Sons of the 613

by Michael Rubens

  I put it down. The phone and I regard each other, neither moving.

  It beeps. New text.

  WHAT RU DOING? it says.

  The bathroom door is opening. Here he comes. I fumble with the phone and accidentally hit reply, then have to work my way back to select Lesley’s message and figure out how to delete it. Josh is coming down the hall, three steps from the door. I highlight the message, delete it, put the phone back in its place, and leap into my seat just as he is rounding the corner into the room.

  “Did my phone ring?” he says as he sits down.

  “Yeah, but they hung up,” I say.

  He picks up the phone, sees who it was, makes a face, and puts the phone down again.

  “All right, let’s keep going,” he says.

  ISAAC, SERIOUSLY, YOU HAVE TO CALL ME BACK BECAUSE WE WERE WAITING FOR YOU AGAIN AND YOU DIDN’T CALL. ARE YOU COMING TO MY B-DAY PARTY? ARE YOU DEAD?

  D

  Yitzhak, I hope you’re okay. You missed it: Jensen threw a total shit fit today at Darrick Prince. I took notes in math if you need them :)

  Sarah

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PURSUED BY THE TROLL

  I eat in silence while Josh and Lisa talk. After dinner I do some homework. Josh watches TV. There’s a terse message on the answering machine from Danny, and several more e-mails from him, but somehow I keep putting off calling him back.

  At nine fifteen I’m doing math homework in the kitchen when the phone rings. Josh answers.

  “That depends. Who’s calling? Oh, yeah, hey, Sarah! How are you?”

  He looks over at me, grinning. I mouth No! to him and wave my hands violently.

  “He sure is,” says Josh. “Boy, am I glad you called. We were just talking about you. He’s sitting right here. He’s been hoping you’d call.”

  I bury my face in my hands.

  “Here,” he says, holding the phone out to me, then knocks it against my skull several times until I snatch it from him.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Hi, Izzie!” says Sarah. She’s one of the only people besides my mother who call me that, which is what happens when you’ve had Passover dinner together every year since you were born. “Are you okay? I was just wondering if you needed those notes from math.”

  She goes on. I answer with as few syllables and as little emotion as possible. All the while, Josh is pantomiming all sorts of perverse acts.

  “What? Condoms? Of course I can lend you some condoms!” he announces in a loud voice, just before I say goodbye and hang up. He finds this very funny.

  “I would not touch her if you paid me a million dollars,” I say, fuming.

  When I’m done with my homework I shower, and then go out to the tent without being asked.

  But tonight, when I fall asleep, I have a plan.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE REBELLION BEGINS

  MERIT BADGE: BREAKING AND ENTERING

  1:15 a.m.

  Out of the tent, moving quietly across the backyard, detouring toward the edge of the lawn, where the illumination from the security lights is weakest.

  This time I go around to the front door. Josh’s window faces toward the rear, and he’s less likely to spot me this way. Plus, I had loosened the bulb in the fixture on the front porch, the one that would normally light up automatically because of the motion detector.

  The key fits and turns in the lock. I had remembered that my dad kept a spare in his office junk drawer, along with ancient cuff links and strange fraternity pins and campaign buttons for someone named Dukakis. I pocketed the key in the morning, my plans already forming.

  I close the door behind me slowly, slowly, then stand quietly, listening for any sounds. Nothing. I reach under the hallway table and find my father’s shoes, feeling in the left one for the small flashlight I’d put there.

  I keep the flashlight off for now. First to the kitchen and the refrigerator, easing the door open, slipping a hand in and holding down the little button on the inside so that the interior light doesn’t go on. Quick rummaging for the pizza box. I sit on the floor with the lights off, next to an off-kilter rectangle of moonlight coming in through the sliding doors that go out to the back porch. I eat the pizza cold, wolfing it down, the cheese hard and waxy.

  Then downstairs, fast walk in the dark to my parents’ bathroom, shut the door, turn the faucet on to a slow trickle, and give myself a head-to-toe sponge bath with a washcloth.

