Nothing happened.
"It's fine," Lukas whispered. "You're just a person."
That September, his parents announced a "family weekend" at a lake. Lukas’s heart seized. A lake. He imagined a meadow, a bonfire, a circle of unashamed humanity. fkk magazin
The next Thursday, he walked to the kiosk.
He looked up at the stars. The stars did not care. He looked at the dark lake. The lake did not gasp. He looked down at his own pale, scrawny body. It was just a body. Like Dieter's. Like the volleyball-playing girl's. Like the grandmother with the potatoes. Nothing happened
Lukas sat at the water's edge, fully dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. Across the lake, he saw them. A real family. A dad tossing a toddler into the air. A mom floating on her back, her grey hair fanning out. A teenage boy, maybe sixteen, diving cleanly off a rock. All naked. All laughing. The sound carried over the water like the chiming of a distant church bell.
What he got was a rented cabin with blackout curtains. His mother wore a long-sleeved bathing suit. His father wore a t-shirt in the water, which clung to him like a ghost. They sat under a massive umbrella, applying SPF 50 every hour, reading separate paperbacks. Lukas’s heart seized
He looked at it for a long time. Then he let go of the coins.