Mean

by Justin Sayre

  I get it.

  And it will probably be better, and we’ll actually get to see more of them, and Hannah will love to ride the airplanes and it will be better, but I don’t want to find out if it is.

  I want them together and everything to be pretty okay, because that’s what I deserve.

  I’m pretty okay. Or at least I’m trying to be most of the time.

  And I like Noah, and I think he’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, but I don’t know what it means to be liked by him and still be myself. I just need to be very still and take a minute to breathe and figure out what kind of woman I want to be, because I’m taking that question really seriously, and maybe if I get it right, all the rest will make sense. It’s important and I’m so excited and scared about my Bubbe Brunch, I’m, like, freaking out, and I don’t want to not get excited about that, just to be excited about Noah. Because he’s beautiful and nice, but he’s not my bubbe.

  I wasted a whole day of school over this.

  Honestly, I walked around all day and went from class to class to class today and all I was ever really thinking about was what I should text him today. And I’m sort of mad about that, but I also can’t stop and I don’t really like either option.

  And then he texts me.

  hey

  And everything starts all over again.

  Chapter 14

  I’ve started to hate my bat mitzvah. It’s all getting out of hand. Not only is the dress still an issue but now Aunt Debbie is riding me hard about the party. I need a theme. Or I needed one a year ago. She’s mad about that too. I don’t know why this whole thing has to be a Cirque du Soleil-y type ordeal. I don’t need a tumbler. I just want music and maybe a magician, because I think that would be funny. And tater tots. That’s it. Aunt Debbie’s not hearing any of it.

  “Everybody has a theme to their parties.” Aunt Debbie sighed into the phone. “Your cousin Brian in Ohio’s was musicals. Cousin Aubrey’s was fashion, which I thought I was going to hate, but I actually really loved. Don’t tell Auntie Miriam that.”

  I thought about just saying a word like “snow” or “pickles” and seeing what Aunt Debbie would do with it, but she was relentless. So finally, I just blurted out Final Fantasy, because I wanted to get back to playing it and Aunt Debbie went off with a mission and a credit card. She’s going crazy now too. At the reception, she told me she’s going to play Enya, which she calls “Hobbit music,” because it’s close enough and there might be someone breathing fire. She’s trying to get knights from Medieval Times to come and have a sword fight. She wants all the waiters to wear elf ears, and she wants me to be carried in on something she’s calling an “elfin barge.” I have no idea what that is. My mom and Debbie got into a fight about it over the phone, but I also know she’s secretly happy that she gets to do something.

  Aunt Debbie thinks I should wear a dress like her friend Pam has for when she goes to the Renaissance fair. “You’ll be a fairy princess, isn’t that what you want? Tell me now, because I don’t want to have to start all over with this theme again.” I don’t know how fairy princess got swirled into it, but I guess that’s what’s happening.

  When I tell all this to Sophie on our walk to school Wednesday morning, within seconds she’s pulling up dresses on her phone. “So would you go more as a Belle or a Snow White?” Sophie says, thinking of Disney princesses as a reference point.

  “Like nobody. It doesn’t have to be a princess anything.” I smile back.

  “Well, then why did you say princess? I mean, it doesn’t make any sense for you anyway. You’re not a princess,” Sophie says, and catches herself, because she doesn’t want that to sound mean, but it’s not.

  I’m not a princess. And I don’t want to be. It’s all so much. I just don’t want to look like a pie or have guys from New Jersey clanking after me with swords and an elfin barge. I don’t say any of this. It’s easier not to. I just need to find a dress because there are only two more weeks. I have to find something soon or Bubbe’s going to have a heart attack. She calls me every day to ask me if I have an idea. She knows I’m not a princess too.

  “All right, chicky, but you need to pick something and it needs to be good.” She clucks into the phone. Bubbe’s being funny, but I know she’s also getting serious. She’s only been up there a week when she calls me and says, “When are we having our brunch?”

