Free Second Fiddle by Rosanne Parry Page A

us. We’re the only ones who can save him, right?”
    They both agreed.
    “Okay, so we just need to … ummm …”
    “Tell a whole bunch of lies?” Vivi said.
    “Yeah.” I thought about my mom and dad and about how much they trusted me. Setting a good example for my brothers was like a religion with them.
    “They’ll never know,” Vivi said. She steered us to the shady end of the train platform. “They’ll think we are at the competition with Herr Müller, and we will be at the competition—just with Arvo. It’s almost like we’re not lying—right? We go. We play music in the morning. We help Arvo find some other Estonians in Paris in the afternoon, and then we go home on Sunday just like they are expecting. What could possibly go wrong?”
    Clearly, we had no idea.
    “You know,” Giselle said, “I don’t think my parents even think about me when I’m not there. They’re so busy all the time. As long as I’m with people they know, doing things they approve of, they don’t care. I think they’re kind of glad I’ll be gone over the weekend. Dad never thinks of anything but his command, even when he has a day off, and Mom works fulltime plus overtime just with the stuff an officer’s wife has to do. They want me to go.”
    “Mom got me francs from the bank on Monday,” I said. “She got me film for my camera. She’d be sad for me if I couldn’t go.”
    “We’ll go!” Vivi said. “It’s only a little bit of lying.”
    “It’s lying for a good reason.” Giselle let her backpack slide off her shoulder and hit the platform with a thump. “Arvo will never make it on his own. Walk to Estonia? Right! He can fly to Estonia from Paris.”
    “Vivi, you said there were Estonian people in Paris,” I said. “Are you sure? Where are they?”
    “I don’t know exactly,” Vivi said. “But Paris is packed with immigrants. I bet we can find someone who knows where people from the Baltics live. Probably those people will give Arvo a place to stay and help him earn enough money to fly home. It won’t be fast, but it will be way safer than walking.”
    “I’ll lie to save someone’s life,” I said.
    “It’s not like our parents are going to be worried,” Giselle said. “All we have to do is get on a train. How hard can that be?”

next day, just Giselle and I went to see Arvo under the bridge. It was Vivian’s ballet day and not Giselle’s fencing day. I wouldn’t have cared if it was my have-tea-with-the-Queen-of-England-day; I was dying to see Arvo again. I’d had the most awful dream of those officers coming back and beating him up all over again and then taking him somewhere where I couldn’t find him. I brought fresh water bottles, a little bit of cash, and a flashlight in case he was afraid of the dark. Giselle brought the crutches she’d used last year, a dress shirt that belonged to Vivian’s dad, and a belt and a navy blue tie, so he would have something to wear that made him look like a music teacher. We didn’t bring our instruments, and we went to the bridge by a different route to not attract attention. I totally felt like a spy.
    Arvo loved our idea of going to Paris. And he knew just how to find Estonians there. Apparently they were all Lutherans before Communism made believing in God illegal, so if we could find a Lutheran church in Paris, then wecould eventually find escaped Estonians who would help him get home. Arvo explained all this while he practiced with Giselle’s crutches. He did okay, even on the slope.
    “He looks kind of scruffy,” I said to Giselle as we sat under the bridge and watched.
    “Scruffy?” Giselle said. “He looks like a cheap drunk with a bad haircut who just shook hands with the wrong end of a bar fight. We have got to do something about that man’s face.”
    Arvo’s black eyes had blossomed from reddish blue to greenish yellow, and although both eyes were less puffy, the dark marks were twice as large. He had cleaned the blood away