The Thing I'm Most Afraid Of

by Kristin Levine

  “Schwarzfahren,” Sara said.

  “That’s what we call riding without a ticket,” Felix explained. “It’s bad.”

  “You mean to tell me,” I said, “the whole bus line works on the honor system?”

  “No, of course not,” Felix said. “The streetcars, subways, and local trains also run on the honor system.”

  I stared at them.

  “America is different?” Sara asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Very different.”

  Felix put his nose back into his book, and I looked out the window. At my school, they didn’t trust you to buy lunch without checking your ID; it didn’t make sense that a whole city would trust its citizens to buy a bus ticket.

  And yet the bus was very clean and seemed new. There were businessmen in suits and old women clutching baskets, actual wicker baskets, full of food. I stared out the window. This part of Vienna didn’t really look like a city, more like the suburbs. Some of the houses were in new developments, like where my father lived, but others were crumbling, as if they were hundreds of years old. Which, I realized, maybe they were.

  I was about to ask Sara when she stood up suddenly and pushed a button on a pole in the middle of the bus. A moment later the bus swerved to a stop, and she motioned for us to get off.

  “Are we in the city already?” I asked as I walked down the bus steps.

  “No,” she said. “Time for breakfast.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Aïda

  The bus had stopped outside an old building with a bunch of different stores on its bottom level. There was a Drogerie (which looked like a drugstore), a store that seemed to sell only paper, and a café with the words “Aïda—Café Konditorei” in pink neon over the front door. Under each window was a basket of flowers, the blossoms overflowing the sides, the red, yellow, and orange petals spilling like crayons out of a box.

  Sara caught me looking at the plants. “Pretty, no?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. Practically every house in Austria seemed to have window boxes.

  “My mama loves flowers,” Sara said as Felix pushed open the door and led us into the coffeeshop. There were small tables everywhere, but every single one was occupied.

  “We’ll have to go somewhere else,” I said.

  Sara gave me a funny look, marched over to an old lady with two needles and a ball of yarn, and said a few words in German. The woman nodded without smiling, and Sara gestured for us to sit down.

  I elbowed Felix. “Do you know that lady?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are we sitting with . . .”

  Sara took my arm and pushed me down into a plastic chair. The knitting lady didn’t glance at me. Before I could decide if I should say hello to her or not, a young woman in a pink uniform came over to take our order.

  Sara started to rattle off what she wanted, then stopped. “Melange oder heiße Schokolade?” she asked.

  Felix whispered, “Eine Melange, bitte.”

  I had been planning to order the hot chocolate, but since the nine-year-old wasn’t ordering it, I said, “I’ll have the same.”

  “Apfel- oder Topfenstrudel?” Sara asked.

  “Topfen,” said Felix.

  “Apple,” I said, since at least I knew what that was.

  Once the waitress left, I whispered to Felix, “What did I order?”

  “Coffee with milk.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  Felix opened his book as I glanced around. The place appeared to have been modeled on a 1950s diner, complete with checkerboard tiles on the floor, stainless steel, and pink plastic booths.

  “I come right back,” Sara said. She stood up, walked to the back of the store, and started talking to a woman behind the counter.

  “What’s she doing?” I asked. “Did she forget to order something?”

  Felix shook his head. “That lady is also from Bosnia. Sara stops here once a week to see if she’s heard anything about . . .”

  Her family, I finished in my head. I didn’t know what I would do without my mom. My heart started to beat faster. No, I thought. I will not freak out on my very first day. Dad would be so disappointed.

  Sara came back to our table and sat down. Felix raised an eyebrow in question, but Sara just shook her head. I wanted to say something nice to her, but it took all my energy to force the air in and out of my lungs. So I stayed silent.

  Finally, the waitress returned with our food. The coffee smelled delicious, with foamy milk swirls on the top. It was served in a real ceramic cup atop a saucer, on a silver tray with a tiny glass of water on the side. The waitress also put a square, flaky pastry sprinkled with powdered sugar down in front of me. “Oh, I didn’t order this!” I said.

