“No.”
“Yes, you do. One of your famous movie nights.”
“Again—how do you know about that?”
Rebecca ignored me. “He thought you kind of felt the same way. But when he put his arm around you, you laughed at him.”
“Not at him!” I cried. “Okay, maybe I giggled, but that’s because I was nervous and because my dad was there. That’s all. Besides, I thought he was kidding.”
“He’s worried about you and Berger.”
“Shut. Up!” I yelled. “I’m so sick of Ryan Berger this and Ryan Berger that.”
Rebecca looked impatient. “The point is, whether you can see it or not, Ryan has a crush on you, too.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know it. Want to know how?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Because Ryan told Adam, and Adam told Ben-o, that you’re the hottest girl in our Hebrew school. I’m third, by the way. After Missy Abrams.”
I laughed at that, a little cruelly. “Tell Ben-o not to worry,” I said. “I am not interested in Berger.”
“Ben-o was there when Sheila said Ryan’s only allowed to date Jewish people, remember? So now Ben-o thinks maybe you’re only interested in Jewish boys.”
“That’s totally racist!”
“No,” Rebecca said. “He was just asking. Identifying with your culture is not the same thing as racism.”
My culture? I thought. Which one?
“Anyway, how do you know all this?”
“Because Ben-o talks to me.”
“He does?”
“Because I’m your best friend. And I’m Jewish. He wanted to know if that was the reason you were blowing him off.”
“I’m not blowing him off! What did you tell him?”
“I told him to ask you. I take it he didn’t. You two are exactly alike—you think you have this weird telepathic communication thing going on, but you don’t. Just because you both say things in your head doesn’t mean you can hear each other.”
“Rebecca—” I bit my lip. “When you start dating, are you only going to date Jewish people?”
She thought for a moment. “I don’t know. But I’m going to marry one, probably.”
“How do you know that?”
Rebecca shrugged. “I just do,” she said.
That blew my mind. I mean, I didn’t know if I’d ever get married, but if I did, it would be in like thirty years, like two and a half lifetimes from now. I was worried about my bat mitzvah and the Robotics finals in the spring. Why were we talking about marriage?
I looked at her hard, trying to figure out where this was coming from. “You’re starting to sound like Sheila Rosenberg. Have you been hanging out with her or something? Oh, right, I forgot. She’s your math tutor.”
“Back to the main subject,” Rebecca said. “You have no respect for Ben-o’s feelings.”
“But I like things the way they are.”
“That’s a little selfish, don’t you think?”
“Why?”
“Never mind—best friend, boyfriend, it’s up to you. Just don’t keep calling him your brother, okay? Because you’re breaking his heart. Now”—she threw open her Hebrew book—“are we studying? Because if not, I have to go home. I have an enormous math test next week. I should really be studying with Sheila.”
“Are you mad at me for something I did to Ben-o?”
“Me? I don’t care what you do. He’s your friend.”
“Whoa! I’m confused. Weren’t you just standing up for him?”
“I have nothing against Ben-o, you dope. It’s that—you’ve been stuck in your own little world lately, you know? Did you seriously not know he likes you?”
“I seriously did not know,” I swore. It was only a partial lie. I wondered what else I’d been missing lately.
We studied in silence for a while, and then Rebecca said she had to go.
“Oh—one more thing, Tara,” she said as she was leaving. “You might want to take a look in your datebook. At Valentine’s Day, to be exact. In case you still don’t believe me.”
After she left, I got out the datebook and flipped to February fourteenth. There was a heart drawn in red pencil around the number fourteen. That was it. I got the message.
’d pretty much forgotten about Sheila’s invitation until Rebecca reminded me about it on Monday.
“I forgot to ask you yesterday when we were … you know,” she said. “You’re going, right?”
“Can’t,” I said. “That’s Ben-o’s chess tournament.”
“You don’t even like chess.”
“I don’t not like chess,” I said.
“But you have to come. You promised.”
“Who?”
