The Thing I'm Most Afraid Of

by Kristin Levine

  You’re going to get an infection!

  Shut up, brain, I said to myself. And then to Felix, “I think there’s some antibiotic ointment in there too.”

  He dug around in the kit, found the tube, squeezed some out onto a clean piece of gauze, and spread it gently onto the cut and the scrape. A drop of blood oozed out and then stopped.

  “Plaster?” he asked.

  “I don’t think it’s broken . . . Oh.” He was holding up a Band-Aid. “Yes, please.”

  He pasted it on, as gentle as my mom. “There!” he said when he was done. He picked up the bloody gauze and threw it in a nearby trash can.

  I sat numbly on the curb. So I hadn’t died. “I don’t think I can get back on the bike,” I said.

  Felix sighed and sat down next to me. “Did I ever tell you why I don’t like to dance?”

  I shook my head. I was happy to listen to any story if it meant I didn’t have to get back on the bike.

  “When I was really little, maybe four or five, my father took me to a dance class he was teaching. I had these tiny little tap shoes, and I remember being so excited. But when the class started, it was a disaster. The students were nine or ten, and they looked giant to me. I stood in the back row with no idea what to do. Halfway through the class, I started to cry. My father had to stop instruction and get me a drink of water. I felt so awful. I had let him down! My parents split up about a month after that class. And for years I sort of thought he left because he was embarrassed to have a son like me.”

  I opened my mouth to say that wasn’t true. But hadn’t I worried about the same thing with my father?

  “I know that doesn’t make sense,” Felix went on. “Those kids were twice my age. My parents were already having problems—he probably took me that evening because Mama was meeting with her lawyer or something. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that the night of the failed dance class was when everything started to go wrong.”

  “I’ve felt that way too,” I admitted.

  “I want to go to the dance class,” Felix continued. “I don’t want to disappoint Mai. But it’s more than that. I want to tell my dad that I tried again. But I don’t think I can do it if you’re not there to help me. So please, Becca, get back on the bike.”

  I did.

  Of course I did.

  And I followed him into the traffic. Even though I was terrified. It’s a lot easier to be brave when you’re helping out a friend.

  * * *

  The dance studio was located in a big old building with a central courtyard. We left our bikes there and followed the signs up a rickety set of stairs to the studio. In the first room, there were little benches with cubbies underneath for your belongings.

  Sara walked over to me as I was storing my backpack. “What happened to your knee?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I had a little . . . mishap on the bike.”

  “Mishap?” Sara asked.

  “I fell off,” I admitted.

  I waited for her to worry. To say, Are you hurt? Did you clean the cut? Like my parents would have done. But instead she said, “You okay.”

  It was a statement, not a question, and somehow, that made me feel better.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I am.”

  The instructor, a tall, impossibly thin woman with a dance skirt and a bun, came out and clapped her hands. She said something in German I didn’t understand, then repeated herself in English. “The teen dance class is beginning shortly. Please come into the studio.”

  We followed her into a large, open room with polished wooden floors. The walls were lined with mirrors. A barre for ballet had been shoved to the back of the room.

  “Felix! Becca!”

  We turned around to see Daisy and Mai.

  “I’m so glad you came,” Mai said to Felix.

  Felix nodded. He looked a little green.

  Rasheed and Peter waved to us from across the room. I waved back, and then the teacher clapped her hands again. “Gather around, please. Girls facing clockwise, boys facing counterclockwise.”

  Felix grabbed my arm. “Be my partner,” he said desperately.

  “Sure,” I said. Daisy and Rasheed squeezed into the circle next to us. Mai and Peter were on the other side.

  “Willkommen!” The teacher cleared her throat. “I am Frau Kovács. These are my assistants, Sara and Marco.” Marco gave a little bow, and Sara curtsied. “They will be demonstrating the steps. This is a five-week class on ballroom basics. Everyone who completes the class will get an invitation to the University Ball on August 28.”

  “A ball?” squealed Daisy.

  August 28 was a few days before I was going back home. A ball sounded like a pretty cool way to wrap up my visit.

  “We start with a waltz,” the teacher continued. “There are three counts. Count with me. Eins, zwei, drei. Eins, zwei, drei.”

  We ran through a few basic steps. Sara and Marco demonstrated and walked around the circle to help anyone who was having trouble. I listened as intently as if we were learning the safety procedures for skydiving. It turned out I was actually a pretty good dancer. “Just like following a recipe,” I told Felix.

  “Wunderbar!” said Frau Kovács. “Now we change partners.”

  “You can do it!” I whispered as Felix moved around the circle to the next girl. It was Mai. She was smiling. Felix was as pale as the powdered sugar on an Apfelstrudel.

  My new partner was Peter; he was a decent dancer. Rasheed was awful but so cheerful about his mistakes, he was fun to dance with. Then there were a couple of guys I didn’t know, and the next time the teacher called “Partner wechseln!” Felix was standing before me again.

  “I did it!” he exclaimed as we practiced the steps. “And I only stepped on her foot once! I apologized, of course, but then she said Peter had stepped on her foot three times, and Rasheed had stepped on her five times, so I was actually doing the best of all!”

