“We’ll take good measurements,” Jean-Paul assured her. “A good tailor is a miracle worker.”
Based on their descriptions, I was starting to feel like the Hunchback of Eisenhower Junior High. Or a blue plate special. I couldn’t wear dark colors, because that would make my small, girlish shoulders look even smaller. I should wear tan, they decided, with a narrow lapel.
“He needs all the help he can get,” said Jean-Paul, apparently forgetting that I could hear him. “Here. Try this.”
I put the jacket on, even though I was only wearing a T-shirt.
“You look like James Bond!” said Jean-Paul cheerfully. Because James Bond shopped with his grandmother at Suitings.
I stared at the mirror. Maybe I was stupid, for thinking that Kelli Ann could ever like me, homunculus that I was. Maybe she was only being nice to me out of pity.
I was broken out of my thoughts when I felt something down there. Jean-Paul was measuring me for the pants.
Was there no end to this?
“We have to be careful that the pants do not have too much fabric in that region,” said Jean-Paul, snapping up his measuring tape.
“David?”
In the three-way mirror, there were three Kelli Anns, plus three Michelles, and nine other friends. Or was that three?
I briefly wondered if I could get away with pretending that I was just someone who looked exactly like me, but wasn’t. Safta nudged me. “David, honey, those girls are talking to you.”
“Oh. Hi.” Did Safta really have to call me honey in front of everyone? “What are you doing here?”
“I’m looking for a tie for my dad. For Christmas.” She pointed at me, in my narrow-shouldered, pancake-butt glory. “What are you doing?”
Dying. I am dying.
“I’m setting a goot,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster.
“We’re trying to find David a suit for his bar mitzvah,” announced Safta. “Are you girls from David’s school?”
“Totally,” said Michelle. She said totally a lot.
I closed my eyes. Dear Russians, if by chance you are presently planning to drop the bomb, please aim for Suitings at the Oak Faire Mall.
“He is getting an Arnauld Portier,” said Jean-Paul, putting some extra French flair on the name. “It’s very nice.”
That got the girls’ attention. They nodded approvingly. And then Kelli Ann said something miraculous.
“You’re having a bar mitzvah. That’s like a party, right?” She smiled. “Fun.” If you put all her words together, she almost said, Your bar mitzvah sounds like fun!
“Yes. It will be. Fun, I mean.”
“C’mon, guys,” whined one of her friends. “I don’t want to shop for a tie. Let’s go to Spencer’s.”
“Yeah, okay,” agreed Kelli Ann. “Maybe I can get him a joke tie.” They moved out of the store like a herd of deer. Kelli Ann wiggled her fingers at me.
I didn’t exhale until they were all out of sight.
“Jolie fille, my friend,” said Jean-Paul in an accent I’m pretty sure he made up, too. He clapped me on the shoulder. “You are a lucky guy.”
I wouldn’t exactly call myself lucky to have a group of girls catch me at Suitings. But then again, hearing Kelli Ann say that a bar mitzvah sounded like fun? That did seem sort of lucky.
“Are these girls on your invitation list?” asked Safta.
“Almost,” I told her.
I spent the rest of Saturday hoping that Safta wouldn’t say anything to my family. I met some of David’s little friends at the mall today! Fortunately, she became obsessed with finding shoes for me, and by the time we got home, she was too tired to blab to anyone.
“I can’t believe you guys went to the mall without me,” complained Lauren. She had been at a basketball game when we left and was mad that Safta had taken me to the mall instead of cheering her on.
“That’s all I needed,” I said. “Another person watching Jean-Paul tell me I don’t have a butt.”
Lauren took a sofa pillow and threw it at me. “It’s just all about what you want right now, isn’t it? You and your butt?”
“Trust me, this is not what I wanted.” I threw the pillow back at her. “What, you wanted more buttons?” Her button today was a picture of a red circle, with the words PRESS HERE. Sometimes a button was just a button. Sometimes it meant the end of the world.
“No! Sheesh, those buttons.”
“At least you’re known for something,” I said.
