Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(58)

Two weeks passed with no reply to Sophie’s last letter to the Bridegroom’s Oak. She fretted that she had given away too much of herself. Perhaps she should’ve remained more guarded. But she had never been able to see any sense in doling out measured spoonfuls of one’s heart. Then she worried that something had happened to Nobody, something terrible. All of those times she’d spent spinning out tales of the tragically romantic were coming back to haunt her. But as the days droned on, with Sophie climbing the ladder to the Bridegroom’s Oak and finding nothing there, her anxiety and worry turned to anger. In the privacy of her room, she wrote haughty responses full of accusations and rebukes and empty promises—If you were to write me a hundred letters now, I wouldn’t answer even one of them. You have lost me forever. Goodbye!

She tore all of these into pieces. She fell onto her bed, heartsick and pining and emptied of the buoyant hope that had carried her through the hard months alone. She cried into her pillow and then, all at once, it struck her as bitterly funny: She had fallen in love with a dream.

She had fallen in love with Nobody.

November arrived. Hanna was due home in a few weeks and Sophie couldn’t wait to see her again. That might take some of the sting out of her failed romance with Nobody, though she didn’t think she could bring herself to confess it to Hanna. Not after last time. When would she ever learn not to give her heart away so easily?

It was toward the end of a wet, miserable November that Klara raced to catch up to Sophie on the walk to school, something she never did. She was breathless, her cheeks ruddy with excitement. “Sophie! Did you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“You honestly haven’t heard the news?”

“Klara. Are you going to tell me or not?” The intimidation Klara once wielded over Sophie had dulled to prickly annoyance.

“About Karl!”

Sophie slowed. “What about Karl?”

“They’ve found him!”

“His body? Where?”

“No! They found him.”

Everything around Sophie tightened like an explosion so that, even years from now, she was sure, she’d remember the brightness of the morning sky against the sharp lines of the rooftops.

She heard her voice as if it belonged to someone else: “What did you say?”

“Sophie! Karl is alive!”





WEST BERLIN.


SUMMER 1980

Jenny had started skipping some of her German classes. The band took up most of her time and besides, she was learning more German just being with Lena and the others in the squat. She’d even had her first dream in German. In it, the Bridegroom’s Oak rose from the rubble of Kreuzberg and Jenny sat on one of its outstretched limbs, suspended above the earth. David Bowie’s voice floated across the broken rooftops like the feathery tips of angels’ wings. In their lonely watchtowers on the other side of the wall, the East German guards put down their guns and danced with each other.

“H?ren Sie: Wir k?nnen Helden sein. Ist das nicht etwas?”

Listen: We can be heroes. Isn’t that something?

She woke to a hazy Berlin sunrise with the feeling that there was actual magic in the world.

“Saturday night at the squat party we are going to show everyone that Sophie Scholl is the greatest punk band in West Berlin!” Lena announced at the start of band practice. She dropped a spent cigarette into a beer bottle, where it went out with a tiny fizz. “We need to build up a name so people will take us seriously.”

“You’re still pissed off that Jürgen wouldn’t give us a spot in the club,” Anke said.

“They say they want to disrupt the system, but they are still sexist!” Lena growled. “They only want to look at us without hearing us. Well, we will make them hear us! No more good girls!” Lena grabbed the mic and screamed long and hard into it until the amp squawked with feedback: “We won’t be your good little girrrls!”

Zehra caught the cue and thumped out a sinister beat. “Keep going!”

Lena made up lyrics as she went. “Sugar and spice and everything nice / That’s what your bullshit is made of!”

An actual smile broke out on Anke’s face. She made the keys hum. Jenny grabbed her violin.

“I won’t conform! I won’t perform!” Lena screeched. “My body is not a museum for your eyes! Good little girls—”

“Never cut their hair,” Zehra shouted. “But I don’t care! I do what I like!”

“I do what I like!” Lena sang, and looked to Jenny.

“Good little girls eat their diet food! Sit with their legs crossed. Such a pretty face! Vergib mir! Vergib mir!” Jenny added.

“My per-i-od blood is not! A! Disgrace!” Anke warbled.

The girls screamed with laughter, high on transgressive delight.

“Good little girls! Good little girls! We won’t be your good little girls!” Lena sang.

“Good little girls! Good little girls! We won’t be your good little girls!” they sang together.

Lena screamed it over and over until there was no more air to give. Zehra finished with a crash of noisy cymbals. They all looked at each other, grinning and sweaty.

“Now that was punk!” Lena said.

“It’s a start,” Anke said, contrarian as usual.