Four
Tovah
THE HUMAN BODY IS MADE up of millions of microscopic puzzle pieces, and in med school I’ll have to memorize them all. Understanding what makes us work has always brought me comfort. I seek out the why, and I learn the answer.
It’s why AP Bio is my favorite class. Today I snip the hinges of a frog’s mouth and open it up, spelling out words to Lindsay so she can label our diagram. Esophagus, pharynx, vomerine and maxillary teeth. She half covers her face as she scribbles on the worksheet.
“I can’t watch,” she says.
With latex-gloved hands, I open the frog’s body cavity. “Look, you can see its stomach and pancreas! And that curled-up thing is its small intestine.”
I try to sound enthusiastic, but with the test results more than a week away, each day brings me closer to solving my own unknown, and this lab isn’t distracting me the way I’d hoped it would. Nothing can. At synagogue over the weekend, I sat on a hard bench in the sanctuary with the rest of my family while Rabbi Levine spoke. I love weekly services; I love the way Hebrew sounds when the entire congregation recites it together. But when I left the synagogue, I couldn’t remember what the Torah portion had been about. I never space out like that.
At the lab station next to ours, Henry Zukowski and Evan Nakayama are pretending to make the frogs talk.
“I feel funny,” Henry says in a high-pitched voice as he puppeteers a frog’s mouth.
“Do I have something on my face?” Evan says in the same tone, and both of them cackle. I roll my eyes.
“Please be mature and respectful, or I’m taking the sharp objects away!” Ms. Anaya calls. She stops by our station. “Tovah, careful with your incisions! You nicked that little guy’s left atrium! Why don’t you give Lindsay a turn?”
Heat flares on my cheeks, and I clench my teeth. Ms. Anaya’s my favorite teacher; she loves biology so much that all her sentences seem to be punctuated with exclamation points. She’s never criticized me before. I can’t even be good at what I’m supposed to be good at, and I have a feeling I won’t be back to my old self until we get our results.
Well. Depending on what those results are.
“Sorry,” I mumble. I try to pass the scalpel to Lindsay, but she shakes her head and clings to her pencil.
“You okay?”
“I need some air.” I peel off my gloves, toss them on the table, and snatch my backpack. In my rush, my backpack knocks something hanging off the edge of a lab table. Someone gasps, maybe me, as a metal tray flies off the table and a frog plummets to the floor.
The classroom goes silent for a split second before erupting into noise. “Oh my God!” and “Did Tovah Siegel seriously just do that?” and “I’m gonna throw up.”
Ms. Anaya tells us to have respect for everything we work with in the lab, especially anything that used to be alive. I’ve taken away whatever dignity that frog had left.
“Tovah,” Ms. Anaya says gently, “I’ll take care of this. Why don’t you go get cleaned up?”
Cleaned up? I have no idea what she’s talking about until I notice the frog’s not just on the floor—some of it is on my sweater, too.
“Lindsay, could you help her?”
Lindsay springs to her feet and steers me outside. I’m still speechless, but I love her for not laughing. I love her for not complaining about how vile she must find this. I love her for helping me scrub the sweater as best we can with generic pink soap and school bathroom water that has two temperatures, cold and ice-cold.
“Thanks for helping,” I say.
“Always.”
Lindsay has some spare clean clothes in her gym locker, though her long-sleeved shirt stretches too tight across my too-big breasts.
“You look fine,” Lindsay says as I tug at the shirt in the locker room mirror. “I know you hate them, but I wish I had your boobs.”
“Take them. Please.” My curves aren’t something I’ve ever been comfortable with—and sometimes I think it’s because my body looks so much better on Adina.
Lindsay’s phone buzzes with a text as the bell rings. “Troy’s heading to the parking lot. Lunch at Mario’s?” All seniors with at least a B average can get off-campus passes.
“Oh.” I’m not feeling supersocial at the moment, so I lie: “I have some work to finish up before fifth period.”
She’s giggling at something on her phone, no longer paying attention. “Sure. Okay.”
