Thirty-six
Tovah
ONCE AGAIN, BEING A GOOD kid pays off. I persuade the art teacher to let me into the classroom early Monday morning, so I’m there waiting to startle Zack when he flips on the lights.
“Shit, you scared me,” he says when he spots me at his table.
“Sorry. We should probably talk.”
He drops his bag on the table and leans against it. “We should.” When I don’t immediately initiate the aforementioned talking, he says, “Feels almost ridiculous to ask this, but how are you doing?”
Lately we’ve seen each other only at school. I’ve invented excuses for not seeing him on weekends, but I’ve missed his floppy hair and paint-stained jackets and the space between his teeth. I’ve missed the way he looks at me like he can’t be disappointed with me.
“I’ve been better, to be honest.” I think of Adina and say the only thing I can manage. “Things are difficult at home right now.”
“I won’t pretend to understand what that’s like, but I wish I could have been there for you.”
“Me too,” I say, surprising myself. Although I haven’t been able to repeat Adina’s plan to anyone, maybe I could have told Zack, and even if he didn’t have any magical solutions, he could have at least shared the weight of it.
He lowers his voice then and flicks his eyes around the room to ensure we’re the only two people here. “I’m sorry about what happened at my house.”
I sigh. “Yeah. That.”
“Your mind was a hundred different places that day,” he says. Not an accusation. A fact.
“I—I know,” I admit. “It was. I’m sorry too.”
“Is it cliché to say that I want our first time to be perfect?” He brushes my knuckles with his thumb. “I don’t want us to have to rush in between parents getting home. I want us to not be thinking about anything else except each other. I want to have plenty of time because”—he blushes—“well, whenever I’ve imagined it in my head, it lasts a long time.”
My heart flutters at those last words. “That . . . sounds extremely good to me.”
“Yeah?” He brightens.
I force myself to say what I’ve been thinking since I said yes to the University of Washington a couple days ago. “But we only have a few more months before college, and you’re going east for school, and I’m staying here.”
“You’ll be great anywhere. I have no doubts.”
I swallow this down, trying to believe it. Wanting to believe it. “Even though I have no idea what I want to do? Or who I am?” It feels like I’m turning my brain inside out for him to examine. Waiting for him to diagnose me.
“Maybe you’re not supposed to know what you wanna be in high school,” he says, like he and my mother discussed this together beforehand.
“But you with art? And my sister with viola? And everyone else who seems to have the rest of their lives mapped out?”
He shrugs. “I could change my mind, and that’s okay. Or I could never make any money and have to figure out something else. Who really knows for sure?”
I did. But everything I used to think has changed.
“I don’t want to force you to do long-distance,” I say, switching the conversation back to what I’m sure we’re both thinking about.
“Is that it? Or do you not want to do long-distance?”
I chew on this for a while. “I’m not sure. And I hate not being sure. It’s not that I don’t like you. You know how much I like you.”
“Yeah. I think I do.” He grins. “Hear me out a sec, because I have an idea.”
I lean forward, my heart twinging with hope. “I’m listening.”
“What if we agree to see where things go? If we’re still together by the end of the summer, well, we’ll figure it out. And if we’re not . . . then there’s not much to stress out about now, is there?”
I nearly open my mouth to protest. To say that we should have a concrete plan. Instead, what comes out is: “I like that idea. We’ll see where we are at the end of the summer.”
Beneath the table, his sneaker bumps mine.
“I’ve missed that,” I say softly. Across the table, we connect our fingers. “There’s one more thing I want to ask,” I add after a while.
“Fine, I’ll show you my mutant toes.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Sorry,” he says.
I take a deep breath. “I love you. A lot. And I’m wondering if you’ll go to prom with me.”
The way he looks at me melts me from the inside. He isn’t smiling—this is a different emotion from happiness. It’s gentler. Softer. “I love you a lot too,” he says, inching even closer and putting his hands on my knees. “And yes. Of course we’re going to prom together.” He opens his backpack and pulls out a canvas board. “Before everyone starts coming in and ruins our privacy, I have something for you. Something I’ve been working on.”
The canvas is covered with a variety of found objects: the receipt he found the night of our first date (ginger ale, cold care tea, cough drops, beer), tickets from a science museum we went to, the stub from the movie at Rain City Cinema.
My heart is full. Throat dry. I can’t speak.
“This one does mean something,” he says, “but I’ll let you figure it out.”
Someone raps lightly on my bedroom door.
“Come in,” I call without glancing up from where I’m lying in bed with my laptop.
“Hi,” Adi says, and I sit up straight. Her hair is in a whatever ponytail and her face is makeup free, her mouth not its usual red. “What are you doing?”
“Browsing the University of Washington’s course catalog. What do you think, should I take History of the Circus or the Anthropology of Chocolate?”
“Both.” She perches on the edge of my bed, but barely, like my sheets are made of lava.
“When do you sign up for classes?”
“They’re all basically decided for me, but, you know, that’s what I want. All viola, all the time.” She doesn’t say anything about taking classes at Johns Hopkins.
“It’ll be the perfect place for you,” I say, because it probably will be. Adina can have Baltimore. She deserves it.
