“Oh my God!” Jed and Matty said together. Matty cupped her mouth with her hands. “Elsa, I’m so sorry.”
Elsa cocked her head. “For what?”
“Right, her mom didn’t die!” I said, letting out a maniacal cackle. I was beginning to feel a little bit like a maniac, actually. “So Elsa’s not sad. She just … um, broke both legs. So she’s okay, but the family can’t go skydiving for a while. Out of respect for her mom, who can’t get out of bed. So now Elsa is free to come hang out with us on Saturdays!”
I was breathing hard by the time my speech was over, like I’d just finished running a race. I kind of felt like I’d been running, actually, though I wasn’t sure what I was trying to catch up with.
“Skydiving is very scary,” Elsa said solemnly. “To be disconnected from the earth like that is a frightening thing.”
Matty blinked. “… Okay,” she said. “I thought maybe she’d just moved here or something, but that’s certainly more interesting.”
Ugh. I had to fight to keep myself from slapping one palm to my forehead. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that, but now I just had to roll with it. “Elsa does lead an interesting life,” I said, and shot her a look not unlike the one the Three Ds kept giving one another. This look said, Don’t you dare say you’ve barely led a life at all, or I’ll pull the shem out of your mouth and watch you crumble into dust.
“I do,” Elsa agreed. She winked and nudged me with her elbow, all like, Look how good I did the lie, but that was better than the alternative.
“Elsa, are you going to come in and have lunch?” Jed asked.
I started, “Oh, Elsa actually has to go home and spoon-feed her poor mother—” but the golem interrupted me with a squeal.
“Yes! I would love to eat some human food with you,” Elsa said, trotting toward the front of the house.
I watched her go. She just needs some time to adjust, I told myself. Less than twenty-four hours ago she was dirt, and now she’s a person. I would need some time to figure things out, too.
“Well, we’ve got chicken salad!” Jed called after her, then turned to me and said with a laugh, “Hopefully by ‘human food’ she doesn’t mean actual humans.”
It took me a moment to laugh in response.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I RAN AFTER ELSA AND managed to catch up with her before she made it inside Zaide’s house. Matty and Jed were lagging behind, so it was safe for me to lean in and say through clenched teeth, “You need to follow my lead.”
Elsa scanned the front of Zaide’s old telephone building. “This is an odd house.”
“Did you hear me?”
“What are you guys waiting for?” Matty and Jed had caught up. “Aren’t you hungry?”
But inside, Dad and Aunt Jessie were sitting side by side on the couch waiting for us. Their features were fogged with worry; they looked in our direction, but as if they were trying to see something twenty feet behind us. “Is everything okay?” I asked.
The corners of my dad’s lips turned up, but it was not a smile. “Everything’s fine,” he said. He took a deep breath, like he was preparing to say something else, but nothing came out except for a long, low exhale.
Aunt Jessie pursed her lips. Matty and Jed got their turquoise eyes from her—hers now shone sadly from her round face. “Aunt Caroline and Dad are sitting in the kitchen with Zaide for a bit,” she said, the words aimed at Jed and Matty but her face aimed at me. My stomach clenched. I knew what that meant: that Zaide was confused again. That he was asking where Ruthie was or that he thought Mom was his dead daughter, and they didn’t want us to face him when he didn’t know who we were.
Dad’s eyes focused on the golem. “Hello,” he said, rising into an uncomfortable-looking half stand. “I’m Leah’s dad.”
“I know,” the golem chirped. “I’m Elsa Aurora Ariel Belle, and I’m here because my mother—”
“Is very ill, bedridden,” I interrupted. Jed and Matty might have bought the whole skydiving story, but I didn’t think my dad would.
Elsa’s smile didn’t waver. “Exactly what she said.”
“Oh, honey.” Aunt Jessie rose and enveloped her in a hug. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’re welcome at our house as much as you want,” Dad said over Aunt Jessie’s shoulder. “We’re just down the block, the green house with the white trim.”
Yes. I gave my fist a victorious little pump. Now I had an excuse for the golem being around all the time. Parents couldn’t help but sympathize with a motherless kid. I bet Mom would cry.
