The Orchard

by David Hopen

  “I don’t know,” Oliver said, peering over at Davis, “now that they’ve got their little lovers’ spat thing.”

  “And for the record,” Amir continued defensively, “it wouldn’t work if you ran, it’d bite us in the ass. We’d cancel each other out and Davis would win.”

  Evan didn’t blink. “Drop out, then.”

  “I should drop out?”

  “It’s not like you need it,” Evan said.

  “But you do?”

  “This isn’t for my résumé, Amir.”

  “Oh?” Amir forced a laugh. “Then what’s it for?”

  “I have my reasons,” Evan said.

  * * *

  PLASTERED OVER THE WALLS OF the first floor the next morning were dozens of strange posters. Other presidential campaign posters were easy to ignore. Davis, for instance, had circulated images of his face superimposed over the bodies of political luminaires (Davis as a grinning Reagan, a solemn Lincoln, a brooding Hamilton), while Amir had hung several bland SAMSON FOR PRESIDENT signs. These new posters, however, were impossible to overlook. Written on black paper in silvery ink was a simple inscription: THE REBELLION. I knew, at first glance, that this was Evan’s doing.

  Talk of the posters dominated the day. By the end of first period, the administration had ordered Gio to dispose of every mention of The Rebellion. (“Tell Stark,” Gio said, cornering me on my way to class, “that I don’t understand signs and also they’re a huge pain in my huge ass.”) The damage, however, was done. They were all anyone talked about.

  “Yeah, the posters came from that crew,” I overheard a freshman announcing to her friends. “You know, Stark and Harris and Bellow.”

  “You forgot Samson.”

  A third freshman, thumbing his nostril: “I think he’s more of a—what do you call it? Consigliere?”

  “You’ve been watching too much Godfather.”

  “That other guy’s with them, too.”

  “Who’s the other one?”

  “The Hasidic kid,” the first freshman said, pointing in my direction and lowering her voice. “I think they want to take down the school.”

  * * *

  DR. PORTER HANDED BACK OUR second math quiz—I was down to a B-minus—and suggested I visit the peer tutoring service offered at lunch. So I did, making my way to the second floor, only to find Kayla, alone, picking at a large Greek salad, her nose in a book.

  I stood at the doorway for a half-second, deciding whether to leave. I’d made it a point to avoid her since our last encounter, making certain to sit far away in classes. As I made up my mind to leave, however, she cleared her throat. “Your lunches are another flight up, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Sorry. Wrong classroom,” I said hastily. “I was looking for the peer tutor.”

  “How serendipitous.”

  “You’re looking for the tutor, too?”

  “I am the tutor,” she said brightly.

  “You’re the tutor?”

  “Don’t look so shocked. It’s insulting. Math, is it?”

  I walked over and sat beside her. “How’d you guess?”

  “You’re more of a humanities type.”

  “Does that make you a math brain?”

  “It most certainly does not. I’m both.”

  “Lucky you.” I took out my test, littered with red marks. I glanced at the book on her lap. “Artaud?”

  “Ever read him?”

  “No.”

  “You ought to if you’re to maintain your misunderstood literary persona. We can all use a little French avant-garde in our lives. Bump him to the top of your reading list.”

  I nodded, and then, to avoid further small talk, pointed to the first problem on my test—find the length of X in this circle with four intersecting chords—for which I’d received a whopping one out of ten points.

  “Are you guys frightened?” she asked.

  I gave her a blank look. “How come I never know what you’re talking about?”

  “I’m obviously referring to Evan Stark’s bid for presidency, and whether it portends civil war.”

  “Civil war?”

  “You’ll have to make the tragic choice between Evan and Amir, won’t you?” She flipped her wavy, reddish hair. “Well, you won’t bear that burden. But Noah and Oliver will.”

  “Maybe let’s focus on math.”

  She nodded pleasantly, grabbed a pencil from behind her left ear and launched into a comprehensive explanation of circles and tangent lines, pausing now and again to give me looks I pretended not to see.

  * * *

  THE DAY ENDED WITH A surprise. As the final bell rang, Gio posted the roster for the basketball team. At the very bottom of the list was my name.

