His words had a snap to them, too. And her answer was biting. Almost taunting. Like she was making fun of him.
I couldn’t bear it. “Hello!” I announced as loud as I could, striding into the room with my arms held wide. I had no idea why I was doing that, but it felt good to take up as much space as possible. Like the more space I took up, the less there was for the golem.
Silence fell over them. I tried to catch one of their eyes, but they slid off me as if my own eyes were made of oil. “I’m here!” I announced again.
“Hello,” Zaide said finally. He took a step toward me, and I blinked, and the golem wasn’t there anymore.
My stomach churned with the feeling of something’snotright. I chose to believe it was the sudden absence of the golem, and not how Zaide didn’t greet me with his usual “Leah Roslyn!”
He noticed her absence as well. “Maria? Where did you go?” Zaide said. Zaide looked around for the golem. His eyebrows pinched together, all the skin of his forehead with it. It looked uncomfortable.
Something’snotright something’snotright.
“Who’s Maria?” I asked.
“Maria?” he echoed.
This is what I knew about Zaide’s past: He didn’t like to talk about how he’d escaped the Holocaust, but he and his parents and his two brothers had made it out of Poland and into America before the concentration camps opened, when America barred most of the fleeing Jews from its shores. They’d gotten lucky because his dad “knew someone,” Zaide had vaguely said. I thought this maybe meant that his dad had bribed someone with a lot of money. He was twelve, like me, when he arrived, and his family bought a chicken farm not far from here. When he got older and found out the land under the chicken farm was worth a whole lot of money, he sold the chicken farm and became an electrician. At some point in there, he married Bubbe Ruth, and they had three children.
Oh, and before he left Poland, he created a golem.
I wondered what his golem had looked like. If it had a name. If he’d remembered to make it Jewish, or if he’d purposely made it not Jewish.
“Maria. You keep talking about her. You thought my friend Elsa was her,” I said. His whole face was pinched up now. He was already upset. I might as well double down. “Was she someone from Poland?”
“Poland?” he echoed. His eyes were focused somewhere behind me, like he was looking at something far away.
“Yeah, Poland,” I prompted. “From when you lived there?”
He squinted at me. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice was oddly formal. “Would you mind clarifying?”
A cold fist clutched my heart. “Zaide, it’s me. Leah Roslyn. You know? You know me.” He didn’t look like he knew me. The fist squeezed hard. “Your great-granddaughter. You know?”
“Of course,” Zaide said, but the fog didn’t lift from his face. His warm brown eyes didn’t focus on me, and his lips didn’t split in a familiar smile as he said Leah Roslyn! “How can I help you?”
What was I supposed to do? Just run off and leave him here while he didn’t know what was going on? He didn’t seem angry, at least, just a little confused. He would probably be fine.
But what if he wasn’t? What if he tried to turn on the TV and the signal was staticky and he decided he had to climb up on the roof to fix it?
The golem. She’d somehow managed him for the past week, and managed him well. I needed her help. Her guidance.
Wherever she was. “Elsa?” I said uncertainly, turning around in a circle. “Elsa, can you hear—”
I stopped and faced Zaide again, and Elsa was standing there like she’d never left. “What?” she said to me.
I gestured to Zaide, who was staring down at the golem with huge, liquid eyes. “He’s confused. Help him.”
“Maria?” he said. There was a tremble in his voice. “I thought you were—”
The golem burst out with something in rapid-fire Polish. Zaide fell silent. His shoulders drooped. He looked down at the floor.
“Is he okay?” I asked the golem. “What did you say to him?”
She said something else in the other language, too fast for me to pick individual words out of it even if I’d been able to understand them. Zaide spun on his heel like he was about to start marching, but instead he shuffled back toward his office area, where he sat down on the lounge he napped on. “Zaide?” I called after him, but he didn’t even turn. It was like he didn’t even realize he was a zaide.
The golem turned back to me. “He’s fine,” she said. She yawned. Could magical beings even get tired? “I just told him it was time for him to go take a nap.”
It hadn’t sounded like she’d been telling him to go take a nap. “It sounded kind of like what you were saying was mean,” I said uncertainly.
Her eyes flashed in anger. “You’ve never seen me mean.”
Her words were like a strong wind. I had to take a step back or they’d blow me over. “So you were actually telling him to go take a nap?”
“Would I lie to you?” she asked, which didn’t help at all.
“Okay,” I said, just as uncertainly as before. “I guess I believe you.”
“Good.” Her brilliant white teeth flashed in a smile. “Then go home. Dream of Isabella. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
* * *
Tomorrow dawned bright and clear. Zaide greeted me with a cheerful “Leah Roslyn!” and Matty had left her phone at home by mistake, which meant she had no choice but to pay attention to me. The golem was nowhere to be seen. It should have been a great afternoon.
