Free My Brother's Secret by Dan Smith

door, disappear inside, and that I’d wave to her again tomorrow morning. It hadn’t been that difficult.

    She didn’t knock on her front door, though. She looked at it, but then she looked at me again. She climbed off her bicycle and leaned it up against the wall beside her front door.
    And then she was coming towards me.
    A girl .
    I hardly ever spoke to girls. At school we were separated, and the Deutsches Jungvolk was just for boys. The girls had their own groups; Jungmädel for girls my age, then the Bund Deutscher Mädel for when they were older. We were even told not to mix with girls, so I didn’t know what I would say if—
    ‘Hello,’ she said.
    I must have looked like a simpleton, the way I stared. ‘Uh. Hello.’
    ‘What happened to you?’ she asked, pointing at my bandages.
    ‘Oh. I … I fell off my bike.’
    ‘Not surprised, the way you rushed off like that. What were you doing anyway? If you want to skip school, it’s not a good idea to come and stand by the fence.’
    Close up, her hair was even darker than it had seemed from further away. It was plaited into pigtails, just how most girls wore it at school. She had dark eyebrows and dark eyes, too. Her uniform was quite dirty and her socks were ruffled at her ankles, revealing shins that were covered in bruises – old and new. Both her knees were grazed, but not as badly as mine.
    She stood on the pavement, with her hands on her hips, and looked down at me with her brow furrowed.‘What’s your name?’
    ‘Karl Friedmann.’ I stood up with the step against my heels, stopping me from moving any further back. It felt as if we were very close and I could smell her. It was a mixture of soap and the outdoors.
    ‘I’m Lisa,’ she said.
    I didn’t know what to say after that. ‘Umm …’ I thought for a moment. ‘Umm …’ I was stuck for something to say so I said the first stupid thing that popped into my head. ‘Are you a mischling ?’ I asked.
    Lisa’s face darkened as if a storm cloud had passed over it. ‘That’s a bit rude, isn’t it?’
    ‘I didn’t mean to … I just …’
    ‘No, of course you didn’t mean to. You’re just a silly boy who thinks girls are from another planet and doesn’t know how to talk to them.’
    ‘I …’ I looked at the pavement, feeling my cheeks flush. They grew hot and I was sure my whole face had turned beetroot.
    Lisa sighed. ‘Well, Karl Friedmann, no I am not a mischling . Not even second-degree mischling , and if you’re going to talk to girls then you need talk to them exactly the same way you talk to boys.’
    ‘Sorry.’ I made myself look her in the eye.
    Lisa waited for a moment, still with her hands on her hips, then the storm cloud vanished as if it had been wiped away. ‘I forgive you, Karl Friedmann.’ She put a hand in her pocket. ‘Do you have any money?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well, never mind. I’ve got ten Reichspfennigs .’ She pulledout two silvery coins and showed them to me, as if to prove it. ‘Come with me.’ She turned and began walking back along the road, in the direction she had first arrived from. ‘Come on.’
    I looked from Lisa to the front door and then back again, wondering what to do. If I was going to go somewhere, perhaps I should let Oma and Opa know.
    ‘Come on ,’ she said. ‘We’re just going along here. It’s not far. It’s not as if you’re running away.’
    So I jogged to catch up and we walked side by side with the warm afternoon sun on our backs.
    ‘It’s good to see you’re not wearing that silly uniform for a change,’ she said.
    I tried to think of when she might have seen me. Oma and Opa had been so strict about keeping me inside that I’d hardly been out at all over the last few days.
    ‘I see you at the window sometimes,’ she said, as if she knew what I was thinking. ‘And when you went to the shops with your oma. She is your oma isn’t she?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Anyway, I like the white shirt better. Your brother