He’s surprised, because he doesn’t know I overheard him complaining that time. “I wanted to ask you—how come you turned Link Rowley Jewish?”
I speed up. “I didn’t turn Link Rowley anything. Link Rowley is Jewish.” I’ve come to terms with it. By birth, he’s every bit as Jewish as I am.
“No, he isn’t. His family puts up Christmas lights. At least they did until you turned them. You’re trying to turn the whole town Jewish with your paper chain!”
I stop in my tracks and turn to face him, even though he’s a basketball player and eight inches taller than I am. “It’s not my paper chain. I’m not even the person who came up with it.”
“It’s about the Holocaust, and that’s a Jewish thing!”
Heat rushes into my cheeks. “You know what’s a Jewish thing? Dealing with idiots who make comments like that one! First off, at least five million non-Jews also died in the Holocaust. Second, just imagine for a second a government deciding to wipe out every single person who was born into your religion. There’s a word for that—genocide! And it’s everybody’s problem, because if it happens to one group, it can happen to any group. That’s why the paper chain is for all of us—even you! It started with the school, but now it belongs to everybody. Don’t you watch ReelTok? The whole country’s in on it now!” I wheel and storm away. This time he doesn’t follow me.
Seeing Ryan calms me down a little. He runs out the door to meet me, proudly waving a section of paper chain five links long and two-thirds crushed. “Look what I made in art!”
“That’s great,” I tell him. “I’ll take it to school tomorrow to add to the big chain.”
“Do you think it’ll get us to two million?” he asks.
Ryan is obsessed with the numbers. He’s always talking about how many links we have: how many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Now that we’ve hit a million, he expects to make it to two million any day now, since two is only one more than one.
“This will definitely help,” I assure him, and he’s pleased to bits.
At home, we find Link on the porch swing, buried in his papers from Rabbi Gold, chanting quietly under his breath.
Ryan corrects his pronunciation of a couple of Hebrew words.
“Thanks.” Link makes notes on the page. “Dana, your kid brother’s really smart.”
Tell me about it. Ryan has already memorized Link’s entire temple service just from listening to Rabbi Gold’s recording so many times. He’s not the only one. I swear I heard Michael humming one of the blessings under his breath as he counted up paper chain links a couple of days ago.
I let the three of us into the house. Ryan heads to his room, and Link and I hit the bar mitzvah books. Link can handle most of it on his own now, so I work on my homework. Not sure why he needs me anymore—I’m really just a safety net in case he has a question.
He’s still here when Mom gets home, so she invites him to stay for dinner.
“Thanks, Dr. Levinson. It’s good to meet you.”
“We’ve met,” she assures him.
He frowns. “Really?”
Her brow clouds. “You might not remember. You were busy at the time.”
“Vacuuming the fertilizer out of the office,” I supply when Link seems totally bewildered.
Ryan cackles. “Did it stink?”
“Kind of,” Link admits sheepishly.
I’m half rooting for him to be too embarrassed to stick around to face my father after that. But he does, and the five of us sit down around the kitchen table.
He takes a tiny bite of his taco and chews as if he’s afraid the stuff is radioactive.
“Is something wrong?” Dad asks him finally.
Link swallows gingerly. “Is this kosher?”
Mom stares at him. “You’re kosher now too?”
“It’s a taco!” I explode. “It has meat and cheese. It can’t be kosher.”
“We don’t keep kosher,” my father informs him. “I actually don’t think it would be possible to find kosher food in Chokecherry.”
“Sorry,” Link mumbles, shamefaced.
“Link, chill out,” I say. “You don’t have to apologize on behalf of the town. Not everything’s about racism, you know. They don’t sell kosher food here because there’d be no one to buy it. Not even us.”
“It’s not that.” His face is flushed. “I mean—the fertilizer in the mail slot. It was supposed to be dinosaur poop.”
Ryan snickers. “Link said poop at the table.”
