Like No Other

by Una LaMarche

“Oh, you’re no fun, frummie,” she says, tearing off the end of her straw wrapper and blowing the paper at me. I raise an eyebrow.

  “Hey,” I say. “If you must know, my frum status has been falling steadily since Thursday.”

  “Prove it,” she challenges, sipping her cranberry juice and feigning disinterest.

  “Well, I talked to him,” I say. “I listened to music on his phone—”

  “What?! Which songs?” Shosh interjects.

  “Something old, I don’t know it,” I say dismissively, rushing to get to the secret I need to spill, that’s burning like a wildfire in my chest. “And . . . I keep thinking about him, too. About Jaxon. That’s his name. His first name, anyway. I don’t know his last name.”

  “Wow, that’s manly,” she says dreamily. “Like a general or something.”

  “He spells it with an X,” I add, unable to help myself.

  “Oooh, edgy!”

  “I guess,” I say. “He wasn’t edgy, though. He seemed pretty nerdy, actually.” I smile self-consciously. “In a good way.”

  “Dev,” she says, pushing away her half-eaten sandwich, “this is literally the best thing I have heard in months. I’m so glad this happened. Not Rose’s baby being born early or any of the dangerous parts, of course, but you getting a crush. On a goy!”

  “Shhhhhh!” The girls at other tables don’t seem to be listening, but it’s a risk to be discussing this out in the open. There’s a lot of inner policing at my school, girls turning one another in for bad behavior. Shosh is the only person I trust with this, and I have to be careful, especially since the news is spreading. Not through Jacob, I’m pretty sure—he’s too concerned with piety to risk the family’s reputation—but through my younger siblings, who don’t know any better.

  “Oh, what, you don’t think half the girls at school don’t go home and pine for Ryan Gosling?”

  “Who’s Ryan Gosling?”

  “This is my point,” she says excitedly. “You don’t watch regular movies. You don’t sneak gossip magazines into your room on Shabbos. You don’t secretly text boys—you don’t even have a cell phone! You don’t do any of the things most of us do. I love you, Dev, but sometimes I’ve wondered if you’re not some kind of perfect robot. Until now.” She grins. “You’re officially normal.”

  I know this is a backhanded compliment, but it fills me with relief. Maybe I’ve been worrying over nothing. Maybe this really is normal.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It doesn’t feel normal to think this much about a boy—any boy.”

  “It definitely is,” Shosh says. “It’s hormones. Hormones don’t care if we’re saving ourselves for marriage.” I feel my cheeks flush bright red.

  “I’m not thinking about him like that,” I say. Which is true. Even in my fantasies, we just sit and talk some more. Or okay, maybe hold hands. But that’s it. “I just think about . . . what he’s doing. Or if I’ll ever run into him again.”

  “Too bad you don’t know his last name or where he lives,” Shosh says, laughing.

  “Well . . .” I lean in conspiratorially. “He mentioned that he works at some place called Wonder Wings. And I know it’s crazy, but I was thinking of going there. One day after school. Just to say hi.”

  Shoshana’s face suddenly changes. Her smile disappears and is replaced by a look of true shock.

  “Devorah,” she says, dead serious for the first time all day—and maybe ever. “You can’t do that.”

  I’m momentarily speechless. Of course she’s right. And I can’t believe I even said that out loud. The giggly girl talk gave me a sense of security that I have no business having. Shosh may be my best friend since first grade, but she’s still Hasidic. I’m still Hasidic. Even if I secretly met with a Chabad boy I could ruin my reputation. And here I am blithely suggesting that I meet Jaxon just blocks from my home, steps from the watchful eyes of my neighbors, my family, the Shomrim. I can’t do that. I know this, the way I know my alphabet or my prayers or how to arrange the Shabbos silverware, but it’s not until this moment that I actually understand: I can never see him again. Not by choice. A lump rises in my throat, and I take a bite of my cold sandwich just to force it back down.

  “I mean, think about him, yeah,” Shosh says, relaxing a little bit. “Pretend he’s your boyfriend in your head if you want. But you know that it can never, ever happen in real life. That’s not an option.”

