by Hopen, David
“I’m flattered you give me such credit, Rabbi, I really am, but you’re very much mistaken.”
“Don’t you see how he reacts when he thinks you’ve received preferential treatment? When he thinks you’ve gained on him in—romantic pursuits?” Again, we each turned our attention down the hall, though nobody approached. “Have you ever seen him react that way with anyone else? It’s because something about you, Ari, reaches him.” He coughed into his hand, lowered his gaze. “I suppose, now, there’s something I should admit.”
I picked up my backpack. “Is it the drug test?” I said, without thinking.
He stared on blankly, pretending not to hear me. “Last year, when I received your outstanding application essay, I allowed Mr. Stark to read it.”
“Yeah,” I said coolly, “I know.”
Neutral expressionlessness gave way to anxious smiling. “You do?”
“I mean, I’ve at least suspected so for a long time. He made it obvious enough.”
Rabbi Bloom nodded, overtaken by a strange look of relief. “Well, imagine my delight,” he said, “when I came across your writing. Here, finally, was the thinker I was searching for. An analogue. Not just someone of his caliber, but someone who could push him . . . philosophically, let’s say. Someone he could push, in turn.”
I put both hands to the crown of my head, over my yarmulke, stunned by the realization that monumental changes are, in the end, dictated by external forces we never discover. “You showed him my essay so he’d approve me,” I said quietly. “You brought me here for him.”
At first, Rabbi Bloom stood there saying nothing. While I waited for him to speak, I braced myself for feelings of betrayal or devastation. Instead, I felt nothing, not because I was numb, but because I couldn’t force myself to believe I’d actually been wronged. I felt, rather, as one might upon learning some intelligent design exists, even if it turns out to be slightly crooked.
“My one regret, Mr. Eden,” he said eventually, “is that I didn’t get my hands on you three years earlier.” He tapped my shoulder and turned down the hall, back toward his office. I stood bewildered for a few moments before reopening my locker and emptying it a final time.
* * *
WE HAD OUR LAST GAME of the regular season that evening. We won emphatically, securing a spot in the upcoming district playoff tournament. Noah had his jersey number retired after the game, and to celebrate we ended up at Three Amigos. After several rounds of beer and a few hits of Oliver’s joint, I decided to call an Uber. It was early, not yet midnight, but I was feeling particularly antisocial and wanted to be alone. Instead of going inside when I got home, I went out back and sat by my pool, staring at the sky and the water, allowing mosquitoes to gnaw quietly at my arms. Eventually, I fell into a strange, half-sober dream: I was wandering through the golf course, looking for someone, a worm crawling between two of my fingers, a house falling in the distance, kicking up dust . . .
“Aryeh?” My mother’s figure appeared at the patio door. “That you?”
I cursed, blinking in confusion. Instinctually, I opened my phone, noticing an unread email from some Joshua Robert:
Ari,
I’m glad Laurence passed along your paper. Impressive work for a high school student, and a brave leap into difficult (moral) waters. Congratulations. Do come see me on campus this fall.
Best,
JR
“You scared me half to death, you know that? I thought you might’ve been an intruder, honest to God.” She was in her robe, scowl-faced. “Please tell me you didn’t just get home? We’ve discussed curfew—”
“No, don’t worry, Imma.” I stood, groggy, and stumbled toward her. “I’ve been home, I just fell asleep outside for a bit.”
“Outside?” She pursed her lips in distress, leaned over to sniff me. “You smell like you’ve been drinking.”
“I can’t talk now, Imma,” I said, wiggling past her at the doorframe, bolting toward my room, “there’s something I really need to do.”
“I’m waking Abba,” she said worriedly. “You’re frightening me.”
I grabbed my laptop from my desk, powered it on, muttering to myself as I waited for the screen to blink to life. My mother followed me into my room.
“Aryeh?”
Over a week had elapsed. Ignoring my mother, I flew about my room, searching for a forgotten red folder. After excavating my password from beneath a pile of laundry, I punched it into the server. A large, roaring tiger materialized on-screen, triumphant collegiate music blaring in the background. YES it said in big, orange letters. WELCOME TO PRINCETON.
