Read Online Why We Took the Car by Wolfgang Herrndorf - Free Book Online

CD, and crawled under my blanket. I couldn’t decide whether the music comforted me or made me even more depressed. I think, actually, it depressed me even more.
    A few hours later I went back to school to pick up my bike. I’d forgotten it. Seriously. It was about two kilometers to my school, and some days I walked. But I hadn’t walked that day. I’d been so deep in thought when Tschick started talking to me that I had unlocked and then relocked my bike, and then just marched off. It really was a horrible day.
    So I followed the route for the third time of the day, past the piles of dirt and the playground at the edge of the wasteland. I climbed up the lookout tower of the play fort and sat down. It was a wooden tower with a fence built partway around it so little kids could play cowboys and Indians. If there’d been any little kids around. But I’d never seen a little kid there. Or even an older kid or adult for that matter. Not even junkies slept there. I was the only one ever there, sitting up in the tower when I felt crappy, where nobody could see me. To the east you could see the high-rises of Hellersdorf. To the north, Weiden Lane wandered off beyond the bushes, and farther on was a colony of little summer cabins. But around the playground was absolutely nothing, just a wide open wasteland that had originally been a construction site. It was supposed to have been the site of a brand-new town house development — you could still see a description of the development on the big weather-beaten sign that had fallen over on the side of the street. coming soon: 96 beautiful new town houses. Below that was something about what lucrative investments they’d make, and somewhere at the bottom it said klingenberg real estate & development .
    But one day they’d found three extinct bugs, a frog, and a rare grasshopper, and ever since the environmentalists have been suing the developers and the developers have been suing the environmentalists and the lot has been left empty. The court battle has gone on for ten years now, and if my father is to be believed, it’ll take another ten years to be settled — because there’s no way to beat the environmental fascists. That’s my father’s term: “environmental fascists.” And these days he drops the word “environmental” from the phrase too, because the court battle has ruined him. A quarter of the land in the development site belonged to him, and all the suits and countersuits landed him right in the toilet. If an outsider were to listen to our dinner table conversation sometime, he wouldn’t understand a single word. For years, all my father has talked about is shit, assholes, and fascists. For a long time I wasn’t sure how much he’d lost and how it would affect us. I always thought my father would figure a way to get out of the whole thing with some legal loophole — and maybe he thought so too. At least at first. But then he’d thrown in the towel and sold his share. He took a huge loss, but he figured the loss would be even bigger if he kept going back to court with the rest of the developers. So he sold his share in the project to the assholes. That’s what he calls the people he worked with. The assholes continued to fight in court for the right to build. That was a year and a half ago. And for a year now, it’s been clear: That was the beginning of the end. My father tried to make up for the losses on the Weiden Lane development by playing the stock market, and now we’re broke, our vacation’s off, and the house we own doesn’t belong to us anymore. That’s what my father says. And all because of three caterpillars and a grasshopper.
    The only thing left of the development is the playground, which was built at the very beginning to demonstrate how child-friendly the area was. But it was all for nothing.
    I’ll also admit there was another reason I hung around