Thirty
Tovah
ALL THE CITY’S SNOWPEOPLE HAVE amputated limbs and punched-in noses. Muddy slush is piled high on the sides of the road. It’s the coldest spring we’ve had in decades: my last spring break of high school.
“Zack tells us you’re very critical of his art,” Zack’s mom Mikaela says during dinner at his house, and I nudge Zack’s foot with mine under the table. He’s grinning.
“I’m not. I swear. Zack’s really talented.”
Mikaela laughs. She has olive skin and dark eyes. Tess, with her auburn hair and high cheekbones and lanky frame, shares DNA with Zack.
“Critics are a good thing,” Mikaela says. “You don’t want to be with someone who’s going to praise everything you do, you know? You want to be challenged.”
“That’s why I tell Mikaela all her art is horrible,” Tess says.
“Exactly. It’s what keeps our marriage alive. Constant criticism and nitpicking.”
Zack’s parents make me like him even more. Make my like for him slide closer to love.
The house is decorated with Mikaela’s and Zack’s art. They have wildly different styles: Where Zack is abstract, Mikaela is realistic. Where he is sloppy, she is precise. When I got here, Zack tapped a hallway photo of him as a Boy Scout. “See? Proof that I was once a wild outdoorsman.” In the photo and in real life he smiled his gap-toothed smile, which back then was too big for his face but now fits him perfectly.
I used to think I was lucky to have my family. My parents were present, caring, kind. They are genuinely good people. They pushed us, but not as hard as we pushed ourselves. True ambition has to come from within—I’ve always believed that. These days, though, at least one person is missing from the dining room table at any given meal. It makes me wonder if my family will ever be whole again. With Adina on the other side of the country in the city I was supposed to be in, maybe not.
Maybe it was wrong of me to think I was ever entitled to that place simply because I worked hard. Surely I could have done more. Taken extra classes, applied to other science programs? God, the past eighteen years have exhausted me. I can’t imagine having worked any harder.
“What do you two have planned tonight?” Tess asks.
“Someone on student council is throwing a senioritis party later,” I say. “We’re all supposed to bring an old essay to throw into a big bonfire. Or in Zack’s case, an old art project?”
Zack’s decided on the Rhode Island School of Design, and I have already teased him multiple times that the RISD mascot is Scrotie, a giant walking penis.
“Senioritis party. I love it,” Mikaela says.
No one talks about where I’m going because that is still a mystery. Zack’s careful not to mention Johns Hopkins, and he must have asked his parents not to say anything about my college decision either.
Tess glances at her watch. “We should probably get going if we want to get good seats. We have tickets to a lecture on green homes at Town Hall. You two mind cleaning up here?”
“Sure,” Zack says as he starts stacking plates. “I’d hate for you to have bad seats for a lecture.” Meanwhile, I try to act casual about the fact that Zack and I are about to be left alone in his house and nearly drop a glass of water.
After his parents leave, it takes us only ten minutes to clear the table and load the dishwasher. I don’t know how long a lecture about green homes can last, but probably not an insignificant amount of time.
“Your parents left us alone,” I say, stating the obvious, anticipation forming goose bumps on my skin.
“They did.”
“Your parents trust you to be alone in the house with . . . me?”
“Are you not trustworthy?” he asks with a sideways grin, leaning back against the counter next to me, bumping me with his hip. “I’ve racked up a lot of good-son points over the years. I may not get the best grades, but my moms and I talk about everything. So, yes. They trust me.”
I position my body in front of him and run my hands up his chest. “Does that mean we shouldn’t go upstairs to your room?”
“It means we absolutely should,” he says, but once we’re up there, something pulls my attention from him.
“Quite a collection you’ve got,” I say, pointing to a shelf of Holocaust books.
“Yeah. I went through a phase when I was younger.”
“Didn’t we all?” I say.
He sits down on his bed next to the bookshelf. “You too?”
“My shelf is practically your shelf’s twin.”
“My grandparents gave me Jewish books every holiday, every birthday. I got worried I might get desensitized to it all, but nope. I’m not.” He pats the bed next to him, and I sink down and lean my head on his shoulder.