  Oh, I hadn’t thought about that yet but yeah, it’s coming up. I don’t even have my question. I mean, I have stupid questions like what should I text Noah, and what do I do if my parents get a divorce, but do I want to waste my brunch on them? There must be other things I need to ask.

  “How about a week from Saturday? It’ll give me an excuse to get away from your aunt Debbie and the dogs.” Bubbe thinks my aunt Debbie has too many dogs, and they argue about it. I answer okay, because I don’t know what else to say. And she says to put it in my phone so I’ll remember but she’ll see me before that, and she hangs up. She’s blindsided me right after school when Allegra’s waiting for me to walk together to Hebrew school. This day just keeps heaping it on me.

  “You really should have come with us last Wednesday. It was, like, the Best Evah.”

  Allegra does this thing that I hate, where she says words like no one ever says them because she thinks it sounds cool. I hate it a thousand percent and when she’s not around I actually make fun of her for it, which I’m not proud of but it is really just dumb-sounding. Who says Evah like that? Nobody, that’s who.

  “Oh, cool, where did you go?” I ask, just trying to get to my seat seventeen blocks away.

  “Oh, just Two Boots. I do this weird thing, I don’t know if you do this . . .”

  I bet I don’t.

  “But, like, I love to order pineapple on pizza and then take all the pineapple off it because I just like the taste it leaves more than the taste of the pineapple. Is that weird?”

  So she’s wasteful and stupid. I should say yes it is, Allegra, you’re a total freak, but I don’t, because I kind of think she’s trying to have a conversation with me. I mean, she did just ask me a question about something I do or like, and she’s never done that. I think she might be trying to be my friend, which would be terrible.

  “I don’t like pineapple on pizza. I like it cold,” I answer. I keep looking at her, like she’s hiding something or getting ready to gnaw on me. I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation, and I certainly didn’t think our first one would be about pineapple. We’re only a few blocks away, so hopefully we can finish this up and forget it ever happened.

  “Oh, I get that. I like that too. I like pineapple ice cream. Jake likes that Stephen Colbert kind, I don’t know what you call it.” Allegra talks while looking at her phone and typing Americone something. “I should get some for when he, like, comes over. Oh, he is coming over. Like, to watch TV or something. Noah might come too.” Noah is standing outside with a bunch of boys from class. Jake waves to Allegra, and she giggles in a way that sounds like the echo in her empty head and waves back.

  “You guys are doing a lot together. That’s cool.”

  “Well we, like, invited you. Noah wanted you to come. You can’t say we didn’t invite you.”

  “I didn’t. You invited me to pizza, but I couldn’t go.”

  “Well, can you come next time?” Allegra says, dragging every word out to show how frustrated she is with me. Noah waves a little bit and laughs a smile that makes me want to run away.

  “Are you inviting me now?” I ask back.

  “Yesssaahh,” she moans as we head into Hebrew school. “And I think Noah would be, like, super happy if you came.”

  And just to stop her from adding a full other syllable to a word with only one, I say, “Fine, I’ll come.” I yell it a lot louder than I should have, and all the boys and the two girls near the gate stop whatever they’re doing to see wher
e this full tantrum is going to go. Allegra’s making a stink face, so she’s no help. But Noah just smiles again. He might like me. Noah Wasserman might actually like me, and I’m not supposed to freak out. Not even a little. I’m supposed to shrug it off and learn about the Torah. Nothing is fair.

  “I hope you’re talking about pizza,” Noah says. I sort of bark and head into the building.

  When we get into class, Noah turns around at the same desk he sat in last week, right near the front and up near me, and he smiles again. He’s killing me. His blue eyes flash their bluest flash, and I don’t know if I can think about anything else for the rest of the class. He’s ruining my education, and I have to say a lot of Hebrew in a few weeks. I just can’t think around him. He’ll turn me into one of those girls with his eyes. Those beautiful, beautiful look-like-the-sky-on-your-birthday eyes.