Lindsay’s mine until her boyfriend comes along, and then I’m microscopic.
I bundle myself in a peacoat so the shirt looks a little less obscene. I’m not hungry, and I don’t feel like facing the cafeteria. The table of student council reps, where Lindsay and I usually sit when we don’t go off campus, is always the loudest. This year I’m a senior rep, which means I have to go to a couple scintillating faculty meetings a month and report back to the rest of the council. It isn’t glamorous, but I needed a leadership role on my résumé.
I roam the school. Near the math wing, I scoop up a discarded copy of our student newspaper, the Roar. I pause before pitching it into the recycling bin. Next to Troy’s article about our football team’s “devastating loss” last week is a photo of Adina.
It’s part of a series the paper does highlighting student achievements. She never told me she was being interviewed, but that doesn’t surprise me. The piece calls her a “prodigy,” which isn’t news. In the photo, she’s wearing her usual Adina smirk, this look plenty of guys reading the paper have likely said lewd things about. Though I’m sure few of them give a shit about classical music.
She gets all this praise because she has this innate talent, this natural musical ability. I know, because I don’t have it. I’ve had to work for every bit of my success in high school: studied for hours for the PSAT and SAT and ACT, campaigned for a seat on student council, fought for a volunteer position at the hospital.
Not for the first time lately, I wonder if waiting for the test results would be easier if we could talk. But there’s no way I’d initiate that conversation after everything that’s happened between us.
I ball up the newspaper and toss it in the bin.
Eventually I wind up in the art hallway. Most of the student work on the walls is pretty good, though I don’t know anything about composition or color theory.
“Admiring my work?”
The voice makes me jump, and I spin around to face Zack Baker-Horowitz. He’s wearing my favorite jacket of his, a tweed blazer with elbow patches, over a faded green T-shirt that makes his hazel eyes more jade than brown. He’s holding a cardboard plate and a slice of cafeteria pizza.
“Which one’s yours?” I ask.
“These three.” All of them are mixed media with various random objects that go off the edges. They’re imperfect but interesting. He props an elbow on the wall next to his work, his body less than a foot from me.
I examine each piece, aware he’s watching me, waiting for my verdict. It makes me wonder if he craves a compliment from me, though he’s the one applying to art school. An agonizingly logical part of my mind wonders, How will he make any money doing that?
“I don’t get it,” I say finally.
A little wrinkle appears between his brows as he frowns. “There’s nothing to get.”
“Isn’t art supposed to have some deep meaning?”
“I don’t think it always needs to.” With his free hand, he points at one of the pieces. “I like to draw connections between ordinary things. I’m experimenting with different ways of telling stories using paint and found objects I’ve been collecting. Receipts, grocery lists, stuff like that. It’s an exploration of the mundane.”
“So your art is mundane?”
He cracks a smile, exposing a small gap between his two front teeth that I find adorable, and moves his elbow off the wall to nudge my arm. Though my jacket is so thick I can barely feel it, my stomach does backflips. I wonder what it would feel like to touch him longer than a split second. “Exactly.”
Really, my crush on him is more of an admiration. In the spring when we both run track, he pushes back his hair with neon sweatbands and strikes dorky, flashy poses at the finish line that make me laugh. I can’t date him, so I’m resigned to appreciating him: his confidence and his jokes and his long eyelashes. And his vintage jacket, of course, because he has his own style and I can appreciate that, too.
“You’re not at lunch with Lindsay and Troy?” I ask.
“Nah.” He stares at the ground for a moment. “You know that whole B-average thing? I’m sort of working on that. Last week I had a bad test . . . or three.”
“Oh.” I chew the inside of my cheek, feeling guilty for assuming a B average was easy to maintain. In my AP classes, kids weep over Bs. I’d weep over a B too, but I’ve only ever gotten a B-plus in Introduction to Drawing, actually, which I took freshman year to fulfill an art elective. Somehow, the introduction was too advanced for me. Mrs. Willoughby insisted we were graded on effort and not talent, but still, it was clear my apple and orange baskets looked like cerebral hemispheres, not fruit.
