Twenty-four
Tovah
OVER AND OVER, WE FAIL miserably at starting a campfire.
“This is probably an embarrassing time to mention I was a Boy Scout,” Zack says. “Though I never did earn my fire-safety badge.”
“Not helping,” Troy says as Lindsay holds up her phone so all of us can see the how-to YouTube video. “We should arrange the logs in a triangle shape, like this. . . .”
The four of us spent the day trekking through old-growth forests, and though Zack and I have had plenty of alone time, I haven’t yet figured out how to talk to him about what Adina said after school the other day. On one hike, Zack pulled me against a tree, leaned in, and whispered into my ear: “Sleeping next to you tonight is gonna be amazing.” That helped me feel significantly better about it all.
Eventually, we borrow a lighter from some nearby campers and get a small fire going. The smoky-wood smell fills the air around us. As the sky turns bruised, then black, we cook hot dogs on skewers and drizzle mustard onto them.
“Anyone know any good ghost stories?” Zack asks, licking mustard off his hot dog before it drips onto his hand.
“No ghost stories, please,” Lindsay says. “I’d like to sleep tonight, thank you very much.”
Troy flicks a pebble onto the fire. “I should have brought my guitar.”
“You can’t play guitar.”
“Yes, I can!”
“You know four chords.”
“And that’s all you need to play a punk-rock song.”
I scoot closer to Zack. “I have an idea. My sister and I used to play this game on long car trips when we were bored. Each person says one sentence, and the goal is to make them into a story.”
“Let’s do it,” Zack says, and we try our hardest to turn the story scary, but Lindsay foils our plans every time it gets creepy.
“It was a dark and stormy night,” Troy begins.
“The wind rustled through the trees,” I say.
“It sounded like the screams of children,” Zack adds.
Lindsay glares at us. “Suddenly, the sky opened up and it started raining gumballs!”
We tell stories until the fires in the distance start going out. Around midnight, Troy pours water on our pit, and Lindsay gently tugs my elbow so she can speak into my ear.
“I don’t know about you,” she whispers as the guys watch the flames die, “but we only brought one sleeping bag.”
My stomach plummets to my toes for more than a few reasons, one of them being that Lindsay and I aren’t close enough to joke like that anymore. She and Troy disappear into their tent, leaving me with Zack and two sleeping bags and an entire night alone.
We change into pajamas separately, first me and then him, and when he opens the tent to let me back in, he’s wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved thermal tee. We zip the tent closed and use our phone screens to guide us into our separate sleeping bags. My heart rate must be well over one hundred bpm. Does he think we’re going to have sex? Was “camping” code for “sex,” like Lindsay insinuated?
Virginity is a strange thing to lose. It seems like something you should gain instead: intimacy with another person, a closeness you’ve never had with anyone else. I don’t know if I’m ready for it quite yet. There are too many other things between kissing and sex we haven’t done.
His sleeping bag rustles as he changes position, propping himself up with one elbow. “Tell me a secret,” he says. Outside, crickets chirp. If we have crickets in the city, I never hear them. “Something I don’t know about you.”
“Hmm.” I think about it for a moment. “I cheated on a test in fourth grade.”
He holds a hand to his mouth in mock horror, which makes me laugh. “Tovah Siegel. No.”
“It was a reading test on a classic book I thought was boring, about a girl who was stranded on an island. I only read half of it and figured I’d be fine for the test. But I had no idea how to respond to most of the questions, so I looked at the girl’s paper next to me. I learned my lesson, though.”
“You got caught?”
“No, or it wouldn’t be a secret. The guilt tore me up. I purposely failed the next test to make up for it. What about you?”
“Well . . . I’m a mutant.”
“What?”
“I have four toes on my left foot.”
“No. Seriously?”
“Your grin is kinda scaring me.”
I try my best to bite it back. “The human body is fascinating. Think of all the ways we can get screwed up. It’s a miracle more of us aren’t mutants. Like you.”
“Right. You could’ve consumed Adina in the womb or something, right?”
“I guess so.”
“I used to freak other kids out when I was little. Some kids made fun of me, but Troy told everyone that my missing toe was a mutation and I was actually one of the X-Men, and that shut them up. And my big toe’s really giant. It’s like it ate the missing toe.”