Now I just had to get her in with Zaide.
“Maria?” The voice was lost, confused. Yiddish, lispy.
We all turned toward the kitchen. Zaide stood there in the doorway, his jaw dropped as far as it could go. He was always pale, but somehow he’d gone even paler, like all the blood had drained to his neck, which was currently as red as a stop sign.
He looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“Maria?” he repeated, taking a step forward. My mom and Uncle Marvin appeared over his shoulders, one over each. Mom was biting her lip. Her face pinched in confusion when she saw the golem, but she didn’t say anything.
He couldn’t be talking to me, right? No matter how confused he got, he wouldn’t mistake me for someone else. Somehow that felt even worse than being forgotten altogether.
Zaide raised a trembling arm and pointed it at the golem. “Maria, how are you here?” He said something rapidly in another language—Yiddish or Polish by the sound of it.
The golem said something back. Her shem-inscribed tongue danced easily over the unfamiliar syllables. I gaped at her. I hadn’t created her to know any other languages—maybe that was a golem superpower? Or maybe, since she was created partially from the soil of the old country, she knew those languages, too?
I didn’t know. The only thing I knew was the effect her words had on Zaide: He sagged backward, his face collapsing on itself almost as if it were melting. Thank goodness Mom and Uncle Marvin were standing behind him to catch him. Otherwise he might have fallen on the floor and broken a hip.
“Why don’t we go outside?” Dad and Aunt Jessie stood at the same time, blocking our view of Zaide—and Zaide’s view of the golem.
It quickly became clear that Dad wasn’t actually asking. He put one arm around my shoulders and the other around Elsa’s. Aunt Jessie did the same for Jed and Matty, even though Jed was taller than she was, and together they steered us outside. I took a deep breath of the cold air. It tasted as refreshing as a drink on a hot day.
“Who’s Maria?” Matty’s voice was small. She looked a little bit like she’d seen a ghost, too.
“I don’t know,” Dad said. “Somebody from Zaide’s past, probably. Maybe he knew a Maria when he was young.”
Aunt Jessie turned to the golem. “Is your family Polish?”
The golem looked at me. I inclined my chin the tiniest bit. She looked Polish enough, come to think of it—we had some neighbors who’d moved here from Poland in our old neighborhood, and they’d had similar heart-shaped faces and high cheekbones.
“Yes,” the golem said. “Polish skydivers. That’s my family.”
What had she said to Zaide, though, that had made him look so upset? I made a note to ask her next time we were alone together.
“Which house is yours?” my dad asked, thankfully not seizing upon the skydivers comment. “I didn’t realize any Poles lived in the neighborhood.”
The golem looked to me again for an answer. I didn’t have one. The chances were too great that, if I named a random house, my dad would know the people who actually lived there. He liked to chat with the joggers and the dog walkers while he was out doing yard work.
“The white house,” Elsa said. Half the houses on the street were white.
“Which white—”
“Why don’t we kick around a soccer ball?” I interrupted, my heart racing. Having a golem was a lot of work. Certainly a lot more work than
my egg baby had been. “There’s still that one in the bushes, right?”
“I love human sports!” said the golem.
Everybody stood and blinked at her for a moment, as if not quite sure how to respond to a statement like that.
“Me too!” I supplied. “I love human sports! Much better than squirrel sports or worm sports!”
Everybody laughed. Relieved, I jogged over to the holly bush and managed to extract the old soccer ball from beneath it without pricking myself on any of the leaves. The six of us separated into two teams that we tried to make fair—Matty, Dad, and Aunt Jessie on one, and me, Jed, and Elsa on the other. Jed and Matty were easily the best players: Matty was maybe a tiny bit more skilled, but Jed had longer legs. Dad was better than Aunt Jessie, but they were both pretty terrible. Elsa was a wild card, and I was the worst.
Seriously, the worst. Even when I had a clear shot standing in front of the goal, my foot aimed at the ball, I missed half the time. And running around the field without tripping? The only reason I got an A in gym at Schechter was because the teacher pitied me for falling over my own feet and creating a pileup on the field so big the other kids spent the rest of the marking period asking me if I’d “had a good trip” and saying that they’d “see me next fall.”
