Slowly, he nods. “No, you’re right.”
“We can change the subject,” I say, and he lets out an audible exhale.
“Please.”
I spring to my feet, unable to handle the reality of being on Neil McNair’s bed any longer. It feels warm in here, despite the low thermostat setting. The bookshelves feel like a much safer part of the room.
“When you said you were a fan… wow. You might have more copies than my parents.”
He kneels next to me, examining the books. “Don’t laugh, but—they were like this adventure I felt like I’d never get to have,” he says. “We’ve gone on every car trip imaginable in the Pacific Northwest, but I’ve never been on a plane. The Excavated books were a way for me to experience it all. It used to make me sad that I didn’t have that… but I knew I would someday.”
“Next year,” I say softly. “I hear college is something of an adventure.”
He spends a lot of time assessing the bookshelves, pulling a few books out, glancing at the covers, chuckling. If it weren’t Neil McNair, it would be adorable. Maybe it still kind of is.
Everything that happened to me in elementary school and middle school made it into a book somehow. The book where Riley gets her first period, the one that got some pushback from parents because apparently basic functions of the human body are taboo, is based on my own experience. I got mine on a sixth-grade field trip to a museum, and I told a teacher I thought I must have injured myself because I was bleeding—which in hindsight is strange because I knew what periods were. When she asked where I was bleeding, I pointed in between my legs, and she quickly found me a pad. I spent the rest of the day hoping no one would notice the bulge in my pants, which I was positive everyone could see.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I hope Neil doesn’t bring that one. As much as this kind of thing doesn’t usually faze me, I would really like to not discuss my period or Riley’s in Neil McNair’s bedroom.
“There’s this word in Japanese: tsundoku,” Neil says suddenly. “It’s my favorite word in any language.”
“What does it mean?”
He grins. “It means acquiring more books than you could ever realistically read. There’s no direct translation.”
“I love that,” I say. “Wait. What’s that in the back?”
“Nothing,” Neil says quickly, but I’m reaching for the familiar cover, the woman in a wedding dress. Vision in White by Nora Roberts. The romance novel I wrote about freshman year.
“Huh. Isn’t this interesting.” My grin cannot be contained.
He fists a hand in his hair. “I—uh—got it used. Later in freshman year. I thought maybe I’d been… a bit of a dick about it? I figured, maybe you were onto something, maybe I should read it if I was going to pass such harsh judgment on it. It’s the way so many people talk about romance novels, right? I was young, and I guess I thought it was cool to make fun of things I didn’t really understand? I wanted to give it a chance.”
“And what did you think?”
“I… liked it,” he admits. “It was well written, and it was funny. It was easy to get invested in the characters. I could see why you loved it.”
He is surprising me in so many ways.
“I’ll take it off my list of potential book reports. There are three more books in the series, though,” I say. “Wow. My head is just reeling. From everything.” I open it up, freezing when I land on the copyright page. “Wait. This is a first edition? Are you serious?”
He peers over at it. “Wow, guess it is. I never looked.”
I’m gaping. Neil has a first-edition Nora Roberts.
“Take it,” he says.
“What? No. I couldn’t,” I say, though I’m hugging it to my chest.
“It means more to you. You should have it.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much.” I unzip my backpack, and in my rush to reshuffle and make room for the book, a small foil packet plummets to the floor between us.
I have never before experienced the silence that comes over us. “Red” doesn’t even begin to describe the color of his face.
“Did… you have plans later?”
I am deceased.
“Oh my God. No. No,” I say, snatching the condom and stuffing it into my backpack. “It was a joke. Kirby was cleaning out her locker—she’d gotten it in health class—and I’ll just go die now. Leave me here with your books.”
If this had happened to any of Delilah Park’s heroines, they’d breezily laugh it off and crack jokes about it later. I can do that with Kirby and Mara, but not with Neil McNair. In the back of my mind—okay, maybe somewhere closer to the middle of my mind—I wonder if he’s had sex. Earlier today, I would have said absolutely not because of how he and his girlfriend were so cold at school. But after all that happened here in his house… anything is possible. I’m only just now realizing how little I knew about him.
“Please don’t die. I have to tease you about this later.”
“We have to go,” I urge, shouldering my saucy little minx of a backpack. “Shabbat.”
Before he opens the door, he glances back once, as though the image of me in his room is too strange for words. Honestly, everything that happened here is too strange for words.
Stranger, though, is the new kind of determination pulsing through me.
I was wrong earlier. Howl is bigger than Neil and me, but it’s bigger than Westview, too. Destroying Neil to accomplish some freshman-year dream sounds so trivial when this money could change his life. God, he could even change his name. While I can’t erase what’s happened to him, it’s clear now that I can’t take a cut of the prize money. I can’t keep playing Howl just for myself. When we win Howl—if we win Howl—we’re winning it for him.
Excavated #8: A Haunted Hanukkah
by Jared Roth and Ilana García Roth
Riley tightened one of the little buns coiled on top of her head, and then the other. She wasn’t about to let her hair get in the way of this mission. Not again.
