I staple some papers together. “If it makes you feel any better, one time at Six Flags I… Is there a delicate way to say shat my pants?”
“I mean, I feel like not at this point.”
“All right, well, I once shat my pants at Six Flags.”
“Is that like an RA thing?”
“Nope, that’s just a me thing.”
He laughs and groans. “Ouuuuch.”
“Sorry. You okay? You sound kind of messed up.”
“Everything just…goes haywire when one thing goes wrong. I get a nosebleed, my stomach decides it needs to hurt, my stomach decides it needs to hurt, my lungs get in on the party…”
“Okay, well, take it slow. Deep breaths. I’m not going anywhere.”
We’re quiet for a bit while I just listen to him breathe, and every once in a while I try something encouraging. He gives this little keel of pain that makes my own stomach clench up.
“You’re doing so great,” I tell him.
“What are you working on? Distract me.”
“Yeah, sure. I’m finishing up my Frida Kahlo project.”
“Frida Kahlo.”
“Yeah, you know about her?” I move some images around on my PowerPoint presentation. I fucking hate PowerPoint presentations.
“I know she was a painter. Flowers in her hair. Eyebrows.”
“She was this big revolutionary,” I say. “One of the last things she did before she died was go to this protest against Eisenhower intervening in Guatemala. Like, days before she died. And she was really into, like, traditional Mexican culture and matriarchal societies and stuff like that.”
“Badass.”
“Yeah, but she was also just, like—she was really unhappy. When she was eighteen she was in this bus accident and a pole went through her, and she had problems from it her whole life. She had to get toes amputated later, and then when she got older—and she didn’t live to be very old—she could barely leave her house.”
He coughs. “That sucks.”
“And she and her husband were always cheating on each other and fighting all the time and then they got divorced and then remarried. They wrote each other all these letters about how obsessed they were with each other, how they couldn’t live without each other, and then they’d just turn around and be awful. It’s like the messiest, most depressing love story. Are you wheezing?”
“A little. Why do you think it was like that?”
“What?” I can’t remember what I was talking about.
He coughs. “Frida.”
“I think it’s probably hard to be happy when you’re in the kind of pain she was. And I think if you’re not happy, you’re not good in relationships.” He’s still coughing. “Sasha, hey.” I close my laptop.
“I’m okay.”
“Honey.” I didn’t mean to say that. It just comes out. I don’t know if he even hears me.
“I think…” He clears his throat. “I think I should wake my dad up.”
“Good. Okay. Stay on the line, okay?”
“Okay.”
…
He calls me the next afternoon on my way home from school.
“Happy Hanukkah,” he says.
“You, too. How are you feeling?”
“Better. Just slept all day.”
“Good.” I turn right at the end of the block and almost walk straight into a woman who’s got to be a hundred and five. Such a struggle not to hang up on Sasha and run and go back and ask her who the last person is she talked to on the phone. But. “You kind of freaked me out last night.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that. Is it too much?”
“Of course not. C’mon.”
“Good,” he says. “What are you doing tonight?”
I stop in at the bodega for a candy bar and an energy drink. The traditional Hanukkah foods of our forefathers. “Nothing really,” I say.
“Nothing? It’s the first night!”
“I know, but my dad has to work, so…maybe once he gets home we’ll light candles late or something.”
“Come over,” he says.
“You’re sick.”
“Which is why I didn’t offer to come to you.”
I dig around in my purse for some pennies. “I can’t just barge in on your family’s Hanukkah.”
“Do you want me to ask my dad? Would that make you feel better?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Hang on.” I hear him shuffle around in the background, hear his dad’s voice. It’s early for him to be home. I wonder if he stayed home with Sasha.
“Do you need a bag?” the bodega lady asks me. I shake my head no and stuff everything in my purse. I always feel like a thief when I do that, even though she just saw me pay.
Sasha’s back. “My dad is very excited to find out you’re Jewish,” he says.
I laugh. “Is that a yes?” I push through the door of the bodega and out into the cold. My house is right at the end of the block, and the subway is twenty steps in the other direction, halfway across the boulevard.
“Yes,” he says. “Please come.”
“Will there be brick chicken?”
“Yes.”
“Well, finally.” I turn away from my house. “I’m coming.”
…
He calls me that night, right after I get home. “That was fun, right?” he says.
I’m going to smell like oil and onions from the latkes for days. “I love your family.”
“They love you, too. Nick says he’s gonna marry you.”
I kick my boots off my feet. “Dad?” I yell.
“Still not home?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Sooooo listen, I called because I had an amazing idea and I couldn’t wait until tomorrow to ask you.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Hanukkah’s eight nights long. I assume you’re coming back tomorrow.”
I laugh. “Okay.”
“So it’s my sister’s birthday next week, and we’re throwing her this roller-skating party.”