Maybe Elsa would be worse than me. That would be exciting.
Ten minutes later, I had to admit the truth: Elsa was not worse than me. Not only was she not worse than me, she wasn’t worse than Aunt Jessie or Dad. She wasn’t worse than Jed. She wasn’t worse even than Matty.
She was better than all of them. She danced over the field like she was floating rather than kicking her way through grass and dirt; she twisted and twirled around us when we tried to steal the ball, and her kicks always went exactly where she aimed them. I paused at one point to watch her go head-to-head over the ball with Matty. They danced back and forth like they were participating in a waltz or something, Elsa bobbing and Matty weaving, then Elsa weaving while Matty bobbed. Matty stuck her leg out to try to steal the ball from Elsa; Elsa rolled it back just enough that Matty fell short, and then she feinted left. Matty dove toward the left, and Elsa lunged right with the ball, sending it sailing between Dad’s legs and into our makeshift goal.
I was dumbstruck. “I can’t believe you beat Matty!” I said, rushing to the golem’s side as Dad jogged off to get the ball. Elsa wasn’t even sweating. “Nobody’s ever beaten Matty except for Jed!”
“Matilda,” Matty reminded me. I avoided her eyes, and finally she looked away, over at Elsa. “But she’s right. What team do you play on? You have to be on at least your school team. You’re so good!”
“I am good at many things,” the golem said, sniffing a little bit, like, How dare you suggest that I am only good at one thing, you peasant.
Envy kindled inside me like a flame. I wished I could be that confident about anything. Just one thing, really. I just wanted one thing where I could say I’m so good at this and mean it, and everybody would nod along with me because they could see it, too.
As soon as you’re eighteen and you get that nose job, I told myself. Then I could be confident. It was hard to be confident right now when I knew the first thing people saw when they looked at me was this honker.
We played a few more games. Elsa’s team won every time. I quickly realized I shouldn’t even bother trying. I jogged back and forth on the field, aiming my face toward the soccer ball. If it hit me in the face and broke my nose, maybe my parents would let me get that nose job while I was getting it fixed.
The ball did not hit me in the face even once, which was a disappointment.
By the time we finally wrapped up, Mom and Uncle Marvin had come outside and were cheering us on. “You can’t cheer for both teams!” Jed shouted as he kicked the ball toward the goal. It flew past Aunt Jessie’s feet and went in. Mom and Uncle Marvin erupted in boos.
Parents thought they were just so funny.
When the last game was done, Matty, Jed, and my aunt and uncle kissed us all goodbye and piled into their car. We watched them drive off. “Elsa, where do you live again?” Mom asked. “We can take you home, or else you’re welcome to come over for dinner.”
“I’ll walk her home,” I said quickly. Mom gave me a look, the one that said, Leah, you’re being rude. I was going to get a talking-to later, but I could handle that. What I could not handle was another few hours trying to run interference around the golem.
The golem smiled at my parents. “Thank you for having me. I had a great time.”
Great. Now Mom won’t just talk about how rude I was, she’ll talk about how rude I was compared to how polite the golem was. I grabbed Elsa’s arm and pulled her in the opposite direction of our house, walking with her down the sidewalk until my parents disappeared through our front door. With the fear of them seeing us gone, I tugged Elsa beneath a tree in somebody’s yard.
“Okay, you’re not doing so bad,” I said. “But what did you say to Zaide before that made him look so sad?”
“I know I’m not doing bad. I’m doing good,” she said. “And all I told him was that he was mistaken and that I wasn’t Maria, I was Elsa.”
Okay. Good. As long as she hadn’t said anything mean. I hadn’t thought she had, but you couldn’t be too sure. “Good,” I said. “It’s probably good you can speak to him in the old languages, anyway, since the whole reason I created you was to take care of Zaide.”
She tilted her head. Her hair fell like a shimmering waterfall. “Take care of him?” she repeated.
