We glanced at each other helplessly, wondering what we’d committed ourselves to, what we were going to do for the next eight hours.
But nobody moved. No one wanted to be the first one out of their seat, the first to hit the eject button. A vague consent swept the crowd: we’re here all day; eventually lunch will come; in the meantime we might as well just listen.
So we did. And instead of getting more and more bored, we found the little things to latch on to—moments, or thoughts, really, that didn’t sound so crazy—and they started taking up space in our minds, growing. When Rabbi Yakov started telling us about eating kosher, and how it wasn’t about which restaurants you went to or what brand of salami you ate, but what it was about was the kind of food you put in your body, what kind of stuff you wanted to become part of your skin and your flesh and your soul, it didn’t seem like such an insane notion. And when I looked around the room and saw everyone else from my school—Rocky Kuzari, Challah Bagelman, even Alix Blitman—listening attentively and nodding furiously, I found myself listening too.
Love for G-d, I think, is the only love you actually have to learn instead of just being thrown into a hormone-knotted mess of it. The thing is that although hormone-infested teenage love is reckless and badly planned and inevitably destructive, it’s actually fun to go through. G-d love usually involves reading a lot of esoteric theological texts or, like a bad audiobook version, listening to speeches.
Lecture followed lecture, rabbi followed rabbi, and at the end of the day, a young guy named Shmuly spoke. He wasn’t more than a few years older than us, in a sharp suit and a black hat with the rim tipped down like a private detective. He leaned against the podium with one elbow, and when he talked, he sounded like an older brother giving us advice. No, not an older brother—an older cousin, just back from college for the first time, telling us about life in the big city and what it was like to be the only frum Jew in his New York City film agency and informing us, tantalizing us, that there was a world out there bigger than Northeast Philadelphia, that things happened beyond our understanding, and, most of all, that we had a destiny.
“Listen, guys,” he said, abandoning his podium and hopping up to sit on the desk at the front of the classroom. “Being Orthodox isn’t—wooo—some hard-to-reach mystical plane. It’s not some secret code. I mean, look at me. I lead a normal life. I just remember, you know, who’s in the driver’s seat.”
We nodded. By that point in the day, we knew who was in the driver’s seat.
“Those people who think they can make up their own religion and tell G-d what they want from Him say, ‘This is what I think you are,’ and expect it to be true—they’re lost. Clueless. Living in their own heads. They don’t want G-d; they want an imaginary friend. What do you think Judgment Day’s gonna be like for them? What are they going to say to their Creator? ‘Hey, G-d, sorry I ignored what You wanted me to do and spent my life not following Your commandments and wasted it completely, and now it’s all over…but that’s okay, right? ’Cause we’re friends?’ ”
The speeches ended. The first kids were out of their seats, making a run for the exit. Somehow, getting up seemed wrong. Moving in this world seemed wrong. Were we going to go back to hanging out and telling jokes, to the Challah and Alex Show? Everything felt meaningless—except that, really, it felt the opposite of meaningless. Every moment was a gift, a box of kinesthesis, empty and glowing with promise. We could fill it with whatever we wanted. We could fill it with stupid after-school stuff, the stuff I never cared much for in the first place—or we could fill it with commandments. What use did we have for this world of flesh and sweat, full of non-kosher food and temptations and distractions and girls?
I reached in my pocket, counting out exact change for the bus—we were still too young to drive, but I had just started discovering the city’s bus system, which was scrappy and underdeveloped but functioned remarkably well in making me independent from my parents.
I met Challah in front of the building. Everyone else was hanging out in the parking lot out back, huddled in a circle, waiting for their rides. He waved to me.
“Hi there, Alex!” he said, and he sounded to me just then like a kid, like someone I’d have no more in common with than a cartoon. “Headed home? We could catch the bus together.”
“No,” I found myself saying before I’d thought about it at all, some instinct that arose in my chest, “I think I’m gonna stick around.”
“Really?”
He followed where I was looking, toward the side alley. Guys and girls gathered together, talking, buzzing, laughing. The streetlights cast them in black blotches, and whatever those blotches were doing felt mysterious, indecent, an echo of today’s warnings.
It also felt like the conclusion to a question I’d never thought I’d hear answered. Something that had started a long time ago, something about when the girls started splashing with us in the river.
He watched me doubtfully as I pulled away.
“Just be careful,” he said. “Remember what Shmuly said.”
Outside, the world felt wild around the edges. Like in movies, when someone’s a superhero and then shows up at their crummy apartment at the end of the day: welcome to reality. We might have had a shared religious experience—hey, we might even have seen G-d together—but life moves on, everything crashes, and you remember that you still live in a working-class dump on the edge of town.
I turned the corner, slinking away from him, moving toward the kids who were still hanging out in the parking lot. I gravitated in the direction of a familiar-looking silhouette on the edge, part of the crowd, but not so close that our every word would be overheard.
The silhouette gravitated right back toward me.
“Hey, Alex,” she said.
“Hey, Alix,” I said back.
Our call-and-response chorus, a wry and dorky in-joke. Our banter was new and tentative, just like we were, and although we weren’t totally in sync yet, our relationship felt curiously settled, as much as anything could in these strange lives of ours.