“You’re known! The King of Trivia. Everyone thinks you’re smart.”
This was news to me. “They do?”
Lauren let out a long snort. “You beat the eighth graders. Even my English teacher knew.” She picked at a piece of fuzz on the sofa. “You’re known for something you can do.”
“So are you.”
Lauren looked at me, sadder than I think she meant to. “Wearing buttons isn’t doing anything.”
After all that, it was a relief to work on the hole on Sunday, even though the air was colder and the dirt was hard to pierce with our shovels. I started off in my coat, but in a few minutes I was sweating and I took it off. We had started a tunnel off the main hole, sort of like the way an elbow pipe looks in plumbing. Digging a tunnel was even harder than digging a regular hole, because first you had to scoop out the dirt sideways from the tunnel, and then you had to lift it up and out of the hole.
“What did you get for Hanukkah?” Scott asked as we were digging and hauling.
“Stuff,” I said.
“What stuff?” he said.
“I got a couple of Atari games,” I said.
“Which ones?”
I wanted to say, ones that will never be as cool as the ones you’re probably getting for Christmas, but instead, I said, “E.T. and Dig Dug.” Dig Dug seemed appropriate, because of all of the digging Scott and I were doing. So far, we hadn’t encountered any monsters in our tunnel, though.
“Dig Dug’s okay, I guess,” Scott said. “E.T.’s not supposed to be any good.”
“It isn’t.” My mom loved E.T., and I thought the movie was okay. But the game was terrible. I was already tempted to throw it in the trash.
I tried to think of a way to bring up talking to girls.
I gave myself a C-plus for my conversation with Kelli Ann at the mall because, while I’d been able to convey a coherent thought, I lost points for sentence mangling. Scott didn’t have this problem. When he talked to girls, he didn’t mangle anything. He was in control.
“My sister got Thriller.” You couldn’t be an eleven-year-old in America and not expect to get Thriller this year, whatever holiday you were celebrating. Michael Jackson was for all people.
Scott grunted. Since only one of us could fit in the main hole, one person had to do most of the work, digging out the tunnel. The person at the top of the hole, which is where I was, had a lot less to do.
I tried again. “I’m just glad I didn’t have to buy her a real present, ’cause girls are kind of hard to buy for, you know?” I’d gotten her a button, which I felt bad about in light of our earlier conversation.
This time Scott answered. “Naw. You just buy ’em some perfume and junk.”
“What junk?”
“I don’t know,” Scott said. “Lip gloss or a unicorn or something.”
“A unicorn?”
“Not a real unicorn,” he said, like he couldn’t believe what an idiot I was. “A stuffed one. Or ceramic.”
What I really wanted to ask was how do you talk to girls without sounding like you’ve lost your mind? “Some girls don’t seem like the unicorn type,” I said. “Like, um, Kelli Ann Majors.” I tried to say her name like I picked it out at random.
Scott grinned at me. “You like her, huh?”
“I didn’t say that. I just said that she didn’t seem like the unicorn type of girl.”
“Yeah, sure.”
I figured Scott could see right through me, so I decided to forge a
head. “So, when you see a girl, how do you approach her?” I liked the word approach. It reminded me of landing an airplane, which was way less scary than talking to a girl.
“You just say hi and their name. Like, Hi, Amanda.”
“Then what?”
“They say hi back. It works every time. Well, almost every time.”
“Um, okay.” It seemed too easy.
“You want some real advice?” Scott said. “Stay away from girls. Be a lone wolf. Relationships make you weak.” He handed me a bucket, dense with dirt. “Speaking of weak, did you get Hector? My daddy’s gonna let us watch an R-rated movie.”
“He was just trying to be nice,” I said.
“We’re almost thirteen,” said Scott. “We should be sneaking into R movies, not depending on someone’s dad to rent one. Hector’s a weak link. He’d never make it out here.”
I didn’t think Hector would be a weak link. But the thing was, we were on Scott’s family’s property. Maybe I was a weak link, too. I used to think of mushrooms only as a possible pizza topping, but now I pictured a huge, rolling mushroom cloud and winced.
