Like No Other

by Una LaMarche

  “You’re good at that,” I tell her once we’ve eaten our snack-food feast.

  “I should be,” she says, lying back on a pillow contentedly, her ringlets spread out like satin ribbons. “I’ve sat through at least two Shabbat meals a week for my entire life, which means I’ve heard it . . .” Devorah whispers to herself as she does math in her head. “One thousand, six hundred, and sixty-four times.”

  “Wow,” I say. “I don’t think I’ve done anything that many times.”

  “Well, my life is all about routine,” she says, and sighs. “There’s nothing new—ever.” She props herself up on her elbows and smiles. “Except you, obviously.”

  “Does that get boring?” I ask. “Having so many rules?”

  “Not for most people,” she says with a frown. “Everyone around me seems to thrive off of it. That’s why I feel so trapped sometimes. There’s literally no one who understands what it feels like to want anything else. I feel like a total—”

  “Freak,” we say simultaneously.

  “Jinx,” I say with a laugh.

  “You, too?”

  “It’s not the first label I’d choose for myself,” I say. “But it’s what I get called.”

  “Who would say that?” she asks in sincere disbelief.

  “Just this caveman on the basketball team who thinks he’s the love child of Kobe Bryant and Kanye West.” Devorah looks even more confused by this biologically unlikely analogy. “He’s just a bully,” I explain. “And it doesn’t help that I accidentally picked a locker in a place that people at school call the freak hallway.”

  Devorah gasps. “That’s so mean!”

  “I know.”

  “Why do they call it that?”

  “Maybe because it’s full of kids who . . . do things differently. Dress funny, or whatever. Girls with shaved heads, boys who wear makeup, that kind of thing.”

  Devorah sits back up and hugs her knees. Orange dots—reflections of the candle flames—dance in her pupils. “What do you do that’s so different?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” I say. “I mean, I don’t run with the popular cliques, but I’m not on the lowest rung of the social totem pole, either. I guess I just don’t fit in anywhere.”

  “That’s not how I see you at all,” she says, her chin jutting out defensively, as if in disbelief that anyone could ever not think I’m awesome. I picture her, all five feet and change, marching up to J-Riv and his crew like David confronting Goliath.

  And that’s why you’re wonderful, I think.

  “Thanks,” I say instead. “But I can’t help but feel aimless. I feel like I’m just reaching for . . . nothing right now. I don’t know what I want to do. My only real life goal so far is to go to college, and that’s only because I don’t have a choice.” As soon as the words are out, I want to shove them back in, rewind like one of the scratchy VHS tapes my mom still hoards under the TV. I know Devorah would probably do anything to have my kind of problem. She’s trapped by too few choices, while I feel trapped by too many. It’s too bad we can’t share some choices and even it out.

  But instead of looking angry, Devorah just smiles. “You don’t know what you want to be when you grow up?” she asks, teasing a little. “Maybe a Ghostbuster?”

  “Ha ha, very funny.” I toss a grape at her. “But no, of course I don’t know what I want to be yet. Why, do you?”

  Devorah rests her chin on her crossed arms. “I didn’t even consider it until recently,” she says. “But if I got to pick, I think I would go to nursing school and become a midwife. Deliver babies.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Why?”

  “Seeing my niece get born was a turning point for me,” Devorah says, her eyes lighting up so bright that for a second I could swear someone flipped on the naked bulb dangling over our heads. “It happened the same night I met you,” she continues, smiling into her knees. “That night changed everything. In the span of an hour my whole world cracked open, and I saw life. Literally, I saw life being born, and then I met you, and I saw a life that was so different from the one I’d been living. I saw a future that could be so different. And that’s what I want to do. I want to bring more life into the world, you know? I want to be there when other people experience that moment.”

  I am in love with you. The words are on the tip of my tongue, and the only thing I can do to beat them back is kiss her, so I do. I crawl over on my knees and take her face in my hands and I kiss her, long and gentle, wanting her so bad it almost scares me. When I finally pull back, she smirks at me and runs her fingers through my hair.