A moment of disbelief as I stared at my computer, my mother hovering over me, the only sound in my room that grainy, low-volume fight music. “What is that? What’s happening?”
I left the computer open, sank to my knees. “Thank you, God,” I whispered, face buried in my hands. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Aryeh!” my mother shouted, on the verge of crying.
“I got in,” I said, tearing my face away from the floor and launching myself into her arms. “Imma, I think I just got into Princeton.”
Full-on tears. She wrapped her arms around me and shrieked, despite the fact that I smelled of beer. I danced about my room, leaping onto my bed, my vision swimming. My father, hearing the commotion, waddled out in his pajamas. When we told him the news—my mother continuing to shriek at the top of her lungs—he blinked curiously. “Where’s that again?” he asked sleepily.
“New Jersey.”
“Well, then. Congratulations.” He shrugged, and headed back toward his bedroom. “Maybe this’ll make you happy.”
May
The orchard now’s the place for us;
We may find something like an apple there,
And we shall have the shade, at any rate.
—Robinson, “Isaac and Archibald”
At first they laughed.
“Right,” Oliver said, striking a ball over the fence. “By the way, have I neglected to mention I’m headed to Harvard with Davis?”
Amir was floored, his entire worldview collapsing before his eyes. “Impossible,” he insisted, even after it was clear I wasn’t joking. “Sorry, Ari, I’m not saying this to belittle you, really, but you can’t just, like, fucking get into Princeton. That’s not how it works.”
I flashed my acceptance on my phone. Noah howled and began pelting golf balls over the fence.
Amir dropped his club, traumatized. “But it—how? How did this possibly happen?”
“Told you motherfuckers!” Noah broke into dance, jabbing his finger at Amir. “The motherfucking kid from Borough Park!”
“Isn’t there a bracha we’re supposed to recite?” Oliver asked. “The one you make when you witness a miracle? Or at least the one for seeing a rainbow? I think there’s a tropical storm coming soon, maybe we can combine everything?”
“I’m getting my dad’s cigars,” Noah said, sprinting toward his house. “We’re celebrating.”
Their incredulity didn’t offend me. Something rapturous had indeed happened: what I had always viewed as the cruel logic of my existence had, remarkably, changed. The future I’d been dreading—a miserable return to my old life, this single year in Florida some gorgeous, twisted dream—was now averted. There was hope, a world beyond the world I’d never thought I’d have at all. I was self-absorbed, I was unhealthily fixated on shallow demarcations of status and success and worth, but I was not, as it turned out, inferior, nor was I trapped. I had another chance, a permanent escape into a life of aesthetics and cathedrals and poets and dining clubs. A life of prestige, a life of learning, a life of the mind.
My mother bought balloons, a cake, a yarmulke bearing the Princeton insignia. For her, the triumph of my acceptance provided validation: the boy she dragged to the library all those years ago, the boy she saved from an education-less world, regained what she relinquished. My father, with slightly different priorities, recognized my moral revita
lization. I joined him at minyan the next morning and experienced my most meaningful Shemoneh Esrei in years. Blessed Are You, Lord, Redeemer of Israel. Dizzy with gratitude, eyes sealed in prayer, I made all sorts of vows: to stop breaking Shabbos, to stop violating kosher, to stop smoking, to again wear tzitzit. Witnessing these changes come to fruition, my parents discovered that, in the time span of bein hashemashos, their son had been made whole again, a new future stretched gloriously before him.
I left Noah’s house light-headed from midday cigars, dropped a smug postcard for Bearman in the mail and called Sophia. She told me to come over, that she was bored and sitting by her pool. Norma let me inside, guided me out through the backdoor. Sophia was on a hammock, suspended between royal palms, wearing that shiny, black one-piece she’d worn nearly a year before at Noah’s barbecue. She had on a large sunhat, sleek sunglasses; her legs were oiled, the visible parts of her stomach toned. She swung, the world swung with her: her face obliterated by light, her face returned to clarity, the tree blotting out the sun.