“That’s not a real secret,” I accuse. “I mean, it’s interesting, but I want something deeper.”
“Fine.” He’s quiet for a moment, then: “I hang out with you and Troy and Lindsay, and I don’t feel as smart as you guys. He doesn’t always act like it, but dude’s a genius. Aced his SAT, straight As, the whole thing.”
“Zack. You’re smart.”
He shrugs. “My grades would disagree with you. And I’m sure my texts are full of grammatical errors you’re too nice to point out.”
“There are a lot of ways to be smart,” I say, though I probably wouldn’t have considered Zack’s art intelligent before this year. “It’s not all about grammar or tests. Your art, for example, that’s smart. I can tell how much thought you put into it, even when you claim it doesn’t mean anything.”
“What I’m trying to say is, you never make me feel that way. Like I’m not smart enough to be with you, even though you’re a genius too. And I really appreciate it.” Our fingers find one another between our sleeping bags, and his thumb rubs mine, dragging another confession from me.
“I have another secret,” I say, and though it isn’t something I’ve intentionally hidden, it all comes out: Huntington’s. Ima. Adina. “Sometimes I feel like I can’t even be sad about it because the guilt is so overpowering.”
He grips my hand tighter. “I can understand that. Your sister, she’s intense.”
“We haven’t been in a good place for a long time.”
“I could sorta tell.”
“I’ve always felt upstaged by her. She was a viola prodigy, and she’s always been so comfortable in her skin. Until middle school, I felt like the invisible twin, I guess.” I sigh. “She was flirting with you at school the other day.”
“I’m with you,” he says simply, as though that cancels out whatever Adina’s intentions were.
“Still. She knows how to charm people when she wants to.”
Zack points to himself. “Not charmed. You, on the other hand . . .” His mouth tilts into a grin.
I want to smile back, but: “All those things she told you—she was right. I’m innocent and inexperienced.” Truths are spilling out of me tonight, fears and insecurities and secrets. It feels good to finally be honest with someone.
“I am too. I haven’t done anything, really. I’ve done . . . more with you than with anyone else.”
“Oh,” I say, grinning into the dark as the crickets fill the silence between us. Urging us on.
“We could corrupt each other,” Zack suggests. He reaches out and draws a line down the curve of my leg through the sleeping bag. Hip to knee. I shiver. “Cold?”
“I’ve never been camping. I didn’t expect it to be so freezing.”
“Nighttime can be a little rough.” He pauses. “You can, uh, come in here with me if you want to.” The tremor in his voice is so endearing that it practically pulls me from my sleeping bag.
“I really want to.”
With a little maneuvering, he adjusts the bag so we can both fit inside. I’m about to say that I don’t think there’s enough room for both of us, but I want us to be that close, sleeping pressed up against each other. I slide my feet down the length of the bag and align my body with his. He zips us up, and though I was right, there isn’t enough space, I don’t want any space between us.
We start kissing, and the night and general aloneness help our hands find each other’s skin quickly. I’m not worried about whether my chest is too big or whether he’s comparing me to my sister. He wants me. It’s difficult to separate what our bodies do from how our bodies feel, the clinical from the intimate. What’s happening between us is so much more than a chemical reaction, so for a while, I turn off my brain. We push against each other with our pajamas on, fingers and lips and discovery, and it’s all new and wonderful, like we’re the only two people who’ve figured out how to feel this way together, how to push our bodies off a cliff.
Once our breathing slows down again, I burrow even closer into him, face pressed into the hollow of his neck, which is always warm and always smells like a mix of soap and paint and, tonight, campfire ashes.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about us and what’s gonna happen next year,” he says. “I know we just started going out a couple months ago, but there’s a good chance I’ll end up on the East Coast in the fall too. That’s where most of my art schools are. And I know you’ll get into Johns Hopkins, and you’ll be in Baltimore, so . . .”
Swallowing around the knot in my throat, I echo him: “I’ll be in Baltimore. Maybe.”
“Long-distance would be tough, but we won’t be that far away. We could see each other every weekend.”
He’s combing my hair, his fingers so light, and I can tell in those touches that he’s imagining us there together, bundled up in our winter coats, sipping cocoa, strolling mitten-in-mitten through campuses with bright red trees.