  I know that I should just backtrack and pretend I was joking. But something is overflowing in me now—years of compartmentalization, years of pushing down the questions, years of accepting the pat answer of Because that’s what it says in the Torah with an obedient nod.

  “Why not?” I hear myself say. “What would be so wrong about it?”

  “Are you kidding?” Shosh asks, looking at me like I’ve just started doing cartwheels in the middle of temple. “He’s not one of us. He’s not even Jewish.” I press my lips together and try to breathe deeply. What am I doing? Just as Jax doesn’t understand my world, no one I know will sympathize with this insane crush I’m harboring. I should have known better. “Unless he converted,” Shosh continues, “you could never be with him and still live here. And even if he converted, you’d have to be matched . . .” She stares at me like I’m crazy. “You know this, Dev. You know the rules backward and forward. And until about five seconds ago, I thought you followed them. All of them.”

  “I do,” I say defensively. “All I’m saying is I liked talking to him, and I don’t know why it’s such a big deal.” I emphasize the past-tense verb, feeling a little guilty. It’s a lie. Just one more drop in the bucket of sins I seem to be hauling around ever since I stepped off the elevator.

  “Well, okay,” Shoshana says tentatively. “It’s over anyway. Just don’t do anything more. If you went away I would die.”

  I laugh, rolling my eyes. “Where would I go?” I ask.

  “Maybe to ‘Israel,’” Shosh says, making air quotes. “Like Ruchy.”

  I perk up. I had been meaning to ask Shoshana about the mystery of what happened to Ruchy Silverman. Getting an answer about her could be the silver lining to what’s shaping up to be a totally depressing lunch period.

  “You mean she didn’t go to Israel?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

  Shoshana shakes her head. “She had a boyfriend,” she says. “A film student at NYU. Her parents found some texts.”

  I furrow my brow. That’s bad, but not as bad as I thought it would be. Niv made it sound like Ruchy had made some fatal error in judgment. Like she was dead.

  “How did she meet him?” I probe. Ruchy may have been beautiful and popular, but she definitely wasn’t a “bad girl.”

  Shoshana smirks. “You know the home for the mentally disabled where she worked after school? The guy had an uncle there. They got to talking, and one thing led to another.” She fixes me with an I-told-you-so look.

  “But then why is she gone from school? I mean, didn’t Mr. and Mrs. Silverman just break them up when they found out?”

  Shoshana shakes her head. “It was too late,” she whispers.

  I frown. “What does that even mean?”

  “Devorah, you’re so innocent,” Shoshana says with a sigh. She glances around nervously and then gestures for me to look under the table, so I “accidentally” drop my napkin. At first I can’t make out what she’s doing down there, since the sun is reflecting off the mosaic glass set into the stone floor, and my eyes have trouble adjusting. But after a few seconds, I get it, and my breath catches in my throat. Shoshana is drawing an arc between her rib cage and her pelvis. She’s telling me that Ruchy got pregnant.

  I sit back up and take a deep breath. “Where is she now?” I ask.

  “No one knows,” Shoshana says gravely. “It’s like she doesn’t exist.”

  • • •

  The conversation wit
h Shosh is still weighing on me after school as I absentmindedly work the register at the store. Since Rose is on indefinite leave from her post as cashier, I get to break up the monotony of my stocking/shelving duties to help out up front when my dad holes himself up in the back office, poring over sales and inventory spreadsheets and making orders. I actually love working the register. Most of our customers have been coming for years, so I can greet them by name and ask after their families, which usually earns me a pat on the hand and a muttered blessing. I love the older ladies especially, because they usually pay cash, and there’s nothing better than ringing up purchases the old-fashioned way, hearing the dull chime of the register as it springs open and counting out change. I’ve never once given incorrect change. My father jokes that he shouldn’t even bother balancing the register at the end of the day when I’ve been working, since it always comes out even, to the penny. That’s the thing about math: It’s dependable. Math will never give you a blank stare and tell you you’re going to end up barefoot and pregnant, some grotesque poster child for the importance of yichud.