Adi gives me a slight smile. “Thanks for saying that.”
She stares up at my walls, all of which are bare now. My room is no longer a museum of all my accomplishments, all my dreams. It’s one big blank slate.
“I don’t hate you,” she says to the walls. Quietly. The opposite of how she said that statement’s opposite.
For about a minute I don’t say anything.
“Tovah?”
“I heard you,” I say. “I—I think I knew that. But . . . thanks for telling me.”
Adina crosses her legs, the bed squeaking beneath her. “I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have said a lot of things to you that night. What I said about death with dignity—that’s not happening. I don’t want that. I hadn’t thought anything through, and I was acting reckless, like you said, and . . .” She trails off, as though waiting for me to say something.
I shut my laptop. I wanted more time to prepare for this conversation, if it’s something I could ever be fully prepared for. I want to do what I wasn’t able to do after our mom was diagnosed. I want to hold her in my arms and keep her there and make sure nothing bad ever happens to her. I want to be there, because maybe if I am, it’ll stop her from thinking such horrendous thoughts.
I should have planned some grand speech. Convince her that life is still worth living. Fill it with quotes and statistics and facts about how people with this disease aren’t doomed the way she thinks they are. But with Ima getting worse, that’s tougher for me to wrap my brain around. Tougher for me to believe.
“I want to believe you,” I say. “I really, really want to believe you, Adina.”
She stares at me, unblinking, and there’s a rawness and sincerity in her gaze that makes me realize: she wouldn’t lie to me about this. It’s too massive. “I swear to you. When I went to the doctor last week, I was terrified, really fucking terrified, that they were going to diagnose me with Huntington’s and what that would mean. That I’d have to start going through with this ‘plan.’ And I didn’t want that. I couldn’t envision it. I thought that was the one way I had to control this, but I can control so many other things. I’m still scared of what’s going to happen to me someday, but . . . I have some time. To do the things I want. And”—she chews her lip—“those things don’t have to involve destroying objects that are important to you.”
“You have so much time.” I want to hug her, or touch her shoulder, but I don’t have the courage to do either yet. “If you ever feel that way again, tell me, okay? Or tell Ima, or tell your doctor, or . . .”
“I’m starting some antidepressants. And the doctor mentioned a support group. I’m going to go. See what it’s like.”
“That’s good. Really good. I could go with you, if you want.”
She twirls the end of her ponytail around a fist, checking for split ends she doesn’t have. “I think I have to go on my own. But thanks.”
In the silence that follows, I mimic her, running my hands through my own short hair. It may never look like hers, but I don’t think I want it to.
“I need to confess to something. I was jealous of you. You were right. I spent most of elementary school and middle school being jealous of you. You had—still have—this confidence I wish I had most of the time. And you’ve always known what you were meant to do.”
Adina’s eyebrows crease together. “But you couldn’t stand my music.”
“I couldn’t stand that because you could play an instrument, you were the music expert, even though I love music too. But viola became who you were, and that was what I wanted. Something for myself.”
“You accomplished that,” she says. She lies down on my bed, increasingly more comfortable in my space. “Pretty well, in fact. And you have to know now that I’m not confident all the time.”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know if what I picked out for myself is the right path, and I’m okay with that. I don’t think I need to have everything figured out yet. I don’t know why I was in such a hurry.” I tap my laptop. “Hence the course catalog.”
She sighs. “Since we’re being honest, you have to know, Tovah, that when you wanted to leave for those programs—that killed me. I couldn’t have handled Ima all alone. And I understand that what I did was wrong and I could have done something else, but . . . that was the only thing I could think of to get you to stay.”
I push my pillows out of the way so I can lie down next to her, prop my head on one arm, and turn to face her. “We’re past that now.”
“I know. I just wanted to make sure you knew. That I’m sorry. Ani miztaeret.”
“Me too.” She sighs. “Hard to believe high school’s almost over.” It’s such not a very Adina thing to say. She’s barely shown interest in high school. “I just think . . . no, never mind.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I wonder if I missed out on anything. I haven’t been the most . . . social person in high school.”
“I don’t know, you have a pretty good shot at prom queen.”
Adi holds a hand to her heart. “Like, oh my God, thanks for voting for me!” she says, and I wish this ease with which we joke felt more familiar. It feels good, though, like picking up a book you read years and years ago, remembering certain passages you loved while some twists feel brand-new.
“I think,” she continues in a small voice, “that I might want to go to prom. Is that weird?”
“Very weird,” I say, and then grin. “Do you want to go with me? Zack and I are going with Lindsay and Troy, and I could find you a date. Or you could go without one. Whichever you want.”
“As much as I like the idea of making a statement by going solo, I want the full experience. Find me a date.”
We talk plans for a while longer, until it’s after eleven and she starts yawning. I almost ask if she wants to have a sleepover in my room like we used to do, but it’s too soon. Things still feel—not fragile, but newly rebuilt.
As she’s about to go across the hall, she turns to me. She holds my gaze, dark eyes hard, a hurricane inside them. “There’s one more thing I need to ask you. If it had been you, Tovah . . . what would you have done?”
And at this point, even after everything we’ve done to each other, I truly don’t have an answer.