Chapter 15

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January 25th, 1941

"Where do you think you're going?" My father's voice rumbles from the living room. I stop in my tracks and take a few steps back to see him.

"I'm going to study with Frances and Eva."

My father looks up from his book to look at the clock on the wall. "At 7:00 o'clock at night?"

I freeze. "We have a big history exam on Monday. Need to finish strong."

He grunts in response. "Be back by 11:00, 11:30 at the latest."

I lean over to give him a kiss on the cheek. "Thanks, Papa."

Straightening out my long gray coat, I walk out of the house. I shuffle through my clutch to find a small tube of crimson red lipstick. Moving my lips together to even out the pigment, I also extract a tiny bottle of perfume. I spray it sparingly on my wrists and rub them together, and then rub my wrists on my neck.

I wasn't technically lying to my father. I am going to be with Frances and Eva, and what we were going to do could theoretically be classified as studying. We're just studying German soldiers instead of history.

Maybe I'm telling myself this so I feel less guilty, but it works. I'm doing the right thing. I know I am. I'm still trying to make peace with the fact that Jacob would never accept this small part of me, but I'm not going to give this up.

I shiver with excitement as I ride closer to downtown Copenhagen. Our first target is La Tosca, an Italian restaurant that seemed to be popular with German soldiers. Frances made this discovery a few weeks ago when she came to celebrate New Years. She noticed that soldiers came in for dinner and ordered a lot of alcohol to go with their meal. As the night wore on, the more intoxicated they became. They also hung up their coats in the entranceway, as well as their gunbelts. It seemed to be the perfect place to catch German soldiers off-guard and collect information without raising suspicion.

I meet Frances and Eva about a block away from the restaurant in City Hall Square. A Nazi flag ripples in the wind above us, its threatening symbol only pronounced by the light circle that surrounds it. The flash of scarlet flutters like a flare in an ebony sea of stars and uncertainty. Soldiers on patrol walk around us with guns strapped to their shoulders. Two army vehicles drive past each other on the road. A pair of spotlights dance through the nighttime sky, searching for any plane that might not be welcomed in German living space.

"I'm sorry, but whose idea was it to meet in front of Nazi headquarters right before our first resistance mission!?" Eva hisses. "I mean, really!? Anywhere else but here!"

"We're three teenage girls on bicycles, Eva. They're not going to suspect anything." Frances calmly replies.

"That doesn't mean we need to go out of our way to be around them!"

"The best way to do this is to hide in plain sight. We are three beautiful teenage girls who look normal and act normal. We're least likely to get stopped and searched here than anywhere else in this city."

"That's true," I add in.

"Can't we just meet in front of the movie theater next time?" Eva grumbles. She wiggles her fingers in the air. "'Like normal teenagers'?"

Frances rolls her eyes and rides off. I send Eva a pleading look. She looks like she's about to back out for a second, and I think that I'm going to have to beg her to continue on this mission, but she closes her eyes and sighs. Releasing the tension out of her soldiers, she grips the handlebars of her bicycle and begins peddling after Frances. I follow right behind her.

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