  But maybe I’m being too hard on Shosh. She’s just looking out for me, in her way, which is to overreact. The funny thing is, her tough-love advice has made me think more about Jaxon, not less. I feel more than ever like I need to see him again, just to find out if he deserves to be on this surreal and dangerous pedestal I’ve placed him on. Was he really that charming? Or interesting? Did it really feel electric when we touched, or were my nerves just jumpy from the day I’d had? Given my mental state that night, I’d worry that I hallucinated Jaxon, except for the fact that Jacob clearly saw him, too.

  “Hey, where do the Shana Tova boxes go?” Hanna interrupts my reverie, teetering into view from the greeting card aisle, balancing a dozen gift boxes bedecked with shiny red plastic apples in her trembling arms. Since the high holidays fall in three weeks, we’ve been spending hours arranging display shelves full of products featuring apples, honey, and the somewhat less appetizing shofar, a ram’s horn. (On Rosh Hashanah we eat apples dipped in honey to ensure a sweet year, and my dad blows the shofar to usher in the Ten Days of Repentance, which are as fun as they sound.) We don’t normally sell food, but the gift boxes are filled with candy and packets of honey, and occasionally Hanna and I will “spill” one on purpose so that we can hoard and eat its contents. Right now, though, Hanna is threatening to spill them by accident. I rush out from behind the counter and take some of them off her hands.

  “Let’s put these in the window,” I say.

  “But we just changed the window for back-to-school!” she groans.

  “Right, but now school is back, and it’s time for Rosh Hashanah,” I say. “Besides, the new year is so much more fun to decorate. It’s full of . . . possibility. Think of all the people wishing for something special this year. Like to fall in love.” That gets her. Hanna is a sucker for all things romance. As a Hasid, of course, she approaches it from an anthropological distance. She would make an excellent shadchan.

  “Fine,” she says with a sigh, adjusting her grip. “Lead the way.”

  We spend almost an hour—interrupted only once by Mrs. Gottlieb looking for a disposable waterproof tablecloth—rearranging the crude tableaus that sit behind the streaky windows, underneath the sagging blue-and-white striped awning. Our store isn’t fancy, but it has character. A few years ago at a stoop sale Mom picked up some pedestals painted to look like Corinthian columns roped with grapevines, and so now whatever product we’re pushing gets special placement. Hanna and I set up three columns side by side, one tall and two short, like an Olympic podium, and have the Shana Tova boxes cascading down them, surrounded by holiday cards splayed out in heart patterns. I think it looks pretty good. And even better, it managed to completely take my mind off what happened at lunch.

  I’ve just resumed my post behind the counter when my father comes out of the office.

  “Daddy, we did the windows!” Hanna announces.

  “That’s great, honey, I’ll look in a minute,” he says, frowning down at his watch. “Hanna, listen, I need you to run an errand for me. I forgot to pick up my cholesterol medicine at lunch, the pharmacy closes at five, and I have a call with a manufacturer that I’m already late for. Can you run over and get it?” He peels two twenties out of his wallet and hands them to her. “You can buy yourself something with the change—just no candy, it’s almost suppertime.”

  “Sure, Papa,” Hanna says brightly, taking the bills. “Just let me know where to go.”

  “It’s J&R Drugs, on Union and Nostrand,” he says. “It’s right next to that fast-food restaurant—”

  I don’t claim to be any sort of mystic, but somehow, I know what my father’s going to say before he does. It’s like déjà vu. This whole day I’ve felt sort of fuzzy and out of focus, and now suddenly, everything is lining up, like the mirrors of a kaleidoscope shifting.

  “—Wonder Wings,” he finishes. And just like that, there it is again, that electric feeling I thought I had made up, crawling across my scalp.

  Jaxon works less than half a mile from my family’s store. Less than four blocks from my school. Of course I could have discovered this easily if I just snuck onto my father’s computer when he was up front helping customers, or stood on a kitchen stool to reach the cabinets above the pantry, where my mother stores the thick yellow phone books that show up on our doorstep once a year, even though we never use them. Those things would have felt wrong. This, though—my father, casually mentioning the piece of information I’ve been all but obsessing over for the past four days, the only piece of this forbidden puzzle that I’m missing—this feels like a sign. This tells me I have to go.

  “Daddy?” I say. “It’s getting late, and the men will be out in the streets coming home from work . . . let me go with Hanna.”