“A surprise visit from Ari Eden?” She closed her book, The Beautiful and Damned, and straightened slightly. The sun’s lengthening beams seared my eyes. “What luck.”
“‘My lord,’” I said, “‘I have news to tell you.’”
Dozens of chimes, angled from citrus trees around the backyard, sung delicately with the wind. “You and Kayla are engaged? You’ve bought a house and a dog?”
I wondered whether my ability to overlook such occasional bursts of casual cruelty indicated weakness on my part, a lack of self-esteem, perhaps, some depraved willingness to put myself at her mercy. I buried this thought. “Funny.”
Her face dipped in and out of view as she swung, one moment returning to the shadows, the next bursting into blinding light, one moment a girl whose gloom was streaked with splendor, the next a girl whose beauty blurred with despair. A mesmerizing trance: light to dark, dark to light. I saw what I wanted, I saw what I had.
“Too soon?”
“Yes.”
“My apologies. Want a drink? I’ll call Norma.”
“No, thanks.” I moved to drag over a lounge chair beside her but she stopped me.
“There’s room,” she said, sliding over on the hammock. I lowered myself next to her, entangled in mesh, her left leg now draped curiously over mine. “So,” she said, after a beat, “everything okay?”
I surveyed the waterfall Jacuzzi leading into a limestone infinity pool, the chaise longues floating over the shallow end, the white begonias and violet-blue periwinkles and light-pink rain lilies of the garden. Maybe this, amid all more meaningful things, turns out to be the shortest distance to joy, I thought, feeling Sophia against me: wealth, beauty, leisure. I felt myself tingling. “Great, actually.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you so enthusiastic about anything.” She adjusted her weight, sinking closer to me within the web, turning to face me. “Do share.”
“I’m going to college.”
She examined a fingernail, newly enameled in pale pink. “Somewhere local?”
“Closer to you.”
“The Northeast? New York proper?”
“New Jersey.”
“Didn’t realize this was a guessing game. Okay, then. So it’s Rutgers.”
“No.”
“Seton Hall?”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Fairleigh Dickinson? Haven’t we exhausted all the options here?”
“You’re missing one.”
“You’ve stumped me.”
“Princeton.”
“It’s in Princeton?”
“C’mon, Soph.”
Her face went slack. “You’re joking.”
“Apparently not.”
“Princeton?”
“Princeton.”
“It’s just—” Her mouth went wide, she blinked unnaturally. “I guess I don’t really—what’d Ballinger say?”
“So she was even more speechless. She called me to come in and take the Ivy picture. Look at it next time you’re in school. Her mouth is fully agape.”
“I can’t believe it,” she said, “Ari, I—” She lurched forward, kissed me, long and slow. I drew a sharp breath.
“It was because of you,” I said quietly. “I wanted this because of you.”
She was on top of me now, the hammock swaying precariously. We were both breathing heavily. “No one’s home except Norma.”
The world spinning on around us: the palm trees dancing in the breeze, the sun burning golden upon us. “That so?”
“Hamlet, you idiot. Come with me.” She took my hand and led me inside.
* * *
WE DIDN’T HEAR FROM EVAN until three days before he was released—twenty-eight days since our time in court. He left word with Noah he wanted us to visit.
“He called you?” Oliver asked, looking insulted. “Suddenly that motherfucker has a phone?”
Noah shrugged. “Said it was urgent we visit.”
“Urgent?” Amir said. “Why?”
“He said it’s a big part of his program,” Noah said. “Before he can officially graduate, or whatever they call it, heal, maybe, or evolve, he’s supposed to formally make amends with those he’s wronged.”
“But he didn’t do anything to us,” Oliver said, glancing my way.
“He was really insistent that we all come,” Noah said, reddening at the way Oliver was putting me on the spot. “And I think we should. Sign of solidarity, you know? He’ll get out of there on the right foot and see there’s no hard feelings.”
