woozy from the anaesthetic when I see Ines for the first time. After that, nothing is ever the same again. My mouth is full of cotton wool, my eyelids are heavy. I’m a stone coming to life. Ines has the bed by the window. The backlight conjures a halo for her. Her features remain in shadow. On her bedside table on wheels are bottles with astronaut food inside them. Ines tells me that the yellow liquid tastes like banana, the red like strawberries. I’m envious. She eats as if she has already flown to the moon. I get boring invalid food. Only a tiny scar graces my belly. The loop in my bowel was untwisted just in time. Ines on the other hand went the whole hog: she got her appendix to burst. The poison flooded through her body. She seems to be an arm’s length ahead of me in everything. I’m thirteen, she is fourteen. Iiii-nes. The syllables suit her. First the expression of disgust, the devastating judgement. Then the sweet-talking ending, the salvation. Ines is neither particularly pretty nor ugly. Nothing about her is remarkable. Her brown hair is smooth, parted in the middle; her nightie is white like the sheets, starched. I dream about her. Water, waves, misadventure. Ines saves me from all of them. She pulls me out of the maelstrom by my hair. When I wake up, I tell her about it. Ines wrinkles her forehead. For the first time she encourages me to carry on talking. I tell her everything. My voice trembles. Ines says nothing. I feel naked. Ines is so certain, so strong. She doesn’t need words to make me understand. I can sense her superiority. She makes the roots of my hair stand up. She is a queen. I recognise that immediately. I don’t need anyone to tell me. I know a queen when I see one. A queen has nothing to lose. That’s why she gets everything. Suddenly I’m wide awake.