In my mind I do some quick calculations. Perhaps I could audition for a symphony while I’m still in school. I could still become a soloist—maybe, hopefully—but how many tours will I go on? How many sold-out Carnegie Hall performances?
I hurry back to the hotel room and snap open my viola case, the minor chord still ringing in my ears. I trace my fingers over the scar, and then I start playing. It doesn’t sound the same. I lock it back in its case so I don’t have to look at how I’ve damaged it.
Arjun hasn’t replied to any of my messages, so I send another few.
What are you up to?
Did you get my last text?
Hey, not sure if my phone is working. Text me back if you get this.
Then I wait and wait and wait.
Aba isn’t back yet, so I start a shower to wash the day off me. I do what I always do in showers now: plant my feet firmly so I don’t lose my balance.
With a fingertip, I trace the jagged pink-white scar on my thigh, remembering how it soothed me to dig the blade into my skin. Sometimes I ache to feel a little of that pain again.
Twenty-six
Tovah
I NEVER THOUGHT I’D BE the type of person to get senioritis, but I’ve been wrong about a lot this year. Second semester in student council means decorating prom posters and ordering crowns for prom royalty. I’m grateful for the mindless break from the rest of my classes.
I squeeze down on a tube of gold puffy paint as Lindsay and Emma Martinez, the student council president, chatter about prom.
“We’re definitely getting a limo,” Emma says.
“We’ll probably get a hotel room.” Lindsay blows on the paint, waiting for it to dry. “Not sure about a limo yet.”
I concentrate on the W at the end of PROM TIX ON SALE NOW, but I screw it up and dribble gold all over the poster. With Adi and Aba on the East Coast, I’ve felt off this whole week. The house is half-empty, and I’ve cooked dinner for Ima and me most nights, usually something easy like stir-fry or spaghetti. The hard part is sitting across from her at the table with two empty chairs next to us.
It makes me wonder how it’ll feel when she’s gone.
“That looks great,” says Ms. Greenwald as she circles the room. “Keep up the good work, you three.”
I’m sure Zack would find some way to make this poster cool. I slip my phone out of my pocket to text him a photo of my artistic masterpiece—Ms. Greenwald doesn’t care if we’re on our phones as long as the work gets done—but before I can, I see something: the e-mail I’ve been waiting months for.
I push myself to my feet so quickly my knees pop.
“Be right back,” I tell Lindsay and Emma, hoping they don’t notice the tremor in my voice. “Bathroom.”
Ms. Greenwald nods at me as I head out the door, teacher-speak for I trust you not to abuse your bathroom privileges.
My wobbly legs carry me down the hall to an empty bathroom. My fingers are so clumsy I miss my phone password a few times before I can read the e-mail.
Dear Tovah, it begins again. Like we’re on a first-name basis. Like we’re friends. The admissions committee has completed its review of your application, and we are so sorry to tell you that we are unable to offer you admission to Johns Hopkins.
The so is what gets me. Johns Hopkins is so sorry.
My phone lands on the linoleum with a soft thwick.
I press my hands against the porcelain sink. “So sorry,” I tell my reflection.
Then I feel it. Deep inside my chest cavity, next to my stomach, this twist that makes me bend over, my head between my arms as I stare down at the sink drain. At the swirls of hair trapped inside it. The makeup smeared on the sides.
My heart slams against my rib cage over and over and over like it’s trying to escape, and my vision blurs. I push the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, willing the tears not to start. I push so hard that when I take my hands away, there are spots in my vision. I’m shaking so badly, my breathing ragged.
They didn’t even wait-list me. They absolutely, positively, definitively do not want me.
My first-semester grades were flawless and my additional letters of recommendation emphasized how good a fit I’d be for Johns Hopkins. But that wasn’t enough. None of it was.
One, two, three, four deep breaths, the way Coach makes us do during track warm-ups sometimes.