  The class went faster than I’d expected. “Hmm,” Frau Kovács said when we were done. “You are not terrible. See you next week!”

  * * *

  After class, Marco led our little group to his father’s ice cream shop. Giovanni’s Gelato was just around the corner, in an old building with marble floors and carved ceilings. The molding on the walls was old, but the furnishings were modern, with glass tabletops made from bits of melted glass and sleek metal chairs. Colorful masks and robes covered the walls, all feathers and flowers and beads, as if a masquerade party had hung up their costumes.

  A man who had a mop of thick gray hair and was wearing an apron greeted us when we came in. “Buongiorno!” he said. “Willkommen bei Giovanni! Das beste Eis im . . .” He groaned when he saw Marco. “Mein Sohn bringt die ganze Klasse.” Everyone laughed.

  “What’d he say?” I asked.

  “He complained about his son bringing the entire class,” Felix whispered.

  Marco chattered with his father in Italian for a moment. His father looked at us again, with more interest this time, and then he grinned and said something in Italian.

  “My father welcomes you to our shop,” Marco translated. “He says, ‘Friends of my son are friends of mine.’”

  Marco showed us to a big booth in the corner, surrounded by windows and padded with little blue velvet pillows. He handed each of us a menu. Instead of words, this menu had color photos of the most amazing ice cream sundaes I’d ever seen.

  Felix and Peter got the Schoko-Lovers sundae; Daisy ordered the Hawaiian—pineapple gelato, vanilla sauce, and pistachios. Sara got the Klimt (apparently a famous Austrian painter who liked gold leaf), and everything was golden on her sundae—butter-pecan gelato, butterscotch, and toasted almonds. Mai ordered a Berry Bonanza, which had so much fruit, I wasn’t sure it counted as a treat after all. Marco and Rasheed each got an iced coffee with vanilla ice cream, and I got th
e Mozart, the house specialty, which had a little bit of everything.

  “Oh my gosh!” Daisy exclaimed when Marco placed the sundae down in front of me. “It’s huge!”

  We dug in. “You’re so lucky your parents let you bike here by yourselves,” Rasheed said between bites. “My mom made me carpool with Daisy.”

  She shoved him playfully.

  His comment made me remember his mom was a lawyer. I glanced over at Sara. She and Marco and his dad were chatting in the corner of the store, out of earshot. “Rasheed, can I ask you for some advice?”

  “Sure,” Rasheed said. “Chess or Legos? Those are my two areas of expertise.”

  I laughed. “Legal advice.”

  “I don’t know anything about the law,” Rasheed said. “If you want to know about that, ask my mom.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s the idea. At Felix’s party, Katarina said your mom specializes in—”

  “Immigration law.” He sighed. “It’s all she ever talks about now. She used to work for a big corporate firm, but then she quit her old job and started her own practice.”

  “Why do you care about immigration law?” Peter asked.

  “It’s not advice for me,” I admitted. “It’s about Sara.”

  “She is such a good dancer,” Mai sighed. “I heard the teacher ask her and Marco to help open the ball.”

  “Open the ball?” I asked. “What does that mean? They stand at the door and hand out programs?”

  Daisy laughed. “No, at the beginning of every ball, they ask a bunch of young couples to perform the first dance.”

  “It’s a great honor,” added Mai. “And they get to wear these beautiful white dresses.”

  Peter rolled his eyes. “Becca asked for legal advice, not fashion tips.”

  Rasheed leaned in close. “Is Sara here illegally?”

  “No. But she only has that temporary thing.”

  “TPS?” asked Rasheed.

  “Yeah,” I said. “So she can’t work.”

  “Oh,” said Peter. “I guess that’s why she told the Heuriger owner no.”

  “What?” Felix asked.

  “At your birthday party. She was so good on the violin. The owner offered her a job playing for him on weekends. She turned him down.”

  “We’re worried about her family,” I went on. “Her mom and brother sent her a letter saying they were coming to join her here, but . . . they never showed up.”

  “Do you think your mom could help find them?” Felix asked.

  Rasheed frowned. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I’ll ask her.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  * * *

  On the way home, I could barely breathe as we wove through the traffic, but the scary part was over after about five minutes. The path through the park was easier. When we arrived at home, I took off my bike helmet and shook my sweaty hair free. And I felt, well . . . I felt like I had climbed a mountain.

  CHAPTER 29

  In Prague

  Things went pretty smoothly for a couple of weeks after that. We went sightseeing; we biked to dance class; we ate ice cream. Dad announced he was taking us on a quick trip to Prague during the second weekend in August.

  “I wish we had more time,” Dad said. “But the plan is for us to leave on the train early Saturday morning. We’ll get to Prague in the late afternoon and have dinner. Then we’ll have all day Sunday to sightsee. Katarina and I have to work Monday, so we’re going to get up super early and take the four a.m. train. You and Felix and Sara can sleep in and come back with Sara around eleven a.m.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said.

  We took a taxi to the same train station where we’d dropped off my mom. The train we boarded was made up of mini-rooms with six seats, three facing forward and three facing backward. Dad said you could slide the seats together to make a little bed on an overnight trip.

