39

HOW TO RECOVER FROM THE HEINOUS BETRAYAL OF YOUR GOOD FRIEND/LOVE INTEREST IN FOUR SIMPLE STEPS

STEP ONE. Reconcile with your mute best friend.

Malka Hadid answered the door when Esther knocked on Monday morning before school. Her husband, Daniel, had once explained that his wife’s name meant “queen” in Hebrew, and Esther had always thought it was appropriate. Malka was possessed of the kind of beauty that made her seem ethereal, like an elven queen out of a storybook. Her eyes were an impossible shade of amber and her hair fell in a tawny curtain to her chest. She was Hephzibah all over, only fuller and brighter, like the warmth and saturation had been turned up.

Malka crossed her arms and looked down at Esther expectantly. “Do you happen to know why my daughter hasn’t spoken to anyone in four weeks?” she said in her Israeli accent, which was more like Israeli mixed with Arabic mixed with French, because Malka was fluent in four languages and conversational in another three.

“I might’ve had something to do with it,” Esther confessed.

Malka sighed. “Come in. She’s in her room.”

If Esther’s room was a cluttered museum, then Hephzibah’s room was a mad scientist’s laboratory. Her uncle was some famous physicist in Tel Aviv who—when he found out about Heph’s love of science—started sending her monthly packages of Bunsen burners and telescopes and microscopes and fossils and peer-reviewed journal subscriptions and a large, somewhat creepy bust of Albert Einstein. Planets hung from the ceiling and one entire wall had been devoted to articles on and illustrations of Heph’s favorite gen IV nuclear reactor, the Transatomic WAMSR (Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor), which Esther knew far more about than she needed to.

Hephzibah was sitting cross-legged on her bed, her arms folded and jaw set. It was the longest they’d gone without seeing each other since they were little kids, and the mere sight of her made Esther want to kick herself for being such a dick.

If a person could be home, she’d built her foundations in both Eugene and Heph.

“Hephzibah,” Esther began, but Heph held up a hand to silence her.

“Stand around the corner,” she signed.

“Please let me—” she tried again, but again Heph mimed for her to zip it.

“Go. Around. The. Corner,” she signed again, each movement exaggerated.

“I’m trying to apologize here.”

Hephzibah groaned and flopped back on her bed and signed to Esther without looking at her. “Shut up, you bitch. I’m trying to talk to you. Go around the fucking corner!” That’s how Esther knew it was all going to be okay. Bitch was the first word they’d learned in ASL and they’d used it so frequently in middle school that it had almost become a pet name.

“Bitch,” Esther signed back, smirking.

Heph looked up, a crack in her serious expression. “Bitch.”

“Bitch.”

The hint of a smile. “Bitch.”

“I’m really sorry about what I said. I know better than anyone that you can’t just turn off your fear because someone else wants you to. I was a—wait for it”—Esther switched to ASL again—“bitch.”

Heph nodded. Licked her lips. Motioned with her head for Esther to leave the doorway and step into the hall.

Esther did as she asked, then heard bedsprings creak as Heph rose and walked across the floorboards toward the door. For a few minutes, all she could hear from the other side of the wall was Heph’s breathing, until her hand appeared in the hall. Esther held it. Squeezed it.

“You were kind of right though,” she said finally, quietly, from around the corner. Not signed. Said. Out loud.

“Is that . . . is that your voice? Oh my God, Hephzibah, no wonder you haven’t been speaking all these years. That’s terrible!”

“Bitch,” said Heph with a giggle as Esther pulled her into the hall and gave her a brief yet crushing hug.

•   •   •

STEP TWO. Watch the goddamn videos already.

After reconciling with Hephzibah, Esther decided, finally, that it was time to take Dr. Butcher’s advice and watch Jonah’s channel.

After school, the two of them went back to Heph’s house. Malka and Daniel Hadid were working on a story in their home office (a terrible slew of suicide bombers in Istanbul—Death had again been very busy), so they had the place to themselves. Heph got the projector working in the living room, and then Eugene showed up out of nowhere, saying he couldn’t stand their mother hovering around him anymore, which was not something either of the Solar children ever expected to say.

They all sat down together on the (very nicely upholstered) couch in front of the screen, on which “1/50” was waiting to be played.