  “Feast your eyes on that,” Oliver announced, drawing circles around my name with a yellow highlighter. “Aryeh Eden, last and likely least, but nevertheless a member of the Kol Neshama Kings!”

  “Well done, Drew.” Noah gave me a celebratory smack on the back. “Time to start working on that left hand.”

  I’d already resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t be making the team, and had done so contentedly: I could do without the time commitment, I figured, not to mention the pressure. Still, I couldn’t help but smile, especially when Sophia congratulated me as she walked by.

  “Look at that,” Evan said, joining us. “Noah, had yourself a chat with Rocky?”

  “Nah,” Noah said uncomfortably.

  “Right,” Evan said, unconvinced. “Anyone see Amir?”

  “He left.”

  “He hasn’t said a word to me all day,” Evan said.

  “Yeah, well,” Noah said, shrugging, “I don’t think he’s overjoyed with you at the moment.”

  “Shame,” Evan said tonelessly, striding away.

  * * *

  THAT FIRST PRACTICE WAS PAINFUL. We started with fifteen minutes of running purposeless circles around the basketball court, and then, without grabbing water, received an expletive-laden speech about our potential (“I’m going to break each of you so that I can rebuild you with my own two hands”), our goals (“we’ll win division, we’ll win districts, we’ll be the goddamn pride of this school”) and, of course, the singular greatness of Noah Harris.

  Only afterward did we get around to installing our playbook. “Our first game is in two weeks, right after the holidays. Learning my system is now officially more important than your schoolwork. Anyone have a problem?” He glared at us individually, pausing at Amir. “No? Excellent, I better not find out someone bitched to Ballinger.”

  We walked through sets, restarting after any minor mistake, running suicides when Rocky lost his temper. “Attention to detail!” he’d yell as we staggered through wind sprints. “No wasted fucking movements! Every fucking possession is fucking priceless! Fuck!”

  I realized quickly that I had little value on the team. I did decently in the drills and for the most part managed to follow instructions without mishap, but contributed almost nothing during scrimmages. I scrambled irrelevantly, passed upon touching the ball, waited desperately for Rocky to mercifully end practice, which was already running a half hour late. My team went down early in our last game but stormed back frantically after Amir drained several threes in the span of two minutes.

  “Attah boy, Samson!” Rocky thundered. “It’s your fucking stratosphere, you hear me?”

  Down one, Amir stripped the ball and found himself alone with Evan, who raced madly to steer him from the hoop. Amir, at top speed, lowered his shoulder and threw himself into Evan’s chest, just as Evan leaped for the block, sending them crashing into a tangled mess. For a moment they remained on the floor, wrestling to unravel themselves, until they sprang to their feet, pushing and jawing, at which point Amir sized up Evan and socked him directly in the mouth.

  Rocky, blowing wildly on his whistle, sped from the opposite baseline to separate them. He pried them apart and stood between them, gasping for breath, still making inadvertent sounds with th
e whistle. “What the fuck is wrong with you two?”

  Evan spat blood, which he allowed to drip gently from his swelling lip to his white practice jersey.

  “Want to swing at someone?” Rocky asked, vibrating with adrenaline. “You guys know I get off on that. But then swing at an opponent, not each other. Understand? Good. Because boy oh boy, I love this shit. Shake hands and go home.”

  * * *

  AMID THE GROWING ELECTION TENSION was the fact that the High Holidays lurked around the corner. With Rosh Hashanah a few days away, the school announced that the annual selichot program—“Optional but heavily encouraged,” Noah explained, “and painfully boring”—would be held Saturday night, and the focus of Judaic classes turned seasonal: teshuva, moral reformation, the necessity of prayer.

  “‘What is gained if I am silenced, if I go down to the pit?’” Rabbi Bloom lectured at a school-wide assembly. “‘Will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness?’ What we take for granted, what we ignore deliberately for much of our year, rises to the fore as we voyage toward Yom Kippur. When we don our kittel, when we spend day after day repenting, inching closer to God, when we fast and stand before our Maker, our hope is to transcend the fact that we are ashes, to reject our origin, to stake a claim in a higher dimension, to look God in the face. The beauty of Rosh Hashanah is not merely what we mindlessly refer to as renewal, which even the secular variant of the New Year contains, but the opportunity to affirm to ourselves, if to no one else, that we are, in fact, more than the dust to which we return.”