  Felix had a guidebook (of course). “In 1989,” he read, “Czechoslovakia overthrew its communist regime in a peaceful transition of power commonly referred to as the Velvet Revolution. On January 1, 1993, it split into two independent countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Prague is the capital of the Czech Republic.”

  “How exciting,” said Katarina, “to visit a country that is only eight months old!”

  “Another communist country that dissolved into independent states?” I asked. “Is it safe?”

  “Yes, perfectly safe,” Dad said. “This split was completely peaceful.”

  “Then why is the situation in Yugoslavia so different?” I asked.

  The question hung uncomfortably in the air for a moment, until the door to our compartment slid open and the conductor arrived to check our tickets. Once he was gone, Sara pulled out a package of Leibniz biscuits—these were flat shortbread-like cookies. She’d gotten the ones that were dipped in chocolate on one side.

  We all munched happily for a while, looking out the window at the scenery. After about two hours, the train stopped. “Are we there already?” I asked.

  “No,” said Katarina, “we’re at the Czech border. It’s just passport control.”

  Another conductor, this time wearing a Czech uniform, came into our compartment. “Pässe bitte. Passports, please,” he called out.

  Dad gave him ours. Katarina handed over hers and Felix’s. Sara adjusted her purse strap and pulled her passport out of her little green bag.

  The man didn’t even open mine and Dad’s, just nodded when he saw the little blue books with United States of America and the eagle on the cover. He opened Katarina’s and Felix’s, glanced at the pictures, then promptly closed them again.

  Sara’s passport was a dark maroon. There were multiple folded papers inside. “Guten Tag,” Sara said pleasantly.

  The man frowned at her. He examined the papers in great detail, looking over every single page. He stuck his head into the hallway and called another, older man in uniform over to ask him a question.

  “It’s just a weekend trip,” Dad explained. “Then she’ll be returning with us to Austria.”

  Finally, the older man said, “Alles in Ordnung.”

  The younger man sighed, frowned again, and reluctantly stamped her passport.

  “Danke,” said Sara. “Schönen Tag.”

  The man didn’t answer, just handed her passport back. He closed the compartment door a little too hard on his way out.

  I ate another chocolate biscuit, but it didn’t taste as good this time. It seemed like the Czech Republic was worried about Bosnian refugees too.

  When we arrived in Prague, we took another taxi from the train station to the apartment my father had rented. There was a living room and a full kitchen with a table big enough for six. It also had three bedrooms: one with a king bed, one with a double, and the other with two twins.

  “This place must have been expensive,” I said.

  Dad shook his head. “Twenty dollars a night. I paid in dollars.”

  “Why is it so cheap?” I asked.

  Dad shrugged. “People want hard currency.”

  “Hard currency?” I asked.

  “It means money from a country that’s politically stable, so the currency is unlikely to fluctuate in value,” Katarina explained. “Like American dollars or German marks or British pounds. Remember the Czech koruna was only invented in January.”

  “In fact”—Dad took out his wallet and pulled out some bills—“the currency still says Czechoslovakia. They just put a stamp on the larger denominations.”

  “That’s so cool!” said Felix. “I want to save one. Part of history!”

  I remembered Sara’s dream and how her mother had used German marks to go shopping. I glanced over at her now, but she was busy unpacking her backpack.

  Once we were settled in, we went on a walk. Prague reminded me a lot o
f Vienna, with the same style of grand buildings, the same cobblestone streets, even the same distinctive yellow paint from Schönbrunn. “It looks a lot like Austria,” I said.

  “That’s because it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” Felix said. “The Hapsburgs ruled over Prague as well.”

  We went to a nearby restaurant for dinner. I thought it was going to be super expensive—it had white tablecloths and waiters in tuxedos—but it came to only about ten dollars a person. Hard currency sure bought a lot.

  “Tomorrow,” Felix said as we walked back to our apartment, “I want to see the astronomical clock and Kafka’s house and the castle.”

  “I want to see the Jewish cemetery,” said Katarina.

  Dad turned to Sara and me. “Ladies, any requests?”

  Sara shook her head.

  I said, “I want to get some ice cream.”

  Dad laughed.

  * * *

  Early the next morning, I was enjoying a leisurely breakfast of yogurt and muesli (which was like granola) when Felix realized the apartment clock was slow and we only had ten minutes to make it to Old Town Square to see the Prague Astronomical Clock. “Every hour on the hour, there’s a little show,” Felix explained as he hurried us out the door. “I don’t want to miss it!”

  We made it to the square with about twenty seconds to spare. Built in 1410, the clock had two big faces—one dial representing the sun’s and moon’s positions and another one showing the months of the year. Above the sun/moon face were two small windows. As the clock chimed nine, the windows opened and a bunch of apostle figurines paraded by. A grinning skeleton rang a bell, and Felix took about a bazillion pictures.

  After the clock, we went to Kafka’s house. Apparently, Kafka was the guy who wrote the book about a man who turns into a cockroach. His house was located on the grounds of Prague Castle, on a tiny street called the Golden Lane. The house itself was blue, with “No 22” written over the doorway. Felix posed proudly with a copy of The Metamorphosis, which he’d brought along from home.