Read Online Going Over by Beth Kephart - Free Book Online

style. I’m a girl rejecting my genetic history. I’m a girl who lost a boy in the dark of Kottbusser Tor. I close my eyes and I see snow. I open them and a salty tear makes its way to the corner of my mouth.
    â€œYou’re warm,” she says. “You have a fever.”
    â€œNo,” I say. “I’m fine.” But my eyes are closing and it’s hard, really hard, sitting here pretending I’m fine. “I just need a minute,” I say, and maybe a minute goes by, or ten, but now I feel Mutti’s arms around me, feel her thinness lift me, her half-strength float me like one of those sad, red balloons.
    â€œHere,” she says.
    â€œI’m fine, Mutti,” I mumble. But I’m not, and she’s here—thin and worried, suffering like she does, leading me away to the couch. She helps me from my jacket, unpeels the cap that is glued to my head. She leaves me and then she comes back, and I feel her lift one of my arms as she tucks in the little bear I slept with when I was a kid. The blind bear with the vest of buttonsand the two rectangular teeth. Mutti made the bear, with socks and felt and thread. Mutti made it when she was young, before living like we do became too hard.
    â€œI’m fine,” I insist, but I’m cold inside and hot everywhere else, and when she touches my head again with the tips of her fingers I feel the prickle of it low in my spine.
    â€œMutti?”
    â€œYou need your rest.”
    â€œCan you tell them?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œTo stop the music?”
    â€œOh, honey.”
    And now she sits there, on the far end of the old couch, rubbing my feet with her fingers. Everything is upside down and reversed.
    â€œClose your eyes,” she says.
    I’m floating.
    I dream red balloons and fighter jets, fireworks and squadrons. I hear Omi in the kitchen, talking; feel Mutti get up and sit down and get up and sit down; and here’s John Lennon in a swimsuit and Ringo Starr with a drumstick microphone and Omi tiny, dancing. Omi pressing her hand to my forehead. Omi leaving her hand behind.
    â€œOmi?”
    â€œShhhhh. Sleep.”
    Ninety-nine red balloons. Ninety. Nine. I write the number onto the sky. The sky is smacked with graffiti. “Look,” I say, and Stefan’s here. He has his hand on my head.
    â€œStefan?”
    â€œAmateur,” he says.
    When I open my eyes it’s dark. When I open them again I’m high in the sky in a basket, a plume of fire beside me. Flamethrower. Gas burner. It is working. We’re escaping East Berlin—all of us and Stefan, too, in a hot air balloon as wide as the city’s widest building. We’re high above the silver teeth and spires, the sausage men, the tin can cars. We’re high, and the river is running. The river and a boy with coal-black hair—a purple shawl flying out behind him, trailing the smell of patchouli.
    â€œAda?”
    â€œSavas?”
    â€œShhh, Ada. Shhh. It’s just a dream. Please. Have some water.”
    â€œOmi?”
    I reach but she’s far. I lean but she’s there—on the fifth floor of a bombed-out building, no walls. The two orange frogs on her shoulders are hiccoughing words; the words are neon. Behind them an orchard grows through the low bowls of lit chandeliers, and past the orchard the city is burning. “You’ll be all right,” Omi is saying to the frogs on her shoulders, to me. “It’s nothing,” she says. “It’s just a fever.”
    â€œMutti?”
    Crackers and soup. “Just a little, Ada. Good.”
    My eyes are like fishhooks. My words are like cotton. My city is no walls and neon frogs, chandelier bowls tipping soup. I feel something cool across my face, and then, for a long time: darkness. A thin sheet yanking and pulling. I hold on to my hair. It is pink.
    Savas is here, like a spider.
    Stefan is coming.

FRIEDRICHSHAIN

    You have to wait for the