by Sigal Samuel
“Cool,” Sammy said, and Alex grinned.
Then she looked at her watch and said we should probably go home, since Dad would be wondering where we were. Alex said okay, but before letting us leave he made us each pick out books to borrow. Sammy chose Cracking Binary Code and Patterns in the Chaos: Listening for Intelligent Life in the Cosmos. I didn’t know what to choose, so Alex picked one out for me: Important Names in Astronomy Today. The book was gigantic, and even though I was positive I would never actually read it, I took it anyway because I could tell from the way his eyes started to shine that it would make Alex happy.
By the time we started making our way home, the sky was dark. The streets were empty. It was Saturday night and all the Hasids were probably still in synagogue. I looked at the clouds, trying to imagine the different voices that must’ve been traveling on the wind at that moment—radio signals, TV signals, messages sent into outer space—but the air around us was still and silent. We turned onto our block and it was hard to believe anyone on the planet had ever spoken a single word. To reassure myself, I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured a series of zeros and ones streaming through the universe. Sammy turned her key in the lock and we said hello into the darkness of the hallway. Nobody answered. For some reason, my stomach began to ache.
We always had Language Arts last on Mondays. I knew that Ms. Davidson liked to lock up her bike in the second-to-last rack behind the school, so on Monday morning instead of walking to Normal School I decided to take my bike. I locked it up next to her big blue bicycle with the shiny bell and the basket on the handlebars. Then I went to class.
When the bell rang at the end of last period, I hunched over my journal and kept right on writing, like I was very concentrated on my thoughts. After a while, I saw Ms. Davidson’s dress out of the corner of my eye, so I pressed my nose close to the page for extra believability. Then she said, “Lev? The bell rang a few minutes ago. Shouldn’t you be getting home?”
I looked up fast and checked the clock, then made my eyes wide to show how surprised I was. I followed her out of the class and down the stairs and into the empty lot behind the school.
“I left my bike over here,” I explained. “I love biking, don’t you?”
She smiled. “Love it!”
We reached the second-to-last rack and she started unlocking her bike. I leaned over to unlock mine, which was so close to hers it was actually touching. For a second I was nervous that she might get suspicious, but when she saw what I was doing she just laughed.
“Well!” she said. “Look at that.”
She was already pulling her bike out of the rack, so I knew there wasn’t any time to lose. Using my most casual voice, I asked, “When’s your favorite time of day to go biking?”
She thought about this for a second, and while she thought, I prayed. Then, because God sometimes listens to you if you pray really hard, she gave the exact answer I was hoping for.
“Night,” she said with a laugh. “I like a good middle-of-the-night bicycle ride! Why do you ask?”
“That’s so funny! My dad loves to go biking at night. He does it all the time!”
“Is that so?”
“Sure!” I said. Then I started to tell her about the time Dad took me and Sammy out for a bike ride in the middle of the night. “It was four in the morning,” I said, to make sure she knew how much he liked the thing she also liked. “We went all the way from our house, which by the way if you want to know is 5479 Hutchison, all the way to the mountain and then all the way back! And we didn’t get home until sunrise.”
“What a fun adventure!” she said, climbing onto her bike. “Well, Lev, I’ll see you—”
“Wait!” I wanted to tell her some more interesting things about Dad, like that he was a professor and highly intelligent and understood completely about Very Private Things and could make macaroni and cheese better than anyone else’s dad in the neighborhood, which I knew for a fact was true even though he hadn’t actually made it for us in ages, but all of a sudden I looked down and something very small and very white caught my eye.
There was a flower in her pedal. From the way it was sticking out, I could tell she hadn’t put it there on purpose. It’d just gotten caught as she rode her way through a forest or meadow or something like that. It made me feel sad, but I didn’t understand why.
“Lev? Was there something else you wanted to tell me?”
I shook my head.
“Okay.” She smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow!” And she pedaled away.