  He furrows his thick brow for a minute—it’s still bright and sunny outside, after all, and at a big-boned five foot seven, Hanna’s bigger than I am, so if anything, she’d be protecting me—but then shrugs.

  “Business is slow today,” he says. “I’ll just put out the bell in case anyone comes in while you’re gone.”

  Hanna is grinning at me, her pale, freckled face slick with sweat. She’s excited to have a break and to have the company. She has no idea she’s just become my accomplice.

  • • •

  I spend the walk to the pharmacy having two conversations. One is with Hanna, in real life, an inane back-and-forth about some girl in her class who Hanna doesn’t like. The other one is more urgent but also much harder to carry on, since it’s all in my head: the conversation I’m about to have with Jaxon.

  “. . . so she told Rachel that Rachel couldn’t sit in front of her because she’s allergic to her perfume. But then Rachel goes, ‘I don’t even wear perfume!’”

  Hi.

  I hope it’s not weird that I came by. I was just running an errand with my sister, and I saw the sign.

  I have the element of surprise working in my favor. I can plan out what to say, at least at the beginning. After that, who knows.

  “—and then she told me that I was too tall to sit in front of her, and finally I just said, ‘You know, Haya, if you have so many special needs, maybe you should just sit somewhere else!’”

  “Good for you,” I say out loud, while in my head I hear Jaxon say:

  I’ve been waiting every day for you to walk through that door and back into my life.

  No, that’s stupid. There’s no way he’s going to say that. Maybe just:

  It’s good to see you.

  And then what? I could say . . .

  Yeah.

  Brilliant. Brilliant, Devorah. Way to think this through.

  “—she’s just a B-I-T-H-C, if you know what I mean.” Hanna is fuming.

  “You mean B-I-T-C-H, and don’t spell out curse words,” I say, distracted by the giant red letters
I can already read from a block away. I glance at my reflection in a shop window and realize that I’m still in my school vest, which combined with the long skirt makes me look like some sort of bohemian train conductor. I peel it off and stuff it under one arm. “What? I’m hot,” I say when Hanna makes a face.

  We push through the doors into the pharmacy—not strictly Chabad but favored by my father for its Orthodox owners and reasonable prices—and are greeted by a cool blast of air-conditioning and the dueling scents of air freshener and cough syrup. It’s a mom-and-pop type place, just four modest aisles of ointments and vitamins, nothing like the Duane Reades and Walgreens that look like mini-department stores, lined with refrigerated cases of every conceivable beverage. The pharmacy counter is in the back, and since there’s only one employee and it’s a few minutes until closing, the line is four people deep. I take a sharp breath—this is my chance. I almost can’t believe I’m actually going through with it, but I know that if I don’t, I’ll always wonder what would have happened, for the rest of my life.

  “Hey,” I call to Hanna, who’s already padding down the center aisle to join the line, “I just saw Shoshana pass by outside. I’m going to talk to her for a sec, okay?”

  “Sure,” Hanna says gamely, giving a little wave. I feel bad manipulating her natural naïveté, but I don’t know what else to do.

  I shall be telling this with a sigh, I think, quoting Robert Frost as I will my legs to move me back through the swinging glass door with its loud doorbell chime, out onto the humid street. Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by . . .

  I look up at the cheery red Wonder Wings sign and the neon letters in the window that flash OPEN! OPEN! OPEN! again and again in a cascading rainbow of colored lights. I swallow my fear and push through the door.

  . . . And that has made all the difference.

  For some reason, in my mind I was picturing a vast restaurant full of dark corner tables and balletic busboys, the kind of noisy, crowded place where I could hide in plain sight while I got my bearings. But instead, as soon as I step over the threshold, I’m greeted by a single fluorescent-lit room—maybe fifteen feet by ten at most—with mirrors and bright Caribbean flags lining the walls. There are only four tables, and three are empty; the only patrons are a middle-aged woman and her young son, picking over a plate of bones and celery ribs. A pretty older woman in a bright yellow head wrap and long green beaded earrings stands behind the counter, refilling a dispenser of lemonade. And there is one busboy, but he’s tying up a garbage bag with his back to me. His broad, muscular back.