“There’s nothing on this side of the building but the fire doors and the highway. You aren’t taking off yet, are you?”
“Man, I don’t know.” I brushed my bangs out of my eyes, then let the wind blow them back again. “I don’t want to hang out with those guys…and I’ve got a lot on my mind, and there’s all this stuff I still need to absorb…”
“Alexander Gellar,” she said sternly, like a teacher.
“Alixandra Blitman,” I imitated her, not as well.
“Don’t tell me my name—I already know it.”
My stupid grin got loose. Outsmarting me was her favorite game to play. Being outsmarted by her was mine.
“Don’t tell me what to think—I’ve already got a brain.”
It was feeble, but she didn’t mind.
“What you have is too many brains,” she said. “Stop thinking so much. Give it a rest. Listen, everyone’s going to Friendly’s now. You should come along.”
“Friendly’s?” I made a face. “Didn’t we just get done hearing why non-kosher food is going to burn your insides?”
“They have kosher ice cream, but whatever. We’ll get tea. We’ll sit at the far end of the table, apart from everyone else, and only talk to each other.” Neither of us drank coffee. It was one of the things that made us understand each other more. “Come on. It’ll be good for you. We’re meeting up with a bunch of kids from Hebrew Academy; we can see how the other half lives.”
“But I don’t want to hang out with a million people,” I said. “Or a million strangers, at least. I’d rather be alone.”
“ ‘It is not good for man to be alone,’ ” she said, and it sounded suspiciously like the Bible.
“Where’d you learn that one from?” I said.
She grew a little pale and looked at t
he ground.
“From this dating workshop,” she said. “They had a special program for all the girls. It was about a week and a half ago.”
“They did?” I said. “But they always call me when there’s a program! How come nobody—”
She shot me a look. And I guess I was too busy acting interested to wonder why she hadn’t told me about it before, and I was trying too hard not to be an awkward teenage boy to notice how much she was looking like an awkward teenage girl.
But all that came to a stop with the sound of a huge, resonant whack, and Alix pitched forward.
Someone had just fallen into Alix—or body-slammed her from behind.
She twisted around. She yanked her assailant backward and away from her, so hard that his body literally flipped over. He landed on the ground on his back.
The guy gave a good-natured but stomachy laugh, rising back up on his elbows. The dark played off his face, making his grotesque smile seem even more deranged and more severe.
Alix gave a dry, throaty laugh, condescendingly humorless. She gave him that charity, but her eyes stayed wary.
“Don’t you even try feeling me up, Effie Spiegelman,” she said. “I don’t touch boys. Some of us are good religious kids, or have you forgotten?”
I felt electric, a mixture of alarm and concern and a sprinkle of jealousy. Feeling her up? I tried remembering where his hands had been the moment before. Last week in school, Dan Price had said I felt her up when he was talking about a girl, about a full-on sexual experience. Or did that just mean skin-on-skin contact? Was he touching her breasts?
“Don’t give me that.” Effie offered up a sympathetic smile, as if the facts of human evolution had just possessed him, and he was an involuntary witness to what had transpired. “If I make a move on you, Alix Blitman, you’ll be the first to know. I just wanted to keep you on your toes. Get the blood moving after that snooze-fest. Baby, remind me again why you guys are choosing this lifestyle?”
“My G-d, Effie,” she huffed, pulling her windbreaker tight around her head. “Flesh and blood was wasted on creating you.”
“Don’t take the L-rd’s name in vain,” he shot back. “Right there, that’s one of the ten big ones. Touching guys doesn’t even make the top fifty.”
Headlights beckoned at the end of the highway. I counted three or four cars and, behind them, a double-tiered row of lights, the telltale sign of the public bus. Little things like this reassured me of the divine order of the universe: I could not have prayed for a more auspicious time to make an exit.
“It’s been good having this theological conversation,” I broke in. “But my flight is departing. I’ve gotta split.”
They stopped their conversation and turned to look at me in horror. “Where are you going?” said Alix. “You can’t cut out now. Listen, Brett’s older brother has the minivan; he’s giving us all rides. It’ll be a fun time.”
“Come out with us, Alex,” said Effie, although G-d knows why he was trying to get me to stay. He stepped close to us, slipped one arm around each of our shoulders. “The night won’t be the same without you.”
Maybe it was that particular moment, those particular words—calling it “the night,” like in a movie the moment before everything changes—but those words seized me. Why would he even care? Alix was trying to squirm out of Effie’s grasp. I had prepared a hundred ways to tell the other fifteen-year-olds of the universe about my newfound proficiency in public buses—everything from It’s like a car, only bigger to Oh sure, I’ve taken it across the city…haven’t you?—but, at this moment, all my excuses seemed feeble and flimsy and like that was what they really were: excuses.
My mouth emptied. My saliva dried up. The bus swung past, not even slowing down, not even suspecting that anybody would want to board at this particular stop. After evening rush hour, the buses were largely a formality in this part of town anyway.
The bus got smaller and smaller on the road. From behind, it looked like any other car.