Then I’m out the door, blinking back tears and sprinting down the hall and into the parking lot. I’ve never skipped before. Even though I pass a few teachers, no one stops me. It’s like I’ve accumulated all this good-kid cred by being Tovah Siegel these past four years, and no one cares that a second-semester senior is about to skip the last twenty minutes of seventh period.
Fleetingly, I wonder what else I’d be able to get away with.
Where are you?
I have your backpack.
ARE YOU OK???
On my way up to my room, I type back something about my period, and Lindsay replies with a frowny-face emoji.
“Tov?” It’s Ima, calling from downstairs. Faintly, her knitting needles clack-clack-clack. She knits slower than she used to. She has to give her fingers so many breaks. “Can you help me with something?”
I sigh and tromp down the stairs. “What is it?”
She places the needles next to her on the couch. “Are you all right, Tovah’le? You look a little . . . frizzled? Is that the right word?”
Ima’s frown is deep, the wrinkles like parentheses on each side of her mouth. Depression is hitting her harder now that she’s home all day, though Aba’s been trying to work from home one or two days a week so he can keep her company and be there if she needs anything. This week, though, she’s been all alone.
“You mean frazzled.” My correction’s much harsher than I intend it to be. “No, I’m fine. Just a long day. What do you need?” I hope she can’t hear the impatience in my voice.
“The yarn.” She picks up a skein of purple wool and crushes it in her hand. “There’s a knot, and I can’t”—tug—“seem”—tug—“to untie it.” She curses in Hebrew. Hurls the ball of yarn across the room. Rage clenches her teeth and fists, reddens her cheeks.
As calmly as I can, I retrieve the yarn. It takes me a couple minutes, but I finally undo the knot.
“Todah,” she says, the anger fading. Sometimes the mood swings last an instant, making her capable of going from zero to fury at any time. “Do you want to sit for a while? You can knit something for yourself, if you want. Remember, you tried it once when you were little? You made a few scarves.”
No. That was Adina. She taught Adina how to knit, but not me.
One day, will she be unable to tell us apart?
“I have to do something upstairs,” I tell her.
When I reach my room, I rummage through all my desk drawers, tossing trinkets and dull pencils and loose papers on the carpet. Finally I find it: Gray’s Anatomy, the classic anatomy textbook. Cliché, but anyone interested in medicine has to have a copy. Aba gave it to me when I returned home from the Johns Hopkins summer program. I stare at the glossy cover, the well-worn pages with intricate drawings of the human body.
Then I yank the cover by the corner and rip it off. Fuck you, Gray’s Anatomy.
I flip to a diagram of the four chambers of the heart, two atria, two ventricles. I tear it into halves. Into quarters. Into eighths. Broken heart, so sad.
The next page I land on is a grayscale rendering of the brain. I break apart the hemispheres. I shred the cerebellum, killing this person’s balance and coordination, occipital lobe, rendering this person blind, and temporal lobe, making them forget it ever happened.
Losing Johns Hopkins must be my punishment for testing negative. It’s how I can repay this cosmic debt I owe. It’s the universe telling me luck doesn’t exist, after all. I’m lucky and unlucky all at once.
It’s the only way I can rationalize it.
I sever heads. I amputate limbs. I castrate men. I turn it all in
to confetti, and then into dust. When I finish, there are more books. Old lab reports I saved because I got As. Endless certificates of achievement and participation. All of them, dust.
The Nirvana ticket is the only thing I can’t bear to destroy. Kurt Cobain didn’t betray me. Nirvana made me no promises they couldn’t keep. I put on “Lithium” and blast it, growling along off-key.
I am acting like Adina: ruled by my emotions. We haven’t ever been that different, after all.
Adina. I’ve tried so hard with her, even when it felt impossible to do so. Maybe it’s because of Adina, though, that I didn’t get in.
My life has been eighteen years of alphabet soup, AP and SAT and GPA meant to lead me to JHU. The best biology education, then the best medical school, best residency . . .
Since I decided this was my path, people have always told me I’d make such a good doctor, a skilled surgeon. Everyone said they knew, they knew I’d get in. How can I tell my parents? My teachers? Zack, who once said he liked how ambitious I am? Am I still ambitious if I’ve failed?