“Sheila.”
“I didn’t promise her anything. I didn’t even know I was invited.”
“I asked Sheila to invite you. And you said yes.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“That time? After your bat mitzvah lesson? Sheila told me you said yes.”
Was that what Sheila had asked me when I wasn’t listening? How did Rebecca even know that? I flashed back to their conversation in the vestibule. I hadn’t been able to hear them through the glass doors, of course, but even then I’d noticed they had seemed kind of chummy. And they had been sitting next to each other at lunch, but I thought that was only because Sheila was tutoring Rebecca in math.
I did say yes. Only I’d had no idea what I was saying yes to. “I thought we were talking about Bereishit,” I mused. Out loud, apparently.
“What?”
“Nothing. Listen—I promised Ben-o, too, and he’s more important. You said so yourself.”
“More important than me?”
“This has nothing to do with you.”
“It has everything to do with me,” she said, stamping her foot. “Wake up, Tara. I asked her to invite you, and you told her yes. Is it so wrong for me to want my two best friends to get along?”
“Hold up! You’re best friends with Sheila ROSENBERG?”
“You know another Sheila?” Rebecca sighed.
“Since when …?”
“You know, you’re doing that thing again,” Rebecca said. “Whenever you don’t like someone, you always call them by their first and last name.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Promise me you’ll go,” Rebecca said.
“I can’t promise,” I said. “It depends on Ben-o.”
I was trapped—having to decide which of my two best friends to betray by choosing between two events I wasn’t even a little bit interested in going to. Despite my protest to the contrary, I knew the chess tournament would be deadly boring to watch, and Sheila’s bat mitzvah wasn’t my idea of a good time either.
“Fine,” said Rebecca, but I could tell it wasn’t.
“You’re the one who said I’m giving him mixed signals, remember?” I fumed. “When was that? Oh, right—yesterday! Or was that before you decided Sheila Rosenberg was your new best friend?”
“I didn’t DECIDE,” Rebecca yelled. “It happened. And it wasn’t yesterday. It’s been MONTHS. You’d know that if you ever paid attention to anyone but yourself.”
Ouch. Maybe I was in my own little world—which was about to get even littler. So, what now? Was I supposed to walk up to Ben-o and say, “Hey, I know we’re best friends and all, and Rebecca confirmed you have a crush on me, and I know I promised to go to your boring chess tournament, but I have to go to SHEILA ROSENBERG’s stupid bat mitzvah instead, because I promised my other best friend I would be nice to her other best friend who I didn’t even know existed”? Yeah, that’d work.
After homeroom, I waited for Ben-o near his locker.
“It’s okay,” he said when I broke the news to him—about Sheila’s bat mitzvah, not the other stuff. He shrugged. “You’ve got your priorities.”
I wanted to tell him, You’re my priority, but I felt too timid all of a su
dden, plus that wouldn’t explain why I was going to Sheila’s bat mitzvah instead of his chess tournament.
“Is Ryan going?” he asked.
“No, Rebecca says he’s not invited. Why?” I asked, knowing full well why.
“No reason,” he said. “He just keeps turning up. Like a bad penny.”
“Ben-o …” I said, weary beyond words. “Ryan Berger and I are like sworn enemies.”
“You mean that thing in the lunchroom? Looked like a lovers’ quarrel to me.”
“Don’t be disgusting.”
“I just thought—you know—with your bat mitzvah and all.”
“What?” I wanted to make him say it.
“That you might be looking for someone—you know.”
“You’re an idiot,” I said.
“Why is that so idiotic? Adam said—”
“Adam’s Korean.”
“No, he’s not. He’s adopted.”
“I know!” I snapped. I felt bad for having said it. But I couldn’t unsay it.
“It’s cool,” he said. “I’d totally understand.”
“Well, there’s nothing to understand. And, Ben-o—I’m really sorry about your chess tourney.”
“It’s okay.” He shrugged. “I have someone else in mind.”