  Rabbi Feldman’s class, too, was spent jolting us into thoughtfulness. “Everyone take one,” he announced, bustling about the classroom to distribute colorful index cards. “Each of you should write one specific thing you want to improve in your life. It can be minor, like opening the door for people or making an effort to greet a friend, or it can be ambitious—say, committing yourself to praying each day or graduating from Minyan X.”

  Amir considered this prospect. “But who sees the card?”

  Rabbi Feldman chortled. “Are you asking if this is graded?”

  “Yes, actually,” Amir said.

  “Cards will be displayed in a school-wide project but will remain anonymous. And ungraded.”

  “What project?”

  “Something the Engineering Club has been working on,” Rabbi Feldman said. “They won an award from University of Miami for it, actually. It’s absolutely delightful, the precision. You’ll see for yourself.”

  Most people crumpled the card or debated the best sexual exploit to include. Yet Noah, I noticed, wrote thoughtfully and Amir, unsurprisingly, scribbled furiously. Even Evan was chewing the cap of his pen ruminatively. As the bell rang and the class rushed to lunch, I jotted the first thing that came to mind, folded my card and handed it to Rabbi Feldman.

  * * *

  THE PROJECT, UNVEILED LATER THAT day, was an intricate model of an ancient coliseum within a small city, stationed outside the school entrance. It was a large structure, the size of a giant outdoor chess set. The model stretched some fifteen feet in length and width, and its pieces were as tall as five feet high. There were replicas of buildings, of people, of cattle, all surrounded by massive pillars and walls and altars and gold-plated doors. An outer court, filled with figurines assembled in prayer, led into an inner court, which housed some sort of temple. Inside the temple stood a sanctuary, where small-scale priests loitered, and then an innermost chamber. The architecture poked at my knees.

  “What the hell is this?” Oliver asked, walking slowly through the model. “They can’t be fundraising for a new school building, can they? I’m pretty sure my parents donated enough last time around.”

  “It’s the Beit HaMikdash,” Evan said. He knelt at the altar at the center, pointing to a figurine of a solitary priest. The kohen was equipped in full garb: a turban, an embroidered sash of purple, blue and scarlet, an ephod, a breastplate. The details were extraordinary: all twelve gems were carved into the breastplate. The priest’s turban even featured the proper words—Kodesh LaShem. Holiness unto God.

  Covering the exterior walls of the temple were the notecards the school had circulated. Judge everyone favorably. Marry Remi White. Find a passion. Try my hardest to believe in the Almighty.

  “Kind of creepy,” Noah said, looking it over, “isn’t it?”

  “It’s just a toy,” Amir said.

  I scanned the temple for my card: What is this quintessence of dust? “An ornate toy,” I said.

  Evan traced the details with his eyes, and then walked on. I would spend a lot of time over the coming months attempting to figure out which card was his.

  * * *

  ANOTHER RESTLESS SHABBAT. SMALL TALK, sweaty afternoon naps, light-headed reading. I was lying on the living room couch after lunch while my father reviewed the latest in our shared adventures in Gemara Bava Kamma. “Didn’t Reish Lakish teach you’re exempt from fire damage only when you transfer an ember to someone else who then fans it into a flame? Why is that so?”

  I had my Gemara resting on a pillow beside me. A different book lay open on my lap. I didn’t answer.

  “Nu, Aryeh?”

  “Sorry,” I said, grabbing my Gemara again and absentmindedly tracing my fingertips over ancient words.

  “Stay with me, Aryeh. Because the potential for damage in that scenario is not guaranteed!”

  “Right, exactly.”

  Without looking I could hear Gemara pages being flipped angrily. “May I ask what is it you’ve been looking at nonstop?” My father gestured to the Yeats propped on my lap.

