Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(9)

The screen does its about-face. He’s looking at an open box filled with tiny cassette tapes and an old mini recorder like the kind journalists used before smartphones. A faded-beige scrapbook is nestled beside the tapes.

“Can you see?” she asks.

“Yeah. What is this?”

“Dunno.”

“You think this is stuff from her spy days? Maybe she’s finally telling you all her secrets.”

“I wish. Pretty sure she’s taking that to the grave.” Chloe wrangles the scrapbook from the box and places it on the desk. The pages crackle when she turns them. One page holds a preserved oak leaf and a daisy whose petals have aged from white to beige. Opposite is a small charcoal sketch of a window open to a view of half-timbered houses with tile roofs and an ivy-covered castle straight out of a medieval fairy tale and, in the lower right-hand corner, the scrawled initials EW. Chloe turns the page and zooms in on a clipping from a German newspaper, dated December 24, 1941. The grainy faces of three teenagers stare back at him from across decades.

“Do you think you could read any of this for me?”

He wonders if this is really why she called. Then again, she could’ve just used Google Translate. “Sure. Can you zoom in a little?”

The screen blurs.

“Wait, go out a little? That’s good. Okay. Um. The headline says: ‘Search for Missing Youths Continues. Hanna Schmidt, age 17; Oskar Gerber, age 17; Sophie Muller, age 17.’ Do you know any of these people?”

“I have never heard their names, like, ever.”

Miles has to work at the translation, but he gets the gist. “It says they disappeared the night of December 22 on … Wintersonnenwende? Guessing, winter solstice. Um … something here about whether this could be related to recent disturbances from outside forces. Also a rumor that it could have had to do with forest magic?” Miles looks up. “Yeah. Okay. Definitely weird.” He turns his head sideways to read something scribbled along the margin of the article. “What’s that?”

“It’s Mormor’s handwriting. It says, Die Eichel.”

“Is that a German Die Hard sequel?”

Chloe flips the camera back to herself. “Haven’t you had, like, three years of German?”

“Yeah. And I am so killer at asking for the bathroom! Hold on. I’ll google it.”

“I heard there’s gonna be a Mystery Mavens TV show,” she says while he types. It’s her version of an olive branch. In eighth grade, it was Chloe who turned Miles on to Mystery Mavens, a true crime podcast about solving cold cases that they followed religiously for three years. They’d even structured their ninth-grade English project on Macbeth as a Mystery Mavens–style whodunit. Mystery Mavens had bonded them. That and a shared hatred of annotating Lord of the Flies.

“Okay. Die Eichel means … acorn?”

“Welp. That really clears things up.” Chloe’s sigh ruffles her bangs into a wave of pale green.

“Any idea why your grandma would send you this?” He reaches for his Mountain Dew. After the ice cream sweetness, it tastes like metal.

Chloe shakes her head. “Ever since the stroke, she’s been different. Like there’s something eating at her that she’s trying to get out. But her mind is fighting her, trying to keep it locked up. She hasn’t said a word since January.”

Chloe lifts one of the mini cassettes out of the box and examines it.

“I haven’t had a chance to listen to these yet. Joyce made me Clorox the box and leave it outside for two days.”

As if on cue, her mom’s nasal voice blasts from somewhere in their house. “Honey! Can you come here, please?”

Chloe exhales in irritation. “Mommm! I’m on the phone-ah!”

“I need your spit!” Joyce yells back.

Miles lifts his eyebrows. “Joyce doing okay there?”

“Her latest pandemic hobby: 23andMe. I seriously can’t with her.” Chloe rolls her eyes and reaches for another veggie chip. Of their shared interests, snacks were rarely among them. “How much longer do you think we’ll be in lockdown anyway?”

Miles shrugs.

“God. What if we have to graduate over Zoom? That would be, like, a whole new level of suckage.”

“Look on the bright side—if Terrence Forman makes good on his promise to Sharpie a dick on his mortarboard, it’ll be screenshotted for posterity.”

Chloe laughs. “You always find the positive, Miles-y Cyrus.”

Then why did you stop talking to me?

“Chloe Ayelet Eisenberg!”

Miles whistles. “Wow. The full name.”

“Oh my goddd! I’m comingggg!” Chloe turns back to Miles. “I really hope things are better by fall. I need Stanford.”

Miles deflates. California. Across the entire country. It’s like he’s lost something he just barely had. “Oh. Cool. Congratulations.”

“Well, it’s not for sure-sure. I did early action, not early decision. I’m still thinking about going to Brown. What about you? NYU?”

Miles looks over at the thin stack of college acceptance letters—one from City College, another from SUNY. He doesn’t want to tell her the truth—that he didn’t get accepted to any of his top choices, which shouldn’t be a surprise given his good-but-not-exceptional GPA and sparse extracurriculars. He can hear Mom Lisa’s exasperated voice: I know you’re smart, Iho. You have to apply yourself, though. You’ve had a lot of breaks but the world is not going to bend to you forever. The whole thing seems pointless to him now. All of that work to get into college and there probably won’t even be college.