Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(95)

“Go to your room before … just go.”





* * *



Jenny lies on her bed, furious and hurt. Yes, she broke their trust. But if they had trusted her, if they gave a damn about who she really is, she wouldn’t have to lie and sneak around. And now she’s grounded. There’s no phone back in the squat. How can she let Lena know what’s happening to her? Dinnertime comes and goes. Jenny refuses to eat with the family. It feels like a capitulation and she won’t give her parents the satisfaction. She chews a piece of flavorless spearmint gum into tacky rubber. An hour after dinner, her mother knocks at the door. She’s carrying a tray with some Sp?tzle and a holy Coca-Cola.

“I thought you might be hungry.”

“I’m fine,” Jenny says in a voice still hoarse from the earlier crying.

Her mother gently clears a spot on the bedside table and sets up the tray. Then she perches at the end of the bed and looks around Jenny’s room as if she’s searching for clues to a mystery that has her stumped. “What are your new friends like?” she asks in a voice that’s clearly still hurting.

“Different.” Jenny takes a forkful of Sp?tzle. She wishes she could go on a hunger strike like a revolutionary, but prison food is probably a lot easier to reject than Helga’s delicious Sp?tzle. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“You know you can tell me things.”

Jenny snorts. “Oh, fer sure.” It’s mean but mean is the easiest option.

“Is there a boy?” her mother presses.

“No, Mom, there’s not a boy.” Jenny’s throat aches. Because what if she could tell her mother this? What if she and her mother could tell each other the truth about anything? It’s a loneliness that has haunted Jenny since Marcia Brady, the loneliness that says her mother’s love is conditional, contingent upon Jenny being the daughter she needs her to be and not the person she actually is.

Jenny’s mother scrutinizes her shaved head. “Well. You know us Harris women—our hair grows fast. In a few months, it’ll look like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Very gamine. You could wear my Hermès until it grows out.”

She takes off her scarf and hands it to Jenny like a game-show consolation prize.

Jenny lets the scarf sit between them. “I’m not covering it up.”

“But, honey, you don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable, do you? What will people think?”

“I don’t care what people think! This is who I am,” Jenny says with more conviction than she feels. She just doesn’t want to lose. “Why don’t you ever care about my comfort? My feelings, Mom? You’re always trying to make yourself smaller to fit into somebody’s little box they want to put you in—and you try to make me smaller, too! I don’t want to live small, Mom. Okay? I don’t want to live my life like … like you.”

Jenny’s mom blinks down at her slippered feet. Her chin trembles. It’s as if Jenny has fired a gun pointed at her. She’d wanted to hurt her mother. But now that she’s succeeded, she hates herself for it. She drops back against her pillow and turns onto her side, away from her mother. She stares at the Sex Pistols album peeking out from the crack in her closet door, waiting for her mother to fight back, to cry, to guilt-trip her—anything.

A moment later, her mother’s slight weight releases from her side of the bed. She leaves as quietly as she entered.





KLEINWALD.


AUTUMN 1941

August bends toward September. The evenings fall faster now, the days shaving themselves shorter. Karl walks Sophie home from the bookshop in the evenings. Sometimes, they duck beneath the bridge to kiss, doing their best to ignore the sounds of soldiers above them, to forget the noose tightening around Kleinwald. One early afternoon late in September, the Kriminalpolizei storms into Sophie’s parents’ bookshop. The Kripo take hammers to the beautiful mahogany shelves and toss books onto floors. Sophie hates to think of all of those beautiful books with their spines bent and bruised.

“I have lived here all my life! I am a German citizen!” her father shouts as the officers’ boots tramp mud across the braided rug in their search for possible seditious materials. In the end, the only questionable thing they find is Siddhartha.

“This author is questionable, Herr Muller,” an officer says.

“I’m not selling it. It is from my personal library.”

“Nevertheless. We will confiscate it.”

In the street, the officer sets fire to its pages and Sophie remembers all the days of sharing it with Karl and is glad that these memories can’t be burned away. Herr Binder stops to watch the conflagration.

“The whole shop should burn,” he says, and walks away.

That night, Sophie’s parents have their biggest row yet. Sophie sits at the top of the stairs in the deepening shadows, listening.

“Erich, we must go,” Sophie’s mother pleads. Fritz has a cold. He cries as she soothes him against her chest.

“I won’t be run out of my home by a bunch of leather-booted thugs.”

“They are the thugs in power, Erich. Pretending otherwise won’t keep us safe.”

Mrs. Muller shuts the kitchen door and their voices become dim oscillations. Lieselotte comes to sit next to Sophie.