  The waitress looked at me in surprise.

  “Yes, you did,” Felix whispered.

  “No, I ordered an apple and . . .”

  Felix jabbed me in the ribs, and I shut up.

  “Alles in Ordnung,” Sara said. The waitress gave me one last nasty look and walked away.

  “It’s an apple pastry,” Felix said. He had a similar pastry in front of him. “Go on, try it.”

  I picked up my fork and sliced off a piece. A sweet-smelling apple pie filling oozed out. I cautiously took a bite.

  “It’s yummy!” I took another bite, then turned to Felix and asked, “What kind of pastry did you get?”

  “Topfen,” he said.

  I made a face.

  “Quark,” he translated.

  “Still don’t know what that is.”

  He pointed to his plate. A cheesy filling oozed out of his pastry.

  “Cream cheese?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “You can try it.” He cut me off a small piece, and I popped it in my mouth.

  “Okay,” I admitted. “That’s good too.”

  We chewed in silence for a moment. I don’t like silence. That’s when my worries start to creep in. I had to figure out something safe to talk about. “So,” I said, “why is this place called Aïda? Is that like the owner or something?”

  Sara smiled. “No. Aïda is a Verdi opera.”

  “Never heard of it,” I said.

  “Very famous opera. Aïda is a beautiful captive princess who falls in love with a handsome Egyptian commander, Radamès. Except the Egyptian princess, Amneris, is in love with Radamès too. But he not love her. He loves beautiful Aïda!”

  “And they all die at the end,” Felix added.

  “So romantic,” sighed Sara.

  It sounded a bit like a plot last summer on Love on the Evening Tide, which was my mom’s and my favorite soap opera. We only watched it in the summer. Remembering that made me tear up, so I stuffed another bit of apple strudel into my mouth.

  “If you ask me,” continued Felix, “there’s nothing very romantic about getting sealed inside a temple and buried alive!”

  It was exactly like Love on the Evening Tide! Aidy and Raymon had gotten locked in a crypt in New Orleans and . . . Wait a second. Were the TV writers opera fans?

  “Their love lasts forever!” said Sara.

  “Oh, please,” said Felix.

  “You’re awfully cynical for a nine-year-old,” I said.

  Felix suddenly turned bright red.

  “I’m not nine,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “I’m. Not. Nine!” He was speaking in a normal voice, which for Felix was almost like yelling. “I’m twelve, just like you. In fact, I’ll be thirteen in three weeks, so I’m older than you. I’m just short, okay? You don’t need to point it out. My dad got his growth spurt really late, so my doctor thinks I will too. Not that it’s any of your business. Now please don’t ever say another word about me being small!”

  Felix drained his coffee and slammed the cup down on the table
. It made the glass of water on the little silver tray jump. “I’ll wait for you outside.” He stood up and marched out the door.

  I felt awful. Dad hadn’t gotten his age wrong! I picked at the rest of my strudel, but it didn’t taste as good anymore. Felix had been so helpful translating everything. He hadn’t even laughed at my frog pajamas.

  Sara patted my arm. “Not your fault,” she said. “He is very sensitive. I made the same mistake.”

  I looked up at her. Some of her bright-red lipstick had rubbed off on her coffee cup, and she didn’t look quite as grown-up. We finished our food, and Sara gestured to the waitress. When she came over to our table, Sara said, “Zahlen, bitte.”

  The waitress took out her pad of paper and waited expectantly.

  “Ich hatte einen kleinen Braunen und einen Apfelstrudel,” said Sara. “Der Junge hatte eine Melange und einen Topfenstrudel.”

  The waitress turned to look at me.

  “Are you ordering more?” I asked. “I mean, it was tasty, but I’m kinda full.”

  “No,” Sara said. “Tell her what you eat . . . ate.”

  “Why?”