“We get the joke,” my mother tells Link. “It was my husband who first identified the fossilized stegosaur droppings for the university.”
“It was a stupid thing to do,” Link goes on in a tortured voice. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I did a lot of stupid things back then …”
His voice trails off, leaving him staring into his plate. It’s pretty awkward.
Dad breaks the uncomfortable silence. “That’s all in the past. Now you’ve set yourself a positive goal and you’re working toward it. You’re on the right path.”
I stare at my father. How can a bar mitzvah be the right path for this kid who grew up going to church, hunting Easter eggs, and writing letters to Santa?
And yet, for the very first time since Link approached me in the cafeteria, I can sort of picture it.
From the YouTube channel of Adam Tok
Interview with Michael Amorosa
REELTOK: I’m pleased to welcome Michael Amorosa, art director of the Chokecherry Middle School’s paper chain project.
MICHAEL: Sorry, can’t talk now. UPS just delivered a stack of new boxes full of paper chain for me to check in.
REELTOK: Thirty-four new boxes, to be exact.
MICHAEL: How would you know that?
REELTOK: TokNation has members everywhere, including at UPS.
MICHAEL: We’ve had packages from over forty states, and countries all around the world. We’re closing in on two million links!
REELTOK: You’re welcome.
MICHAEL: Don’t you get it? One person has to keep track of all that: me!
REELTOK: What’s it like to count two million paper links?
MICHAEL: Well, I can’t count every single one. I just keep a running total—you know, three hundred here, five hundred there, two thousand in a carton.
REELTOK: And how do you verify the numbers are correct?
MICHAEL: By length. We know the average link takes up about four inches, so if the count is off, we’ll catch it. We’ve already filled up the farm equipment warehouse and the Chokecherry Municipal Garage. We’ve started on the abandoned silo at the Beaverton farm. And a lot of people have volunteered their spare rooms, basements, and attics. The whole town is on board.
REELTOK: Well, there has to be at least one person who isn’t on board. The swastikas are still coming, right? You found the first one. Do you have any idea who might be doing it?
MICHAEL: I—I—I gotta go.
If Pam thinks I’m going to come crawling back to her over broken glass, then she’s losing what’s left of her mind.
Just because we got back together all those other times doesn’t mean things are always going to go that way. We’re done. Through. Finished. Finito.
This isn’t like when we broke up because she likes her peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on wheat bread, when everybody knows white bread is the only bread for a PBJ. That was babyish. You don’t throw away a relationship that’s been going on since second grade over a sandwich, no matter how wrongheaded the other person is being.
It isn’t even like the time when she told me to buy the sneakers with the four stripes and I accidentally bought the sneakers with the three stripes, but it was too late to take them back, because I’d already stepped in gum.
This is different. Pam and I have a thing where we always see every Marvel movie the first Saturday it’s in theaters. Sometimes Link, Pouncey, and Sophie come with us, but for sure, the two of us never miss. Anyway, the
new one is coming out the weekend of December 4, and Pam wants me to buy advance tickets—there’s only one theater in Chokecherry, and when it sells out, that’s it. So I told her December 4 is no good, because we’re both going to be in Shadbush Crossing that day for Link’s bar mitzvah.
She looked at me like I had a cabbage for a head. “I’m not going to any dumb bar mitzvah! I’m not Jewish and neither is Link!”
So I said, “I don’t really understand it either. But if Link thinks this is important, that’s good enough for me.” Then, to show her how reasonable I am, I added, “Why don’t we go to the movie on December fifth?”
You would have thought I suggested we hunt down Captain America himself and gut him like a trout. She went off on me. December 5 is her dance recital—like I’m supposed to memorize her schedule! “If you’re such a bar mitzvah lover,” she snapped, “why don’t you go with Dana?”
That really confused me. I barely said three words to Dana before the paper chain project, and even now I wouldn’t describe us as friends. Then it dawned on me what she meant. A bar mitzvah is a Jewish thing, and Dana is Jewish.