  I poked my head up. “He’s a poet.”

  “A poet? Are we not learning Torah right now?”

  “Sorry, it’s for school.”

  “You know, Aryeh, I’m very happy you’re enjoying your English class so much with that—what’s her name? Mrs. Hararei?”

  “Hartman.”

  “Yes. Hartman. But you shouldn’t forget that a bachur needs to prioritize Limmud HaKodesh over secular studies.”

  “Actually, it’s not for English class.”

  “Whichever class, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Rabbi Bloom gave it to me.”

  My father stiffened in his seat. “The principal?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Where does he come off giving that to a student?”

  “Come off? I think it’s wonderful he’s worldly enough to be teaching things like poetry,” my mother said, sweeping into the room, splaying herself on the opposite couch. “Plus, he’s clearly taken a serious interest in Ari. He’s impressed with Ari! You heard what he said about his application, his rare acceptance.”

  My father buried his face in his Gemara. “The rabbi circulates poetry, the silly basketball team pretends they’re being paid to meet seven nights a week, the friends come and go late at night in ridiculous cars and don’t wear yarmulkes outside of school and hardly ever go to shul. Is this a yeshiva? Which part of this education is a yeshiva?”

  I smiled and returned my attention to “The Hero, the Girl, and the Fool.”

  * * *

  AFTER HAVDALAH THAT NIGHT I waited to be picked up for selichot. Loud honking came a half hour later than I expected. I hurried into Oliver’s Jeep before my parents emerged to investigate. “You had to honk like that?”

  Noah, in the passenger seat, turned with an apologetic smile. “I told him to stop, Drew, but the idiot doesn’t listen.”

  “Can we just get out of here,” I said, unnerved at the sight of my mother peering anxiously from our front window, “before she comes to talk to Oliver?”

  “Your lovely mother can have my ear whenever she pleases. Whoops.” He put the car in reverse too quickly so that the Jeep bestowed a soft kiss upon the palm tree in my driveway. “I’m prolific with older women.”

  “Definitely better than you are with girls our age,” Noah said. “Though that’s not saying much.”

  “It’s my fault
they don’t appreciate my advanced maturity?”

  “Right, let’s go with that.” Noah checked the score of the Marlins game on his phone. “Shouldn’t we scoop Amir first?”

  “He said his mom wants him driving separately,” Oliver said, deliberately running a stop sign. “She doesn’t like me driving him at night just because of that one little accident, can you imagine?”

  “Before I forget,” Noah said, twisting in his seat and pulling out a card from his wallet, “this is for you.” He handed me what appeared to be a license. I shone the light of my iPhone over it: one Drew Carraway, hailing from 770 Summit Avenue, Saint Paul, Minnesota. The picture was of my own face, the one taken at orientation.

  “What the—?”

  “Fake ID, buddy,” Oliver said. “Be grateful. We had Amir hack the yearbook database for those professional headshots and I had a buddy hook it up. I figured it’d be a waste but Noah insisted on including you.”

  “I’m from—Minnesota?”

  “Well, you can’t be from here,” Oliver said.

  We went to retrieve Evan. It was the first time I’d seen his house, designed to resemble Miami Modernist architecture—sleek, minimalist, tree-studded. A sculpture of enormous, clashing red triangles guarded his lawn. A black Aston Martin was parked beside a BMW.

  I blinked at the house and cars. “So what’s his family like?”

  “Well.” Noah’s face dimmed. “His mother passed.”

  “Oh,” I mumbled. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, pretty awful.”

  “When was this?”

  Noah reclined his seat, stretching his cramped legs. “It’s been—what? Nearly a year.”

  Oliver confirmed with a nod.

  I played with the buckle of my seatbelt. “How’d it—happen?”

  “She got really sick,” Noah said.

  “Nicest person you’ll ever meet,” Oliver added with uncharacteristic seriousness.

  “And they were close, man,” Noah said. “Extremely close.”

  “Does he have siblings?”

  “Nah, Ev’s an only child. His dad’s never home. Hedge fund workaholic.” And, after a slight pause: “Not an easy man.”