The so-called summer days rained away and my plans weren't so grandiose anymore.

His eyes were murky wells that held dark secrets at the bottom. And he had a certain rock star swagger. You could see that clearly in the photos from the capturing. This happened on a train in Denmark after a week on the run. A train conductor had recognized the pair and at the next station hordes of police waited. The pictures were splashed all over every newspaper. Juha in handcuffs with wild hair like a halo of twilight around his pale unsmiling face. Flanked by policemen, you could tell he wasn't very tall.
They brought the two to a jail near my hometown. Well, it was really about 150 kilometers away, but when you live that far out into the sticks your judgement of distance becomes fucked. To drive two hours to see a band you kind of, sort of like? No problem.
Either way, the thought of him sitting in a jail cell in that town, where I had lived once when I was a child, created little bubbles of electric current that bounced around in my belly. It was not unlike the effect a roller coaster has on me; the feeling is hard to label. Is it fear? Is it joy? Is it lust? Is it a mechanical orgasm?

The so-called summer days rained away and my plans weren't so grandiose anymore. On the last day of classes, when I knew I wasn't coming back to those corridors and the little smoker's square out back like a monkey play pin, I had gotten pretty tipsy. I bragged about my highfalutin plans to anyone that cared to listen. Mostly it was my friend Anneli who had no choice. Since she had succumbed to a friendship with me. Her hair did what mine never managed to do. It mimicked a porcupine or Robert Smith and it looked so damn good. It didn't matter how much hair spray, gel and mousse I used, my hair never did anything like that. It mostly just looked like a scraggly bush in need of some deep conditioning. I dyed it with henna.
Anyway, I said to Anneli that I was going to try my luck in London, or at the very least in Stockholm. Now everything that I didn't have seemed to be slipping from my hands.

I honed in on Juha. Don't ask me why. It was something to do, at least.