Going Over

Part 2

In this, the second section of GOING OVER, we meet Stefan, who lives in East Berlin, on the wrong side of the wall.....

Friedrichshain

 

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She has pink hair, a big pop of Bazooka color. She cuts it straight across, Cleopatra style, with scissors that she borrows from the co-op. Out in the night she shines like some West Berliner planet.

“Did you see me?” That’s her question. “Did you see me up there waving to you?”

You tell her yes. It makes her happy. It isn’t a lie, not every time. A splash of color will flash your scope and you’ll think that it’s her; think she’s found you. Three letters and two syllables. That’s her name, and it fits her.

She brings you basil leaves in summer and electric pop all year round. She hides chocolate in her pockets. She tears pages out of the books she likes and leaves them on your table. Once she showed up at the door in a spackled leather jacket, worn and beaten, she was boasting, by some surfboard-sanding punker.

“It’s yours,” she said, and when she took it off, her arms were freckled color. She’s a graffiti genius, if you believe what she says. Cocky looks good on Ada.

There’s nothing she believes in less than black and white, or gray. Even the mole she paints above her lip is green sometimes, and sometimes orange, and the mole trades sides above her lip depending on the season. She wasn’t always like this. She was a little kid once. You remember her even when she won’t remember herself. Ponytails and questions. Big eyes. “Why not?” “What’s this?” “Can I?” It’s right there. In your head. Who she was before she had the power of being anyone at all.

“This is Ada.”

“This is Stefan.”

She was bored out of her mind. She’d drive you crazy. You’d be out on the balcony and she’d show up and want. Asking for it, always. Why. Why is the air thick blue up high and thin blue at the edges? What is the color of blur? Which one is Mars, and why does Cygnus fly south, and what do you mean: four-power finder scope? Why don’t you get a bigger power? The only cure for her was a pencil. Give her one of those and a chart of the skies and at least she’d sit for a minute, looking and tracing, putting a shine on the belt of Orion, a couple of bows on the tail of Centaurus, fire in the mouth of Draco.

“I need paints,” she’d say.

“I need pastels.”

One day she showed up and she was twelve years old. She’d cut her long hair short, painted a stripe of blond that hung across one eye. She wore a hoop in one ear, nothing in the other. She had that mole on her lip. It could have been purple. Glitter, you think you remember.

“I’m Ada,” she said, like you were going to argue her wrong. Like you hadn’t met her two dozen times before, four times each year, in the good years. Every time the door opens your grandmothers act like they can’t believe the other one still exists, like surviving is the biggest miracle and maybe it is. But the year Ada turned twelve, she made like you were someone brand-new, a boy she’d never noticed before.