  Then upstairs again, naked except for the towel wrapped around my waist, staying on the right side so the stairway doesn’t creak. I stand at the entranceway to the hall that leads to Lisa’s room, Josh’s room, and my destination: my room. Josh’s light is off. I move cautiously down the hall, noiseless on the carpet.

  Twist the door handle and open my door in a smooth, slow motion, shooooosh as it brushes over the carpet, shoooosh as I ease it shut, the tiniest of clicks as I twist the handle back into place, then off with the towel. I squat to place it over the bottom of the door to block out any stray photons, straighten, feel for the light switch, flick it on, turn, and shriek like a girl.

  “What are you doing in the house?” demands Josh. We’re in the living room, where he herded us after all the excitement. “How did you get in here?”

  “What are you talking about? What is he doing in my bed!?”

  “Dude, seriously, I can, like, go sleep on the sofa or just split.”

  This last slurry bit is from Patrick. As in punk-rock Patrick from the club, Patrick the Ear Chewer.

  “You’re not sleeping on the sofa,” says Josh to Patrick, who WTF is he doing in our house?! To me: “You’re going back outside.”

  “I’m not going back out there!”

  Patrick is wearing black boxers and one black sock. Now that we’re not in a dark club and he’s not covered in several layers of studded leather, I can see that he has a lot of tattoos of the skull/demon/naked-lady variety. His Mohawk lies completely limp down over his shoulders, like a deflated sea urchin. Even with his boxers on he’s wearing more than me. I’m holding a sofa pillow in front of my crotch.

  I was not expecting to turn on the light and find him splayed out on my bed, his mouth wide open and his eyes only half-shut, like he was dead. That’s what caused the shrieking. Then I turned and tried to run out of my room, remembering too late about the whole shutting-the-door business. By the time I had unscrambled my brain and managed to find the doorknob and yank the door open, Josh was already out of his room and yanking Lisa’s door open—“Because I thought all that high-pitched screaming was her,” he said. Then she did start screaming, because of Josh nearly pulling her door off the hinges, then I came running into the hall and ran right into Josh, which was like running into the door but more painful.

  So now here we are, Josh furious at me for being inside.

  “You’re going back out.”

  “No!”

  “I could go sleep in the tent,” suggests Patrick.

  “You’re not sleeping in the fucking tent, Patrick. Isaac is. And do not frigging touch those.”

  Patrick quickly pulls his hand back from the shelf with our mother’s prize collection of Chinese snuff bottles.

  “Sorry.”

  “What is going on?”

  Lisa is standing in the doorway.

  “Nothing. Go to sleep.”

  “Who is that?”

  “This is Patrick.”

  “Hey,” says Patrick, waving at Lisa.

  She looks at him, expressionless.

  “Go back to bed,” says Josh.

  “What’s he doing here?” asks Lisa.

  “He’s staying here for a few days.”

  “A few days?” I say.

  “Why is Isaac naked?”

  “Go to bed!”

  “You said ‘fucking.’”

  “Lisa . . .”

  There’s a meth dealer with the Grim Reaper tattooed on his chest sleeping in my bed, and Lisa is upset that Josh is
swearing.

  “Lisa, please go to bed,” says Josh. Please, he says, which he’s never once said to me in his life. She goes.

  “All right,” he says to me, “put some pants on and let’s go.”

  “No.”

  “Put some pants on, and let’s go.”

  “No.”

  Patrick is doing the tennis-match thing, head twisting back and forth as we have our standoff.

  “Isaac . . .”

  I can see what’s going to happen next. He’s going to grab me, pick me up, stuff my clothes on, toss me out the door, and humiliate me. Patrick’s presence makes him even less likely to budge. I feel helpless and angry, and I’m still shaking from the shock, but I also feel half crazy, like it being two in the morning and having Patrick there makes anything possible, and I don’t want to back down. I want to win somehow.

