by Una LaMarche
So I’m feeling pretty good walking to school to start my junior year, even if I am carrying ten pounds of books over my shoulder and wearing my same old jeans and navy hoodie, the one with the cuffs all frayed and thumb holes poked through. (My dad may have given me money, but that doesn’t mean I could leave the house to spend it.) But it’s seventy-five and sunny, and I’ve got a free first period and Charles Mingus playing on my phone as I walk down Kingston Avenue, past the neat little brick row houses with red plastic awnings jutting out over front stoops tagged with amateur graffiti, past the nail salons spilling their acetone-laced air-conditioning out onto the sticky pavement and the liquor stores, all neon signs and labyrinthian aisles of lotto-ticket-lined bulletproof glass, before I finally see the broad, leafy lanes of Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn’s own little ghetto Champs-Élysées.
And then I see them.
Black coats, white shirts, black fedoras, and beards on most of them, just like that mean-looking dude outside the elevator. They’re clustered around a reddish brick building with pointed turrets and stained-glass windows that looks kind of like a church crossed with a normal apartment complex. But the really weird thing is that I’ve made this walk at least five hundred times, and I’ve never noticed them before—not as anything other than scenery, anyway. Just then a group of girls rounds the corner, in matching black skirts, white blouses, and cardigans, and out of the corner of my eye I see a lock of dark, curly hair lifted up by the wind, and suddenly my breath is gone. I stare for longer than I should, just to make sure it’s not her (of course it isn’t, and to add potential injury to insult a burly middle-aged guy sees me looking and gives me the stink-eye). As I make a hasty retreat down the steps to the train, Devorah’s words ring in my head—What, we all look the same to you?—and I think about how just a week ago I wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a crowd, and now she’s the only thing I’d see in one. Not that I’ll ever see her again. I turn my Mingus up, wedge myself into a too-packed 3 train between two Jamaican nurses trading salt-fish recipes, and try to zone out.
• • •
When I get to school I take the stairs two at a time to the third floor and step over the other free-period kids, who are sitting cross-legged under their lockers, alternating between screaming greetings at one another and staring into their phones. I don’t see anyone I know yet, so I head to my locker, which is just through the doorway that leads to the back stairwell and up to “the cage,” a chain-link janitorial supply area by the roof entrance that’s supposedly a secret hookup spot. Not that I’d know.
I’m unloading the contents of my messenger bag when Polly passes by about six inches from me, so close I can smell her coconut shampoo. She’s got her hair pulled back in a little ponytail with pieces tucked behind each ear, and she’s wearing skinny jeans, a tight purple button-down, gray Converse, and thick, black-framed glasses that added up make her look like an impossibly cute hipster librarian. But something about the sight of her doesn’t paralyze me for once. And maybe that’s why, for the first time in months, she zeros in on me right away.
“Hey,” she says, a little hesitantly.
“Hey.” I close my locker and try to lean against it casually, which it turns out is impossible if you’re actually trying. I give up and shove my hands in my pockets.
“I was actually looking for you,” she says. Polly’s amber eyes dart nervously behind me, where a couple of goth-looking girls are clustered around their lockers comparing schedules. “I’ve gotta get to International Relations. But, hey, is Ryan okay? I felt bad not staying, but my dad—”
“Hates us?” I finish.
“No!” Polly smiles apologetically. “He was just in a bad mood.”
“Right,” I say, raising an eyebrow. I mean it to be flirtatious, but Polly frowns. “I mean, right, like of course,” I say, clearing my throat.
“Right,” she says. It could not get any more awkward.
Or so I thought.
“This freak bothering you, P?” Jason Rivera, the varsity basketball shooting guard, who’s easily two hundred pounds and built like a tractor trailer, all square shoulders and compact muscle, swoops in and lifts Polly up under one arm like she’s a physics textbook (not that J-Riv, which is his ridiculous, derivative nickname, would ever pick up a physics textbook, I’m just saying). Polly squeals delightedly and yells, “Put me down, monster! Jaxon and I were just talking.”