Like, a backup?
“Who, Adam?”
“No, Jenna.”
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “That’s cool.”
Of course it wasn’t cool at all.
“You don’t even like chess,” he said for like the hundredth time.
Did Jenna like chess? I had no idea. More to the point, did Ben-o like Jenna more than me? Maybe Rebecca was right—maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention to my friends. I hadn’t noticed that Rebecca was becoming BEST FRIENDS with Sheila Rosenberg or that Ben-o had been interested in me as more than a friend. For like ten minutes.
“For the hundredth time, I don’t not like chess,” I said lamely.
“Jenna’s dad’s been teaching her. She’s really good! We’ve been practicing together. We’re hoping she places in the next tournament so we can go to state together next year.”
“We?” I echoed, feeling just like Mum must have felt when Gran and I came to her about the sari—left out. “It’s cool,” I said again. But it wasn’t, really. I had finally gotten the message, but Ben-o had already moved on. To Jenna Alberts.
The bell rang, and we headed to our classes, in opposite directions.
“Ben-o and I had a fight,” I accused Rebecca in English class. “I hope you’re happy.”
“Of course I’m not happy.”
“He’s taking Jenna Alberts to his chess tournament.”
Rebecca’s face fell. “Jenna really is into chess, you know.”
“So I heard,” I spat.
“Don’t take this out on me,” Rebecca said. “Or Jenna.”
Jenna. The girl who thought Ben-o was one of the cutest boys in the seventh grade.
“I guess he’s not into me after all,” I said. All at once I saw it—how I was the go-to for hanging out and watching horror movies and eating ice cream and playing Stingray Rampage, while Jenna Alberts, with her golden skin, shiny hair, and hazel eyes, was girlfriend material. It should have been a relief.
“You’re an idiot,” Rebecca said, reading my mind.
The second bell rang, and I went back to my seat.
After school, I read Sheila’s invitation again. The response card was the blank kind that didn’t let you just say yes or no. I thought for a moment before I wrote:
I was going to write I forgive you for biting me, but then I pictured Mrs. Rosenberg reading that. I was stuck with the P.S., though, so I wrote, as a kind of apology:
That sounded stupid, so I crossed it out and wrote:
I hoped I was making the right choice.
he whole time I was at Sheila’s bat mitzvah, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ben-o—how I should have been at his chess tournament instead of sitting in temple wearing an itchy wool dress. Mum and I had finally agreed on a light gray dress with little pearl buttons down the front. I wanted to cut off the pearls and replace them with something funkier, like big neon pink safety pins or giant peace sign buttons, but Mum said she would absolutely skin me alive if I made any modifications to it whatsoever. She did make me wear one of her big colorful scarves, though, so I wouldn’t look like I was dressed for a funeral instead of a bat mitzvah. And I persuaded her to let me wear neon pink tights, so it was an okay compromise.
Sheila made a decent speech about remaining true to yourself, your family, and your friends, and how you shouldn’t betray one for the other. I didn’t know what that had to do with Bereishit, so it must have been something mentioned in her haftarah. Anyway, it started me thinking about Ben-o again, which I had managed not to do for a whole three and a half minutes. I wondered again if I’d made the right choice, being here.
Sheila and her mom wore matching lavender dresses. Who does that? Her dad even wore a purple tie. The reception was a festival of purpleness, too, just as I’d predicted. Purple tablecloths, purple balloons, purple everything. It made everyone look a little bruised, especially Sheila’s relatives, who were all as pale as she was. In fact, they all looked exactly the same, like a clone colony. If you lined up her cousins from youngest to oldest, you would get a pretty good idea of what Sheila will look like in five, ten, and even twenty years. I, on the other hand, don’t look like anyone in my family.
