The first time I met the great love of my youth was at Nicoline’s apartment, where a bunch of us were meeting up to drink tea and smoke weed. Nicoline was seventeen and had recently given birth to a little girl whom the father refused to acknowledge. When I arrived, Arab Tommy was threatening to beat a girl up and calling her a whore.
“What the fuck are you doing, Tommy? It’s a girl. What the hell, man!” I said to him as I shoved him.
The girl’s name was Anna. I thought she was hot, but I had no idea who she was. She fled into the apartment, and I managed to put Arab Tommy in his place. He had told his friends that he and Anna were dating, but Anna had denied it, so Arab Tommy had publicly lost face and was angry about it.
Today, Anna is married and lives in a house with a picket fence. She works as a kindergarten teacher and has two children with a good man. She is a slender woman of forty-three with brown hair and a quiet, pretty face. The night we met, she had not been expecting any drama. Nicoline’s baby girl was sitting on a friend’s lap when a group of immigrant boys suddenly entered, and one of them slapped the girl with the baby on her lap.
Arab Tommy and his crew were standing outside the apartment and wanted Anna to come down, but she felt really, really threatened so she refused to go outside which made them furious. I offered Anna that I could smooth things over for her, went outside and calmed things down with Arab Tommy’s crew by explaining how the entire situation made them look. I made him apologize to Anna and after brokering peace, the rest of the night was without incident.
We didn’t see each other for the next couple of years. Anna got a boyfriend, and when we met at the mall, we would just say hello, but I was captivated by her
Anna worked as an assistant kindergarten teacher, and when the two of us met at the mall at the close of 1999, we got to talking about our jobs. Anna still had a boyfriend, but a couple of days later, she called me up and asked me if I wanted to go for pizza. I said yes.
When I saw her at the restaurant, we began to catch up. I asked her what her boyfriend thought about us having pizza together. She said that he should mind his own business because she was allowed to have friends. She told me that she was sick of her boyfriend because they weren’t evolving together, and then she asked me to walk her home.
Outside her house, I hugged her and gave her a kiss on the cheek. It felt like the right thing to do, and she didn’t object. We didn’t see each other for a while after that, but then she called me up and told me that she had broken up with her boyfriend.
A couple of days later, she invited me over for dinner. Mid-dinner, she told me that she thought there was love between us. Did I feel it too? I did. I kissed her, and we started dating. I couldn’t believe my luck. What the hell did she want with a guy like me? What did I have to offer? I just figured she was in it for the sex and thought, All right, if that’s what she’s looking for, I’m happy to oblige. But I couldn’t believe she actually liked me. She was nineteen and I was seventeen, but I pretended to be twenty-one because I figured she wouldn’t have anything to do with me if she knew how young I was.
Anna was from the nice residential neighborhood in Greve, and I became a regular visitor at the house. Unlike Sally’s stepfather, Eddie, who loathed immigrants and represented my only experience with Danish homes so far, Anna’s parents were hospitable and had a different perspective. Her dad was a very open-minded person who had worked around the world as a construction engineer. He wasn’t judgmental in any way, and he never said a foul word to me, even though he had heard all sorts of things about me.
Anna had not expected a guy like me to walk into her life, but she thought I was sweet, charming, and good-looking. Who was I to argue?
Anna was completely oblivious to my criminal behavior. She knew I was involved in something, but she thought of it as more along the lines of boyish pranks that my friends and I happened to get into from time to time. I wasn’t going to correct her.