Jason drops her and looks me up and down, clearly unimpressed.
“Action Jaxon, huh?” he says. No one calls me that. “He don’t look so weird to me. Well, except for that pube mustache.” My face tingles with shame. I only have to shave like once every three weeks, but if I forget I get some sparse little tufts. I didn’t think anything was showing, but Ameerah fogged up the bathroom mirror so much with her long-ass shower this morning, I guess I didn’t really get a good look.
“Thanks,” I say, attempting to defuse whatever’s happening here with self-deprecation. “I’m working on a soul patch, too.”
Jason shakes his head, like I’m a lost cause. “Whatever, freak.”
“Hey,” I say to Polly, who’s averting her eyes. “Did I miss a memo or something? Why does he keep calling me a freak?”
“Because,” Jason booms, “this is the freak hallway, freak.” He bangs his giant fist against my locker for emphasis, and a group of seniors passing behind him crack up. I look behind me just in time to see one of the goth girls give him the finger.
“Let’s go, P,” Jason says, leading Polly away by the arm. She shrugs at me and mouths “Sorry.”
I’m sorry for you, I want to call after her. You’re better than this. But the urge to get through my first day without a beat-down is slightly more powerful, so I just watch them go.
• • •
I wait around for Ryan, but he’s late—really late, since first period is almost over. And I know we have the same schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays: free first followed by a double AP Bio lab. We also have the same social studies elective: Intro Philosophy on Monday and Wednesday mornings with Mr. Miserandino, whose nickname is “Mr. Misery” because he routinely yells at students and kicks you out of class if you’re even a second late. My commute is half an hour door to door, so I’m gonna have to hustle to get here early. I’ll probably have to get up at six thirty just to win the race for the first shower. Or nah, I’ll just skip the shower those days and spray on some extra Axe. Like my mom says, I have to keep my eyes on the prize, and I’m willing to bet the admissions board at Columbia cares more about grades than a little natural musk.
Finally the bell rings, and Ryan runs through the door so fast he nearly smacks into me. He’s still wearing his sling, which he’s tagged himself with a Sharpie message that reads, “Keep Calm and Carry My Books.”
“There you are!” he pants. “Oh, man, you owe me. I told Miserandino your grandma died yesterday.”
“What are you talking about? And that’s not cool. Both of my grandmas are still alive, man.”
“Philosophy,” he says. “The class we just had. Or I just had.”
I place my hands on his shoulders, making the most of our six-inch height difference. “Ryan,” I say. “What are you smoking? We have a free first period Tuesdays.”
He swats my hands away, his blue eyes twinkling with some mixture of amusement and schadenfreude. “Jaxon,” he says, imitating my condescending tone. “Today’s a Monday schedule, dude.”
“Oh, no.” I feel the blood drain from my face. I’ve accidentally cut my first class of the year. With Mr. Misery, who takes no prisoners. “Oh, shit.”
“Yup. You so owe me.”
“I don’t owe you,” I say, grabbing my bag. (If today is a Monday schedule, that means I have Spanish in five minutes, which means I need to get halfway around the building.) “I stayed with you in the ER all day Thursday. If anything, you owed me. And now
we’re even.” I make a break for the stairwell, and Ryan follows. “By the way,” I say once we’re out of the goth girls’ earshot, “did you know our lockers are in the freak hallway?”
“I found out this morning when some chick with a septum barbell tried to scalp me tickets to see a band called Blood Spatter,” Ryan says. “I already put in a request with the main office to switch.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.
“I would have, if you would have been on time,” he says, trying to rub it in some more.
“You could have texted me,” I say as we exit the stairwell on the second floor and merge into boisterous teenage traffic. “Or did your phone get dislocated trying to jump the toaster?”
Ryan gets quiet, and I wonder if I’ve hurt his feelings, but when I turn back to check he smiles at me nervously.