  I’m getting really nervous about this. My brain turns off when I think about him, and I just look like the dumbest but happiest person in the world. He’s just so good to look at. I don’t notice that class has started until Rabbi Jessica asks a question and I don’t have an answer.

  “Rachel E, I was asking the class, ‘Is there something you would never do?’”

  “Maybe. Yes,” I stammer out. I barely know what’s happening.

  People start saying things that they think Rabbi Jessica wants to hear, like murder someone or lie, which I know Caitlin Brofferman, for a fact, has thought about and maybe done. But then Rabbi Jessica says, “Well, what if to save your life, or the life of your family, you had to do these things? Would you lie? Would you kill someone?”

  Now everybody’s a little confused, but Noah answers right away, “Well, that’s different.”

  “To you it is. Sure. Because you’re the one doing it. You know there’s a reason why you’re doing it, but it doesn’t necessarily make the thing you’re doing right, does it?” Rabbi Jessica asks the class. Nobody knows how to answer because they think it’s some sort of word trap, but I don’t think it is. So I try to wake up my brain and answer.

  “No. It’s just an excuse, and everyone’s got one,” I answer.

  “Well, Rachel E, that’s one way of looking at it but not a very positive one.” Rabbi Jessica seems a little upset about my answer but I know that’s what she’s talking about. “What if we could look at it a little differently? What if we could do both? What if we could see the bad but try to understand it a little better?”

  See, that’s what I was saying. I don’t know why she made a strange face. I mean, we’re saying the same thing.

  “When we talk about an ‘excuse,’ it sounds like we’re not really listening to the circumstances. We can have justification, but we can also have blame. The two can exist together, but the point I’m trying to make is that we can understand why people do things we don’t like and not excuse them, but at least have compassion toward them. What about someone who’s really hurting or really in trouble, what about them? What if they take out that hurt on you?”

  I’m honestly a little lost now. I don’t know what she’s looking for, and now I feel like the rest of the silent class, just trying to figure out Rabbi Jessica’s right answer instead of our own.

  “If we can just for a minute try to step into someone else’s shoes and give them all the license to be as crazy and wonderful as you are, don’t you think you’d understand people and forgive them?”

  People around the room start to nod. Allegra is paying attention too.

  “Understanding is the first step to forgiving and the banister that helps you up these steps. Forgive me, I was up a little late, and this didn’t sound as cheesy at two in the morning, but the banister is empathy.” We all laugh at her joke, and the silence changes. It’s not fearful anymore, it’s warm. “If you can put yourself in someone’s place, even though you don’t have to do what they did, you can somehow see why they did it, you can understand, and maybe you can help them to not do it again. But it has to start with the first step and a hand on the banister.”

  It all sounds so nice, and people are nodding and dying to say a few things, but Rabbi Jessica goes on. She’s walking around and waving her hands as she talks to us about understanding why people do the things they do and the forgiveness we need to have for them and ourselves. She’s really making her point.

  “We’ve talked about mitzvahs before, and I want to be clear about them, because it’s not about doing something good for someone so you get credit for it or so you get points with God or something. That’s not a mitzvah. A mitzvah is that you do something good in the world because there should be more good in the world, and it’s your job to make the world better. We call that tikkun olam, repair the world.”

  None of us have ever seen Rabbi Jessica like this before. She’s never been so animated, almost frantic, about anything like this before, and finally she sits down at her desk, and she puts her face in her hand.

  “I’m sorry, everybody, if I’m making a bigger point of this than seems necessary, but I just got some bad news from home, and I’m upset.” Rabbi Jessica’s sister in Minnesota has cancer. It’s a really awful thing, and we all know about it but none of us are sure we should. None of us talk to her about it, and she’s never mentioned it in class before, so it’s a weird gray area. “Because sometimes I want to fix the world. I want to concentrate on that, but sometimes the bad is all I can see.”

