Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(49)
“She can talk. She just won’t. I think this”—Chloe points to the scrapbook and tapes—“is her way of talking. I just don’t know what she’s saying.”
“Then we will figure it out. Right?”
Chloe smiles at him. “Thanks, Miles-y. I appreciate it.”
God, he misses her.
“Uh … yeah, so, I’m gonna see if I can find out anything on this artist, EW. It just seems weird that these pictures of Hanna are dated from just before her disappearance.”
“You think this EW had something to do with it?”
“Honestly? The more I dive in, the less I know.”
A timer goes off. 6:58 p.m.
“Is it time?” Chloe asks.
“Yeah.” Miles carries the phone and Chloe down the stairs, Dodger following eagerly behind in case there might be food. In the kitchen, Miles grabs a pot and a wooden spoon. Over the ether, he hears Joyce yelling at Chloe: “Not the Le Creuset! Use the old saucepan!”
“FML,” Chloe singsongs quietly to Miles.
“Not the Le Creuset! Not the Le Creuset!” Miles whispers back.
He throws open the back door and a clanging symphony pours in—clapping, whoops, whistles, and the banging of many pots. He beats the spoon against the pot, getting a rhythm going with some of the other neighbors while on her end, Chloe does the same. At 7:01, the claps and clangs die down. It’s unnaturally quiet again. Miles shuts the back door and lays the pot and spoon on the counter.
“For Lisa,” Chloe says.
“For all the Lisas,” Miles says.
* * *
Miles can’t sleep. The house is too quiet and his brain, too loud. He’s thinking about everything—the mystery, Chloe, his moms, the incident at the deli, what happened in history class. On an impulse, he looks up Chi’s Instagram and scrolls through the public collage of her life. There are some of the typical shots of friends laughing outside a movie theater and sitting on a blanket in a park. But there are also plenty of postings about social change. Links to calls for action with the NAACP. Petitions to take down Confederate monuments. And videos about how structural racism works and how to be an effective ally in the fight. She ends one with a chant and a hashtag: “Keep! Showing! Up!”
Miles sends her a DM. “I liked what you said in class and also #onhere about showing up.” He doesn’t know what else to say so he ends with “Also, I think it’s cool what you’re doing to register voters. Guess I’ll see you Monday. Unless the revolution happens first. Peace, Miles.”
Within ten minutes, he has a response from Chi. “Thanks. I appreciate it. But next time, maybe you could speak up? I could use the support. Here’s the info on Vote.org. We definitely need volunteers—phone banking, texting, making flyers, social media outreach, and, when it’s safe again, canvassing and helping people get to the polls on election day. Hope you’re holding up okay. Zoom school suuuuucks!” She adds a Black fist emoji and a heart and a signature of her own: #NoJusticeNoPeace, Chi.
KLEINWALD, GERMANY.
1939–1940
Autumn came to Kleinwald in a fantasia of deep reds and golds and an orange that shimmered like the last sunset of a perfect summer. This was followed by a dreary, damp fog that trailed across the tiled rooftops and sat upon the browning fields like the muddy lace of a bridal hem. At the end of September, Sophie turned fifteen. It was the first birthday she had spent without Hanna by her side, and without her, it didn’t feel like a birthday at all.
Sophie’s mother had fallen pregnant again. There had been some early bleeding with this one and the doctor had warned Frau Muller to rest. Once the school day was done, Sophie was needed in the bookshop and at home to help look after Liesl and it was as good an excuse as any to avoid BDM meetings and the pain of seeing Hanna. After their fight, Hanna had become friendly with Klara. From the bookshop’s windows, Sophie often saw them walking past in their uniforms, arm in arm, heads bent together the way Sophie and Hanna used to do back when they were so close that everyone said they were “cut from the same cloth but dyed different colors.” Lotte trailed behind them begging for a sweet, but the girls ignored her, and Sophie felt sorry for the child, who was so desperate for someone, anyone, to pay attention to her that no amount of sweet treats would ever fill the hole. She wondered if she, too, would end up like that. She wondered if Hanna ever missed her. For weeks, whenever the bell rang above the shop’s door, Sophie’s heart gave a tiny flutter of hope that she would see Hanna instead of someone searching for a book whose title they could not remember but knew “it had a green cover.” Sophie had never been in love but a best friendship was a sort of love, and losing a best friend was a grief as sharp as losing a lover.
She took comfort in books. When alone in the shop, she liked to run her fingers along the spines and imagine that they were the backbone of some sleeping dragon full of fire and magic. She collected the words inside them like sea glass, turning them over in her mind. Numinous. Illuminate. Exultation. Repentance. Redemption.
Leon had gone on to university in Berlin. He had been turned down for military service because of a clubfoot but mostly for being Polish, and before he left, there had been some grumbling in the town that maybe one of his grandparents had been Jewish after all, but it was not proved, and when the order came down from Berlin for all Polish Jews to be expelled from Germany and sent back to Poland, his family remained in Kleinwald, which seemed to settle the matter.