“Look,” he says, struggling to keep pace, “I was going to talk about it at lunch, but, um . . . I’m kind of not supposed to hang out with you for a little while.”
“What?!” I stop in my tracks, and a tiny freshman plows into me, sending his iPod flying. Ryan retrieves it for the kid and then drags me over to a nearby water fountain.
“I know,” he says. “But my parents are pretty pissed about what happened.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” I say, glancing at my phone. I have sixty seconds before I’m late to my second class of the day.
“They kind of think it is,” Ryan says, looking at the floor and scratching the back of his neck.
“Why would they think that?”
“Because I kind of . . . told them it was?”
“Ryan!”
“I know, I know,” he says, holding up his good hand defensively. “But they were so mad at me for not telling them about it, they were going to take my Xbox 360, so I needed a scapegoat.”
The warning bell rings—thirty seconds—and I take my cue. I back away from Ryan and toward the small beige-paneled room where I’ll be forced to perform dialogue scenes in which I describe in detail every piece of furniture in my imaginary Mexican hotel room.
“I don’t have time for this,” I yell. And as I turn my back I wonder if it’s remotely possible that this could all be a dream, one of those worst-case-scenario anxiety nightmares in which everything that could go wrong, does. I’m an accidental truant and a self-selected freak. My best friend can’t talk to me, and my former crush is getting manhandled in front of me by a giant basketball star. I have a patchy mustache and old clothes, and nobody sees past that to the person underneath.
No one but her, anyway. Devorah’s different from every girl—hell, every person—I’ve ever known. She has no game, no agenda. She made me feel like the best version of myself: brave and funny but not trying too hard; romantic but not cheesy. She made me feel like a good man, maybe even good enough to deserve someone as open and guileless and beautiful as her.
But I’ve got to stop thinking that. I don’t know where Devorah is, and I probably never will. Like the saying goes, lightning doesn’t tend to strike twice.
Chapter 9
Devorah
SEPTEMBER 2, 12:30 PM
People like to say it’s a small world. And even if you’re talking big picture, that’s probably true. But my world sometimes redefines the word “small.” Like the fact that my school is four blocks from my house, and my family’s store is one block from my school. Which means that on the average day, I travel exclusively within the same quarter-mile radius.
It didn’t used to feel so small. I never wanted to venture outside. We’re taught early on that strangers can’t be trusted and that we are never to speak to anyone who isn’t Hasidic (well, except for the boys and men who get to ride around in the Mitzvah mobiles, trying to bring non-Orthodox Jews back into the fold; Chabad is the only Hasidic sect that embraces proselytizing, which in a way is the only reason I exist, since my grandma was allowed to convert). Anyway, I know it sounds closed-minded, but I never really even wondered about what life was like beyond the borders of my neighborhood. People outside the faith didn’t seem real, more like two-dimensional cutouts living in a far-off other world.
Before I met Jaxon, my only connection to life beyond Chabad, ironically, was through the subjects I studied in school. This might sound nerdy, but I really loved learning. I used to pore over my textbooks when I got home, following the words with my pointer finger and stopping whenever I struck something I wanted to commit to memory, like octopuses have rectangular pupils, or every hour the universe expands by a billion miles in all directions. When my finger hit a sentence that was blacked out by the school censors, it felt like an exciting mystery.
But something about this year feels very different. Suddenly nothing quite fits—and not just my billowy white school blouse, which is straining at the bust for the first time under my thick navy vest. I feel an unrest creeping in, that expanding, unknown universe straining against the confines of my consciousness. And it’s paralyzing. This morning I sat through my Hebrew class without raising my hand once, even though as usual I knew all the answers. I forgot to take notes during Halakha because Mrs. Piekarski started talking about the three levels of sin—pesha, avon, and chet—and I got distracted trying to figure out which sin I’m committing by not being able to stop thinking about Jaxon. Pesha is purposeful and wicked, deliberately defying G-d, like stealing or killing. Avon is uncontrollable lust or emotion against your will or better judgment. And chet is unintentional, obviously the best kind. I want it to be chet, but I’m pretty sure it’s avon. It can’t be a good sign that I keep thinking about the curve of his lips in profile, or the way his skin felt against my own, like electrified velvet. Incidentally, I don’t marvel over the censored pages in my schoolbooks anymore. I know what Romeo and Juliet are doing behind those marks. And more than that, I want to know.
