by Leah Scheier
It was no big deal, I told myself. Danny was a close friend; he wasn’t actually touching me; it was only a tiny patch of bare skin. We all saw naked actors and actresses on TV every single day. What was a flash of collarbone? It was ridiculous to be so conscious of this bit of nothing. But deep down, I knew I’d crossed a line. And Danny knew it too.
“You were going to find our initials?” I suggested hesitantly. I was waiting for the brush of his pen, like a girl waits for her first kiss. I knew that this was the closest we were going to get, but that afternoon, it was enough for me.
Danny’s hand shook as he raised the marker to my neck, and I jumped a little as the tip grazed a freckle beneath my ear.
“If you draw it there, I won’t be able to see it,” I said as he began to trace.
“So?” His breath was warming my cheek, and the marker was tickling my skin. I was loving every second of this sexy art project.
“I want to know what your real initials are,” I teased. “How can I reveal your secret identity if I can’t read what you wrote?”
He laughed into my hair, and I stopped breathing for a moment. “Look in a mirror, genius,” he murmured.
The closest mirror was hanging on the second floor, and, for us, that might as well have been miles away. At that moment, the idea that we would actually have to leave the kitchen and rejoin humanity was unbearable. As far as I was concerned, Danny had a million initials, and I was ready and willing to be a canvas for all of them.
I didn’t say what I was thinking, of course, but as the pen continued its naughty dance over my clavicle, I couldn’t help sighing. Loudly.
Twice.
“You okay?” he asked after the second time. It was his turn to sound croaky and breathless.
“Fine. Just—you know—exhaling.” It was a stupid thing to say, but I didn’t care. There was no way he could expect me to be witty when his lips were inches (centimeters?) from mine.
He smiled and continued his drawing. “Yeah? Felt like you quit breathing there for a minute.”
“I didn’t want to mess up your sketch, Michelangelo.”
He stopped writing and studied his work, and for a moment I was worried he’d run out of letters and the experiment was over. I couldn’t think of anything to say. There was no way to say what I wanted to—which was basically, Don’t stop now, just touch me, touch me, touch me, please, I don’t care if you make it look like an accident, I don’t care if it’s only for a second, but please touch me touch me touch me. Please—
I couldn’t tell what he was thinking exactly, but he was almost as red as I was, and his mouth was way closer to my ear than it needed to be. I’m pretty sure Michelangelo never got this turned on by his work.
“I think I messed up,” he whispered, and before I could ask him what he meant, it happened. His fingers brushed against my neck. I forgot everything. I forgot how to inhale or exhale. I forgot how to pretend. I forgot that all of this was supposed to be totally innocent. I forgot that we were just two friends. I forgot that I was a religious girl who’d promised to lead a religious life. I forgot that I had already decided what was good and what was bad. Because at that moment the only good thing in the world was the feel of Danny’s fingertips on my skin.
I forgot everything and just said, “Oh!”
But it came out all sharp and panicked and not at all like the breathy, fluttering “oh” you hear in movie love scenes. It was the “oh” of someone who’s been stung.
Danny pulled his hand back as if I’d smacked him. “Sorry,” he faltered. “I smudged a letter. So I just thought I’d—sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just—your fingers were cold.” (They weren’t.)
“Well, I’m done anyway.” (He wasn’t. I discovered later that he’d left out his own name.)
“I’m hungry.” (I wasn’t. Didn’t think I would ever eat again, actually.)
“Did Rae and Deenie leave?” (They hadn’t. In fact, they were standing in the doorway staring at us when we turned around.)
Rae sauntered up to me and examined Danny’s handiwork on my shoulder. “Oooh, hottttt,” she drawled. “How sweet, you guys. You did this all for me?”
I was too embarrassed to speak. How much had they seen? And did it really matter? Nothing had happened, right?