Should have.
I felt haunted by what had happened yesterday. I tried to convince myself that I could trust the golem, that the golem wouldn’t hurt Zaide or bully him around, but my brain wouldn’t quite believe me. She’d been saying something mean, and then she’d lied to me about it.
Jed and Matty and I sat in the living area, cross-legged in a triangle on the floor. Jed was showing us some funny videos of guys messing up skateboard tricks—at least, he thought they were funny; I thought they mostly looked painful. “Hey,” I said, after Jed laughed and I winced as a sorry kid nailed himself in the groin. “Have any of your friends ever lied to you? Or been mean to you?”
Jed set his phone down and swiveled to me, his eyes totally serious for once. “Tell me their name, and I will murder them.”
Okay, that was not a great start. “I was looking for a, um, a less violent option,” I said hastily. “Like maybe talking to them or something.”
Matty slung an arm around my shoulders. “I only go to Jed when I want a dumb joke or him to beat someone up,” she said. “For everything else, come to me. Who is this friend, and what did they say?”
Guilt trickled through me as I spoke, because this whole conversation was about how lying was bad, and yet here I was, bringing more lies into the world. I couldn’t tell them the liar was Elsa, because what if I still needed her? “It’s a girl at … school,” I said. “I … found out she might have been saying some mean things about another friend behind her back, but she denied it.”
“Is the other friend you?” Jed asked. He hit pause on the video. “I told you, I don’t mind going to jail for you, Lee.”
Matty rolled her eyes. “Ignore the idiot. Lee, if it were me, I’d ice her out. She knows what she did wrong.” I couldn’t exactly ice the golem out, though. Maybe that was good advice if I was talking to a real person. “Find some new friends, some real friends, because once someone’s talking behind your back and lying to you, you’re never going to trust them again. Or reconnect with your old friends. Don’t you have really good friends at Schechter?”
I burst into tears.
“Oh no!” Matty said, her mouth forming an O of dismay. “What did I say?”
I wiped my eyes, trying to quiet down so that none of the adults would hear me, but it just turned into a nasty case of the hiccups. “My—hic—old—hic—friends…”
“Hold your br
eath and swallow six times—then the hiccups will go away,” Jed said. I did, and they did. He glanced sidelong at Matty. “See, I can do things besides make dumb jokes and beat people up.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” Matty turned back to me. “What were you saying about your Schechter friends, Lee?”
“Everything’s different. I feel like we’re not really close anymore, and—and I’m losing them.” Matty and Jed both knew friends. They had a ton of them. I wiped my face. “How can I make it so that I don’t?”
“Well, you’re keeping in touch with them, right? Talking about your lives and stuff?” Matty asked, her face pinched with sympathy. I nodded. “And you’re getting together as much as you can?” I nodded again.
“Well, I think that’s really all you can do, Lee,” Jed said.
That couldn’t be true. “There has to be more I can do,” I said. “They’re doing stuff without me all the time! And they’re making a new friend I’m pretty sure is replacing me. I don’t want them to forget me.” I said the last part quietly. I was tired of people forgetting me.
They were silent for a moment. Then Matty said, “It doesn’t sound like they’re forgetting you. It just sounds like your friendship is changing.”
“But I don’t want it to change, Matty.”
“How many times do I have to tell you I’m going by Matilda now?” She gave me the stink-eye. It was like a switch had gone off, and she was done giving good advice. She shrugged. “And tough luck. Everything changes.”
Anger swelled in me like a wave. She was wrong. She had to be wrong. I’d tell her exactly how wrong she was, too, just as soon as I thought up a good response.
“Oh, don’t get like that. I remember being your age,” she said. She gave a world-weary sigh, like being thirteen was basically ancient. “I got a whole new group of friends going into eighth grade, when I started hanging out more with the other girls on the soccer team. It’s not like I don’t like my old friends anymore. They’re still my friends. I just see the girls on the soccer team more often. A friendship where you’re seeing someone every day is different from a friendship where you stay mostly in touch over the phone or online. But it doesn’t make either of them any less real. Just different.”
“Maybe,” I said flatly. The anger was draining out of me. Now I just felt sad.
“You don’t know how things are going to change,” Matty continued. “What about when they graduate middle school? Aren’t they going to go to public school? So even if you were still living there with them, you might be going to different high schools. Things would be changing anyway. You can’t stop growing older.”
“Unless you die,” Jed pitched in.
Matty rolled her eyes.
It wasn’t that I wanted to stop growing older. On the contrary—I’d be happy getting older faster. I couldn’t wait to be able to drive. To work and earn my own money. To eat ice cream whenever I wanted. I just didn’t want to lose my friends. “Thanks,” I said.