  Sara looked at me as if I were crazy. “So she knows what to charge!”

  “But we already ordered!”

  Sara rolled her eyes. “Sie hatte eine Melange und einen Apfelstrudel.”

  The waitress finished her calculating and put the bill on the table.

  “You mean, you have to tell them what you ordered?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Sara said. “How else they know?”

  “But what if you said you only ordered one coffee?”

  “You lie?” Sara asked, her eyes wide.

  “I wouldn’t!” I protested. “But someone could! Wait, is this the honor-system thing again?”

  Sara nodded. “Different in America?”

  “Yeah,” I said again. “A lot.”

  We went outside and found Felix waiting by the bus stop. “Hey,” I said.

  He wouldn’t look at me, just kept his nose buried in his book. For the first time, I looked at the cover: The Federalist Papers.

  Wait. I knew that book. We’d read excerpts in history class at school. It was the collection of essays that Hamilton and those other guys had written to encourage the states to ratify the constitution. “Why are you reading that?!” I blurted out.

  Felix shrugged. “I like history. And when my mom started dating your dad, I figured I should learn more about your country.”

  That was actually . . . really nice. Except for that one old movie Dad had made me watch, I’d done nothing to learn about Austria. “Oh,” I said. “That’s cool.”

  Felix turned back to his book.

  Suddenly, I remembered something Dr. Teresa had said. She’d told me I shouldn’t think so much before I spoke. If I had something I wanted to say, I should say it. So I took a deep breath.

  “Felix, I’m sorry. And I’m not just saying that—I’m actually sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed you were nine. I should have asked. I mean . . . I know things can look one way but be another.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re not the first one to make that mistake.”

  He nudged Sara.

  “Hey,” she said good-naturedly. “I apologized too.”

  And then they both smiled.

  Before I could say anything else, the bus arrived to pick us up. Except it wasn’t a bus this time. It was a streetcar.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Streetcar, the Cathedral, and the Royal Hamburger

  The streetcar, or Straßenbahn (as Felix informed me it was called in German), looked like a skinny bus with rounded edges, white on the top, red on the bottom. It was connected to an electrical line overhead and ran on rails embedded in the street. On the top of the curved white roof was a round black-and-white sign with the number 38. Underneath that was the word “Schottentor.”

  The doors slid open, and I followed Felix and Sara up the stairs. Again, no one checked our tickets as we sat down. The seats were wooden, with two seats on one side of the aisle and single seats on the other. Felix and Sara took a double, and I took the single one across from them. The doors closed and we started off.

  The streetcar moved faster than the bus, zooming along in its own lane, ringing a bell to warn cars to get out of its way. I didn’t usually get nervous on public transportation, but the jerking and clanking made it seem like our compartment might break apart at any moment. At the end of the block, a car was stopped squarely across the streetcar tracks in the intersection. The driver rang the bell and proceeded full speed ahead. I gripped my seat, wondering what the safety statistics were on streetcars. The bell rang again, a car honked, and the driver slammed on the brakes so hard, I bumped into the seat in front of me.

  The streetcar driver cursed in German and gestured at the car. He rang the bell again, and the car finally moved out of the intersection. I sighed with relief, even though no one else seemed to think we were in any danger. Felix read his book calmly. Sara stared out the window.

  “Freud’s house.” She pointed when I caught her eye. “Museum.”

  “Sigmund Freud?” I asked, still clinging to my seat. “Founder of psychotherapy?”

  “Yes,” Sara said.

  I could use some therapy after this ride! “Can we see his couch?” I asked.

  A huge cathedral came into view then, with two tall, skinny towers that pointed like fangs into the sky. Between them was a massive stained-glass window shaped like a rose. And just as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone, as the streetcar dipped underground as if it had turned into a subway. It made my stomach lurch. I swear, the Straßenbahn was as bad as a roller coaster. Which, by the way, I do not enjoy.

  “Where are we now?” I asked.