I snapped out of it. Effie was in the middle of telling Alix some story. Doubtlessly, it involved dirty ways to say things in the Talmud.
“Fine,” I said, startling them both out of the story. “I’m in. I’ll go.”
Effie Spiegelman was every charming villain in every movie ever. He was dashing and flirtatious and socially adept to an almost frightening degree, able to say all the right things to all the right people. Which was especially nefarious, considering that he ostensibly grew up without movies or girls. And yet he knew how to make it so the girls were all over him. But how did everyone buy his act when, as soon as someone tried to quote a Torah verse, he would correct them in note-perfect Galician Hebrew?
When we got to Brett’s brother’s van, the motor was running and the door was open and the only two seats left were in different rows. Alix sat next to Romy Vogosan, Brett’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, who was asking him why he was sitting with the guys and not with her, did it mean something, what had that rabbi’s talk done to him? I sat in back, half-heartedly eavesdropping, feeling the glow of Alix on my arm. Our skin close together, the secrets we shared. Why would anyone want to sit with the guys? I wondered.
At the restaurant, Romy yanked Alix into the seat next to her, and, smiling at me—as if I was Alix’s special friend, and that was our special secret—she nodded for me to take the seat across from them. Which I did.
They were talking. I couldn’t even talk. It was unbelievable to me how, after everything we’d heard and everything we’d talked about today, people could relapse to the same old things—talking about school and guys and the latest nighttime television dramas. Help me, I prayed, right then, in my seat. I am fifteen years old, G-d was hanging out with me in my head, and physically I am still stuck with morons.
We ordered. Most people did only get ice cream—it was almost ten p.m., after all—but some of them ventured into other desserts, and a few of those ordered the ones with marshmallows and the ones that were freshly baked, which were not kosher. At the far end of the table, Effie Spiegelman was actually ordering a burger and fries. I thought of my soul: we are what we eat. I felt physically ill.
I turned back to Alix, tried to immerse myself in her conversation. The other girls were talking about weddings.
I let my head fall into my hands. I was trapped in some parallel dimension where brains had been replaced by stale breakfast cereal and dryer lint. I had to be. I stared at the glow of light through my fingers, tried to seal it off completely.
Just then, I felt hands closing on my shoulders, my chair as it was yanked away from the table. My butt got pushed three-quarters off the chair, my finger mask fell away, and suddenly I was face to face with Effie Spiegelman.
How did he get here? It wasn’t even a question. Hitchhiking and black magic were equally likely answers.
“Dude,” he said. “Are you after Alix?”
“What?” I exploded. “No, are you crazy! And keep your voice down, she’s right over—”
“Who cares?” he said. “Stop acting like a caffeinated lab monkey if you don’t want her to notice. If you speak real low, every person at this table is going to notice.”
I swallowed. I could be calm. “Fine.”
“Good. Now, what’s your scene with her?”
“Why do you want to know, Effie? What are you even doing here?”
He pulled back. He gazed at me levelly, and if I hadn’t already known he was a total asshole, then he would’ve looked hurt. “What do you think of me, Gellar? I’m not completely inhuman.”
“Stop it.” I stared him down. “Do you like her, Effie?”
Now he really did look insulted.
“No!” he said, and then: “No way.” And, after a minute, he added, in a tone so honest I didn’t think he was capable of it, “I mean, I thought you did.
“You see
m like a good kid, Gellar,” he was saying, calling me by my last name as if he were my baseball coach, “and, honestly, I hate to see anyone get suckered into this whole thing. I can tell you what the next ten years of your life are going to be like. Religiously, socially, whatever. ’Cause they are about to put you through the wringer, and they’ve been putting me through the wringer since I was born.
“First, they’re going to tell you to forget everything you’ve learned. That the only valuable learning is Torah learning, and everything else is crap. Don’t listen to them. Okay, the Torah is a great book, maybe the greatest book that’s ever been written—don’t look so surprised; just ’cause I don’t believe it happened doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s true—but there’s a lot of other true stuff in the world too. Don’t swallow anything without digesting it all. These kids, they’re like a herd. You feel it too. I’ve seen the way you look at them. But the thing you haven’t accepted yet is it’s completely fine. People like being in a herd. Just don’t let them brainwash you, and don’t let them take over your thoughts, and eventually you will rise to the top of them. They will let you walk all over them, and they’ll thank you for it. So, what do you think?”
What did I think? What I thought was changing every minute, every moment. I could no more tell him what I thought than I could tell him the exact number of cells in my body, or the stars in the sky. I didn’t want to think. I just wanted to believe and to trust the greater powers of the universe with making the call on what was right and what was true, and I would just go along with that.
Effie was wide-eyed and honest, looking every bit like a ghost, or maybe like a fortune-teller.
“Are you talking about the rabbis, or are you talking about girls?”
At that, he let out a laugh so huge that he couldn’t control it, that knocked him off the three-quarters of my chair that he was occupying, and that centered everyone’s attention on him. “Both,” he gasped breathlessly. “I’m talking about every-fricking-thing in the world,” he said. He shot me a grin, and I could see it was a real grin, and it was a grin that left me satisfied that I knew what he was talking about.
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