Then why did it feel like Danny and I would never be the same again? Was I the only one losing my mind? I looked around at my friends. Danny was shifting back and forth on his feet and staring at the ground. Deenie was suddenly occupied with a flake of fingernail polish and wouldn’t meet my eyes. Only Rae was staring straight at me, her head thrown back in triumph. She touched the writing on my shoulder.
“Now that, I think, is permanent,” she declared, with a sarcastic wink.
Chapter 12
“I’m quite impressed by your progress,” Nina says at our next meeting.
I’m not sure what she means, exactly. Recently, I’ve been breaking the rules more often than I’ve been keeping them. I’ve found ways to talk to Danny in public. He keeps showing up after curfew. I wonder suddenly if her statement is just a sneaky therapist’s tactic that she uses before introducing more restrictions. We’re due to pull the curfew back to six p.m. this session.
“I noticed that you came today without Danny?” She glances around the room. “That’s a milestone.”
“Danny’s busy this afternoon,” I lie. He’s actually sitting right next to me; I’ve simply been careful not to look at him since we walked into the room. Even when he leans over to whisper in my ear, I keep my eyes fixed on my psychologist. “Hey, hey, hey, hey,” he taunts. “What, am I invisible?” I don’t crack a smile. I know he’ll understand. Maybe if she thinks I’m making progress, she’ll forget about the curfew thing.
“That’s great,” she says as she scans the room again. “How is the assignment we spoke about?”
“The stories? They’re going great.”
“Stories?” she asks, raising her eyebrows. “Plural?”
“Yeah. I’m making a collection.” I’m so relieved she’s brought up my writing. I can use that to distract her with something innocent, a sign that I am actually following her instructions.
“Here they are,” I tell her, pulling my notebook from my bag and flipping through the excerpts. I land on a simple one which I don’t mind sharing. With a quick tug, I tear out the pages and hand them over. “Do you want to see?”
She chuckles at the title. “ ‘Love, Lies, and Gas.’ ” She reaches for her glasses. “Do you mind if I read it out loud?”
Yes. I think. Please do. Read as slowly as you like.
LOVE, LIES, AND GAS
“You know, I could just ask your dad,” I declared one morning as we dug into our mint chocolate chip ice cream. It was a warm autumn morning two weeks after the beginning of eleventh grade. We were sitting on one of the red metal benches opposite Bruster’s. “I’m sure he would tell me.”
“Go ahead.” He waved his spoon in front of my face. “Cheater.”
“How is it cheating if I ask your father about your real name? I have a right to know what it is.”
“Do you?”
“I’m one of your best friends! We tell each other everything.”
“Do we?”
He was in one of his moods, I realized. Somewhere between teasing and irritable. It wasn’t likely that I would pry anything out of him today. Still, I could at least try. All my other attempts to learn his secret had failed miserably. He was Danny Noah Edelstein on all his correspondence, both virtual and paper. I had begun to think that he had invented the alter ego just to mess with me.
“I’ve told you everything about me,” I insisted. “So what’s the big deal? Is your real name that embarrassing?”
He frowned and drew a little smiley face in the ice cream droplets that had dropped from his spoon onto the bench. “You tell me everything, huh?” he said, ignoring my question. “Come on, now.”
“I do! I
’m totally honest with you. But you still don’t trust me.”
I’m not sure why I was so fixated on learning Danny’s real first name. It didn’t really mean anything, after all, especially if he never used it. But there was so much more beneath my raging curiosity. I’d been friends with Danny for two years now, and he still refused to speak about his pre-Atlanta days. I knew virtually nothing about his mother, for example. He changed the topic whenever she was mentioned, and he did it so persistently that I sometimes wondered if he was hiding a terrible relationship.
There weren’t even any pictures of her online, not on his public profiles anyway. Facebook had been scrubbed of all early photos, and there were large gaps on his Instagram page. A few months earlier while playing with his phone, I was surprised to find entire folders that I’d never seen before. I clicked on one (It wasn’t snooping if Danny was sitting right next to me!), and the image of an olive-skinned, dark-eyed woman popped onto the screen. “Wow, she’s gorgeous!” I exclaimed. “Who is she?”