  “You want me to go?” I say. “I’ll go.”

  I toss the pillow to him and march past him, out of the living room, and through the house to the kitchen and the sliding doors.

  “Isaac,” I hear Josh say from somewhere behind me, but I keep going. I slide the door open violently enough that it bounces a third of the way closed again, and I turn sideways to step out onto the porch. The security light blinks on, and I can see my own naked shadow as I accelerate down the steps to the lawn.

  “Isaac!” Josh is calling to me in a strained half shout, the kind of voice you use when you want to be loud but can’t. I’m halfway across the lawn, and I turn and walk backwards, seeing Josh and Patrick crowded at the kitchen doorway.

  “Isaac!” says Josh again, and I salute and turn back to face the tent at the edge of the yard.

  “Damn!” I hear Patrick say—two syllables: “DAY-um!”—and he starts laughing. Josh says something to him but I don’t catch it, and then I can hear the door closing roughly and the click of the lock.

  Naked on the lawn under the moonlight. Two fists up over my head in triumph.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IN WHICH REBELLION PROVES TO BE SOMEWHAT ADDICTIVE

  MERIT BADGE: JOURNEY TO THE GREAT UNKNOWN

  Climbing out of the bathroom window is harder than I thought it would be, especially in my tight new jeans and with my new belt buckle scraping against and almost getting caught on the window frame. I make it, though, and drop to the ground without hearing any seams give.

  If I time it right, it should all work out—Josh should be making breakfast for Lisa right now, giving me enough time to get to the garage, retrieve my bike, and be on my way. After a while Josh will start wondering why it’s taking me so long to shower and change after our morning exercise session. Maybe he’ll even be concerned. He’ll knock and say, Isaac? Are you in there? Are you okay? Isaac? I can picture his face now as he realizes that something’s wrong, that maybe he’s pushed me too far and I’ve collapsed, and he’ll open the door and rush into the bathroom to find me—but I’m gone. And then he’ll see the note on the mirror, written in my mom’s lipstick: I’M GOING TO SCHOOL.

  I was hoping for a brighter, bolder red, but the brownish color was the only one I could find in my mom’s makeup drawer. Either way, it should get my point across: any surprises today are coming from me, not from him.

  I’m pedaling now toward Tracy Avenue. There’s a surprise for Josh right there, in case he decides to come tearing after me and kidnap me for another one of his stupid plans: he’s not going to find me on the road to school, because I’m not actually going to school. At least, not yet.

  Patrick didn’t stir when I went into my room this morning to get my clothes. He looked very comfortable on my bed, especially the way he was facing the wrong direction and had his feet mushed onto my pillow.

  I check my watch. Plenty of time. I figure it will take maybe twenty minutes or so to get where I’m going. I’ll get there, just stay for about ten minutes, and then ride back to school. Worse comes to worst I’ll be a few minutes late for homeroom. And my brother’s right: What are they going to do? Expel me?

  In the end it takes me twenty-seven minutes to get where I want to go, not counting the three minutes I need to lock my bike, and then the other three minutes I take fanning myself and wiping my face before I accept that I’m not going to stop sweating and I should just go in.

  I fidget by the brown sign that says PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED until the hostess notices me, glancing over at me from behind the long counter with a quizzical expression on her face. She’s about fifty, I’m guessing, and fattish and unfriendly.

  “Can I help you?” she says.

  “Um, I just wanted to . . . I wanted some breakfast.”

  She looks at me just long enough for it to get uncomfortable, then says, “You’re alone?”

  “Yes. It’s just me.”

  She’s still eyeing me suspiciously as if she’s trying to decide whether to give me a table or call the authorities.

  “You’re going to be eating?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I have money,” I add, in case that’s the sticking point.

  “You want to sit at the counter?” she asks grudgingly.

  “I got this one, Jenny,” says a voice from my left, and it’s like the sun has just come out.

  Lesley doesn’t say a word to me, just gives me a sly grin when she turns her back to Jenny to grab a menu, a look that says, You and I are a team in this conspiracy.

