Wunderland(78)

Ulrich stared up at her with open suspicion. “Why?”

“Why?” Frau Klepf smiled harder. “Why, don’t you like candy?”

“Klar. But so does everyone else,” he pointed out. “But no one else got two. Everyone else only got one.”

“Well, Ulrich. You see…” Frau Klepf cleared her throat again. Her smile was starting to look like a grimace. “You see,” she restarted, “sometimes when something is left over, rather than waste it, it is better to…to give it to someone deserving.”

“But how do you know I’m deserving?” Pushing his glasses back up his nose, the gangly boy leaned back in his wooden chair. “It’s only the first day of school. You don’t know anything about me.”

Her mouth still tingling with almond-paste transcendence, Ava found herself gawking at her new friend. It wasn’t just that he’d landed this confectionery windfall, or that (incredibly!) he didn’t seem to want it. It was that she’d never seen someone her age address a grown-up in quite that way: as though he were every bit as adult as she was. It was easily the most subversive thing she’d ever witnessed—and that included when someone at her old orphanage pinned a note to the backside of one of the plumper nuns reading First Prize: Fattest Pig.

“Well.” The teacher coughed. “You mentioned that you’ve lost a parent.”

“Lots of people did. Lotte, for instant. And Ava.”

“I understand that.” Was it Ava’s imagination, or had the teacher’s tone taken on a slightly pleading note? “The war was very hard on all our families. But in some cases…”

“I don’t want it,” he interrupted flatly.

A handful of gasps sounded audibly. Frau Klepf looked as though she’d been slapped.

“You don’t…you don’t want it?”

“No. Give it to someone else, please.” Picking the bonbon up, Ulrich held it out at her stiffly.

Staring down at him, Frau Klepf’s pinched face took on a rosy flush not unlike that on the candy’s mini-Mozart portrait, while Ulrich simply stared right back. Ava bit her lip. She could practically feel the mounting tension displacing the close, quiet air in the room.

At last, the teacher sighed. “Bring it home for later,” she said tartly, and turned away. “For everyone else: please have your wrapper ready when I come around with the bin.”

“I won’t want it later either.” Ulrich glared at the teacher’s receding back. But if she heard him, Frau Klepf didn’t give any sign.

Ava waited until she was well past the first row of desks. Then, leaning over, she tugged on Ulrich’s shirt. “If you don’t want it,” she whispered, “can I have it?”

He looked back at her with lifted eyebrows, and for a moment Ava worried that perhaps she appeared greedy, and that this would sever the thin thread of their new bond.

But Ulrich merely shrugged. “Sure,” he said. And turning around, he picked up not one but both of the candies, depositing them directly on her desk.

“Really?”

“I don’t really like marzipan,” he said. He gazed solemnly at her from behind his scratched lenses. “Or Mozart,” he added.

She wasn’t sure if he meant it as a joke, but she found herself giggling anyway. It almost seemed too much: she’d not only acquired a friend who liked her drawing, and wanted to talk again tomorrow. But she had two more whole candies to herself….

“Fr?ulein von Fischer!”

Starting, Ava lifted her gaze to see Frau Klepf glaring at her from the blackboard.

“Did you take those from Ulrich’s desk?”

Ava licked her lips. “He—Ulrich said that I could have them.”

Setting the bin she was holding down, the teacher strode back down the aisle. “I thought I’d made myself clear. Those were for Ulrich, and Ulrich alone.”

“Yes, but…”

“But what?”

The teacher stood directly over her now, her fists propped on her slight hips. She smelled of old sweat and stale perfume and something deeper and slightly fishy.

“He doesn’t want them,” Ava said. “You heard him say it yourself.”

“Are you implying that there’s something amiss with my hearing?”

“It’s true,” Ulrich chimed in. “I really don’t…”

“Not. Another. Word.” Frau Klepf’s face had gone from rosy with rage to as white as the chalk stubs she had just lined up neatly on her blackboard. “Give the candy back to Ulrich. And apologize.”

Ava looked down at the two bonbons. It felt as though she had been told to give away the two sweetest pieces of her very soul. Just do it, she told herself. Just say you’re sorry.

But her entire body, from her fingers to her lips, felt as fixed and frozen as Herr Andersen’s Ice Maiden’s.

“Well then!” hissed the teacher. “I’ll do it myself!” Scooping the candy up, she flung it at Ulrich’s desk so hard that one of the pieces bounced off again and skittered to the wall. Ava followed its trajectory. Then she looked at Ulrich, rendered speechless by the gesture’s violence.

He stared back, his expression unreadable. Then, very slowly, he crossed his eyes behind his glasses.