His expression didn’t change as he plucked the phone out of my hand. “My mom,” he replied.
“Your mom?” The woman in the picture looked Yemenite or Moroccan to me; she didn’t resemble her fair-haired son at all.
Danny answered the question in my eyes. “My father adopted me after his brother and sister-in-law were killed in an accident. My father—the one who raised me—is actually my uncle. “He pointed to the picture. “And Dalia became my stepmom when they got married.”
I was stunned silent for a moment. “Oh, wow,” I said finally. “I didn’t know that. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
He shrugged and slipped his phone into his pocket. “It isn’t a secret. It’s never come up, I guess.”
“It comes up in your stories,” I pointed out. “They’re full of orphans and adoptive fathers.”
“Brilliant observation, Sherlock,” he said.
“You don’t trust me enough to tell me anything real about your life,” I retorted. “So you just tell me stories instead.”
He glared at me for a moment.
“We should head back,” he said abruptly. “Your stomach hurts.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your stomach is starting to hurt,” he reiterated, tossing the empty ice cream cups into the trash can behind us. “It’s probably going to get worse.”
As he said it, I felt the familiar wrenching twist of indigestion. It had been happening every week for months, and by that point I’d gotten pretty good at ignoring it. I pressed a hand to my belly and swallowed. Until he’d mentioned it, I’d been so focused on our conversation that I hadn’t even felt the warning squeeze. So how had he known?
“I think I’m okay.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get it, Ellie. Why don’t you just take Lactaid? Or order the sorbet instead?”
I grunted and took a deep breath. There was a clammy sweat breaking over my brow. The double helping had been a really stupid mistake. I’d known I was lactose sensitive for a while now, but I’d been careful to hide my dairy issue from him. “The pills don’t work for me. And I don’t like sorbet.”
“So why didn’t you just tell me?”
Did he want me to spell it out? Ice cream at Bruster’s was our tradition. It was the best part of my week. How could I risk giving it up?
An embarrassing roar broke from my bloated stomach, and I sprang to my feet. “Oh God. We’d better go.”
I spent the better part of the afternoon in the bathroom, miserable and sweaty, moaning with pain. It was the worst stomachache I’d ever had. But worse than the pain was the knowledge that I’d given myself away and that our Sunday mornings were over. Danny never referred to that awkward morning again. But the following Sunday I got a text from him just as I was getting out of bed. “Where are you? Ice cream is melting.”
I was down at our bench ten minutes later.
Two heaping mounds of mint chocolate chip were dripping over the edges. He was carefully catching the drops and scooping them back into the cup.
“But I thought—you know that I can’t—”
He held up an empty carton of dairy-free ice cream. “I tried three different brands, and this one’s the best. Not as good as the real thing, but pretty good.”
And that became our new Sunday tradition. He would eat my portion of Bruster’s and fill the empty cup with a serving of nondairy before I got there. And, true to his word, he never asked me why I’d hidden my lactose problem from him. Maybe he already knew.
“Very sweet, Ellie,” Nina tells me as she lays the page down. “Gives me a window into your relationship.”
“Yeah, what a great guy, right?” I say flippantly. “Oh my, look at that; our time is up. My mom is waiting outside.”
I don’t give her a chance to answer.
“Wow. That was smooth,” Danny says as we head out the door.
“Oh yeah.” I raise my hand and give him a mock high five. He goes through the motion but stops just short of my palm. “Curfew is still at eight p.m.,” I declare triumphantly. “You’re welcome.”
He gives me a look. “Why do you care?” he asks. “You’re not following the rules anyway.”
We pass into Nina’s living room, and my mother rises quickly from the rocking chair. “How’d it go?”