  She leads me across the restaurant to a booth in the back corner. She glances over at me as we walk, taking in the clothes that she selected for me.

  “I dig your outfit,” she says.

  I look at the pink striped shirt that’s part of her uniform. “Yours, too,” I say.

  We arrive at the table and I sit. “Here you go, sir,” she says, handing me the menu.

  “I think I know what I want.”

  “Oh, good. I like a man who knows what he wants.”

  “Can I get French toast?”

  “Of course. Coffee?”

  “Uh . . . yes, please.”

  She raises her eyebrows and smiles, but doesn’t say anything as she writes on her little waitress pad. “I’ll be right back.”

  I watch her walk away and I look around the restaurant. I think it’s a chain, a step or two above a Denny’s and a step below a real restaurant. There are just a few customers sitting in some of the booths. I’m the youngest one by at least fifty years.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” says Lesley as she places a coffee in front of me. “How did I get such an awesome job?”

  Then she puts a second cup on the table and slides into the booth opposite me. “Cheers,” she says, and knocks her cup against mine and takes a sip.

  She watches as I try mine, then wordlessly slides the cream and sugar toward me. I add some cream and a packet of sugar, wanting to add another but deciding against it. I take my time stirring, thankful for something to focus on, because I didn’t expect that we’d have this much time face to face, and I suddenly can’t remember what it was I had rehearsed saying. Everything seems very quiet. When I figure I’ve done about as much stirring as I can get away with, I take another sip and put the coffee down hurriedly. Lesley, again without a word, picks up another packet of sugar, tears it open, and dumps it in my coffee.

  “Someday I’ll take you to a place where they make actual coffee,” she says.

  “Thanks,” I mumble, because I’m not sure what else to say.

  She sits leaning forward with her elbows on the table, both hands holding her coffee cup. I expect her to say, So, to what do I owe the pleasure? Or, Shouldn’t you be in school right now?

  Instead she says, “Tell me everything.”

  So I do.

  I start drinking my coffee and tell her about Josh and the Quest. She listens silently, getting up a few times to give people their checks or refill their waters and to get my French toast, but after each interruption she sits down and nods at me to continue. I tell her about my parents and Lisa and school and the Assholes and Patrick and my b
ar mitzvah and worrying about crapping in my pants during my haphtarah. I even tell her about Patricia Morrison. There’s a point when I’m talking about Josh and what a turd he is to me that I get a little teary but don’t want to wipe my eyes because that would draw attention to it, and she pulls out a napkin from the dispenser and hands it to me in one smooth move, all the while nodding and listening, just like she did with the sugar, and I talk and drink coffee and talk and drink coffee and by the time I’ve told her about pretty much every experience in my entire life I realize that I’m speaking very quickly and gesturing emphatically and fighting an urge to get up and run laps around the dining room.

  Finally, I fall silent.

  “Maybe we do decaf next time?” she says.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, maybe.”

  Tap tap tap tap tap on the table with my fingers.

  “Am I a freak?”

  “Only enough to make you interesting.”

  She smiles and gets up to help some customers, resting a hand briefly on my shoulder as she passes. My heart, which is already redlining, goes a bit faster.

  When she comes back and sits again, I ask, “What happened yesterday?”

  “Your brother and I,” she says, “have a very complicated relationship.”

  “Did you ever go out?”

  She laughs. “No.”

  “Did you ever want to?”

  She sips her coffee and looks at me.

  “One of us did,” she says.

  “What happened?”

  She smiles.

  “You’re sure nosy.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Your brother has bad taste in women,” she says.

  Well, clearly, if he never went out with you, I think of saying. Cool and clever, or like I’m trying to be cool and clever? Well, clearly, if he never went out with you. I could say it with a shrug or looking off into the distance or looking right at her over my coffee. No, casual, while bringing my coffee up to my mouth, right now. Well, clearly, if he never . . .