“Take care of him, like, make sure he’s doing well and is safe,” I said. “Can you do that?”
She gave me the stink-eye. “I can do many things.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
She shrugged elegantly. “You created me. You give me my orders. So I must say yes.”
“Okay, good,” I said, relaxing a little bit and filing a mental note that she had to obey me. She’d said she was good at a lot of things. I’d seen her at soccer, and she wasn’t exaggerating. She would do a great job taking care of Zaide, and he wouldn’t have to go into the nursing home, and Matty and Jed and I would keep hanging out every Saturday afternoon until forever, and I would keep training at chess until I could beat Zaide every time. “So here’s what I was thinking…”
As we walked back, I laid out the rules as I saw them. First and foremost: Take care of Zaide. Keep him from hurting himself or freaking out or, equally as important, calling my parents or aunt and uncle, because they had to know he was doing fine. Sit with him when he was confused and don’t let him wander or climb up on the roof. Second: Don’t freak Zaide out. Try to stay hidden as much as possible. Third: Report back to me, like this was a job and I was her boss.
She nodded after each one. “Got it, boss,” she said, and saluted. It seemed a little bit like she was making fun of me, but her face was serious.
I nodded back. “Okay. Thank you. The door to Zaide’s should be unlocked, soldier.”
I watched her go. Trepidation simmered in my stomach, but I pushed the worry away. What could go wrong?
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS MONDAY MORNING, AND I was at lunch because some heartless school administrator decided that sixth graders needed to have lunch at ten thirty in the freaking morning. That school administrator deserved to eat nothing but mushy peas and meatloaf-shaped cardboard—at ten thirty in the morning—for the rest of their days.
Anyway. I was sitting at the table with Deanna, Dallas, and Daisy, mechanically chewing my turkey sandwich. I wasn’t really hungry yet, but otherwise, I’d be starving by the time school let out at 2:27. Deanna was telling us all how she’d spent the weekend helping her older brother move into his new town house. “And then the neighbor’s pit bull broke free and charged at my sister, and she screamed and dropped the microwave on her foot, but it turned out the pit bull just wanted to lick her and get pet.”
“Pit bulls are actually nice dogs,” Dallas said, squinting down a
t her pudding cup to make sure she’d scraped out every single bit of the chocolaty goodness. “They have a bad rap because some jerks train them bad.”
“Yeah.” Deanna nodded. “The dog was nice. My sister had to go to the hospital for her foot, though.”
We all winced in sympathy. Looking down, I noticed something on the table. Someone had carved a heart with AP + JB on the inside. I racked my brain for kids I knew with those initials but came up empty. I traced the letters with my finger and wondered how long they’d been here.
“Leah?”
I looked up. The Three Ds were all staring at me, inquisitive sets of brown and hazel and blue. All those eyes on me made my cheeks go hot. “What?” I blurted.
“I was just asking how your weekend was,” Dallas said. Her voice sounded cautious, the way my mom’s had when she talked about Zaide moving in with us. Like she was afraid of me or afraid of talking to me.
She didn’t like me. I knew it.
I had gone a weirdly long time without answering. I had to be careful not to say anything that would make them like me even less, where I’d have to move to another lunch table. I couldn’t sit at a lunch table by myself. That would be even worse than sitting at a table with people who weren’t crazy about me. I could just imagine the whispers. Look at that girl with the beak, all on her own. What a loser. I wouldn’t let such a freak sit with us. Maybe not even if she got a nose job.
And now I’d gone even weirdly longer without answering. “Oh, it was good,” I said. Usually I stopped there, but I actually had something interesting to say today. “I … met a new neighbor who moved in down the street who’s my age. It turns out she speaks Polish. And she’s really good at soccer—she kicked my and my cousins’ butts.”
“Nice,” Daisy said. She actually sounded like she meant it. “Is she going to be coming to our school?”
I hadn’t thought about that. The back of my neck heated up, then my cheeks. “Um, I don’t know,” I said. “She might be going to private school.”
“That’s a shame.” Deanna sighed. “Our soccer team could use some players who are actually good.”
The Trouble with Good Ideas Page 6