“Okay, do it,” said Esther, but as soon as Heph moved the mouse, she changed her mind. “No, stop, wait a minute.” Then she proceeded to pace around the room for ten minutes, waiting for the unconscious push that would lead her to watch it.

Everything you want is on the other side of fear, she reminded herself.

Esther knew it would be better once it was over. For the last month, like Dr. Butcher had said, the videos had been a splinter digging into her mind and ignoring them had only caused an infection that seemed to leak out into everything she did.

The push didn’t come. There seemed to be a physical block between Esther and the play button, a strong force field, the kind of fear she’d experienced only once before. Esther couldn’t hit play, so she started to scroll down instead. Hephzibah immediately stopped her.

“Do you really want to read YouTube comments?” she signed. And then, as if suddenly remembering that she could speak, she said, “Do you really want to do that to yourself?”

“How bad are they?” Of course they would be bad. Of course the world would hate her, judge her, call her names.

“I don’t know. I haven’t even bothered looking.”

Esther scrolled down and started to read the comments on “1/50: lobsters.”

But by far the most popular comment was this:

A lot of people liked the channel. A lot of people had replied and said similar things to the emotional mom. Their son, their daughter, their brother, their sister, themselves; A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares had spread bravery like a virus. It was contagious and lots of people were catching it. There were new copycat videos popping up every day of people going head-to-head with fear, doing things they’d swore they would never, ever do—riding a rollercoaster, singing onstage, sticking their hand into a jar of cockroaches, surfing, skiing, bungee jumping, skydiving. Week after week, fear after fear, they went out into the world and became less afraid. They did something every day that scared them.

Now, again, it was Esther’s turn, too.

“I’m ready,” she said, and this time she didn’t stop Hephzibah when she moved the cursor over the play button and clicked it.

It was uncomfortable, at first. Esther cringed at the way she looked onscreen and hated that people had seen her against her will, from all the angles she hated. Her face was speckled, and her hair was too long and too red, and she had the sensation that there were thousands of eyes on her, peeling away her skin. But—as with the first and only clip Jonah had showed her months ago—she soon saw a different version of herself. Esther the wolf. Esther the fear eater. Esther with the steely, determined eyes, the one who’d been so afraid in the early videos but now marched triumphantly in the direction of each and every fear, come what may.

Eugene and Hephzibah were in the videos too, as was Jonah. Esther had frequently snatched the GoPro and turned it on him. It was so strange: on film, Jonah Smallwood wasn’t fearless. In real life, Esther was usually so distracted by her own anxiety that she failed to catch the small moments—a flicker of hesitation, a bitten lip, a deep breath—when Jonah, too, looked into the face of fear and wasn’t sure, even if just for a moment, if he’d be brave enough to win the battle.

It wasn’t these little windows into his fear that hurt her heart the most, though. Not the realization that he, too, had been afraid, that he’d packed away his anxieties and hidden them for her sake, because if he was scared she’d be terrified. What made her heart hurt the most was the way he filmed her. Esther had never imagined that love could be written in any other way except words, but the way Jonah had filmed her? The close-ups, the soft lighting, the way the camera followed her . . . it was like a caress in moving pictures. If she had to describe love to aliens without using words, she’d simply show them what he’d made for her and it would be enough for them to understand the beauty and the terror of it all.

By the time the sun went down and they’d watched all the way through to 25/50, Esther came to realize that her fear no longer belonged to her alone. It was shared by thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—of people, and she owed it to them and herself to see this through to the end.

•   •   •

STEP THREE. Build a new kind of dam against fear.

The comment from the woman about her daughter was the first that Esther printed and stuck to her bedroom wall to plaster over the torn up wallpaper.

Over the coming weeks and months, she’d print thousands more, each one a brick in the dam against fear. Each one a badge earned for bravery. Each one proof that facing her fears had made a difference, somewhere, somehow, to someone, in some small way.

Some mysteries might never be solved. Who killed the Black Dahlia? What happened to D. B. Cooper? Who was the Somerton Man?

A mystery that could be solved, though, was what it would feel like to conquer fifty fears. Esther could keep going. She could push on. She could find out.

But she didn’t want to do it alone.

•   •   •

STEP FOUR. Send the We make a perfect pear card back to Jonah.