beartown

As a child he always loved the summer, when the foliage lets boys hide in trees without being seen from the ground.

He doesn’t say anything, just stands there with his eyes half open and his hair a mess, as if they’d started the fight next to the bench he’d spent the night sleeping under.

To them the Pack is a small group of people who refuse to take any crap, who don’t change to suit the demands of power and money and politics.

Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did. We’ll end up saying that violence came to Beartown this summer, but that will be a lie; the violence was already here. Because sometimes hating one another is so easy that it seems incomprehensible that we ever do anything else.

The days blur together in Beartown this year; perhaps we can't bear to keep track of either time or our feelings. At some point the autumn comes to an end and winter arrives, but we barely notice.

Vidar doesn't say a word. It's the finest thing anyone has ever done for Ana.

The comment section does what the comment section always does: smells blood and catches fire.

But every cell in Benji’s body hears the oxygen being sucked out of the room. He stands still. The very fact that he’s come here might seem crazy, but he was never the sort of child who lay in bed afraid of ghosts and monsters.

Culture is as much about what we encourage as what we permit.

All his life Bobo has wanted just one thing: to be allowed to belong to something.

This story doesn’t start today, it’s been going on for two years, because that was when Maya Andersson moved away from here.

Bitterness can be corrosive; it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.

Benji’s three sisters have always communicated in different ways. His youngest sister, Gaby, talks, and his middle sister, Katia, listens. His eldest sister, Adri, shouts.

The hard core, the central unit within the Pack, the most dangerous of them all.

The look in her eyes is hard, her voice brittle. "I refuse to be a victim. I'm a survivor."

Maybe we recognize that men don’t have to become the bastards their fathers were.

“Aren’t you going to the game?” “I’d rather go for a walk with you, Dad.”

But Teemu takes a step back, his shoulders sink, and he lowers his head, making himself as small as possible. "I just want to help," he says.

“It’s, like, autumn, how cold does it get in December?” he asks anxiously.

“It’s, like, autumn, how cold does it get in December?” he asks anxiously.

None of them asks Peter about his. He has no scars, he never lost any teeth, never got into any fights. He has never been a violent man.

He will always have to be grateful just for being allowed to take part. Because he isn't one of them. And never will be again.

The juniors were going to play a game straight afterward, but when it was supposed to start Beartown didn't have a goalie, because Vidar was sitting in a police car.

Culture is as much about what we encourage as what we permit.

Teemu has just told Peter that this is his stand and he can reclaim it whenever he likes.

Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. This is the story of how we got there.

The town wakes early, like it does every day; small towns need a head start if they’re going to have any chance in the world.

Bobo was with them but changed sides at the last minute. If he hadn’t taken such a severe beating for his new friend, they might well have killed Amat. That fight isn’t over yet.

The comment section does what the comment section always does: smells blood and catches fire.

He called her when he saw the weather forecast, when she didn’t answer he knew something was wrong, she’d never admit it but she always kept her phone close when he was out on the road.