Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(60)
“I’m so sorry,” Jenny said. The apology felt anemic, but what was there to say? “What about Andreas?”
“He went to live with cousins. We write. I send a Westpaket—what do you call it? Care package?—with letters, coffee, when I can. I send it through friends here. The Stasi bastards take the coffee most of the time. They read the letters, of course. Andreas seals his envelopes with cellophane so that I can see if they’ve been opened. The tape is always broken. So we speak in code. ‘How’s the garden?’ means ‘Are you in trouble?’ If he says ‘mostly gray,’ it means all is the same. If he says ‘there was sun on the flowers,’ it means he’s met a girl he likes.” Lena smiled but it quickly disappeared. “If he says, ‘I think it’s going to rain,’ it means the Stasi has pulled him in for questioning or torn up his apartment. I’m worried about him. He has become a punk, too.”
“Just like you.”
“No. Not just like me. Here, if you are a punk, people stare. Sometimes they say something. There? Being a punk—punk music—is illegal. East German bands like Wutanfall and Planlos? They’re not playing clubs—there are no punk clubs. The only place that’s safe to play is the church. The state can’t touch the church. But the Stasi can harass you. They can make it impossible for you to get a job, and when you have no job, they will arrest you for not working. Then they throw you in prison. Sometimes, people don’t come back from prison.” Lena wiped away angry tears. “And this is what it’s like. You can’t get out. You don’t know who to trust. Your whole future has been written for you and you’d better give up and fall in line. It’s not the wall they put around the city.” She tapped the side of her head with her ring finger and the ash from her cigarette fluttered to the ground. “It’s the wall they put around your mind. Around your dreams.”
Lena bit at her cuticle, nibbling off a bit of skin. She spit it at the floor. “For a while, I hated my mother for sending me first. For leaving me all alone.”
“You’re not alone, though. You have the band. The squat. Me.” Jenny laced her fingers in Lena’s. Her heart was beating very fast.
Lena smiled through her tears. “Upsy-daisy!” she said, and fell back on the bed, tugging Jenny down beside her.
“It’s oopsie-daisy.”
“I like upsy better.” Lena sighed. “You ever just like to look at the ceiling? I feel like if I stare at it long enough, it can become whatever I imagine it to be—sky. Snow. A break through the wall. Anything.”
Jenny stared at the ceiling. She saw water stains and broken plaster.
“You see it?” Lena whispered.
“Mm-hmm,” Jenny lied. Because all she could see there was Lena.
* * *
As Saturday drew nearer, Jenny was beside herself with nerves. It wasn’t just the playing. She didn’t know how she was going to get past her parents. They would want to meet Lena and talk to her parents to make sure that Jenny was making friends with “the right kind of people.” She shut her eyes and imagined Lena sitting on the expensive sofa, Helga in her starched maid’s uniform feather-dusting pristine furniture while Jenny’s mother offered finger sandwiches from a silver tray: And what does your father do, Lena? Is he at Mercedes or perhaps the university? Doomed. Utterly doomed.
Martina answered her door with her hair clipped into a Metropolis-halo of hot curlers. Jenny handed over the coveted Grease soundtrack. Martina’s mascaraed eyes lit up with John Travolta greed.
“You can have it,” Jenny said. “For keeps.”
Greed became suspicion. “What is your catch?”
“I just need to tell my mom that I’m staying over at your house tomorrow night. Your parents are going to Munich, right?”
“Ja. So. Where are you going?”
“To a party.” For a minute, Jenny was afraid Martina would ask to come along. Fortunately, Martina proved to be reliably incurious about Jenny’s life except for one detail.
“Are you going to do drugs?”
“Uh … no.”
“Good. I don’t cover for drug addicts. I saw an American movie about a girl who did heroin. She got syphilis and died. But she went insane first. It ate her brain.”
Jenny tried to hear it in Richard’s fake Greta Garbo voice. He’d love Martina. It would be material for days.
“I’m not doing heroin,” Jenny said. “So you’ll cover for me?”
Martina tucked the soundtrack against her chest. “For Danny Zuko, ja.”
In the U-Bahn station, Jenny ducked into the cheerless public bathroom and changed into the jeans vest that Lena had punked out over a plain white T-shirt and swiped on a dark red lipstick she’d stolen from her mother’s makeup drawer. The hair really was all wrong but there was nothing she could do about that now. She stared at this new self in the cracked bathroom mirror. “You are on your way to the life you’re supposed to have,” she said.
Halfway down the block, Jenny could hear the party, which spilled out into the street in strobing bursts of light and caterwauling sound. On the second floor of the building kitty-corner, an old man in an undershirt leaned his head out the window and shouted—“Mach das Ger?usch aus!” Turn off that noise!—before giving up, shaking his head, and slamming his window shut.