Childhood best friends to enemies to lovers.
Alina wants nothing to do with the rebellious bad boy, Liam Somner.
Which is difficult, because he goes to her school. And lives on her street. And keeps showing up at her apartment, and sitting in her ki...
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This time, when I make it out onto the fire escape, it's to find Liam is already there. He's stolen the best spot, with his back up against the iron rail, so that he can look out over Juniper Street and our favourite pizza shop, which proudly declares itself the Best Pizza. Best Pizza, says who? Best Pizza, where? In New York? In Brooklyn? Just in Juniper Street? Who knows.
I allow myself five seconds to take in Liam - truly, take him in. Because I haven't seen him in about a year, and he's changed. He's somehow less of that trickster fox that I knew, with the messy hair and the wily grin. He looks more grown up. And for a second, up here where no one else can see him, he looks sad.
But then he sees me and everything I thought I saw slips away from his face, and suddenly he's the fox again, with a grin like sin, a glint in his eye like he knows he's in trouble; he's mischief, and he loves it.
"I tracked down the Engels in Munich, over the summer," Liam says, and there's something about that foxy grin of his that grinds my gears, and I know he's about to say something cruel.
"The Engels," I repeat, easing myself into a cross-legged position opposite Liam.
"You were named after your great-great-grandmother," Liam tells me, and it's like he knows everything about me, but he knows nothing. "Lina Engel."
"Did you already do that Chemistry homework?" I ask him bitingly.
"You know Engel means 'angel' in German, right?" he asks, ignoring my question.
"Yes, I know," I say snappily. "I know the story of the Angel."
Liam's phone buzzes like a bee, and he looks down at it, which makes me look down at it. He reaches his hand out for his phone. When he picks it up his hands shake, slightly. There's a tremble in his fingers as he reads something on the screen. He puts the phone down again.
"Tell me the story of the Angel," Liam says. "Tell it how Ingrid always used to tell it."
I sigh, remembering the way my grandmother would tell stories. When we were kids we were enraptured. Oma Ingrid's stories were better than anything I could read in books. But then as she got older she would lose the tale as she told it. She'd start weaving the tapestry and then we'd watch as the threads would unravel, and she wouldn't know how to repair it.
"Franz Engel was only twenty-three," I say, because that's what Oma Ingrid always said. Twenty-three doesn't seem that young to me, but I guess when you're in your sixties and struggling with Alzheimers, it seems like childhood.
Liam leans back and closes his eyes, as if my voice is soothing him. I glance down at his phone when it flashes, and see the name 'Jasmin' written on the screen, but I can't read the message.
Liam opens his eyes again. "Keep going," he tells me.
"Franz Engel was only twenty-three," I say, and I struggle to remember exactly how Oma Ingrid always told the story. "He had a wife and a baby, back in the German Empire, and they were the only two things he cared about in the whole world. They were waiting for him to earn enough money so they could join him in. Roosevelt was president, and they built the very first subway that year. Franz Engel couldn't wait for his wife to see it all. He couldn't wait to raise his son in America."