And I got mad, because that was kind of mean. So I said something mean back. I told her she dances like a spider on a hot plate, and if I want to see that, all I have to do is turn on the barbecue after a long winter.
Piece of friendly advice: Never insult your girlfriend’s dancing. They’re sensitive about that.
So not only am I a single man again, but now I’m probably going to break my perfect record of seeing every Marvel movie all the way back to Thor: Ragnarok.
“You guys’ll make up,” Link assures me. “You always do.”
“I don’t know, man. She gave me back my Iron Man bracelet. She’s never done that before. I was a real jerk this time.”
Sophie volunteers to talk to her and comes back looking grim. “I’ll give it another week and try again.”
Pouncey tries to put in a good word for me, but his only report is “You really blew it this time, Einstein.”
Leave it to Pouncey, who’s wrong about everything, to be right about this.
The thing is, the more I act like I don’t care, the more it bugs me. It would be easier if I could just move to Venezuela or something, but I have to see her every day at school. We’re in the same homeroom and have the same lunch hour. She picks a different lab partner in science, so I have to work with Caroline, who talks my ear off. When we’re paper-chaining, Pam makes sure to set up on the opposite side of whatever room we’re in. And no matter who’s with her over there, she smiles and laughs and acts like she’s having a way better time than she’d be having if she was with loser me.
It stinks. But you know what? She really does dance like a spider on a hot plate.
When I walked through the school halls, kids used to look at me with admiration and respect. Now they just shake their heads in sympathy. I keep expecting to feel better, but every day it’s a little worse.
I have an orthodontist appointment on Wednesday, so I get to school late. I’m heading down the back hall to first period when I spot Pam running in the opposite direction. I’ve seen her a million times since we split, but this is my first chance to talk to her with nobody else around. And I’ve already decided that I’m going to make up with her no matter what. That’s how it always goes with Pam and me. One of us has to swallow our pride and take the blame for the whole breakup. It has nothing to do with who’s wrong and who’s right. It’s just my turn.
I wave. “Pam—over here!”
As she pounds down the hall in my direction, she definitely doesn’t seem happy to see me. I try to read her expression. Angry? Sad?
I plow ahead. “I didn’t mean what I said about your dancing. You dance great—”
That’s when it hits me—she’s not slowing down.
I give it one more try. I step directly into her path. “Pam, please listen—”
She reaches out a hand and shoves me away so hard that I stagger back and land on my butt. She doesn’t even turn around to see if she’s killed me. By the time I scramble to my feet, she’s disappeared around the corner.
So that’s it. We’re through for good. Pouncey said it all: I really blew it this time.
I feel like going home, crawling into bed, and binge-watching Netflix on my phone for three straight weeks. But I don’t. I have to get on with my life eventually. I might as well start now.
Link tells me, “Sorry, man.” And he means it. But the very next minute he’s mumbling in Hebrew, humming that tuneless tune, and forgetting he’s got a friend who’s suffering. The old Link wouldn’t say sorry. He’d come up with an epic prank—something hilarious to distract us and make us laugh. But these days, it’s all bar mitzvah, all the time. When you need support, some guy singing in a foreign language is a lousy substitute. And since he’s off the soccer team, the sports connection between us is gone too. That leaves just Pouncey, who is zero comfort. You don’t go to Pouncey for sympathy. Pouncey’s the guy you feel sympathy for.
And it doesn’t help that the whole school is tense and on edge. The word is that a new swastika was discovered this morning. You’d think we’d have gotten used to it by now, but we never do. It’s always awful. The teachers freak out and start being mean to the kids, like six hundred of us got together to hold the paintbrush. We get weird because we’re feeling guilty for something we didn’t even do—all but one of us anyway. It’s the poison icing on the lousy cake.
So surely I’m at rock bottom, right? It can’t get any worse.