I gave up on the girl conversation and changed it to school. There were girls at school. Maybe it would come up more naturally that way. “Did you start on your science project yet?” I asked him.
“No. But I’m thinking about doing something on survival.”
“Oh, yeah, me too,” I said. “How did you do on Hudson’s test?” Mr. Hudson had given us a test on the Great Depression.
I could tell Scott was shrugging, even though he was shoveling at the same time.
“Do you know what you’re going to do your paper on?”
More shrugging. “What about you?”
“Diplomacy?” Our assignment, which Mr. Hudson had told us about at the beginning of the term, was about the Cold War. Basically, he wanted us to solve it, like we were the UN. Points would be given for creativity and plausibility.
“We could blow them up,” Scott said. “That would end it.”
But that’s what we didn’t want to happen—“mutually assured destruction” and all that. Plus, I almost knew a Russian now, with Alexi, so joking about it didn’t feel right. “I don’t think Mr. Hudson would call that ‘creative,’” I said.
“But it’s plausible. And effective.” Scott climbed out of the hole, and I jumped in.
I emptied a shovelful of dirt into a bucket. A millipede scurried out, and I could tell I’d damaged a few of its legs. That didn’t seem to slow him down. He was red and prehistoric-looking. I watched him for a minute as he climbed down the bucket and back up the mud wall. I wondered if he would survive a nuclear war, like the cockroaches in The Day After. If he did, I wondered if they’d be friends.
“You know what’s wrong with nuclear weapons?” I asked. I’d been thinking about this. “There are no heroes. It’s not like in the previous wars where you threw yourself on a grenade or you took a hill even when the odds were against you. This time, it’s just pressing a button and then seeing who’s left.”
Scott let out a strange laugh. “Yeah, well, once you’re bent on destroying the other side, what do you expect?”
I went back to digging. Scott and I were preparing for the end of the world, but the difference was Scott didn’t seem to care or even want to try to stop it.
If Hector were here, he’d probably mention that his favorite hero was Robin Hood. Or he’d name his favorite heroic moments in old war movies. Or maybe he wouldn’t. But he definitely would not act like the end of the world was a sure thing.
“I have a Russian twin,” I said. “Maybe I can write about that.”
“You have a what?” Scott said.
“A Russian twin. It’s not a real twin. Just somebody I got paired up with for my bar mitzvah. My grandmother got me into it. I don’t even know him, but I’m writing to him. Maybe he can give me some information.”
“You’re communicating with Russians?”
“He hasn’t written back,” I said. “So it doesn’t count as communicating. And it’s not like that. He’s one of the good guys.”
“We’re the good guys,” Scott said.
“So is Alexi,” I insisted. The shovel hit a rock and made a harsh, metallic sound. “He’s being repressed by the Soviets. Because he’s Jewish.”
“He’s probably just saying that to get your sympathy,” said Scott. “I’ll bet he’s a spy.”
Here’s the weird thing: I didn’t know Alexi from the not-so-proverbial hole in the ground, but I felt as though I needed to protect him.
“It’s all been checked out,” I told Scott. “Alexi’s the real deal.” I used the shovel to try to feel for the edges of the rock, but it must have been a big one because everywhere I tapped was just more rock. “There’s a rock in the way,” I told Scott.
“So dig it out.”
“No, it’s big. Really big. I think digging it out could destabilize the tunnel.”
“Look, we can’t stop every time we run into something. We gotta commit. Dig it out.” Scott was acting like the rock was my fault.
At one point in The Great Escape, part of the tunnel falls down on one of the diggers, showering him with dirt. Not super bad, but enough that he had to be helped out, and I wondered if moving the rock might do the same thing. If I told that to Scott, he would think I was a worrywart. “I’ll get started,” I said. “But this is definitely a two-man job, okay?”
Scott gave me a weird look. “Two people can’t even fit in the tunnel.”
