Twenty-eight
Tovah
ADINA CREEPS INSIDE THE HOUSE with the grace of a cat. One of Ima’s knitted scarves, a maroon that matches the flush on her cheeks, is loose around her neck. Her hair, as usual, is long and wild. Beautiful.
I sip a vanilla protein shake as she tiptoes from the hall to the kitchen, unaware I’m watching her. Waiting to catch her and interrogate her.
I quit track—which I joined only to put it on my JHU application—the day after my rejection, but I can’t seem to give up running entirely. I won’t allow my muscles to atrophy. My internal clock wakes me up early, even on Saturday mornings. Most exercise is prohibited on Shabbat unless it relaxes you. These days, running is one of the few things that does.
“Are you just now getting home?” I ask.
Adina jumps, startled by my voice. “Good morning to you, too.”
She pours herself a glass of orange juice, and we do an awkward dance in the kitchen for a few seconds as we try to get out of each other’s way. Then she sits at the table across from me. Casually. Like staying out all night is something she does all the time.
“Were you with that guy?” I ask. “Your mysterious boyfriend?”
Adina shrugs. Takes a sip of juice.
She was. She was with a guy the whole night. On Shabbat.
“Did you have sex with him?” The word isn’t frightening anymore. After all, Zack and I are on the precipice of it.
“I have been for a while.”
“Oh,” I say softly.
He’s not my first, she said before her audition trip. I assumed she meant first boyfriend. First kiss. Not the first everything else.
I guess I thought, even after everything we’ve done to each other, that she’d tell me when the first everything else happened. I can’t believe I missed it. That I have no idea who it was or when it was, if it was good and if she felt different afterward.
“It isn’t a big deal,” she says, unwinding the scarf and fluffing her hair.
My sister looks calm. Relaxed. Happy. Is it because of the sex? Maybe she should be having as much sex as she wants. Why shouldn’t she?
If I’d tested positive instead of my sister, there’d be no Zack. I’m sure of that. There’d be none of these Adina mind games. Would I have been as heartbroken over Johns Hopkins? I planned so much for both outcomes, but none of this is what I expected. At all.
Adina is the person I’m going to have to take care of the rest of my life. We’ll always be tied together like this. Every day of my life, I’ll face this nightmare of my supreme genetic luck. Over and over and over.
I force myself to drink a third of the protein shake; if I don’t, I’ll feel miserable my entire run. Adina smiles at something on her phone, draws a design on her glass with a fingertip, hums something off-key under her breath. God, she really is happy. Evil eyes glint on her wrist.
“You’ve been wearing the bracelet every day too, right?” I say, searching for some common ground between us. Like after everything we’ve been through, maybe all we have in common is a piece of jewelry.
“Oh.” Her eyes dart from her bracelet to mine. “The bracelets from savtah.”
“Yeah.” I take a closer look at hers. The bracelets are nearly identical. The beads on hers are larger, a deeper blue. I haven’t noticed before.
“Well, mine belonged to savtah,” Adina says, and when I raise my brows in confusion, she continues: “Ima only had one actual heirloom. She found yours online and told me not to tell you. I guess yours does look a little cheap.”
“What are you—,” I start, shaking my head, not sure if she’s telling the truth or merely trying to hurt me. “You—you’ve been skipping school,” I wind up firing back at her, fighting for leverage in this conversation. “Your teachers have been asking me where you are.” To be fair, it was only one teacher we have in common, Ms. Hawkins, who teaches both regular gov and my AP US Government class. She mentioned to me yesterday that she hadn’t seen Adina in more than a week and calls to my parents had gone unanswered.
“Why does it matter? I’m going to Peabody next year anyway.”
A pause. I blink at her.
“You’re . . .” The words dissolve on my lips. She’s strapped me to an operating table and cut out my tongue. “Peabody, as in the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins? You’re going to Baltimore?”
Her lips twist into a strange smile. She drags the scalpel from my mouth to my heart. “Yes. I am. My acceptances arrived yesterday. I got in everywhere I auditioned, but it was an easy choice. Baltimore was incredible when I was there, Tovah. I loved it. All the old architecture, and how artsy it is, and the cute little neighborhoods . . . There’s so much history there, you know?”
Of course I fucking know.
“And the Peabody campus is much prettier than Johns Hopkins. JHU looks like any old college campus, but Peabody is like something out of a movie.”
Any old college campus. How dare she make it sound ordinary.
She continues to babble about Baltimore. My Baltimore. She’ll walk those cobblestone streets and absorb all the energy of a brand-new place. Maybe she deserves exactly that. Surely she does. She tested positive, so she gets everything else she wants, and I get indecision and confusion and choices, choices, choices.
“I was supposed to be there,” I say hollowly, as though I had some claim to it. I wasn’t good enough. Adina knows it. I know it. The entire city of Baltimore knows it.
“You didn’t get in.” She finishes her juice and gets up, leaving her empty glass on the table. “Hey, since you’re the expert, do you think I should take any classes at Johns Hopkins my freshman year?”