I walked my bike down the street, trying to find the reason why I’d suddenly felt so sad, but I couldn’t. This was a thing that happened to me sometimes, I got sad for no reason. Once, when I was eight, I’d asked Sammy what she thought was causing it. I thought maybe it was some kind of sickness, and if it was a sickness it probably had a name, and I wanted to know the name of it. But she just told me not to worry, it happened to her, too, it happened all the time.
When I turned the corner, I saw that Mr. Katz was out on his lawn again. He was sitting on the grass surrounded by the cans of green paint. He had the paintbrush in his hand, and even though he’d already gone over all the leaves once, he was going over them all again.
Because I had nothing better to do, I asked if I could help with the second coat. He said okay, so I sat down and picked up a leaf. The sun was shining and the birds were singing and I felt like I could sit there for hours, warm paint squishing between my hands. I knew I was doing a good job because after I painted a leaf it looked even realer than the leaves of the old oak tree on the lawn. Mr. Katz was happy, too, and when I left he said I could come back and help out some other time if I wanted.
There was almost no light left in the sky by the time I got home. Dad and Sammy were in the kitchen. He was making dinner and she was setting the table.
“Why are your hands all covered in paint?” he asked me.
I stared down at my green hands and froze.
“You haven’t been talking to that old quack down the street, have you? Because when I passed by his house this morning, I saw him sitting there with green paint.”
“I, um . . .”
“The man’s delusional. One too many religious ideas gone to his head.” He frowned down at me. “Well? Were you with him, yes or no?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sammy shake her head, very slowly, from side to side.
“No.”
“Then why are your hands all covered in paint?”
“I’m working on a project? With Alex? From Normal School?”
“For what class?”
“Science?
“What’s the project on?”
I froze again. But in the next second, Sammy was standing right beside me.
“Chlorophyll,” she said.
He looked at her. “Oh?”
“Yes,” she said. Then she stared down at her feet and added, “And just because Mr. Katz is religious, that doesn’t make him delusional. He looks lonely. I feel sorry for him.”
“Is that right?” Dad said. But she didn’t answer, so he just told me to wash my hands and then turned back to face the stove.
As I walked to the sink, I snuck a look at Sammy. I rolled my eyes in Dad’s direction and her face cracked into a smile. I grinned. Me and my sister didn’t just share the same nameless sickness. We also shared a secret language that only we could speak.
In Hebrew School, we spent most of the time listening to Mr. Glassman read the Torah out loud. He’d read a section, then try to get one of us to translate it into English. Because nobody ever wanted to do it, nobody ever volunteered, which meant lots of seconds passed without anybody saying anything, which made you wonder why Mr. Glassman didn’t just call on someone and make them translate it like any normal teacher would. After a while, you realized Mr. Glassman didn’t need to call on anyone because he sort of had his own trick, which was to just stare at us in perfect silence until finally, eventually, somebody cracked.
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br /> But that week the temperature shot up like crazy. Mr. Glassman, who wore his usual neat shirt and vest and tie even though it was a million degrees, had circles of sweat under his arms. I counted off seconds in my head. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty. After sixty-three seconds passed without anyone saying anything, Mr. Glassman did something he’d never done before. He closed his book and asked if we wanted, just this once, to hear a story instead.
Right away everyone yelled “Yes!” and slammed their books shut. Mr. Glassman ran his fingers through his damp gray hair and smiled.
Rabbi Akiva, he said, lived two thousand years ago, but he wasn’t always called Rabbi. For the first forty years of his life he was just plain Akiva, a poor shepherd who didn’t know how to read or what the alphabet was or even how to pray. He said he was so jealous of the Torah scholars in his village that if he’d had the chance he would have bitten them like a wild donkey. But then one day, when he was out with his sheep, he saw a big rock lying in a riverbed and a tiny stream of water dripping onto it from up above. It was a very slow drip, but Akiva saw that over many years that drip had worn down the rock. Now there was a hollow space in it big enough for a pool of water to collect. He thought: If a drop of water can make its way into a stone, the Torah can make its way into my heart! The next day, he went to school with his youngest child to learn how to read the alphabet. By the end of his life, he had the most knowledge and the most students of any Torah scholar in the world.