Paper fuzz covers my clothes and floor like a thin dusting of snow. My room’s a disaster zone, nothing left to take apart. Still, adrenaline surges through me, so back downstairs I go, taking the steps three at a time.
“I’m going for a run!” I shout to Ima before bolting outside.
I zip my hoodie all the way up and tie it under my chin. I forgot my special bra, but there’s no going back now. The air bites at my ears, turning them numb. The reason is because—
Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter.
My legs carry me eleven miles north. Nearly a half marathon. Track started a few weeks ago, and I push myself harder than I ever do at practice. I run on sidewalks and through parks and parking lots. The sky darkens and the temperature drops, my clothes damp with perspiration. I have to keep going. Running used to be my time to think about the future without distraction, but today I understand why everyone uses it to clear their heads. The only thing in mine is the thump of my feet on cement, the pulse of my heart in my ears.
I don’t know what will happen if stop.
But I do stop at a gas station in Shoreline, when my feet are screaming and my throat is dry. My family doesn’t use disposable bottles because they’re bad for the environment, but right now nothing sounds better than crunching plastic in my fist as cold water streams down my throat.
After I pay, I head outside and chug it all in nearly one gulp. I suck the last drops of it, the sides of the bottle caving in.
And then it all comes back up.
I fall to the pavement, my knees smacking the cement. I heave again, my stomach twisted and my throat raw.
“Are you all right?” asks a woman filling up her hatchback. “Should I call an ambulance?”
I wipe my mouth with the sleeve of my hoodie. Slowly get to my feet. “I’m fine. Thanks.” Then I’m on my aching feet again, limping to the nearest bus stop a couple blocks away. It takes me three buses and almost two hours to get home.
Ima’s standing outside my inside-out room, gaping at the paper snowstorm I left behind.
“Tovah’le,” she says, voice full of confusion. Like she doesn’t know who I am anymore, and maybe I don’t either. “What did you do?”
Spring
Twenty-seven
Adina
A BROKEN INSTRUMENT FOR A broken girl. My viola and I have this in common, and I like the poetry of it so much that I haven’t brought it in to be repaired yet. We are both imperfect, but we still make beautiful music.
Arjun may feel differently about it, though it’s been three days since I returned from my trip and he hasn’t seen me or my viola. Two days ago I performed with the youth symphony and waited around to see him afterward, but he wasn’t there, despite promising me earlier this month he would be. Yesterday I called him four times. Each time it went to voice mail and I hung up. Maybe he got bored of me. Maybe he went back to his old girlfriend, the one with the wild rose moisturizer who wasn’t his student. I imagine him and this faceless girl in his bed. I imagine him touching her the way he touches me.
I have to make sure there is still an us. Adi and Arjun. Even our names sound right together. Like music.
Friday after sundown, Shabbat, Tovah is locked in her room weeping over Johns Hopkins. I am still waiting on my acceptances; they ought to arrive any day. I am not nervous, though, only eager to know which places want me.
My parents are on a walk, unlikely to notice the car and I are gone until much later. I have no patience for the unreliability of the bus, not today. Besides, if my parents are upset when I get home, I have a feeling I will get away with it.
When I get to his building, before I can get out of my car or even find a parking spot, I spy him getting into his silver Honda Civic. He’s wearing a deep brown jacket I’ve never seen before, probably because we’ve never really been outside together. I’m not sure if I’ve ever noticed the way he walks, but he does it with purpose. Head high, back straight. Perfect posture.
I could wait around until he returns to his apartment, I suppose. Or I could head back home. He fiddles with something in his car, probably trying to find the right music. Liszt? Schubert? Mozart?
I tap my fingernails on the steering wheel. And then I follow him out of the parking lot.
