The Extra by Kathryn Lasky Page B

from every which way.”
    When the other girls had left the hayloft, Lilo noticed that Django had suddenly grown quite still. “Django, are you becoming invisible?” she tried to joke.
    “That’s just the problem,” he said.
    “What do you mean?” she asked.
    He slid his eyes toward Lilo. “Your mother is, too, Lilo, and me.”
    “What — too what?” she asked. A dark feeling was rising inside her.
    “We — me and your mother — have been too invisible. We’ve been here, what? Almost three weeks. No close-up shots. Only long shots. We’re replaceable. I mean, all they shot were my hands on that accordion. They could be anybody’s hands.”
    “No! No!” She wanted to say, “No one could have hands like yours.” She loved his hands. She looked down and reached out, touching his right hand lightly.
    “You mean replaceable with Marzahn Gypsies?”
    Django nodded but said nothing.
    Lilo returned to what she and her mother called their hay bale apartment. They had stacked nine bales of hay to make a small three-walled enclosure for their sleeping pallet. The fourth side of their sleeping area was the barn wall. The moonlight slid like a silver blade through the crack of the boards, casting its light on her mother’s tired face. Lilo looked at it, not daring to stroke the cheek for fear of waking her. It was a wonderful face despite its gauntness. She was so thin that the outline of her teeth and gums made a slight impression on the space above her upper lip. Just the day before, she had lost one of her front teeth. It had simply dropped out. It was as if with not enough real food to chew, their teeth became loose — loose from disuse perhaps or most likely malnutrition. But at least her mother’s bleeding had stopped.
    Lilo simply had to figure out a way to get her mother to Babelsberg.
    My mother is not replaceable.
Nor is Django!
Miteinander!
She suddenly realized. The thought shocked her. There was indeed no one quite like Django. It was not just that he was so smart and that they all needed him to figure things out. It was that Django, despite all his annoying ways, had crept beneath Lilo’s skin, inched his way into perhaps her heart, and now haunted the edges of her soul like a soft mist.
    Lilo lay close to the barn board and pressed the side of her face against the crack. It was her new viewfinder through which she could scan the world for a place for herself, her mother, and Django. But all she could see now was the moon riding high and full in the crisp night air.
I must think about a close-up shot — no more long shots — for Django and Mama,
she told herself, then silently repeated,
No more long shots.
In her mind, she began framing their faces.
    The moon was so perfectly round. Suspended in the night, it seemed to quiver slightly. But as Lilo watched the glinting orb through the crack in the wall, it did not slip away to another night in another world, but darkened and shrank. Then into her dreamless sleep, an eye floated up. “Call me Tante Leni.” The voice giggled, and Lilo rolled over. Outside, the guards were roasting chestnuts in a grate. The mouthwatering scent drifted into the barn. She spied a shadow by the fence. At first she thought it was a small animal — a lamb perhaps, escaped from a lambing pen. But no! It was the little girl, crouching down where she had first met Lilo’s mother. She looked around furtively, then ran off. What was she doing up this late, outside all by herself? Was she looking for Bluma?
    Quietly Lilo got up. The barn door was no longer locked at night since they had enlarged the enclosure and built new latrines farther from the barn for the prisoners to have access to. It was only the fence prickled with barbed wire that was locked. There were rumors that they might electrify it, but so far they had not. Lilo slipped around to where the little girl had been standing. She saw that the dirt was loose around the fence stake. When she put her hand down, she