  There are tears in Rabbi Jessica’s eyes as she keeps talking. She’s not our teacher or our rabbi at the moment, she’s just a friend, and that feels amazing, but it’s also so strange. I feel like I want to hug her, but I also feel like I want to leave.

  Her sister is having to do another round of chemo because all the stuff they thought was gone was just hiding, and it’s just been really tough on her and on their mom. David S. says that his mom had cancer and it was so scary, and Jeremy F. says his uncle died. It’s so weird because nobody is raising their hand, and we’re all just there together in it for a minute. We’re all people but none of us really knows what to say. We just wish we did.

  Rabbi Jessica takes a deep breath and says she’s sorry for making class her therapy session, which we all laugh at, but we mostly want to hug her. Thank goodness Erica Greenblatt does. She breaks the ice and we all go in for one. Rabbi Jessica thanks us and goes back to repairing the world.

  After class, Noah walks out alongside me and asks, “So, you’re coming for pizza?”

  “I guess I am now.” I shrug.

  “That was such a weird one today.” Noah shrugs back.

  “I didn’t think so. I thought it was great,” I say.

  “Why?” Noah smiles, trying to distract me, but I am going to keep thinking. I swear.

  “Because it was nice to be treated like a person, and I’m sure Rabbi Jessica feels that way too,” I say. “She wasn’t our teacher, we weren’t her students. We were just people. And that’s what she was talking about anyway.”

  “I really like that.” Noah smiles again. I keep trying not to look directly at him, because I’m actually afraid that my brain will turn right off again. When I finally look up, he’s still smiling and says, “Well, I’m excited you’re coming for pizza.”

  Chapter 15

  “So wait, who is Noah?” Ducks asks me as he slams his tray onto the lunch table.

  I’ve started telling Ducks everything about my crush and he’s almost too into the gossip of it to be mad at me for not telling him sooner.

  “And why didn’t you tell me about him?” he adds, slamming himself into his seat.

  Okay, I guess I was wrong. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t tell him. I mean, I don’t feel like Ducks would be awful to me about it. I don’t think he would make fun of me or say Noah’s name weirdly every time I bring him up. I guess I just wanted to keep it to myself because I never thought it would ever happen, and I didn’t want to look like a tool if it didn’t. But
it did. We went for pizza. It’s on.

  I tell Ducks all about Noah. Not the boring stuff like how good he smells or the eyes, I just mention them. I tell him about where he goes to school and how smart he is and how he was excited that I went for pizza and really nice to me the whole time and how I probably love him. That last part I don’t say out loud, but I think it. I’m trying not to blush the whole time I’m talking about him, but I can’t help it. I just think about him, and he’s so super sexy to me. I mean, you didn’t see him eat cheese.

  Ducks just listens. So I keep going. I tell him about walking there with Allegra and Jake. I tell him about laughing with Noah. I tell him about leaving him at 5th Avenue and how I texted him when I got home. I don’t tell him that all I want to do is kiss his face. I almost want to eat his face. I know how awful that sounds, but I just want all of his face because it’s all good. That part I don’t tell Ducks because it weirds me out. I’ve never wanted to eat someone’s face before. I’m not even sure I should now. I’m worried that I’ll either say something like that or lose all control of my body and senses and tackle him to the ground. I’m surprised I didn’t yesterday. I’ve never had these sexy-times thoughts about anybody, and now I’m having them all about Noah. All of them. All the time. And then eating his face.

  “So did you text him when you got home?” Ducks asks.

  “Yes. And he texted back,” I spit out.

  “Wow,” Ducks says, a little bit in shock, but then smiles. “You must really like him if you were willing to go for pizza with Allegra. You hate Allegra.”

  “I don’t hate Allegra,” I say, trying not to be too loud.

  “You at least ‘don’t like her strongly,’ Ellen,” Ducks corrects me. I know he’s right, and I give it to him anyway. I just want to skip over him being mad at me, and get back to talking about Noah.