Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(3)

“Hmm.”

“I just thought it might be nice for you to have a friend here.”

“I have friends. Back in Dallas.”

“Well, that’s not a very positive attitude, is it? Remember: Things turn out best…”

“… for those who make the best of how things turn out,” Jenny finished. It was her mother’s favorite phrase.

Jenny opened a random drawer and found a spoon. “Fine.”

“Wonderful! I’ll arrange it with her mother.” Then, with a nod at the yogurt and another of her practiced smiles: “Let’s not eat that so close to dinnertime, okay?”



* * *



The girl’s name, as it turned out, was Martina. She wore a terrycloth short set, striped tube socks, and baby-blue eye shadow. She’d curled the sides of her feathered strawberry-blond hair into sausage rolls so big that Jenny was pretty sure she could hide a toilet paper tube in each one.

“Guten Tag,” Jenny said, standing outside their apartment carrying a fruitcake her mother insisted she bring.

“It’s better for me if we speak in English,” Martina responded. “Anyway, come in.”

Martina had no discernible sense of humor. She did, however, have a stash of Kinder chocolate bars, which she traded to Jenny on the promise of borrowing the latest issue of Seventeen magazine. They spent the afternoon in Martina’s room trying out different makeup looks while Martina asked Jenny if she’d ever met any famous Hollywood stars—“Shaun Cassidy? No? Wait. What about John Travolta?” The entire episode gave Jenny a sense of future doom. This was going to be her life now: watching Martina crimp her eyelashes with a metal curler she had heated against the stove to sear her lashes into standing at attention. It was boring and lonely. And just when Jenny was sure her misery had reached its crescendo, when she had begun to list the things in her mind that might get her parents to send her back home—a faked illness, a life of crime, smoking pot (none of which she could ever bring herself to do)—Martina suddenly beckoned Jenny to the window with an urgency bordering on espionage.

She put her finger to her lips and jerked her head toward the sidewalk below. “See her?”

Jenny searched the street for someone worthy of such scrutiny.

“Herrrr,” Martina whispered. She pointed to the older woman ambling up the walk, a bag of groceries in one hand and her key in the other. “That’s Frau Hermann. I think she might be a witch.”

“A witch?”

“Shhh! She might hear you.”

They periscoped their heads till they were eye level with the windowsill. The woman did not look like a witch to Jenny. She looked like a teacher. Or possibly someone’s youngish grandmother.

“Yes. Eine Hexe. A witch.”

“Eine Hexe,” Jenny repeated. “What makes you think that?”

Martina shrugged. “Things.”

“Like, what things?”

Martina blew out a gust of breath that ruffled the stiff coil of her meticulously curled bangs. “Okay. First: She has this nice apartment. They say she was married to a much older, much richer man. How was he so rich after the war?”

“Nazi?” Jenny whispered.

Martina pursed her lips and let the insinuation float. “Second: Her husband died very suddenly.”

“I thought you said he was much older?”

“So? There’s old. And there’s dead.”

There was a lot Jenny could say to that but Martina was on a roll.

“Third: She talks about magic.”

Now this was interesting.

“What kind of magic?” Jenny pressed.

“Old magic. Folk magic. Goddesses and sorceresses. She talks about the forest as an enchanted place.”

Jenny laughed. Martina did not. If her best friend, Richard, were here, he’d raise an eyebrow and do his German film noir voice: “I am going to kill you, Herr Blaumer. But first, I vill sing some-sing from Blue Angel, okay? You sit.”

Thinking about Richard brought a lump to Jenny’s throat. She pushed the memory aside. Besides, she was now intrigued by this Frau Hermann in her sensible brown skirt and pumps, cardigan sweater fastened loosely across her shoulders by a thin gold chain. Time had faded her hair into a washed-out, generic paleness, like a photocopy of another photocopy of a once-vibrant picture. Jenny hoped that Frau Hermann was a witch. At least it would liven up things.

“Whatever you do, don’t get into a conversation with her, or she might curse you!” Martina’s eyes widened; flecks of Maybelline dotted her upper eyelids. “You’ll be talking about the weather and then she’ll ask you up to her apartment for tea or pastry, and the next thing you know, she’ll have snipped a piece of your hair. And after that…” Martina shook her head.

Jenny peered over the sill. Down below, Frau Hermann stopped. Patted her pockets. She glanced up. The girls shot down and pressed themselves against the wall, and when they rose again, the older woman was gone.

“That was close,” Martina said on a heavy exhale. She turned to Jenny. “Hey. Do you think I could be on an American TV show?”



* * *



Jenny’s father returned from a business trip in Frankfurt the next day in time for lunch. He still had his sporty Texas tan.