  “I didn’t know you felt so strongly about childbirth,” she says.

  I roll my eyes and kiss her forehead, settling back against the pillow with her head nestled in the crook of my arm. “I don’t,” I say. “But what you said, how you feel about it, is amazing. I don’t feel that way about anything.”

  “Nothing?” She turns on her side and rests her hand on my chest. I could get used to this. I never thought I’d pray to be stuck in my elderly landlady’s mildewy basement for all eternity, but here I am.

  “I don’t know,” I murmur. “I mean . . . I like music, but I don’t know if I want to be a producer. I like kickboxing, but I don’t want to train rich white ladies at a gym.” Devorah laughs, and I get bolder. “I love being with you,” I say slowly, “but that’s not a career . . . unless you need a houseboy when you’re a big famous midwife.”

  “You can be my househusband,” she says. “You can stay home and raise the kids.”

  After that, we’re both silent for a long time. It’s crazy scary to think that far into the future (although maybe it doesn’t feel that far for her, if her friends are all getting married at eighteen), but it’s also unspeakably exciting to imagine that something like that could be in the cards for us someday. I want to say exactly the right thing, to reassure her without overwhelming her, but I’m too afraid of saying the wrong thing. Finally, after five or ten minutes have gone by with nothing but the clank of the boiler and the faint strains of a TV upstairs, I find the ability to form words again.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say.

  Devorah nods into my neck.

  “Hypothetically, can we really do this?” I ask. “Can we choose each other?”

  “I don’t know,” she says softly. “I didn’t think so at first. But then . . .”

  “What?”

  Devorah sits up and turns to look at me. “There’s this girl I went to school with, Ruchy,” she says. “She disappeared from the neighborhood abruptly, and I hadn’t seen her in a long time. And then last week, I found out that she left.”

  “What do you mean, left?”

  “I mean she left the community,” Devorah says with a far-off look in her eyes. “She moved in with her boyfriend. She just . . . left.”

  “That’s allowed?” Now I sit up, too.

  “No!” Devorah’s small hands ball reflexively into fists, but then she relaxes. “Or at least, I never thought it was. I grew up being taught that the world outside was immoral.” She casts her eyes down. “Honestly, I didn’t know better. I looked down on it, on all of you.”

  “So do we,” I say guiltily. “About you.”

  “It’s convenient, at least,” she says, sighing. “Mutually exclusive.”

  I tuck a curl behind her ear, letting my fingers trail down her cheek. “But it doesn’t have to be,” I say. “Your friend Ruchy—she broke through, right? That means we can, too.”

  Devorah smiles, but her eyes are sad. “Maybe,” she says. “But it’s easier for you. You can pass back and forth. I’m afraid that if I leave, I won’t ever be welcome home again. And I don’t hate it, you know?” Her chin trembles as tears fill her rain-cloud eyes. “My family is everything to me, and there’s so much I love . . . I want to be able to have both. You and them.”

&n
bsp; “Listen,” I say. “No matter what, you’ve got me, okay? You’ll always have me.”

  Devorah stares at me for a long minute, the light flickering across her face, almost like we’re back in the elevator. Except this time, no one’s waiting outside for us. And this time, we can’t control ourselves anymore.

  I’m not sure who moves first, but within seconds we’re all over each other, Devorah’s hot tears staining my cheeks as I pull her against me and taste her lips, breathe her oxygen. She grabs the back of my neck, and my hand leaves her waist, operating as a free agent from my lust-paralyzed brain, tugging at the zipper of her hoodie, reaching in, cupping her breast. She moans, and I gently ease her back onto the blanket. The tension that’s built up in me over these weeks of waiting is overpowering. I feel like I’m going to explode.