“That sounds fun. It’s her fourteenth?”
“Yeah. It’s a surprise, because she doesn’t really… Stuff like that stresses her out because she feels like she doesn’t have a lot of people to invite, so it’s better just to leave her out of the planning stuff.”
I hang my coat up. At Sasha’s, we just throw them on the chair when we come in. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, the thing is, she really doesn’t have that many people to invite. And I know she likes you, so…”
“I’d love to come,” I say. “I can’t really roller skate, but I can definitely eat cake and bring presents.”
“Well, I was thinking you could come, and you could bring all those healthy friends of yours, and they could roller skate, and you and I can, y’know… Bring presents and eat cake.”
I head upstairs. “Sure, sounds fun.”
“You’re amazing. Do you need ideas for a present?”
“No, I know what to get her.”
“Amazing,” he says. “You’re amazing.” After we hang up, I curl up with those words and sleep beside them. Amazing.
…
I call him on Friday from the girls’ bathroom on the third floor of my school. “I feel like shit,” I say. “Why aren’t you at school?”
“I am. I ducked out of class when I saw your number.”
“Oh.” I kick the metal trash can next to the toilet. “Sorry.”
“What’s wrong?”
“My wrists are killing me, and my neck hurts, and I’m so fucking tired, and I just… It’s not a good day. I’m supposed to be in class right now, taking notes on this presentation, and I feel like my fingers are about to snap off.”
“You should go home and get some rest,” he says.
“Why not? Is this presentation life-altering? Is it about, like, falling in love or how to do your taxes or something else we’ll actually need to know, or is it school bullshit.”
“It’s school bullshit! It’s shitty, stupid school bullshit.”
“Isabel,” he says.
“What.”
“Go home.”
“I can’t just go home in the middle of the day.”
“I do it all the time!” he says.
“But that’s different,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and when he says, “Why’s that different?” his voice sounds funny.
“I didn’t mean it, I just… It’s different. With me.” I sink my head down into my toilet-paper-covered hands. I shouldn’t have called him.
He says, “You know there’s nothing wrong with being like me, right?”
“Of course. Sasha, come on. Of course I know that.”
“Whatever. It’s fine. I don’t care.”
“Sasha.”
“Seriously, it’s fine. Listen, are you all right? I’ve got to get back to class.”
“Yeah, I’m…”
“Seriously,” he says again. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you still coming over tonight?”
I rub my forehead. “Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll see you then.”
“Yeah.”
…
I call my dad after my rheumatologist appointment in Astoria, a couple hours before the last night of Hanukkah. “How did it go?” Dad says.
“Fine.” I hunker down in my coat on my way to the train. “They took some more blood, and they had my results from last time.”
“How’d it look?” He’s walking, too; I can hear it in his voice. Rushing around the hospital, white coat swishing behind him. On his way to see some patient who’s probably in critical condition, but making time for me and my blood tests.
“Good,” I say. “Sed rate was normal. CRP was fine.”
“Munchkin, that’s great!”
“He told me if my knees keep hurting I should try losing weight.”
“Want me to come over there and beat him up?”
I laugh a little. “It’s fine.”
“Listen, baby, I am going to try so hard to be there tonight.”
I feel myself smile. “Yeah?”
“Yes. I’m getting the last of this paperwork done, and then I’m going to be home. So at least we can have one night together, right? I’ll call you as soon as I’m on my way out of here.”
“Okay.”
“That’s my girl. So glad the tests were good! I knew they would be. I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
I get to the Ditmars subway station, or, at least, to the stairs in front of it, and look up at the people rushing up and down the metal steps. My phone is still in my hand. I duck underneath the elevated tracks and call Sasha.
“My tests results were really good,” I say. “Everything came back normal.”
He sighs. “Well. That’s really frustrating.”
And just like that, I’m crying. “Y-yeah. It is.”
“Deep breaths, honey. I’m here.”
I look up at the train and stick my arm in the air for a cab.
…
My dad calls three hours later.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “Something just came up, and…”
“I get it,” I say. “It’s okay.”
“No, I told you I’d be home, and…”
“It’s okay, Dad. There’s always next year.”
“I’ll be home when I can,” he says. “As soon as I can. Maybe you and I can do some kind of midnight candle lighting, how’s that sound? That could be fun.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, sounds good.”
I hang up the phone. Sasha’s dad gives me a quick squeeze around the shoulder and gets back to showing me how to make brick chicken while Nick and Josh wrestle on the floor.
Sasha reaches over to get the garlic and brushes his finger, so lightly, against the inside of my wrist.
All in all, a damn good Hanukkah.
What secret are you keeping?
Ashley likes someone, and I’ve been threatened not to tell on pain of death, and like… What is this, fifth grade? We’re practically adults. I think she’s taking the single thing a little too seriously. Has to guard her new single-dom with her life, I guess. ’Cause she knows as soon as a guy found out she liked him, he’d be all over her. What is it about Ashley? She’s magnetically charged. Amazing.