He must sense the awkwardness because he changes the subject. “Happy New Year, by the way.” Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is tomorrow. My family will spend hours at our synagogue, both morning and evening, to observe it.
“You too. Doing anything for it?”
One of Zack’s moms is Jewish, but his family is pretty secular, while I was raised Conservative Jewish. We have this running joke that he’ll never be as Jewish as I am. Obviously it isn’t an actual competition, and if it were, well, I’ve already won.
Conservative Judaism isn’t at all related to American political beliefs; “conservative” simply means we conserve Jewish tradition. We obey halacha, Jewish law, but we’re flexible enough to adapt as society progresses. “Tradition and change”—that’s the motto of the movement. My family and I keep kosher, observe Shabbat, pray multiple times daily, and attend synagogue weekly, though much of our spirituality takes place outside of that. We’re a people with a history, thousands of years of culture and traditions.
There’s this phrase “klal Yisrael,” which means “all of Israel,” that all Jews are connected. I’ll admit I’m drawn to Zack partially because he’s Jewish too, one of fewer than ten kids in my thousand-person school who are.
“I get presents. Does that count?”
“Barely.” Gift giving isn’t a typical part of Jewish holidays. Some families exchange gifts on Chanukah because of its proximity to Christmas, but we haven’t done that since Adina and I were kids.
“Then I’ll have to impress you with my Hebrew,” he says, and I lift my eyebrows, a challenge. He clears his throat. “L’shanah tovah . . . Tovah.”
“Kol hakavod,” I commend him. “And nice pronunciation.” I’m sweating in my coat, but I refuse to reveal Lindsay’s triple-XS shirt.
“L’shanah tovah” means “for a good year.” My name means “good” in Hebrew, hence the double Tovahs. Adina’s name means “delicate and refined,” because of course it does. My name’s definition is boring in comparison.
L’shanah tovah, Tovah. I like the way he said it. Maybe good isn’t so bad after all.
“You know, we’ve been doing this thing for a while,” Zack says. “This our-best-friends-are-dating-so-we-might-as-well-hang-out-with-each-other-too thing.”
“Yeah . . .” Though we don’t hang out just the two of us, not ever. “We have. It’s like we each got a bonus friend.”
“Bonus friend. I like that.” Zack’s fingers fidget with his plate. I’ve never seen him nervous, not even before a track meet. “I wanted to ask you something. Bonus friend to bonus friend. Do you . . . maybe want to see a movie sometime? With me?” When I don’t respond right away, he continues: “Or it doesn’t have to be a movie. Most movies these days aren’t that good anyway. It could be dinner. Somewhere kosher! Or we could go to a science museum—you’re into that kind of thing, right? Or an art museum if you wanna make fun of some famous masterpieces . . .” At last he trails off, ripping the plate crookedly in half.
My jacket is suffocating me, my temperature probably well over thirty-seven degrees Celsius. I can handle the joking around. I can pretend the elbow bumping happened by accident. But this is impossible to ignore. As much as I want to say yes, I can’t. What’s the best possible outcome here—we have a spectacular first date, and then he has to comfort me if/when my life falls apart at the end of the month? He plays the role of supportive boyfriend because he’d be an asshole not to? That isn’t how I want to begin my first relationship. If I’m ever going to be with Zack, I should be entirely unburdened.
“I, um.” Telling him about the test flashes across my mind for an instant. Then this would turn into a pity party, and I don’t want that. “I—can’t,” I say, because Ask me again in ten days would require more explanation than I’m capable of giving.
“Oh. That’s fine. Never mind, then. It was just an idea. Don’t worry about it.” He flicks his hair out of his eyes again and spins to head down the hall. “See ya.”
“See you,” I mumble.
Zack’s meaningless art stares down at me. He was wrong: it does mean something. It means that inside his mind is all this creativity and life and energy. All this color. It’s not mundane at all. It’s a reminder that today I got too close to him, and I won’t make that mistake again.