  But then Devorah turns her face away, puts a hand against my chest, and pushes. It’s the universal sign for stop, so I roll off, panting. “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “No,” she says, her face plump and flushed, her eyes wild and dazed. “You didn’t do anything I didn’t want. We just . . . can’t.”

  “I know,” I gasp, trying to turn off the electric current buzzing through every inch of my body.

  We lie there for a few minutes listening to each other breathe, until her hand migrates over to mine, and we just hold on, splayed out on the basement floor like stargazers.

  “I should probably go,” she whispers.

  “When can I see you again?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. But soon. I can’t stand this.” She gets up and finds my backpack, pulling out her clothes. “Could you . . .” she says awkwardly, and I turn over and I close my eyes as she stands in the corner to change.

  “This is just how it’s gonna be, huh?” I mumble into the blanket. “Underground meetings, sneaking around, no time to do anything but talk about how we can’t do anything?”

  “For now,” she says. “We just have to wait until Jacob stops hovering. And he will. He has a new baby, and his rabbinical studies. I’m actually amazed he has so much time to stalk me as it is.” It’s a joke, but I can’t laugh. I’m suddenly in a kind of terrible mood, all my endorphins dive-bombing, reality seeping back in. As long as we stay in Brooklyn, we’ll always be hiding. The only way to get the time we need to give our relationship a running start is to get away somewhere. And not permanently or anything—I know we can’t go the white-picket-fence route at sixteen without so much as GEDs—but just for a few days. Even just for one night.

  “Hey,” I say, a spark of hope igniting in my chest. “Are you allowed to have sleepovers?”

  Devorah laughs. “With you? Doubtful.”

  “No, with other girls. You know, popcorn, pillow fights, frozen bras.”

  “You’ve never actually been to a sleepover, have you?”

  “Just answer the question,” I say, laughing.

  “Sure,” she says. “Sometimes.”

  “Could you have one next weekend?”

  “Why?” She pauses. “You can look now.” I pop up onto my knees to find her sitting on the bottom step, buttoning up her cardigan.

  “Ryan’s parents have a house out in the Hamptons,” I say, the idea taking shape as I talk. “They only use it in the summer; by now it’s empty most of the time. I could get the keys—”

  “Jax—” she says, but I won’t let her finish.

  “Just think,” I say hurriedly. “We could go up on a Saturday, come back Sunday, have a whole twenty-four hours to ourselves. Take walks in public, go out to dinner, lie on the beach. Go to sleep together, wake up next to each other . . .”

  “There’s a pretty loaded time lapse buried in there,” Devorah says, blushing.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I sputter. “I won’t try anything, I swear. All I want is time with you.”

  Devorah nestles her chin into her palm and looks at me for a long minute. “We’d have to be back early on Sunday, since I have school,” she says.

  “Is that a yes?” I can barely contain my glee.

  “It’s an ‘I’ll think about it,’” she says.

  I take her up to the street and say goodbye, but it’s not bittersweet this time. I know I can reach her whenever I want. I know she’s just as crazy about me as I am about her. And most importantly, I know that if I can just get Devorah away from all of this for a weekend, we can figure it out, find a way to make it work, for real. Not just as some secret star-crossed fling, but forever. Out in the open. The way it should be.

  Chapter 19

  Devorah

  SEPTEMBER 14, 7:30 AM

  This morning I stayed in the shower much longer than is probably considered polite in a ten-and-a-half-person household. But I just couldn’t tear myself away from the warm rivulets of water coursing down my back. It felt too good. I could chalk it up to it being my first post-Shabbos shower, but it’s only been a day since my last one. And it’s not just the shower. Everything has felt too good for the past eighteen hours. Eating. Walking. Running my fingertips along the wood banister as I head downstairs for breakfast. And I think I know why. It’s because I know for sure now: I’ve met my bashert.