—Luna Williams, 16, proud owner of an A on her Bob Fosse project
All right, I’ve got a good one. My husband and I have a place in Cape Cod, and we go to stay there sometimes. My husband, he likes to save money. So what he wants to do is turn off the heat—or the air-conditioning, y’know, depending on the time of year—at our place here the whole time we’re gone, and then he wants our neighbor to come in and turn the heat back on for us a few hours before we come home. And also, neighbor’s got to come every day and turn the heat on for twenty minutes and run the water so the pipes don’t freeze, then come back, turn it back off. Can you imagine asking a neighbor to do this? It’s so… I don’t know what’s going through his head. So what I do is, we turn the heat off right before we leave, and just as we’re getting in the cab to go to the train, I go, “oh, hang on, I forgot something,” and I run back to the apartment, and I turn the heat on, and then I tell him before we’re leaving to go home, “oh yeah, I called the neighbor, she turned the heat back on for us.” And he has no idea that it’s always on the whole time. Look, I like saving money, too, but I’m first of all sure as hell not coming home to a frozen apartment, and I’m also not going to be the woman who asks her neighbor to come in and make sure the apartment’s nice and toasty when we come back from our vacation. If I wanted someone to boss around, I would have had kids.
—Doris Lancaster, 63, married for 42 years
The same one you are. I’m you, remember? You think he’d still like you if he knew?
—Claire Lennon, 16, dead
All right, remember our hero John D. Rockefeller—I mean, he’s not a hero, there’s the whole Nazi-connection thing, but he’s an established protagonist—who didn’t die in a train derailment? Before he helped eradicate yellow fever in the U.S., it was going around killing people left and right. If you left your house, the world was like, hey, how about some yellow fever, like the people at Trader Joe’s giving out free samples. But of yellow fever. And in New York, I mean, you can imagine, it was a yellow bloodbath. So they needed places to put the bodies of people who couldn’t afford funerals—and also, y’know, people didn’t want to have the bodies of people who died from it just lying around because they didn’t know if you could get it from the dead bodies or whatever. So they developed these things called potter’s fields where they’d dump the bodies. Eventually those became vaults, and the city built over them, and people forgot. But in 2015, when they were doing plumbing repairs or something in Washington Square Park, they were digging and they found this vault of yellow fever bodies. Now. My brothers love Washington Square Park. Favorite place. And every time I take them there, they’re running around, and I’m like, don’t tell them about the bodies, don’t tell them about the bodies. It’s a struggle. Honestly, they’d probably be into it. My family’s so twisted.
—Sasha Sverdlov-Deckler, 16, overeducated
I’m the Zodiac Killer.
—Nadia Sverdlov-Deckler, 14, Zodiac Killer
Chapter Eleven
Nadia’s birthday par
ty is at a roller rink in Jackson Heights. My friends show up decked out in eighties clothes they stole from their moms that they’re probably pretending are ironic. Most of the crowd here is still just regular roller-skating people, if such a thing exists, but there are enough people here for Nadia that I think she’s happy. She’s smiling more than I usually see, anyway.
While EDM and synth-pop blast over the speakers and everyone else roller-skates around in endless circles, Sasha and I man the gift table. “What did you get her?” I ask him.
“This nail polish set that’s themed after Disney villains.”
“Badass.”
“How about you?”
“Just some books I liked when I was her age. I figured then she’d have a built-in someone to talk about them with.”
“I love that,” he says.
I smile.
We sit on one of the tables in the eating area and scarf down cheese fries and watch everyone skate and dance a little to the music. Josh and Nick are bored of the kids’ play area and run over every so often to climb all over us.
My friends come over for a break. “Well hey there,” Luna says to Nick. “Who’s this little guy?”
“That’s Nick,” Sasha says. “And Josh, here.” Josh is currently hanging off his neck like a zoo animal.
“So cute,” Maura says.
“They look like you!” Ashley says to Sasha. He raises his eyebrows at me, quickly, and I try not to laugh at the image of Ashley and Sasha together. She’d run him into the ground in the first ten minutes.
“Can I have some fries?” Nick asks me.
“Yep, right here…”
“She’s great with kids, huh?” Maura says to Sasha.
I say, “Cut it out, Maura.”
“She has all these little cousins,” Maura says. “That’s why.”
Sasha looks at me. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, well, they’re my mom’s family, so it’s…” I wave a hand. “Complicated.”
Siobhan says, “Oh, whoa, she told you about her mom?”
“Not really,” Sasha says, but they talk right over him.
“That’s amazing,” Maura says. “She doesn’t talk about her mom to anyone.”
“You know I’m sitting right here,” I say.
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