Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(16)

“Wie viel Uhr?” the taller of the punk girls asked. What time?

Lena shrugged. “The usual time,” she said in German first. Then to Jenny in English: “We start around eight and go until something breaks or there’s a fight.” She smiled down at Jenny. “Dallas! You made it.”

Moments later, Lena swung back the heavy factory door, still in her ratty T-shirt and a pair of men’s trousers cinched at the waist by a bright yellow necktie patterned with tiny ducks. “Come in.”

Jenny stepped into a large open space shadowed in more Berlin gloom and nearly tripped over a sleeping punk couple entwined on a dirty mattress in the middle of the floor.

“This way,” Lena said, leading Jenny deeper into the warehouse, past large cardboard boxes filled with scrap metal, wires, and tools. “Anything that can be used to fix things or to make art,” Lena said by way of explanation. The walls bloomed with psychedelic, half-finished murals, collages made from magazine cutouts, thumbtacked photo booth strips, and Polaroids. Jenny followed Lena up a winding and wholly unsafe staircase to a second-floor loft. Two Turkish rugs had been hung by clothespins to a rope to make a curtain. Lena parted them and ushered Jenny into a cozy, carved-out bedroom. Band posters torn from Western magazines had been affixed to the wall with black electrical tape above a sagging twin bed. Stacks of homemade cassettes were lined up neatly at the foot of the mattress.

“My room,” Lena said proudly.

“Don’t you mind not having a door?”

Lena shrugged. “Why do we need doors? We are not hiding anything. And anyway, I don’t like to feel confined. It’s Klaustrophobisch … how do you say it in English?”

“Um, claustrophobic?”

“Ja!”

“Can I?” Jenny raised her camera.

“Bitte.”

Jenny snapped away. Beside the mattress, a cardboard box served as a nightstand holding an assortment of personal effects—soap, toothpaste, a toothbrush. And shaving cream—“to make the ends stand up tall!” Lena explained, rubbing some into her hair. The only other thing was a black-and-white photo of a serious-looking blond boy.

“Your boyfriend?” Jenny asked.

Lena glanced at the photo. “No.” She climbed up onto the bed. “Here. Take my picture!”

“Oh. Sure. Okay.” Jenny raised the Canon and adjusted the aperture, bringing Lena into sharper focus. Lena’s eyes were not just blue, Jenny could see now; they were a dark blue gray, the color of the ocean after a storm. Last night’s black eye makeup still clung to her thick lashes. Her nose was short and cute and bulbous at the end. Her hair, wine red with black roots and tips, looked as if it had been cut by a lackadaisical barber—an uneven mix of shorter and longer pieces that all stuck out at odd angles like a surprised cockatoo.

But her mouth.

Lena’s large lips still had trouble concealing her overbite and a mouth full of wayward teeth. Back home, everyone Jenny knew had the same straight smiles, courtesy of Dr. Johnson, the orthodontist. Lena’s crooked smile was the first one that Jenny could really call a grin.

“Ready?” Lena asked.

“I think that’s my line,” Jenny laughed. A sweat had broken out on her neck.

“Well, are you?” Lena challenged. She pursed her lips and stared at Jenny’s lens as if daring it to contradict the fullness of her existence.

Click.

Lena smiled.

Click. Click. Click.

She got onto all fours and growled at the camera. Jenny laughed. Her whole face had turned warm.

Click.

Lena sat back on her heels and bit her bottom lip. She flipped the bird.

Click.

“Okay. That’s enough. Now, come hear us play.”

Lena pushed through another set of Turkish carpet-drapes. “I have a visitor! Cover your vaginas—or uncover them, whatever you prefer!”

Three girls sat on the floor drinking coffee and circling classifieds. None batted an eye at Lena’s intro. Off to the right sat a mismatched drum kit, a keyboard plugged into a stream of extension cords whose electrical delta Jenny could not locate, a scuffed-up guitar painted with anarchist symbols, a mic stand, and a couple of taped-up amplifiers. It all looked like it had come from somebody’s sad garage sale.

Lena swung an arm in Jenny’s direction. “Ladies, this is Dallas. Dallas, this is the band. On guitar, Mia.”

A girl with a teased bouffant of peroxided hair saluted. Below the balloon of her oversized boys’ white T-shirt, a low-slung bandolier belt rested atop slim hips encased in a pair of slashed-up Levi’s. A short, muscular girl in a leopard-print slip and black combat boots wandered over to the keyboard. Her black hair had been cut asymmetrically, short on one side with a long fringe that covered one eye. “That is Anke.”

“Guten Tag,” Anke said in a way that might just as well have been Get lost.

Lena pointed to the dark-eyed, shaggy-haired girl clad in a thrift-store 1940s dress, who was circling ads in the newspaper. “That’s our drummer, Zehra.”

Zehra gave a perfunctory nod and puffed on her cigarette.

“You all live here?” Jenny asked.

“Us. Rat. A-Blitz. Johnny Scum. And sometimes Mia’s boyfriend…” Lena squinted.

“Mischa!” Mia said, clearly irritated.