“Did you feel different from everyone else? Like, because you didn’t celebrate the same holidays?”
“My family’s pretty secular—not nearly as Jewish as yours, as you know—but yes. Every December my teacher made me get up in front of the class and talk about Chanukah, so I told the story about the light burning for eight nights and that’s why we my parents gave me eight presents, one on each night. I probably embellished a lot. I don’t think Batman or Spider-Man were in the original version.” He gives a sheepish grin. “I didn’t know why I celebrated Chanukah or why I didn’t celebrate Christmas. I just knew that it made me different.” Zack wraps an arm around my shoulders. “For a while I didn’t get it,” he says, “why we didn’t have a Christmas tree or lights, or egg hunts for Easter. But you understand.”
“I do. Have you heard the phrase ‘klal Yisrael’?”
He shakes his head. “Something . . . about Israel?”
“Ha-ha. Yes. It means all of Israel—that all Jews are connected.”
He smiles. Warm. “I feel that way all the time.”
No matter what else changes, religion is constant. Every time I read a portion of the Torah at synagogue or say a prayer in Hebrew or observe a holiday, I’m awed that people have been doing this exact same thing for hundreds of years.
I don’t know if I can verbalize exactly how important Judaism is to me, how it makes me feel that I’m not alone. With Zack, I feel less alone too, even when everything else is falling apart.
“Tov? What’s wrong? You’re quiet.”
I attempt to count the things that are wrong. My mother is dying. My sister is dying. Then the selfish things, the things that occupy too much skull space: I don’t know what I want to do next year, where I should go or what I want to be. I could study medicine somewhere else, of course, but the idea of becoming a surgeon was linked to Johns Hopkins—that was where I fell in love with it. And becoming a surgeon means facing death nearly every day of my life. Am I sure I want that?
Adina was wrong. Choices aren’t easy, and I have an entire lifetime to continue making stupid ones. Lucky me.
All I want is to know exactly what I want in this moment. To become a surgeon, to go to school nearby or leave this place behind, to do nothing at all. I want to fucking pick one thing and be happy with it.
I glance up at Zack. There’s this way he looks at me: like he’s awed by me, even when I’ve disappointed myself. Suddenly I know exactly what that one thing is.
“Tov?”
Adina stole Baltimore. I’ll steal her confidence.
In one quick motion, I press my lips to his and push him back onto the bed, kissing him harder than I ever have before, until I’m dizzy with the scent and feel of him. I never thought when I got a boyfriend that I’d want to touch him all the time. I never thought I’d want so much of someone else.
“Whoa, whoa,” he says, his hands roaming down the sides of my body. “Where is this coming from?”
“I really want you.” And I really, really need to feel good again.
He clutches me tighter. “God, you’re beautiful.” His mouth travels from my jaw to my neck to my collarbone. “And hot. You’re hot, too.” No one has ever, ever said that about me. That’s something they say about Adina. I’m smart, and she’s beautiful.
It’s working: I can be both. I am both.
Our shirts land on the floor, and my fingertips memorize the curve of his spine, the feel of each individual vertebra. I’ve always tried to hide my double-D-cup breasts beneath layers of loose clothing, and now I’m hyperaware of the way they react to Zack’s hands and lips. With him, I’m not shy about it.
I reach between us and splay my hand over the front of his jeans, fumbling with the button.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey. Wait a second.”
He doesn’t get it. I have to go fast, fast, before I lose this fragile confidence I’ve only just claimed for myself. Finally I undo the button and mash down his zipper. My hand finds what it wants, and Zack groans. I hold my mouth to his ear. “Do you have a condom?”
He wraps his hand around mine. Gently removes it from inside his boxers. “Tov. Slow down.”
Breathing hard, I blink up at him, unsure what he’s saying. “You don’t want me?”
“It’s not that. I do want you.” He makes a strangled-sounding laugh and glances down. “That part should be pretty obvious. But I just—this would be my first time too. I don’t want us to rush into it or regret anything.”