Seeing the lineup of Rosenberg-alikes made me think about the unit we’d done on genetics in science the previous week. Stuff like dominant and recessive traits that explain why someone like me could never inherit my dad’s green eyes. Green eyes and attached earlobes and the ability to curl your tongue are recessive traits—meaning you have to inherit two copies of the gene, one from your father and one from your mother. Brown eyes and normal earlobes are dominant traits, meaning you only have to get them from one side or the other. The only thing I seemed to have inherited from both my parents was the ability to curl my tongue.
The thing about being mixed is that nobody ever says I look like this or that relative. And since I don’t have any brothers or sisters, nobody looks like me either. I look at Mum and Daddy and I try to see a resemblance, and it’s as if I’m some kind of third species, not related to either of them. Rebecca and her mom have the exact same nose, and Ben-o’s hair flops to the right (or at least it used to), same as his dad’s. Sheila Rosenberg is a carbon copy of her mother. Me? I might as well be adopted, like Adam Greenspan.
I’m kind of like a vanilla milkshake with one pump of chocolate syrup—compared to white people I look brown, and to brown people I look white. Even my hair color is somewhere halfway between Daddy’s sandy brown and Mum’s chestnut. But it’s neither one nor the other, just a nondescript shade in the middle. A color so boring, there’s not even a crayon for it. Not even in the sixty-four pack.
I hung out with Missy Abrams while Rebecca was busy doing her best-friend-of-the-bat-mitzvah-girl stuff with Sheila. I also talked to Marina Cartwright, the eighth-grader from Robotics, for a while. I didn’t even know she knew Sheila, but it turned out they’re family friends, so her mom and three brothers were there, too.
Happily, the food wasn’t purple, except for the little frosting flowers on the cake. Sheila called up Rebecca to light a candle, which is a big honor reserved for family and really close friends. I’m not gonna lie. I was jealous.
The truth is, I could learn to get along with Sheila Rosenberg, maybe even get on a first-name-only basis with her, if it meant saving my best-friendship with Rebecca. I could deal with anyone as long as I had my BFFs backing me up.
Sheila didn’t show up for Hebrew school the next morning. It’s kind of a tradition, not coming in the day after your own bar or bat mitzvah, but I was surprised anyway, because—she’s Sheila Rosenberg. Rebecca said it was because she had a lot of out-of-town guests.
We were learning about the Holocau
st, which is when the Nazis persecuted and killed twelve million people, including six million Jews. The subject is fascinating and awful at the same time. Some people did really amazingly heroic things, like the family that helped Anne Frank. It made me think, though: I mean, how could people let something like that happen in the first place? Rabbi said that was a good question.
He told us about some prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp who risked their lives to help a thirteen-year-old boy in their bunk have a secret bar mitzvah, and about another man who had a bar mitzvah when he was seventy, because he wasn’t allowed to have one during the Holocaust. Rabbi says what makes the second story really special is that the man never lost faith.
It seemed incredible to me that someone could keep believing in God after living through something as terrible as that. And if he did, then why did I have any doubts whatsoever?
I finally worked up the nerve to approach the subject with Rabbi Aron on Monday. It was hard to know where to start.
“I don’t know … how I feel about Judaism. The religious part,” I confessed during my bat mitzvah lesson. For a moment I thought—wished, even—that he couldn’t hear the question over the sound of my heart beating.
“Are you having a crisis of faith, Tara?” he asked kindly.
“I don’t know,” I said. In order to have a crisis of faith, I suspected you had to definitely have a faith first. I didn’t even know if Mum and Daddy believed in God. Gran did. I mean, I assumed so, because all old people did. Rabbi said he wasn’t sure about that.
“You do, right?” I asked him. “Believe in God?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“But how do you know?”
“Tara—I don’t want to tell you what to think. You’re far too smart to let me get away with that.” Rabbi put his fingertips together. For a moment, I thought he was praying. “I ask only that you keep an open mind. And heart.”
“How will I know?” I asked, my voice hardly a whisper.
“You’ll know.”
I bit my lip, almost afraid to ask. “Rabbi Aron …”
My Basmati Bat Mitzvah Page 11