“Are you okay?” Shoshana asks me when we break for lunch in the courtyard, sitting down at a wooden table and unwrapping our chicken sandwiches. “You seem weird.” The sun shines brightly in my eyes, lending Shosh’s light brown hair a halo of starbursts.
“What do you mean?” I take a bite of my sandwich but find it hard to chew. My mouth is dry, dehydrated. I probably sweated all my fluids out through stress over the weekend. Mom took us clothes shopping in the city, and every dark-skinned boy I saw made my heart pound. I don’t know if I was more scared to find out that it was him or that it wasn’t.
“Ever since Rose had the baby you haven’t been returning my calls,” she says, pouting a little. “And you haven’t told me anything yet.” She lowers her voice and leans in so that the teachers chaperoning lunch won’t hear. “Especially about the stranger.”
“How did you hear about that?” I stage-whisper. But it’s not surprising. Gossip travels fast in our community, because the culture is so insular. Everyone wants to know everyone’s business. Amos probably told Shosh’s brother, Judah, or Hanna told her friend Naomi who lives next door to Shosh’s older sister, Aviva. Jacob also sometimes does his Shomrim patrol with Aviva’s husband, Michah. The potential paths are endless.
“Come on,” Shoshana says with a playful smile. “You? Trapped in a confined space with a black man? That’s like a joke setup, like ‘Two rabbis walk into a bar.’”
“Thanks,” I say.
“But seriously,” she says. “What did you do? Did you freak out?” Shosh has always been easily excitable; the first time I met her, on the street in our neighborhood when we were six, she was literally spinning in circles because she’d eaten too much chocolate babka. I can’t help but get worked up by proxy.
“A little,” I admit, taking a gulp from my water bottle. “Inside, anyway.”
“Did he try to talk to you?”
I nod, ducking my chin to hide the smile that reflexively parts my lips every time I think about our conversation.
“What did he say?”
“Not
much at first. He told me not to worry. Then he tried to get us out. He actually climbed through a hatch in the ceiling.”
“No!” Shosh’s eyes have grown perfectly round. She is loving this.
“Mmm hmmm.”
“What did you do?”
I look around to make sure that none of the teachers are paying attention, and then I lean forward, my chin nearly trembling from the weight of what I’m about to say. I’ve been dying for four days to get the guilt off my chest, and if anyone will understand, I know it’s Shosh. “I spoke to him,” I whisper.
“Shut up.”
“I know,” I say. “But he was being so considerate, and after he kicked open the ceiling just to try to help, I felt bad—or rude—not saying anything.”
Shoshana sits back, smiling softly. “I’m impressed,” she says. “I never would have pegged you for such a rebel.” Of course she’s joking, just like Jaxon was when he called me a rebel. But still, my face burns with shame.
“It’s awful, isn’t it?” I ask.
“It’s not awful, it’s awesome,” Shoshana cries, drawing the attention of the nearby tables. I glare at her, and she lowers her voice again. “What did you guys talk about? No, wait, first tell me what he looked like. Spare no details.”
“He was . . . normal,” I sputter, unprepared for the question.
“Was he handsome?”
“I . . .” am obsessed with his face, even though I can’t remember exactly what it looks like. “Couldn’t really tell. It was dark.”
“What about his body?” Shoshana wiggles her eyebrows. Girls in my community tend to respond to the laws of yichud in two ways: Some never, ever think about the opposite sex, to keep their minds pure; and some think about them all the time, seeing romance as a forbidden mystery. My best friend is clearly in the second camp.
“Shosh! Stop it,” I say, covering my face with my hands.