“All right,” Amir said. “Yeah, I mean, I guess I’m game to help him become a normal human being again.”
Noah turned my way.
“Nope,” I said reflexively. “Count me out.”
“Dude,” Noah said, “c’mon, Ari—”
I imagined Evan gathering us together, only to announce the events of the courtroom. What if Rabbi Bloom was wrong? “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said, visualizing the disgust with which Noah would regard me were he to find out what I did to Evan.
“Well,” Noah said, “he specifically requested I make you come, even after you refuse. A personal favor, he called it.”
“I really don’t care what he requested.”
“In fact, he told me to tell you not to be worried about whatever you heard from Socrates and to remind you that you’ll have to see him eventually.”
“Socrates?”
Noah shrugged. “Yeah, dunno. Figured that was some weird philosophical inside joke you guys had?”
Refusing to see him would only postpone our encounter—and for a grand total of three days, at that. If Evan intended to confront me, it made no difference where this happened. He had a plan in play, whether or not I acquiesced.
We drove westbound on 595, top down, everyone staring coolly into the purple sunset. The center was about forty minutes away and looked like a boutique hotel. There was a fountain in the circular driveway. The lobby was tastefully decorated: wingback armchairs, crystal chandeliers, neutral paintings of sailboats. A large TV, on mute, played local news: a reporter diagramming the path of a tropical storm barreling our way over the coast.
“Actually, this isn’t so bad,” Amir said, taking a look around. “I expected something a bit more . . . spartan?”
“Yeah, I could probably get used to this when my time comes,” Oliver said, putting his feet up on the side of an armchair. “Think the pool has a bar?”
Evan had a small corner room on the fourth floor. He looked more or less the same, but clean-shaven with trimmed hair. His face was slightly leaner, though not gaunt. His limp was unimproved. “Boys,” he said, moving aside from the doorframe after we knocked. “Come in.”
“Some place you’ve got, Ev,” Oliver said, taking a look around. It was cramped, but not terribly. A twin bed, neatly made up, sat in the center of the room, next to two mahogany cabinets. The corner of the room had a wooden desk. His nightstand b
ore a small stack of books: Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Heidegger. There was a lone window through which faint sunlight dripped. The room had no right angles. Evan took a seat on his bed. We stood around him.
Evan met my gaze. “Eden. Thanks for actually coming.”
“Yeah,” I said, quickly glancing away, “good to see you.”
“He put up much of a fight?” Evan asked Noah.
Noah gave a good-hearted laugh. “Hardly.”
“So,” Amir said, “what the hell’s the emergency?”
Noah socked his arm.
“What?” Amir protested.
“What kind of opening is that?” Noah said.
“That’s all right,” Evan said, holding up his hand. “Apologies if I frightened you. I didn’t intend to.”
“Nah, buddy, we’re happy to see you,” Noah said cautiously. “Hear about the game last night?”
“No, sadly.”
“Yeah, we smacked North Miami Country Prep,” Noah said, receiving a fist bump from Oliver. “Clinched a district playoff game, baby. You’ll be back for that.”
“Yes,” Evan said, hardly stirring, “that’s right.”
Oliver looked Evan up and down. “Why do I feel like you’re not having normal human reactions? They have you on something?”
Evan smirked. “Don’t I look clean and pure to you?”
“Nah, honestly you look like fucking, what’s his name, Darth Vader with that scar. But they got to you, didn’t they?” Oliver covered his face with his hands. “This place is worse than a monastery.”
Evan bent over, groped under his bed, pulled out a small, black box.
“Not sure how to feel about this,” Oliver said, rummaging through the contents: a half dozen pale-blue pills, a large stack of round, light yellow pills.
Amir eyed the cache. “What’re these?”
“Dilaudid for the leg pain,” Evan said, gesturing at the yellows. “Then amitriptyline for sleeping. I don’t sleep well. My leg still kills.” For effect, he attempted to lift it.
“And depression,” Amir added hesitantly. “I remember that from AP Chem.”
