Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(73)
“And Karl? Is he…?”
“Yes,” Hanna says. “Yes.”
Sophie nods. She pushes up her sleeves. “Let’s get to work.”
WEST BERLIN.
SUMMER 1980
Berlin has become a Lena-shaped city. It is a gritty, grafitti-painted fairy tale amid the rubble of Kreuzberg and in the dank basement clubs where bands thrash all night and ears ring afterward for days. The sound of Berlin is frenetic guitar and Lena’s machine-gun laugh. The smell is Lena’s scent, tobacco and hair spray and the faint musk of a girl who refuses deodorant as “unnatural.” Jenny lives for Lena’s mouth on hers. The two of them, kissing by the wall, just like a Bowie song. Lena finds the spot on the dirty concrete where Jenny wrote her new name weeks before. With the same marker, she adds + Lena and draws a heart around their unlikely equation. Jenny spends all of her time with Lena and still it isn’t enough. She wishes she could stop time and they could breeze through Checkpoint Charlie hand in hand past the frozen guards, marching right into the square at Alexanderplatz. They would waltz around the Neptune fountain, the metal god and his forked spear daring anyone to break them apart.
When she’s not with Lena, Jenny shows up for the occasional German class, where she is already far ahead of the other students, thanks to life at the squat. She suppresses a giggle thinking of the filthy German she’d love to add to her perfect homework answers. Other times, she sprawls on the sun-warmed oak of her bedroom floor and listens to her new albums. She writes angry lyrics in a spiral notebook but the margins are embroidered with Lena’s name. Whenever Jenny runs into Frau Hermann on the stairs, the older woman cajoles her inside with promises of some new pastry and more of the story about Sophie and Hanna: Hanna was very athletic and popular; Sophie liked reading and she was kind. They claimed to have a seidr wand—that is from the Norse for divination. Who knows? Maybe they really were sorceresses.
Lying to her parents has become much easier for Jenny with practice. Martina has proved to be a surprisingly solid ally on this front. It has cost Jenny a slightly used Bonne Bell Bubble Gum Lip-Smacker and her subscription to Seventeen, but it’s worth it. Jenny can barely tolerate her family now. Every sentence her parents say is its own death strip. It looks traversable but it is mined and guarded. It can kill you in a hundred different ways.
“I heard you missed German class last week?” Her mother. Sniper position.
“I started my period. I didn’t have anything with me.” Here are my papers, comrade.
“Why didn’t you go Thursday?” Trigger cocked.
“The cramps were, like, terrible. I thought my insides were gonna come out, Mom.”
Jenny’s father looks up from his pork chop with disgust. “Some of us are trying to eat.” Wave this tourist through. Next, please.
“I’ll explain to Miss Blau,” her mother says quickly. The rifle is lowered. The guard retreats. “But you’ll have to do whatever she says to make it up.”
Close call. Jenny reaches for the dinner rolls and her mother makes a face.
“Honey, don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
“If I’d had enough, I wouldn’t still be hungry, Mom.”
Her dad isn’t subtle. He makes loud pig noises. Alison giggles and joins in. Jenny imagines flicking a forkful of mashed potatoes and gravy at both of their faces.
“John. Alison,” her mother scolds. Alison gets in one last oink. “Staying slim is a full-time job, isn’t it? I know I sure hate it.” Her mom says this to Jenny with a little smile. Like they’re in this together. On the same side.
“It’s a capitalist trap,” Jenny says. “Corporations just want us to feel bad about ourselves so we’ll keep buying their stuff. It’s all so bourgeois.”
Her father snorts. “You didn’t think it was so bourgeois when your mom took you shopping last week. Should we donate your bourgeois new clothes to Marx and Lenin?”
Strangers. She is at a table of strangers. They don’t know her, wouldn’t accept her if she let them in all the way. They will never see her play as Dallas Doberman with Sophie Scholl. Never take pictures of her smiling nervously in the foyer before a date with Lena. Never acknowledge the strength and power of her natural, healthy body. She should be angry about this—she is angry about it. But mostly, it’s lonely. She doesn’t want them to love a theoretical version of her; she wants them to love the real her. It sounds so simple. Like being a kid and thinking that if you just build a tall enough ladder, you can rope the moon. It’s only when you’re older that you understand the impossibility in the millions of miles and layers of choking atmosphere, the final absence of gravity that keeps you floating forever alone in the vast isolation of space.
Later, Jenny overhears her parents talking. Her father sits in his leather chair with a scotch, not his first. Her mom is on the sofa with her wine spritzer. They are separated by the coffee table like little islands.
“I don’t know what’s going on with Jenny,” her mom says, looking off.
“She’ll be all right once school starts. But you know more about how girls are than I do.”
Her mom sips her wine. “I don’t think I know anything anymore,” she says.
“Suit yourself.” Her dad reads his paper, drinks his scotch. Unable to sit any longer, her mom walks to the windows and shuts the drapes against the night.