Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(115)
Jenny sidles up next to Lena, who is uncharacteristically subdued. Her eyes dart around the space, searching, not finding a resting place for longer than a second or two. There’s no sign yet of Anke and Zehra. Jenny wonders what it must be like to be in the place where you haven’t been for nine years. Even returning to Dallas for Christmas break after six months in Germany will seem like a lifetime. But nine years! Jenny wants to reassure Lena. She would do anything for her. She smiles, brushes her fingers against Lena’s. But Lena just keeps looking anxiously over her shoulder at the door.
Planlos finishes their set. A band from Leipzig called Keine Hoffnung—No Hope—is plugging in and taking their places for their five songs. There is another band after that and then it’s Sophie Scholl. Lena’s nervousness is catching. Jenny’s mind unspools into catastrophe: Anke and Zehra have been detained. Under torture, they’ve confessed everything. Guards will come—not just any guards but the meanest in East Berlin, the guards feared by other guards. Jenny’s parents will be called. They’ll be so mad they’ll tell East Germany to keep her but to please return the Hermès. Her stomach hurts. She wants to unzip her skin and crawl out. And just as her apocalyptic fantasizing reaches its vertiginous zenith, there’s relief. Above the bopping, exotic bird heads of the punk crowd, Zehra and Anke are snaking their way toward Jenny and Lena, Anke scowling and pushing, Zehra ambling behind in mute resignation. They come to stand beside Jenny and Lena.
“Supplies,” Anke says, holding up a black eyeliner and a tiny can of shaving cream for hair spiking, bought at a pharmacy nearby. Zehra has smuggled in two black leather dog collars. They’re looped around her narrow waist like belts. “Shouldn’t we be getting ready?”
“Nein,” Lena says, looking toward the door. “Noch nicht.”
She vibrates with an odd fear. It’s more than the border crossing, more than stage nerves. They can all sense it.
“Lena. Lena. What is going on?” Anke says.
The church doors open again, gray light slicing through the crowd like a hot knife. Lena lets out a strangled cry. Jenny follows her gaze to a tall, lanky blond boy at the back of the mob. In his T-shirt and jeans, he looks like any other college student. But his mouth when he smiles is like Lena’s. Lena forces her way against the tide of the crowd and the girls can do nothing but follow in her wake. Lena hugs the boy violently.
“Nein, nein,” the boy whispers. “Sie werden zuschauen.” They will be watching.
Lena breaks away. She is crying. “This is my brother. This is Andreas.”
* * *
They’ve decamped to a makeshift greenroom littered with enough hair dye to be a beauty salon and enough beer bottles to be a bar. The muffled screech of punk shivers the walls. Jenny looks from Lena to Andreas and back again. She can see more of the resemblance between them now, the fullness of their brows and lips. But they are different, too. Lena is small and fierce. A girl of cut glass, all sharp edges. Everything about Andreas is soft and dreamy as a painting of a Romantic poet. Jenny drops her bag on the bench beside a mound of discarded jackets. Punks come in and out, letting in jarring blasts of hardcore with each opening of the door until finally, Lena jumps up and locks it. She motions everyone close and lowers her voice. They all know the walls have ears as well as eyes.
There’s a fading bruise above Andreas’s left eye. Jenny doesn’t want to think about how it got there.
“He got fired from his job and he can’t get another because they won’t let him. Soon, they will arrest him for not working. Put him in prison. I won’t let him die there like my mother,” Lena says. “I’m getting him out. Tonight.”
On the other side of the wall, the singer screams and Jenny feels it in her molars.
Zehra and Anke both look as if they are screaming inside.
“Are you out of your mind?” Zehra whispers.
“You should have told us,” Anke says.
“If I’d told you, you would have had to lie to the border guards.”
“You didn’t tell us because you didn’t trust us,” Anke says.
“You didn’t tell us because you knew we wouldn’t have come,” Zehra says through slitted teeth. Jenny has never seen her angry before.
“You didn’t tell me,” Jenny says. I love you and you didn’t tell me.
“I couldn’t risk it. I had to keep us all safe,” Lena insists.
Jenny wants to believe this, even as Zehra scoffs. Anke’s expression is intimate in its hurt, and why is Jenny only now realizing that she is in love with Lena? All the snide remarks? The look on her face when Lena kissed Jenny? It wasn’t disapproval; it was jealousy. What else has she missed?
“How?” is all Jenny can think to ask.
“We’ve been digging a tunnel for the past year under the abandoned bakery by the wall in Bernauer Strasse. Me and some students from the university.”
“No wonder you never came back with pastry,” Zehra mutters.
Someone’s banging on the other side of the door. Lena ignores it.
“We tunneled all the way through to the East side, to the basement of an apartment building right beside the wall. I’m going to take Andreas there. Then I come back. We play our set. And we go home the way we came in. Okay?”