I thought of a different reason to have two people. “I think we’ll need two people to get the rock out of the hole.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Scott. Then he started doing a weird dance around the hole. “Da, comrade. We vill remove all rocks from ze motherland!” He saluted. “Is that how your Commie pen pal talks?”
“I told you, he hasn’t written back yet,” I said. “It probably takes a long time to get letters past the censors and all that.”
“He’s probably a spy, trying to infiltrate young American minds,” said Scott. “Aw, blow ’em all back to the Stone Age. Who has time to sort them all out?”
Anger rushed over me. Here I was, trying to be reasonable and he couldn’t even take two seconds to admit that maybe I was right. And making fun of Alexi wasn’t okay, either. I wanted to say dig your own dumb tunnel. But I needed it to be my tunnel, too. And maybe a tunnel for Hector or my family or Kelli Ann. “I gotta go,” I said, before I could say anything else.
I walked halfway back to my house before I remembered I’d left my jacket near the hole. I didn’t want to go back for it, though. I went straight to my room and pulled out a piece of paper. My fingers were stiff from the cold, so my handwriting was pretty lousy.
I stopped and I wondered if I should tell Alexi that Scott and I had a fight about him. Or a non-fight. Alexi would probably think Scott was a jerk if he found out that Scott wanted to blow him up. So I decided to say something more general. Now I was covering for Scott. I wrote:
I reread my letter. Mr. Haggerty, my English teacher, was always telling us to do that. I decided that I needed to end on a more positive note.
I thought about writing about the two video games, but decided against it. Maybe getting socks and underwear for Hanukkah would be a big deal in Russia. Maybe they didn’t get to celebrate at all.
Maybe I should have asked if he had any ideas about how to talk to girls, too. But somehow, asking about how to solve the Cold War seemed easier.
Socks and underwear night turned out to be pretty fun, aside from the socks and underwear. I finally figured out how to spin the dreidel on its stem instead of the normal way. When I was little and my Grandpa Joe was still alive, he’d do it. But I could never do it myself. The trick was to spin the dreidel and kind of snap your fingers at the same time, and to face your hand up instead of down.
“Look, Safta.” I flicked the dreidel so that it spun on its stem.
Safta watched it spin until i
t fell over. It landed on shin, which is the worst letter you can get. But that wasn’t the point and my grandmother knew it.
“Your grandpa would be proud,” she said. I could tell she missed him. Safta was different when Grandpa Joe was alive. She’d still try to get her way, but Grandpa Joe could always get her not to take things so seriously.
Wai Po joined us for the present opening. She gave Lauren and me dress socks and spun the dreidel. Then she told us about the da touluo, a top-spinning competition in China.
“Tops come from China,” she said. “China invented them.”
I lifted up my dreidel and studied it closely. It said Made in Taiwan, but Wai Po would say that didn’t matter—it was still Chinese.
I peeked over at Safta to see if she would say something back, but she just smiled and said, “Isn’t that nice?”
Why couldn’t it always be like this? I’ll never understand why people get along sometimes, and fight other times. I wish I did. I bet I could solve a lot of problems that way. Maybe even big problems, like the Cold War.
At the beginning of the week, posters appeared all over the hall. Science Fair! Monday! A lot of the posters had little beakers drawn around the edges, and a volcano in the middle, because whoever made the posters knew that 50 percent of the kids would make vinegar-baking soda volcanoes.
Our school always has the science fair on a Monday night, so you have a weekend to get your project together. The fair was optional when you were in sixth grade, but required when you were in seventh. Mrs. Osterberg made a big point of saying that if our experiment didn’t work, it was fine, as long we documented the reasons why.
“That’s science,” she continued. “What was it Edison said? ‘I have not failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’”
She looked at us and added, “Indeed.” Then she scrawled the quote on the board, only no one could read it. In my experience, English teachers have good handwriting; science teachers don’t. Anyway, it didn’t matter what she wrote up there because nobody listened to that bit of advice for the science fair. We believed in another saying: If your science experiment fails, it’s time to go find a new science experiment.
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