For a while I don’t say anything.
“Tov?” he says. “What do you think?”
“I think . . .” I have to force the words out. “I think seeing each other every weekend sounds amazing.”
He kisses my forehead. Whispers, “And we can fall asleep like this more often.”
This feels too good, imagining our imaginary future. The logical side of my brain tells me this could all fall apart based on one admissions decision. But logic isn’t warm and solid, and it doesn’t have its arms wrapped around me. It scares me how deeply, how much I feel when I’m with Zack. There’s too much of it, and I can’t contain it, and one day it’ll burst out of me like a solid ray of light.
Adina is packing as I’m unpacking. She leaves for her audition trip tonight: New York, Boston, and Baltimore. Peabody, one of the schools Adina is auditioning at, is part of Johns Hopkins, though on a separate campus. My parents encouraged me to tag along, but I couldn’t bear it. Not with my future still so uncertain.
Adina’s door is half-open, which I interpret as an invitation. Quickly, before I can change my mind, I drop my duffel on my bed, snatch a box from my closet, and knock on her door.
“Come in.”
“Excited for your trip?” I ask, on such a high from camping that I bounce inside her room like I’m human sunshine.
She folds a sweater into a suitcase, then turns to me. Her grin is sunshine too. Real. Thank God. “I can’t wait.”
“I, um, got you something.” I hold out the box. “For your auditions.”
She arches a brow but accepts the gift. Unwraps it. “Tovah . . .” She picks up the container of Larica rosin. It’s top-of-the-line; I looked it up.
I bought it a few weeks ago, but after she humiliated me in front of Zack, I wasn’t sure I was going to give it to her. But I’m able to forgive, and after the camping trip I know my sister isn’t a threat. Zack wants only me, all of me. The expression on her face makes me feel like I’ve finally done something right when it comes to the two of us.
“I want your auditions to go well.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s funny,” I say, dipping a toe into the seemingly calm waters between us, “we’re both dating people for the first time.”
“What?” Adina sounds startled.
“What you said at the Mizrahis’. You’re dating someone, but it’s not official or anything? I won’t tell Ima and Aba, if you’re worried about them making a big deal about it or something.”
“You don’t know him.”
“Was it . . . Connor?”
“Who?”
“He’s in your orchestra class.”
“Oh. The bassist. We’ve exchanged maybe five sentences ever.”
“He asked me about you.”
“He did? When?”
“A while ago. I guess I forgot.”
“He’s pretty forgettable. Why would he ask you about me?”
“I don’t know, Adina. I told him I didn’t think you were seeing anyone.”
“Well. I am. And it’s definitely not him.” She opens her underwear drawer and carefully zips a few lacy underwire bras into a lingerie bag. My bras look like I’m going to the gym. I need new bras.
“Kind of fancy for an audition trip.”
“I like to look good.”
“Who’s going to be seeing your bra?”
Her eyes knife into slits. “Maybe I’m wearing them for myself, not for anyone else. Kind of antifeminist for you to think I could only wear a sexy bra for a guy.”
I clench my teeth. “You’re right. Pack all the sexy underwear you want.” I go back to my original line of questioning. “Can you at least tell me what your boyfriend is like?” Has he seen you in those bras? “Is he Jewish?” If I sound desperate, it’s because I am. I ache to talk to someone about the things I can’t—and don’t want to—share with Lindsay.
“No. He’s not Jewish.” She sighs contentedly, and for a second I think she’ll actually spill some details. “He’s . . . different.”
Different. Okay. I push out a breath. Maybe I was wrong to think she’d confide in me. Maybe nothing should surprise me about Adina at this point. Someone could tell me she spends her spare time reading to the elderly and my response, probably, would be, “Sure, that sounds like something she’d do, I guess,” if only because nothing sounds like something she’d do anymore.
“Different how?” I chance.
She slams a dresser drawer shut. Edges me toward the door. “I don’t ask you about your boyfriend, okay?”
“No, you just embarrass me in front of him.” The words slip out, and I grit my teeth hard. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. It’s just, whoever he is, he’s your first boyfriend. I guess I thought we’d talk about those things.”
Adina laughs hard. Cruel. Before she shuts the door in my face, she says, “He’s not my first.”