First he goes to Bartell Drugs. I park far enough away that he won’t notice I’m there. He doesn’t know this car, anyway, considering I always take the bus. He carries a canvas tote with the words I ♥ NPR on it, the kind everyone in Seattle uses since the city outlawed plastic bags. He must be either eco-conscious or stingy. I wonder if he keeps the bags in the backseat of his car, the way my family does.
After fifteen minutes, he emerges with his canvas bag half full, judging by how he’s holding it. I wonder what’s inside. Toothpaste and hand soap. Shaving cream. Shampoo. Condoms.
Then he heads to a music shop, my store’s primary competitor, which makes me silently seethe. Is he avoiding my store, or does he simply prefer this one? Mine is better—I made sure of that when I applied. Arjun wanders around the store for a while, chats with a couple salespeople.
I send another text, trying to sound casual.
You around tonight?
Through the window, I watch him peek at his phone and then slip it back in his pocket.
Clearly he is so busy running errands that he cannot reply.
Next he goes to a café in Capitol Hill. I can’t find a parking spot that lets me see inside, so I have to pay for street parking five blocks away. I pull my hood up as I approach the café’s window. Arjun is sitting at a table toward the back. Across from a woman.
My guts twist into pretzels, tighter and tighter until I think I might collapse in the middle of the sidewalk. The woman has delicate features and a blond bob that skims her shirt collar. She’s thin, entirely curveless, and I wonder if the way Arjun pinches the curves of my body and buries his lips in my hip bones is because I am the type of woman he prefers. But she is older than I am, probably in her midtwenties. Closer to his age.
She crosses her carrot-stick legs beneath the table and leans over it. Arjun is tilted slightly away from her. They each have their own cup of coffee, and while she’s nibbling on a muffin, he’s not eating anything. When she reaches out to stroke Arjun’s forearm, he pulls back.
What the hell is going on?
I stand outside the coffee shop watching their conversation I cannot hear for ten, twenty, thirty minutes. By the time Arjun heads for the door, I have to race out of sight, but I lose my balance and slip on a square of wet pavement. I go down hard. When I get back to my car, there’s a pressure behind my eyes and my knees are burning, probably beginning to bruise and bleed beneath my torn-up tights.
I tune the radio to Seattle’s classical station, which is playing Dvorak, and I circle the blocks again and again until I find his car and follow him all the way back to his apartment.
I key in the access code: one-
nine-four-five. No patience for the elevator, I take the stairs two, three at a time. The stairwell smells like wet dog. I don’t know how Tovah runs for fun because this is torture, four flights of stairs. When I reach the third flight, I’m huffing and puffing and have to hold my hand against the wall to ground myself.
On the fourth floor, before I can make it across the hall, the door to 403 swings opens. There he is, holding a basket of laundry, which he nearly drops when he sees me.
“Adina! Shit, you scared me.” He sets the basket down as I draw nearer. Inside I see his collared shirts, his burgundy sweater, his underwear, black and gray and one pair that’s plaid. “What are you—how did you get in?”
He didn’t ask me that the last time I got in. He didn’t ask how.
“I need to talk to you.”
Picking up the basket, he heads to the elevator and presses the down button. “I’m busy. Can this wait?”
I wedge myself inside the elevator with him. “No. It can’t. Who is she?”
“Who is who?”
“The blond woman!” I sputter, breath ragged. Who the fuck else would I be talking about? “The blond woman I saw you with in Capitol Hill today.”
“You were there?”
“You weren’t answering any of my messages or calls. I’ve been back for three days and I haven’t seen you.” My voice trembles and cracks. My stupid, young, eighteen-year-old voice. “What were you so busy with today that you couldn’t take two seconds to reply to me? Going to Bartell’s and the music shop and meeting her?”
A couple measures of silence pass between us.
“Were you following me?”
I open my mouth to either defend myself or confess, I’m not sure which.
Then, with a screech, the elevator stops.
“Fuck,” he mutters, shoving his palm into the wall. “It’s always doing this. It should start back up again soon.”
Pushing my back against the wall, I say, “How long does it usually take?” I wonder if we will suck up all the oxygen before it begins descending again.
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