  I know my father says that only G-d can know when two souls are meant to be together, but my feelings for Jaxon have developed into something so deep and profound that I don’t know what else it could be but fate. And it’s made me question the future my parents expect for me even more. How can anyone commit themselves to a life with a person they don’t already feel this way about? How can you blindly trust that love will follow marriage? How can you put so much of your happiness into the hands of a stranger who doesn’t even need to take a class or earn a certificate to become a matchmaker claiming to do the work of G-d? These questions don’t seem irrational or disgraceful to me, and I can’t believe that no one else is asking them.

  But I try not to get too bogged down in crises of faith on this sunny Sunday morning. Breakfast has morphed into a casual affair ever since Liya moved in, and the circle of my siblings on the living room rug, surrounding the baby, who’s working on her “tummy time,” is too warm and inviting to resist. Plus, thinking about Jaxon and our date puts me instantly back in a good mood. I pour myself some cold cereal and sit down next to my mother, who is tickling Liya’s feet and singing.

  “You know,” she says to Rose, “you can just move in here. I won’t mind a bit.”

  “We’ll only be four blocks away, Mama,” Rose says, stirring her cup of odd-smelling fennel and anise tea, meant to help with milk production. (If the wet spots on her blouse are any indication, it’s working.)

  “The nursery is almost ready,” Jacob calls from the dining table, where he is reading the paper with my father—and also, apparently, eavesdropping. “We’ll be out by Tuesday.”

  My mother makes a pouty face, but this piece of information just buoys me even higher. Of course I’ll miss having Rose and the baby here all the time, but it will be worth it if it means I have to endure Jacob’s miserable, accusatory glances only two or three times a week from now on.

  Liya burps loudly as if to punctuate this announcement of good fortune, and we all laugh. But then, once it’s quiet again, another sound rings out, farther away and decidedly less funny.

  It’s my cell phone. And it’s ringing.

  My mother has a cell phone. So do my father, and Rose, and Jacob, and Amos. It’s not an all that out-of-the-ordinary thing. Or it wouldn’t be, except that my phone is playing “our” song. The one we listened to in the elevator. It’s playing music—secular music, sung by a woman, which is the worst kind!—and it’s playing it loudly. So much for the volume controls. I can’t believe I didn’t just turn it off after Jax and I were done texting last night. After we were so careful all afternoon, one tiny oversight is about to bring everything crashing down.

  “What is that?” my father asks, furrowing h
is brow and looking up at the ceiling. Hanna looks at me with wide, dramatic eyes, and I see Jacob look over at her, and then at me. I wish she would stop being so obvious about everything.

  “Sounds like the radio,” Miri says.

  “Probably outside,” Hanna jumps in. “A car with the windows down.”

  “No,” Jacob says, standing up and looking right at me. “It’s definitely coming from inside the house.”

  As the tension mounts in the living room, the Shirelles blithely continue their distant, moody crooning.

  “No!” I spring to my feet, milk sloshing out of my bowl onto the carpet. “It’s—” My mind races to come up with some excuse, but I can’t think straight with everyone staring at me. “I’ll go see what it is,” I sputter, and run up the stairs two at a time.

  The phone has stopped ringing by the time I get to my room, but I slam the door behind me and pick it up off the floor next to my bed. With shaking hands, I struggle to turn it off and then, in a blind panic, stuff it into the band of my tights, far enough down my thigh so that it doesn’t make a bulge under my skirt. So much for a lifeline. (But at least for once, I’m grateful to be wearing stockings.) I stand helplessly, trying to concoct a reasonable explanation, when the door swings open and in walks Jacob, followed by my mother, looking smug and flustered, respectively.

  “Hand it over,” Jacob says, holding out his hand, the thin, bony fingers flexing in anticipation.

  My only choice is to play dumb. “Hand what over?”

  “Jacob seems to think you have a cell phone,” my mom says, in a tone that lets me know she’s not willing to believe it until she sees it with her own eyes.

  “What? No!” I feel the chunk of warm plastic inch down toward my knee.

  “There’s no use lying, Devorah, we all heard it,” Jacob says testily.