Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(87)

“But … people escaped the Nazis, right? Thanks to Sophie and Hanna and others? If walls go up, they can also come down,” Lena says.

“True. But the system—that is what must be changed. That takes time.”

Lena is insistent. “They made it out. I’m sure of it. So it can happen!”

“Well. That has always been my hope,” Frau Hermann says. “We must remain hopeful.”



* * *



Lena storms down the street toward the bus stop, Jenny following. It has started to spit rain and Jenny doesn’t have an umbrella.

“Lena, slow down! What’s wrong?”

Lena whirls around. “Your friend, Frau Hermann! You think she is innocent? You think she isn’t part of this whole … machine? She was raised during the Third Reich. Vergib mir. What does she need to be forgiven for?”

“She’s not like that. Like them,” Jenny sputters, but she’s not so sure anymore.

“You just want to think she wouldn’t. But then, look at your parents. You’ll probably turn out bourgeois just like them!”

Jenny feels as if she’s been slapped somewhere so deep inside she can’t quite find the wound. “That was uncalled for,” Jenny says, an echo of her mother, but it’s dress-up righteousness, no real teeth, and Lena can smell it.

“At least I’m honest.”

“Ha. Oh yeah. So honest. Fer sure.”

“Fer sure,” Lena mocks. She shoves her fists deep into her pockets. The rain is coming down harder, soaking them both. Lena’s hair droops under the weight. “You’re a tourist in my world! You come to the squat but then you breeze home to your fancy apartment with the maid and the champagne and tennis lessons and none of my world touches you! You can drink tea with the secret Nazi and talk about magic trees and pretend everything is beautiful. You don’t have to worry about how to get food or if you will come home to find the police have thrown everything into the street and seized the building. You have a family. You aren’t all on your own having to fight. So. Go on. Go back to your rich life, your pretend world. I said, go!”

“Oh yeah? Maybe you’re alone because you push away anybody who wants to help you! Big tough Lena. Look-at-me-I’m-sooo-punk Lena. You say you don’t like fairy tales? Well, you’ve made yourself into the biggest one of all!”

Lena smirks. It’s infuriating. Jenny is not a violent person but she’d like to slap the smirk off Lena’s face. No one has ever made her this angry before. The bus rounds the corner, windshield wipers fighting off the downpour. Lena conceals her eyes behind the shades she flicks down from the top of her head. The lenses are rain-spotted and ridiculous. Pure affectation. Like Lena.

“Some of us have to go to work,” she says, waving to the driver.

“Oh, at the bakery that’s closed?”

Lena’s mouth falls open.

“I saw you. With that girl. Who is she?” Jenny hates the way she sounds, like a character on a nighttime soap. But she has to know.

“Are you spying on me? Are you an informant now? Comrade Dallas!”

“If you weren’t so mysterious about everything I wouldn’t have to…” Jenny trails off. She’s afraid now. Afraid she’s wrong. Afraid she’s pushed Lena too far.

The bus is here. The doors hiss open.

“I trusted you,” Lena says.

Lena skulks her way onto the bus, down the aisle to the empty back, and flops into an open seat by the window.

“Kommst du?” the driver asks Jenny.

“Nein,” Jenny says. The doors close. The bus pulls away. Lena never looks back once.

By the time Jenny trudges back up the winding staircase of her apartment building, she is miserable and angry but more miserable than angry. She wishes it were the other way around. Frau Hermann leans on her cane in the open doorway of her apartment. Backlit by the windows, she is feathery as a ghost. “I’m sorry, Jenny. I don’t think I made a very good impression on your friend.”

“No, um, she’s just … very tired. Sorry,” Jenny says, making excuses for Lena the way her mother always does for her father.

“Your friend Lena is very frightened.”

“Lena? She’s not afraid of anything.”

“People who seem as if they are not afraid of anything are often afraid of everything.”

Jenny doesn’t know what to make of this. She wants to cry. She’s afraid Lena is lost. She’s angry with Frau Hermann; she’s angry about everything. “Why did you say that to Lena, about Sophie and Hanna being part of the resistance?” she demands.

“Because it is the truth.”

“You never told me that before.”

“Well. Now I have.”

“You told her that so she’d like you…,” Jenny says, piecing something together, fuel for her fire. “Because Lena is a rebel who lives in a squat. A resister. What was it you said to me when I told you? ‘She’s part of the underground.’ You’d spin out any story to get me to come around, wouldn’t you?”

Frau Hermann stands silently, like a therapist at the end of a session. It infuriates Jenny. She is through with fairy tales.

“I saw you wrote a whole letter to yourself. Vergib mir,” Jenny says.