That night, at dinner, Dad asked again what me and Sammy were learning in school. He wanted to know how Sammy was liking King Lear so far, but she just stared down at her skirt, so instead I told him all about Ms. Davidson and how she went for bike rides in the middle of the night and wore happy colors and really made you think. After a few minutes, he yawned. I could tell he was extremely bored but I kept on talking because that was the only way, because if I kept on talking, word after word, drop after drop, sooner or later a space would open up.
On my way home from school in the last week of May, I saw Mr. Katz sitting on his lawn in between the old oak tree and a second tree trunk that seemed to have sprouted up overnight. But when I got closer, I saw that it wasn’t a real trunk at all, it was the hundreds of toilet paper rolls that we’d painted brown tied together with dental floss. I went over and said, “Hello, Mr. Katz.”
“Hello, Lev.”
“Are you making a tree, by any chance?”
After a very long time, he said, “Yes.” Then he grabbed my wrist and pulled down hard so I kind of fell onto my knees on the grass. He whispered, “Can you keep a secret?”
I rubbed my wrist and said, “Yes.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“This is not an ordinary tree I am making.”
I dropped my wrist and said, “What kind of tree is it?”
“This,” he said, “this is the Tree of Knowledge.”
The next day, I decided to ask Mr. Glassman about the Tree of Knowledge, because all I knew was that it was in the Garden of Eden and that eating from it was what got Adam and Eve kicked out. I waited for Torah class to be over, and then I went up to him and said, “Mr. Glassman, I’ve been thinking about how you said it’s never too early to start preparing for your bar mitzvah, and I was wondering if I could study with you some days after school?”
Smiling, he pinched my cheek and said, “Geshmack!” He told me we could start right away, so I followed him home.
When Mrs. Glassman opened the door, she said, “Two times I get to see Lev in the same month, tu-tu-tu kineahora, but if I knew my Chaim was going to be schlepping you here every day I would prepare for you more things to eat!” She told me to sit at the kitchen table and brought us hot tea even though it was a zillion degrees outside. She said, “Drink!” so I drank.
Mr. Glassman asked when my Hebrew birthday was so he could calculate when my bar mitzvah would fall during the year. That way he’d know what Torah portion I’d have to read. I said, “I don’t actually know when it is because my dad says that calendar’s based on a backward idea of when the world was created, which scientists are still iffy about but which was definitely more than six thousand years ago.”
Mr. Glassman raised his eyebrows, then shook his head and sighed.
Since what I really wanted to learn about was the Tree of Knowledge, I asked Mr. Glassman if we could study Genesis instead. His face lit up. He said, “Begin at the beginning, excellent idea. I see you’re just as thorough as your sister!”
We started reading the first chapter of Genesis, but after an hour we had only gotten up to the part about the grass being created. Even though I wanted to ask about the Tree right away, Mr. Glassman could see the toilet paper roll version of it right from his window and I didn’t want to make him suspicious that maybe I was trying to help Mr. Katz.
The reason why was that Mr. Glassman was not the Hasidic kind of Jew that believes in personal miracles and prayers full of dancing and curls that bounce at the sides of your face. He was the Misnaged kind of Jew that believes in logic and straight lines, like the lines of his shirt and vest and tie, like his combed gray hair. Once when I came over after Hebrew School, Mr. Glassman said that Mr. Katz was a nice person, but he was all faith and no knowledge. What good was one without the other? An animal also had faith! Mrs. Glassman poked him in the ribs when he said that, but I could tell from her face she thought he was right.
That’s how I knew I had to be patient and come back as many times as it took. I didn’t mind because Mrs. Glassman’s rugelach was the best in the neighborhood. And even though she talked to me for nine gazillion hours before letting me leave, asking questions like “You are liking math class?” and “You have learned about Fibonacci numbers?” and “A syllogism, you know what it is, yes? No? How can you not know?” she only pinched my cheeks three times.