I’m so numb, I can’t even feel her scalpel anymore. Peabody students are allowed to take classes on the Hopkins campus, but I can’t imagine what kinds of courses would interest Adina.
I shrug like I don’t care, though there are few things I care about more at the moment.
She stands. “I’ll figure it out later, I guess. I’m going back to sleep.”
I wash out her glass and place it in the dishwasher so our parents don’t have to deal with it later. Typical careless Adina. Then I roll the evil-eye bracelet off my wrist and slip it into my pocket.
Suddenly it seems like I’m the one struggling more than she is. I’m the one stuck deciding where to go to school. I’m the one suffocating beneath all this guilt. I’m the one who can’t figure out how the hell to be happy with my own result.
“Why did you pick it?” I call as she climbs to stairs to her room.
Halfway up, she pauses. Doesn’t even look back at me. Then she says, as though it really is that simple: “Because you wanted it so badly.”
After I get home from my run and shower—another activity only occasionally prohibited on Shabbat, but it’s up to the individual and this individual needs a shower—it’s time for Saturday-morning services at the synagogue.
“Is Ima coming?” I ask Aba, who’s waiting for me in the hall.
He shakes his head, then readjusts his kippah. Ima knitted it for him. “Not feeling up to it. And Adi’s still sleeping. I didn’t want to disturb her.”
I bite down on the inside of my cheek so I don’t say anything. Of course, better not disturb my doomed, beautiful sister.
Our walk to the synagogue is chilly and filled with Aba’s chatter about his ivrit class. He asks me about my impending college choice, but I give only vague, one-word answers.
We’ve been going to the same synagogue since Adina and I were children. We had our bat mitzvah here, and Rabbi Levine, a six-foot-tall man with short silver hair, still leads the congregation. Aba exchanges hellos with the Mizrahis and his other synagogue friends, both American and the few other Israeli transplants like my mother, who all pull pitiful faces when they see she’s not here.
Rabbi Levine talks about this week’s Torah portion, Terumah, in which God tells Moses to collect an offering from the Israelites to build a sanctuary so God can live among them. If my life were a movie, the Torah portion would parallel whatever problems I’m facing. I’d emerge from the synagogue with new energy, full of solutions.
It doesn’t. And I don’t.
“It’s a shame Adi missed that,” Aba says afterward.
Right. It would have meant so much to her, I’m sure. I pull my coat tighter around me as we trek outside. It’s too cold for April. “Did you know Adina’s been skipping school?” I’m a tattletale. I don’t care.
“The principal has called a few times,” he says. “Ima and I are still deciding how to bring it up to her.”
“Seriously?” I sputter. “She gets a free pass to act however she wants now? Even with her parents?”
“She’s fragile, Tov.” He hunches his shoulders, shielding himself from either the cold or my accusation. “You know your sister. She can be . . . volatile. I love her, but I don’t always know how to act around her. I’m still figuring it out.”
“You and me both,” I mutter, wondering if I’ll ever figure it out.
Though there are only a few months left of senior year, I drop out of student council, too. My afternoons are now wide-open, lonelier even than my sister’s. She’s never been involved in school, and now it’s my turn.
Since seventh period is now free, I spend it in the library mulling over my college acceptances. I got into a half-dozen public and private schools in Washington and across the country. The pain of losing Johns Hopkins has dulled to a bruise. It hurts only when I imagine Adina there next year.
Someone taps my shoulder, and I twist in my seat to find Zack.
“What are you doing here?”
“Abusing my hall pass privileges.” He shows me a wooden paddle with GET OUT OF CLASS FREE written on it. Gently, he bops my arm with it. “You’re cute when you’re concentrating hard. What are you working on?”
I show him my pros and cons lists. “Trying to plan out my entire future.”
He kneads my shoulders, and I lean into him. A librarian shakes her head at us, smiles, and looks away.
“You’ve been grinding your teeth a lot.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s annoying.”
He turns my face to him and skims my jaw with his thumb. “It’s not annoying. I feel bad that you’re so anxious about it all.”
None of the cities or states of schools we got into overlap. That night in the tent, he was so hopeful we’d end up near each other next year, but now we don’t talk about it. I like him too much to imagine losing him to distance. So when he asks me to come over later, I tell him yes, and I slide my foot up his leg until he blushes.
When the last bell rings, we walk outside with our hands linked. It’s amazing how natural it feels now.
“Hey,” Zack says as the school doors swing shut behind us, his voice incredulous. “It’s snowing.”
I blink at the flurries of white. A thin layer has begun to coat the grass. Everyone’s staring up at the sky, laughing and running around. Surprise snow in Seattle turns high schoolers into children. I hold out my hand to catch a snowflake, but it disappears as soon as it touches my skin. Snow in April: another strange mystery in my strange universe.
Climate change deniers, come at me. Let my entire city prove you wrong. Maybe we’ll get enough snow to bury me and put me out of my misery.