She wasn’t scared. She hadn’t been scared since she was ten, maybe eleven. Roxy was the one who got scared, who begged Riley to check inside her closet and beneath her bed for monsters. Riley had always taken her role as monster vanquisher very seriously, and after poking her head into every shadowy space, she declared in her most official voice that her sister’s room was officially beast-free.
No, she wasn’t scared, not as she crept up the familiar steps to her favorite place in the world at half past midnight. Being in the museum after hours was a privilege; Riley knew that. As she swiped her badge and waved hello to Alfred, the overnight security guard, she reminded herself she had to see the stone up close. She needed silence to allow her mind to fully process it.
The museum’s senior curator, Mrs. Graves, said it had been found on a dig in Jordan, and the image carved into it was unmistakably a menorah. It was, in fact, perhaps the oldest depiction of a menorah that had ever been found.
And yet there was something about the stone carving that hadn’t felt quite right to her, something that pulled her back to the museum when her parents thought she was asleep.
Riley drew closer, her lucky sneakers tip-tapping the tiled floor. It should be up ahead, near the other religious relics housed as part of the museum’s permanent collection.
But just as she turned the corner, she heard someone scream.
And suddenly, Riley was very, very scared.…
6:22 p.m.
NEIL MCNAIR IS ogling my parents like he can’t quite believe they’re real.
“Do you want to lead the kiddush?” my mom asks him after lighting the candles with a hand over her eyes. Maybe she sensed he wanted to by the way he was staring at them.
“I’d love to,” he says after a pause.
In the car, he lamented not having changed into something nicer, but I insisted my parents wouldn’t care that he’s wearing a shirt with an obscure Latin phrase on it. Downside: the whole Neil’s arms situation is
back.
It’s not quite sundown—read: not the best Jews—so there’s still light coming in from outside. When we got here, he took off his shoes in the hallway and shook my parents’ hands, but he could barely speak. They know the basics about him: longtime rival, infuriating, mediocre taste in literature. And Jewish, which I included in my message letting them know Westview’s valedictorian would be making an appearance at Shabbat dinner. My parents love opening our home to other Jews, and it happens much too infrequently.
My mom passes him the kiddush cup.
“Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam borei p’ri hagafen,” he says in this low, honeyed voice. The blessing over wine.
His pronunciation, his inflection—flawless. Of course they are, with his affinity for words and languages. There is so much I love about Judaism, the history and the food and the sound of the prayers, but it isolates me too. Yet here’s someone I labeled as an enemy who was maybe feeling isolated in the same way.
After what happened at his house, I’m not quite sure how to act around him. It’s clear things have changed between us; we’ve shared more about ourselves than we do with most other people. But I don’t know how to tell him that if we win, I want him to take the Howl money without it sounding like it’s coming from a place of pity.
We pass around the kiddush cup that belonged to my dad’s grandparents, silver and ornately designed. Neil takes a small sip, then hands it to me. My sip is tiny too. I wonder if he thinks I purposefully sipped from a place he didn’t. Then I pass it to my dad and try to act a little less neurotic.
After that, we recite the blessing over the challah, and then it’s time to eat. True to their word, my parents picked up mushroom ravioli and threw together a salad with my dad’s secret vinaigrette recipe.
“Do you observe Shabbat with your family, Neil?” my mom asks.
“Not very often, no. But I have a good memory, and we used to do it when my sister and I were younger.” It’s slight, but I notice his jaw tense for a split second. “You do this every week?”
“We try to have Shabbat dinner together every Friday,” my dad says. “I suppose it’ll be different when Rowan’s in college.”
“It’s strange being one of only a few Jewish kids in class,” Neil says, and it’s odd to hear him vocalize something I’ve only ever thought to myself. Odd and a bit of a relief to hear someone else say something you thought was the way only you felt.
Most of the year, you don’t notice it makes you different. It’s just what your family does every Friday, and we don’t completely unplug like some more-observant Jews. But during the entire months of November and December, you’re a complete outsider. So many people never realize that someone doesn’t, by default, celebrate Christmas.
“In fifth grade, one of my teachers put up a Christmas tree before remembering that I was the only Jew in her class,” I say. “So she announced to the entire class that because she didn’t want to offend me, she was taking it down. And everyone was mad at me for, like, a whole week. She didn’t even ask what I thought, or if she should add a menorah to balance it out. It was almost like she wanted people to know I was the reason they couldn’t have a tree.”
The table is quiet for a few moments. I didn’t realize I’d been holding on to this for so long.
“You never told us!” my mom exclaims. “What teacher was that?”
“I didn’t want to make it a thing,” I say. But maybe I should have. “Mrs. Garrison?”
“We donated a set of books to her class,” my dad says with a grumble.
“That’s terrible,” Neil says. He gestures around the room. “This is nice, though. To be around other Jewish people.”
And simply put, it really is.
My mom shines a smile on our unexpected guest. “Rowan said you’re a fan of our books?”
Neil’s mouth opens and closes, but no human sounds come out. His Excavated books are underneath the table. Fanboy Neil: definitely not someone I ever thought I’d meet.
I kick him under the table. Please remember how to word, I try to telepath to him. My parents’ egos are going to be unmanageable after this.