Wrong. In Spanish, I can’t figure out why Señora Wallace keeps staring at me. Maybe I’m imagining things—a day like today would make anybody paranoid. But at the end of the period, she pulls me aside.
“Jordan, your shirt—”
“It’s a West Ham United jersey,” I explain. “My favorite English soccer club.”
“Yes, but—” She points to a spot on my chest. “That stain. Where did you get it?”
“Stain?” I look down. It’s hard to see against the wine-colored fabric of the jersey, but there’s a light purple splotch about the size of my fist just below the team crest. “My mom’s going to kill me. You don’t know what she went through to get this shirt.”
“But where did it come from?” she persists.
“We had to order it from London.”
“No, I mean the stain.”
I shrug. “I was at the orthodontist this morning. Maybe something dripped on me. You know, fluoride, disinfectant, toothpaste—”
“Come with me,” she interrupts. “We’re going to the principal.”
I’m stunned. “What did I do?”
“Let’s just see what Mr. Brademas says.”
As I follow her through the school, I’m completely blown away. Am I in trouble for having a dirty shirt? Since when is bad cleanliness against the rules? Pouncey spends half his life covered in food, and he never gets dragged to the principal’s office. Is this a new thing starting today?
Señora Wallace doesn’t even drop me off, but walks me right into the inner office while the secretary pages Mr. Brademas. If the school has suddenly decided to get tough on stains, why did they have to pick me to make an example of?
Lost in my swirling thoughts, I glance through the glass wall of the office and spy Mr. Kennedy and one of the other custodians cleaning the glass of the main floor trophy case. It was always a special place for me because I’m an athlete, so I was on the teams that won a lot of those awards. But now all I can think of is that this must be where the latest swastika was drawn. It’s not there anymore, but the custodians are scrubbing at what’s left of it, their sponges dripping purple paint.
Light purple paint, almost exactly the color of …
Mr. Brademas hits the office running, and I instantly understand why. He isn’t sprinting to enforce a new cleanliness code. He thinks he’s caught the swastika guy and it’s me!
I leap to my feet, sputtering like a car with a bad engine.
“But—it’s not me! It can’t be! I checked in late. Ask anybody!”
“That’s true,” the secretary calls in through the office door. “I have the slip here. It’s marked nine thirty-seven.”
The principal is undaunted. “Where did you get that paint on your shirt?”
“I don’t know!” I babble. My fluoride theory is pretty much out the window. What are the odds that my orthodontist uses fluoride the same color as the latest swastika? “I must have bumped into something!”
Mr. Brademas is like one of those TV cops in the interrogation cell. “Tell me everything you did from the moment you walked into the building.”
“Well, I missed homeroom. I was late to math, and I went to Spanish. Then Señora brought me here.”
“I want every detail,” he insists. “Don’t leave anything out. Everything you did. Everyone you met.”
“I didn’t talk to anybody,” I say honestly. “I ran into Pamela Bynes in the back hall, but she was running too fast to—”
I relive the moment in a flash. I step into her path. She pushes me out of the way. I feel the shove—in exactly the spot of the stain on my jersey.
Mr. Brademas is already instructing the secretary to page Pam out of class.
“But it can’t be Pam,” I tell him. “She would never do anything like that.”
The principal is grim. “I just want to ask her where she got the paint on her hand that she transferred to your shirt.”
“Maybe she brushed against the trophy case,” I suggest hopefully.
“Maybe.” He doesn’t sound convinced.
The principal takes me to Pam’s locker, number 318. Mr. Kennedy is already there. Pam arrives, accompanied by Coach Ventnor, the girls’ PE teacher.
“Pamela, please open your locker for inspection,” Mr. Brademas orders.
“I don’t have to,” she says in a shaky voice. “It’s an invasion of my privacy.”
I shoot her an encouraging smile. Why make a big deal out of this? She has nothing to hide.
The look on her face is absolute panic. That’s the first inkling I get that she does have something to hide. Something huge.
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