  “Schottentor,” Sara said. “Come. We go see Stephansdom. It is a very old, very big cathedral.”

  “I think I just saw it.”

  “That’s the Votivkirche,” said Felix. “It’s barely a hundred years old. St. Stephen’s has been functioning as a church since 1160.”

  Over eight hundred years?!

  I followed the two of them off the Straßenbahn and up an escalator, where we jumped onto another streetcar, this one with a large number 1 on the top.

  “Ringstraße,” said Sara.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Literally, it’s Ring Street,” said Felix.

  “Why?” I asked. “Are there lots of jewelry shops?”

  Felix sighed, as if I were incredibly stupid. “You do know there used to be walls around cities in Europe, right?”

  “Of course,” I lied.

  “Well, there used to be a wall in Vienna too, forming a ring around the city to defend its citizens against invaders. By the mid-1800s, the Austrian Empire was strong and powerful; they didn’t need the wall anymore, so they tore it down and built a wide, majestic street around the inner city instead. Streetcar number one takes you around it, past all the buildings they constructed on the reclaimed land.”

  “What kind of buildings?” I asked.

  Sara pointed out the window. “Universität. Where I study German. Next is Rathaus.”

  “Rat house?” I asked. “Like a zoo for rodents?”

  Felix rolled his eyes. “Rathaus means city hall.”

  “Your local government meets in a rat house?”

  “Rat means advice in German. The animal rat is Ratte.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Rat is a false cognate,” Felix added.

  “What’s that?”

  “A word that sounds the same but has a different meaning in another language.”

  “Oh.” German sounded confusing.

  “Like Gift,” he said.

  “Like a present?” I asked.

  “Nope,” said Felix. “
In German it means poison.”

  Yup, it was definitely confusing. I was about to say so when I got a glimpse of the Rathaus. The building had five towers: a big one in the middle and two smaller ones on either side. There was a park in front of it, complete with food stands, as if there were a festival going on. And next to the building itself stood a giant movie screen.

  “They show movies?” I asked. “Like a drive-in theater?”

  “Opera movies,” Sara explained.

  Okay, this town was weird.

  Next to the Rathaus was the parliament, a Greek-style building with a statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, standing guard out front. The streetcar kept moving, zipping along, but there was so much to look at that it was hard to feel scared.

  “Museums,” Sara said. “Natural history. Art history.” She pointed to the other side of the street. “The Hofburg.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A castle,” she said. “And Heldenplatz.”

  “Where Hitler gave his speech after marching into Vienna during the Anschluss,” explained Felix.

  I barely got a glimpse of Heldenplatz, only enough to see it was a vast, open space with a statue of a man on a rearing horse, before the streetcar moved on.

  Finally, we reached a large building with a green roof, multiple archways, and two statues of winged horses on either side of the roof. “The opera,” said Sara, and then she jumped up and pushed a button. The doors on the streetcar swung open. I hurried after her as she and Felix starting walking down a large street.

  And when I say they were walking down the street, I mean they were literally walking down the middle of the street. I gave them a horrified look. “You’re going to get hit by a car!”

  “Kärntner Straße is a pedestrian zone,” Felix explained.

  It took me a moment to realize what he meant. The road was made of cobblestones. There were fancy boutique-style shops on either side of us, lots of people, and a few delivery trucks, but no cars. I guessed it was safe and reluctantly stepped off the sidewalk.

  We window-shopped as we walked. Palmers appeared to be a fancy underwear store, like Victoria’s Secret on steroids. Embarrassed, I kept my eyes averted so I wouldn’t accidentally glance at their mannequins. Next to that was a Swarovski shop with crystal vases and bowls in the window. I lingered by that one, gazing at a shelf of tiny crystal animals: sparkling elephants, lions, and giraffes. There were multiple cafés, their chairs and tables spilling out onto the cobblestones. A souvenir shop hawked Mozartkugeln, which seemed to be some sort of round candy wrapped in foil and plastered with Mozart’s face.