“Huge fan,” he finally says. “I started reading Excavated back in third grade, and then I couldn’t stop. Those books actually got me into reading.”
My parents are utterly charmed. “That’s the best compliment you could give us,” my dad says. “Have you read the entire series?”
“Too many times to count.” He gestures to the table. “And you both are vegan, right? Just like Riley!”
“We are,” my dad says. “Rowan’s a vegetarian, though. She just can’t get enough dairy.” My parents became vegans in college, and they wanted me to decide for myself when I was old enough. In kindergarten, I declared myself a vegetarian, and I’ve never gone back. I loved animals too much to imagine eating them. As a result, keeping kosher, as least its most basic rules, is pretty easy at our house.
“Rowan loves cheese,” my mom says. “Sometimes when she wants a snack, she’ll take a spoon and a tub of cream cheese up to her room.”
Neil lifts his eyebrows at me, clearly trying not to laugh.
“Mother.” Yes, cream cheese is the food of the gods—specifically Chris Hemsworth circa Thor: Ragnarok—but I’ve only done that a few times. Definitely fewer than ten. “Let’s maybe tone down the cheese talk?”
Besides, it’s not just cheese. I couldn’t survive without Two Birds cinnamon rolls.
“Fine, fine. How’s Howl going?”
They’re rapt as Neil and I explain our strategy, this year’s clues, and the grand prize. Now that they’re not on deadline, they’re much more relaxed.
“We should put that in a book,” my dad says. “That would be fun, huh?”
My mom shrugs. “I don’t know. It might be a little hard to follow. A little too niche.”
“I think it would be great!” Neil says, a little too enthusiastically. “What was the book you just finished?”
Once he gets them going, they won’t be able to stop. I sneak a look at my phone. An hour and a half until Delilah’s signing. Since it’s unlikely we’ll get all five remaining clues by then, I’ll have to leave Neil alone for a bit. I wonder if I can do it without telling him why.
“This one’s the start of a spin-off series about Riley’s younger sister—”
“Roxy!” Neil blurts. “She’s hilarious. I love the way she uses foods she doesn’t like in place of exclamations, like Oh my grapefruit or What the fig? Always cracks me up in the Riley books.”
“Our editor loves her too,” my mom says. “And the publisher thought we could reach a whole new audience of kids with this series. So it follows Roxy on her quest to become a pastry chef, and each book is going to have recipes in the back that are easy for kids to make.”
“What a cool idea,” Neil breathes. “My sister would love those. She’s eleven and just starting to get into the books. You know, I always thought Excavated would make a great movie.”
“So did we!” my dad says. “The rights sold, but nothing happened with them.”
“Knowing Hollywood, they probably would have whitewashed it anyway,” my mom says. “Turned Riley Rodriguez into Riley Johnson or something like that, and made the Hanukkah books revolve around Christmas.”
Neil shudders. “I actually brought a couple books with me, if you don’t mind…”
“Of course we don’t mind!” my dad says. I swear he already has a signing pen ready. “Is Neil E-A or E-I?”
He gives them the correct spelling, and they swoop their signatures over the title page.
Neil reads it over and over, lips forming the words. He looks like he might faint. “Could you make the other one out to my sister, Natalie?” he asks, and they oblige. “Thank you. Thank you so much. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”
All these years, I’ve been waging war against a Riley Rodriguez superfan. I can’t deny that it’s a little endearing.
&nb
sp; “Anytime, Neil,” my mom says. “If you want to come over later this summer, we can show you some drafts of sketches for our next picture book.”
“That would be amazing,” he says, and I swear he sits up straighter, seeming to gain more confidence. “You know what other kinds of books I love? Romance novels.”
And then he shovels more salad into his mouth, all casual.
Pardon me while I reattach the lower half of my jaw.
My mom lifts her eyebrows. “Huh,” she says in this perplexed tone. “Is that so?”
“You and Rowan have that in common,” my dad says. “I guess they’re not just for bored housewives anymore.” He places an emphasis on “bored housewives,” as though it’s not a phrase he likes, necessarily, but couldn’t come up with a better one. Dad, your misogyny is showing.
“And not just for women, either,” Neil says, after a pause that maybe indicates he was bothered by my dad’s comment too. “Though they center women’s experiences in a way little other media does.”
His voice is solid, steady. There’s no hint of sarcasm there, and I’m no longer convinced he’s teasing me. When his eyes meet mine, one edge of his mouth pulls up into a smile that’s more reassuring than conspiratorial. Almost like he’s trying to help my parents understand this thing that I love.
But that’s bananas.
“Well, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true,” my dad says, and rattles off the names of a few Netflix shows because, of course, three recent examples are incontrovertible proof that an entire art form isn’t still majorly skewed toward the male gaze.
What would they say if I told them right now? If I said when I take creative writing classes at Emerson, it’s because I want to write the kind of books they think are worthless? Would they try to change my mind, or would they learn to accept it? Part of me is hopeful they’d understand if I wanted to semi-follow in their footsteps, but I want a guarantee their reaction won’t flatten me.
Today Tonight Tomorrow Page 14
