I haven’t forgiven her yet, not quite, but I’m working hard to hide it. I don’t think she can tell anyway. And it’s really not that big of a deal. But I just can’t let it go, as much as I want to. During the day it’s not so bad, I hardly even notice it, but it’s when we go out at night that it gets thrown back in my face and I get a little bit angry all over again. Like last night, for example. The same kind of blauem American tourist, the same kind of line (were the two of them sisters, or cousins or… twins, maybe?) and with that boring horny gleam in his eye. And the two of them laughing politely and saying no, just friends, sorry and looking at each other like we’re so special and attractive and important and completely forgetting for half a second that I was there with them as well. And me just standing there off to the side sipping my Aperol spritzer through a cocktail straw and waiting for the Amerikaner to go back to his friends so that we could go back to gossiping about Luise’s widowed oma who had just announced on Facebook that she was in a relationship with another woman who had always celebrated Silvester in the countryside with Luise’s family when she was little.

Last week one Typ asked if we were related, all three of us, but I know that was mostly out of not wanting to exclude me as the question was obviously still directed to those two. I know that the more pragmatic men only ever ask about two of us at a time, because as remote a chance they have at a ménage à trois, any half-drunk idiot still knows that a full-on blond orgy is a blond hairsbreadth away from impossible. Not that we sleep around anyway. But before Olga bleached her hair blond to match ours, the men in the bars used to ask if me and Luise were related, and I got to feel special and attractive and important for half a second, and now I don’t anymore because it’s all about them now. But we’ve been friends since we were ten years old, and two of us have always been a little bit closer, but not always the same two, and it changes frequently, so I know if I bury my anger just a little bit deeper for just long enough, it will all shift again and I can forgive her.