“So you’d regret having sex with me.” I get off his lap and cross my arms over my chest, feeling a hundred times less hot than I did a minute ago.
He scrapes a hand over his face. “I’m not saying any of the right things.”
“No. You’re not.” I snatch my bra and shirt and dress faster than I ever have before. Then I press my back against the wall and pull my knees up close to my chest.
Zack zips his jeans. Puts his shirt on inside out. Neither of us can look the other in the eye. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly, fingers searching for mine on the bed, but I keep them out of reach. “I guess I thought we’d talk about it before we, you know, did anything.”
“What was it you said when we went camping? About corrupting each other? We’ve done just about everything else. And we barely talked about that.”
“I—I know. But this feels like a bigger deal, I guess. We could . . . talk about it now. If you want.”
I choke out an odd laugh—odd because I don’t find this funny at all. “I really don’t.” What’s there to talk about? He doesn’t want me: that’s all I can focus on.
A silence hangs between us, heavy as a meteor.
“You don’t have to stay,” he says.
“You want me to leave?” My voice cracks. I don’t know if I can take getting kicked out, doubly rejected.
His eyes widen, and again he tries to grab my hand, but I won’t give it to him. “No! I meant, maybe you wanted to leave? If you’re . . . mad at me? I want you to stay. If you want to.”
Great. We’re stuck in this loop. “I guess I’ll stay, then.”
All the amazing things I usually feel with him—beautiful, admired, even sexy—are gone. The confidence I stole from Adina is gone too. I flick my gaze between his striped sheets, the jacket with elbow patches draped across his desk chair, the canvas boards mounted on the walls. I finger-comb my hair, trying to erase the evidence of what we didn’t do.
“Do you still feel like going to the party?” he asks.
“I don’t know that I could handle a party right now.”
“Yeah. Same here.” Zack stands up. “Maybe we could go downstairs and watch a movie or something?”
“Sure.”
We sit a cushion apart on the couch watching an old Wes Anderson movie. All I can think about is how this would never have happened to my sister. She’s the girl who always gets what she wants, and I’m the girl who tries and tries and tries but can never quite get there.
Two of the walls in my room are still bare, a result of my Johns Hopkins meltdown. It’s nine thirty and I’m home from Zack’s and ready to fall asleep for about a week. But something stops me from collapsing onto my bed.
Several dozen scraps of red paper are spread across the sheets like confetti. At first I assume they’re from when I tore this place apart, but I was meticulous in my cleanup. I can’t have missed something as obvious as this.
I pick them up with my fingernails. It takes me only a few seconds to puzzle them together, and when I do, my stomach plummets so quickly I nearly drop to my knees along with it.
It’s the Nirvana ticket that used to hang above my desk. The only thing on my bedroom walls I loved enough to keep. A connection to Aba my sister can’t begin to understand.
“Adina,” I hiss under my breath, and it sounds like a vow of vengeance.
I have no idea what I’d have done had our results been flipped, but I wouldn’t have destroyed something that meant the world to her. I wouldn’t have smashed her viola or sabotaged her future.
I’ve been kind to her—as kind as I could. So understanding. I’ve held myself back when I wanted to explode so many fucking times. I’m done with that. We’re both the evil twin.
I want to scream at her. I want her grab her by the shoulders. I want to force her to piece together the ripped-art concert ticket until her fingers are covered in paper cuts. But I’m not allowed to do any of that, am I? Because she tested positive, and I tested negative.
“Where is she?” I ask my parents as I race downstairs. “Where’s Adina?”
“She went out,” Aba says. They’re eating a late dinner. He’s cutting a piece of chicken into more easily chewable chunks for Ima. She struggles with a fork and knife, and she continues to have trouble swallowing. “Some kind of senioritis party? What does that mean?”
Ima’s face scrunches with concern. “What’s going on?”
I ignore her. How could I possibly explain what her darling daughter has done? I grab my keys and then I’m out the door, touching my fingertips to my lips and then to the mezuzah and praying I finally have the strength to tell my sister exactly how I feel about her.