Antonia and Sofia wave to one another when they pass in the hallways; they sit close together and say oh how are you with detached warmth at Sunday dinner. It is as if their friendship has been put on hold, frozen, and when they are together they both have to time travel to a place where they can speak the same language. They always have to leave something of their present selves behind. Antonia’s plain face reflects the ways Sofia is faking. With her new friends, Sofia never wonders if she needs the new sweater, the perfumed neck. Antonia, with her studiousness and her sensible shoes, makes Sofia feel like a fraud. And where once being with Sofia had made Antonia feel stronger, she now feels gawky and uncomfortable in the edges of Sofia’s light, even, if she is honest, faintly judgmental of Sofia’s new affect. How destabilizing, to question the motives of someone who has always been your compass. How isolating, to wonder if despite your family ties and the friendship promises and oaths of trust you swore, you are alone after all.

Late at night, when the hours seem not to have names anymore, and Antonia’s body is heavy with exhaustion but her mind spins a million miles a minute, she sometimes lays a palm flat against the brick wall that her bedroom and Sofia’s share. On the other side of the wall, Sofia sometimes rests the plane of her forehead against the brick. Each of them imagines that the other is there.

Chapter 7

Antonia reads the news with a manic obsession. She watches Hitler’s men and boys trample through Czechoslovakia and imagines, as the summer burns a little less brightly, that they filter into Poland like a glass of water being poured. She feels evil seethe up through the cracks she’s beginning to notice in the world around her.