I nod and force a bright smile. “Really well. Lots of progress.”
Mom follows me out to the car; I feel her watching me as I climb into the passenger seat. Danny catapults through the rear window and stretches his long legs over the back seat.
“You could have opened the door for me,” he calls out. “Are you pretending you can’t see me now?”
My mother starts asking me questions about the session, but I’m too distracted to answer her. Danny is calling my name over and over. When I don’t answer him, he starts drumming his hands on the back of my seat.
“Ellie? Are you listening to me?” asks my mother.
“Ellie! Why aren’t you listening to me?!” Danny demands.
I close my eyes to block both of them out.
BUT WHAT WOULD GOD THINK?
Middot lectures were a nuisance to which we’d grown accustomed; about once a month a speaker would speak to our grade about morality—covering topics from drugs and alcohol to modest dress and the dangers of gossip. It never felt very relevant to me until the day Rabbi Garner took his place at the front of the room. The subject of the discussion was going to be relationships, he told us. I sat up in attention. A few people in the back groaned.
“I’m glad Rae’s out sick,” I whispered to Deenie. “She would hate this.”
Deenie nodded. “Yeah. And I bet so will her new boyfriend.”
Greg resented every minute of Judaic studies and never missed an opportunity to remind the teachers that his parents were forcing him to attend our school. I glanced over at him warily. His thick arms were crossed over his chest, and his deep-set eyes were narrowed, glowering his disapproval.
“Rabbi, if this is a talk about how God wants me to save my body for marriage, can I be excused, please?” he called out. “I find the idea offensive. It’s basically God-sanctioned slut-shaming.”
Rabbi Garner blinked. “I see,” he said slowly. “Is that what you think I’m here for? To tell you that God is disappointed in you?”
There was a ripple of laughter. “That’s kind of your job, isn’t it?” Greg remarked. “We sin. You make us feel bad. We repent. Then we sin again. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s the Jewish circle of life.”
Rabbi Garner held up his hands in surrender. “Okay. Okay. I don’t know what they’ve told you about this lecture. But I’m not here to talk about God. Today we are putting that all aside. Nothing Divine at all. We are only going to talk about you. I want to take God out of it. Completely.”
No one was expecting that. Not from the rabbi, anyway. Take God out of the discussion? That was unheard of. A little scandalous. Possibly even heretical.
We were all ears.
“I have a question that I want all of you to answer,” the rabbi continued. “But I want you to do it silently. Don’t share your answer with anyone, even your closest friend. This is a personal question. And there is no right answer.”
Again, revolutionary. That was the purpose of religion, wasn’t it? Religion was supposed to give you the answers. I wasn’t sure where this was headed, but I wanted to get on this train.
“I want you to think about what intimacy means to you,” he continued after a pause. “Not just sex. All intimacy. A kiss. A hug. A touch of the hand. What does each of these things mean to you?”
I didn’t really hear the next few minutes of the lecture—my mind went immediately to Danny, who was sitting just a few seats away from me. His brief touch last week still made me giddy when I thought of it; I was pretty sure a kiss would completely destroy me. I allowed myself to linger on the thought for a moment, but then my face began to warm and I had to shake the image from my mind. I couldn’t get all hot and bothered during a sermon. Time to focus.
The rabbi spoke for a while about shomer relationships, but to my surprise, he presented both sides of the argument. He described the excitement and discovery from months of pent-up desire but also the anxiety about chemistry, and the fear that all those expectations would be disappointed.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Being shomer could lead to disappointment? That wasn’t possible, was it?
I stole a glance at Danny to find that he was watching me from across the room. Our eyes met, and then he quickly looked away.
I had no idea what that meant. What did he think of what the rabbi had just said? What was I supposed to think?
“There is more than one path,” the rabbi concluded. “And whether each path leads to happiness depends on the people traveling it. The question you need to ask yourselves is, how do you define intimacy? And how do you want it to define your life?”