Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(22)
“Maybe she is a witch! Or…” Lena shrugged.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just, a lot of people like her have secrets. You know?”
Jenny thought about what Martina had insinuated. “No. She’s not like that. She’s really nice. She helps people—she’s a psychologist.”
“Ach! I don’t like that type. They try to get inside your head.”
Sometimes, Jenny wished someone would get inside her head and tell her what was going on in there, try to make sense of it. She wondered if the wall she’d wrapped so tightly around herself would ever come tumbling down. They continued up Bernauer Strasse. An old apartment building peeked over from the eastern side, its windows bricked in, a holdover from the 1960s when desperate people jumped into the West from their apartments in the East. A young, dark-eyed man in a zip-up sports jacket stood smoking a cigarette in front of an abandoned storefront whose windows had been pasted over with old newspapers. He eyed the girls intently. Jenny felt watched.
“Uh, don’t look now but that creepy guy is, like, staring?” Jenny whispered.
Lena locked eyes with the man and tensed.
“What? Do you know him?” Jenny asked.
“Nein,” Lena said. She tightened her grip on Jenny’s arm, pulling her forward.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK.
SPRING 2020
Miles was in fifth grade and learning about square roots when he started calling his moms the “Moms Squared.”
“Are you calling us squares?” Mom Lisa had teased.
Mama D had shaken her head. “Wow. That happened fast. I had the Ramones. On vinyl.”
Miles had been confused. Maybe square had a different meaning than a shape or a math problem. “What does square mean? Is it bad?”
“A square is somebody old-fashioned. Not cool like your mama and me.” Lisa pumped her fully inked arms, then smoothed her palms across the close shave of her undercut. “A square is a boring old fart.”
And after that, Mom Lisa and Mama D were officially the Moms Squared.
Here is what Miles knows about his family: The Moms Squared fell in love at a club on the Lower East Side. Mama D had recently finished a photojournalist assignment in the Balkans for Time magazine; Mom Lisa, just back from the Gulf War, was in nursing school. They moved into a dumpy apartment in Brooklyn, fixing it up over time. Miles came along in 2002 after twenty hours of labor and an emergency cesarean for Mama D. He doesn’t know much about the donor except that he was Filipino, a request from Mom Lisa to honor her heritage. From the donor, Miles inherited his thick black hair, dark eyes, and a wide, straight-toothed smile that Chloe once teased him was “tween heartthrob–worthy.” From Mama D, he got some height, topping out at five-foot-ten, with broad shoulders from his days on swim team. In 2011, when gay marriage was legalized, the Moms Squared made it official at city hall with Miles, who was barely nine, as the ring bearer. Later, in their backyard in Brooklyn, under a purpling summer sky, the smoke from the grill scenting the air with celebratory hot dog grease, Mom Lisa held Mama D while she cried.
“What’s wrong?” Miles had asked, worried.
Their neighbor, Rashad, had bent down and put his arm around Miles’s shoulder. “Ayyy. It’s a’ight, my man. Your mom’s just happy ’cause they could finally get married. Today, love won the fight.”
This is how Miles will forever think of his family, as a defiant act of love.
* * *
The exhausting Zoom school day is almost over. The last class is history with Miles’s favorite teacher, Ms. Diaz. He loves that she treats them like adults, even sharing parts of her own story. Like the time she told them about Argentina’s Dirty War, how her favorite uncle, a social worker and activist, had been dragged from his home by the military before dawn and shoved into the back of a truck. That night, he joined the nearly thirty thousand people who became known as Los Desaparecidos—the disappeared.
“Thoreau once said, ‘Things do not change; we change.’” When she said this two weeks ago, Ms. Diaz had been standing beside a projected image of mothers and grandmothers in white headscarves gathered in Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo holding up handkerchiefs bearing the names of their missing children and grandchildren while armed soldiers stood nearby ready to advance. “The mothers of Los Desaparecidos marched every Thursday from 1977 until 1983, despite intimidation and violence, until the world paid attention and the dictatorship was overthrown,” Ms. Diaz said. “And so, with apologies to Mr. Thoreau, I would add that things do not change until we decide to change them.”
For the past week, the class has been studying fascism in WWII. Today, they’re examining the role that propaganda and misinformation played in the rise of the Third Reich.
“How does propaganda work?” Ms. Diaz asks.
A handful of students unmute to throw out ideas. Miles is not one of them. “It plays on people’s emotions.” “It creates an enemy or ‘Other.’” “It ignores nuance and complex ideas.”
“How did the Third Reich use propaganda to further its aims? Let’s hear from some people who haven’t spoken yet.”
Miles stares at his desk like he’s thinking deeply about the question. It’s his time-honored avoidance strategy that has seen him through most of high school. He’s often afraid of saying “the wrong thing”—something that makes him look dumb or gets him canceled—and finds it safest just to stay under the radar.