Luckily it took me just a few seconds to get home because the Glassmans’ house and our house were so close they were practically touching. Actually there was so little space between them that when we were little Dad used to always tell me and Sammy to keep it down, noise traveled easily through the windows and he was sure the Glassmans could hear us. I pointed out that we never heard any voices coming from their house, and noise travels both ways, but Dad just said that must be because the Glassmans talk very quietly. I didn’t want to tell him he was wrong, but I knew for a fact that wasn’t true, because sometimes when Mr. and Mrs. Glassman talked to me their voices were so loud I could feel it in my teeth.
As soon as I opened our front door, I knew right away Sammy was already home. I could hear her voice coming from her room. She was chanting in Hebrew, so I knew it was the Torah portion she was preparing to read at the bat mitzvah next month.
I crept into my room quietly so that she wouldn’t hear me and get embarrassed or mad. I clicked the door shut and held my breath for nineteen seconds straight, and she kept on chanting. But then Dad came home, and the second she heard his voice in the hallway she stopped.
He called, “Samara?” and she said, “Yeah?” and he said, “Would you help me get dinner started?” and she said, “Okay.” I heard Dad ask, “How about cheeseburgers?” so I ran into the hallway to say, “Yes!” but when I saw Sammy’s face I said, “Ye—No, could we have grilled cheese instead?” When Dad went into the kitchen, Sammy gave me a funny look, like maybe she could tell that I could tell that she was trying to keep kosher in secret.
The second the bell rang for lunch, I knew something was up. All the kids jumped up from their desks, got their lunches from their lockers, and raced out to the empty lot behind the school. Gabe was in the lead and I could tell he had something hidden in his jacket, because the corner of it was peeking out, a lighter blue against the dark blue of his ripped-up jeans.
Alex was taking his time getting his lunch out of his locker. I told him to hurry up and he asked why and I said to just do it and he asked why so I pulled him by the sleeve and rushed with him outside
. I had a very tight feeling in my stomach, and once we reached the empty lot it took me about three milliseconds to understand why.
Gabe was standing at the far end, near where the grade sixes usually played dodgeball. Swarming around him were twenty kids from our class, and they were all pushing and shoving at each other to get a better look. The thing they were trying to get a better look at was in Gabe’s right hand, and the thing Gabe’s right hand was holding was—
“The Secret Diary of Alex Caufin,” announced Gabe, and the entire class cheered their heads off. “Who wants to hear what this loser really thinks of us?” Again the kids roared. Very slowly, with a huge grin on his face, Gabe opened the journal to the first page.
He frowned. The kids waited. He turned the page. The kids waited. He flipped to the middle of the notebook. One kid shouted, “Come on already!” and even Dean shouted, “Yeah!” but Gabe just scowled. I turned around to look at Alex but he was walking up to Gabe and Dean. Half the kids spilled onto one side of him and half the kids spilled onto the other. I couldn’t figure out why he looked so calm, but then I saw the journal in Gabe’s hand and remembered what I’d seen on the first page, which was line after line of numbers. The whole entire thing was written in code, and that’s why Gabe couldn’t read it, and that’s why his face was turning so red!
Alex stretched out his hand and said, “I believe you have something that belongs to me.”
Behind Gabe’s shoulder, Dean grinned and raised his fist like maybe he was planning to give Alex something else instead. But just then Ms. Davidson came outside and we heard her voice call out, “What’s going on here?”
Dean lowered his fist. Alex snatched his journal back. The two of us went inside.
Alex seemed proud of himself, but all day long my stomach stayed tight because I could see Gabe shooting us laser looks of hate out of the corners of his shiny black too-small eyes.
Which was why, hours later, after I’d gone to bed and crawled under the covers, I turned on my flashlight and took out my journal and read through all the pages I’d filled so far. I wanted to make sure there was nothing that would be too embarrassing if Gabe and Dean ever decided to read it out loud in front of the entire class.