Matty gave me a comforting pat on the shoulder. “It’s going to be okay. I promise. Being the new kid is hard, but eventually you’ll find your people.”
Right. Maybe if Isabella Lynch could become my friend and I could be popular and fit in, this would all be worth it. “That’s true,” I said, and hoped Matty wouldn’t ask any more questions.
“Good,” Jed said, and then he roared, “Let’s hug it out!” He dove over us, knocking us up against the hard floor. And even though I thought my shoulder blades would probably be bruised later, it was worth it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I WOULDN’T HAVE BELIEVED IT if you’d told me a few days earlier, but I actually forgot about Isabella’s invitation until Sunday morning. I blinked into the fuzzy sunlight filtering through my curtains and wondered what time it was.
The sound of clanging pots and pans and knives met me as I drifted down the stairs. I perked up. That sounded like a big, fancy breakfast. French toast? Pancakes? Waffles? My stomach let out a ferocious growl. Like there was an actual big cat growling behind me, I hopped down the stairs and skidded into the kitchen.
Where there was definitely no French toast or pancakes or waffles.
My shoulders slumped in disappointment as I took in what was actually going on. The counter was heaped with boxes and bags of walnuts, figs, prunes, dried dates, and dried apricots. Apples scattered around like they were trying to run away from the gleaming silver apple corer. There were opened boxes of matzah, their contents soaking in a pan of yellowy-white gloop.
“Good morning,” my mom said from behind me, holding a massive knife. That sounded like the beginning of a nightmare, and if you considered this breakfast disappointment a nightmare—as I did—it held up.
“No breakfast?” I asked. Hope rose in my voice. It could still happen. I was sure we had all the necessary ingredients. “French toast?”
My mom shook her head, sweeping past me. She set the giant knife down on the counter with a clink. “Seder prep for Passover.”
“When’s the seder?” It was weird, not knowing when it was. In Jewish school, we’d discuss the holidays and calendar all the time. But since practically no one else in my new school was Jewish, the holidays felt like they snuck up on me. Like a few weeks ago, with Purim. It totally snuck up behind me, and I didn’t see it until it was too late. Boom! It’s Purim! Have you decided on your costume yet?
When I went to Schechter, we’d start thinking about our Purim costumes ages in advance, practically as soon as Chanukah ended, even though Purim didn’t usually come around till March-ish. When I was a little girl, all my friends and I would go as the Purim heroine, Queen Esther, but we changed it up as we got older. Last year, Lexy and Julie and I went as our Hebrew school teachers. Julie got particularly inspired when it came to imitating Rabbi Paskind’s beard.
This year I went as nothing. Why bother? Even though the Purim carnival at our old temple was on a Sunday, Mom and Dad were busy and couldn’t do the two-hour trip.
“The first night is Monday,” Mom said, and the word Monday was like a lightning bolt direct to my brain.
“Oh! I’m supposed to go over to Isabella Lynch’s house on Monday after school.”
I said Isabella’s name the way we’d say Queen Esther’s name when reading the Purim story, but the effect was lost on my mom. “You’ll have to reschedule then,” she said. “We’re due at Zaide’s at four.”
School was over at 2:27. “I could still go to Isabella’s for a half hour…,” I said, but my heart wasn’t even in it. It wouldn’t make sense for me to go all the way to Isabella’s for a mere half hour, and my mom wasn’t going to drive all the way out there to pick me up when she had to make half the seder food.
“No.”
“Fine,” I said. Hopefully Isabella’s invitation would extend until Thursday or Friday. Maybe it would even make me look cooler, saying I had to reschedule. Like I could possibly have something better to do than going over to Isabella’s house.
“Leah.” Mom’s voice broke through my thoughts. “Would you help me chop the fruit and nuts for the charoset, please?” She pronounced the first syllable of charoset like she was clearing her throat. The chhh sound in Hebrew was one of my favorites to make. The boys in my old class used to say it like they were hacking up a big wad of spit in their throats. “I want to get started on the matzah ball soup.”
“Sure.” I hadn’t had breakfast, but I could make my own breakfast by sampling all the charoset ingredients: the apples, the dates, the figs and prunes, the apricots, the walnuts. They weren’t quite as good as French toast, but they were passable. And then I had a spark of life-changing inspiration. “Hey,” I said, grabbing the smallest knife I could find. “You know what would be amazing? Charoset French toast.”
I waited for my mom’s face to break open in awe, but she just kept mixing and measuring. “Mom?” I prompted.
“Leah,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”
I focused
on the fruit. Chopping apples was easy, but chopping the dates and apricots and figs and prunes was hard. They were sticky and mushy and liked to cling not just to one another but to the knife. I always felt kind of bad for them, like they were fighting for their lives. “Okay. What?”
She sighed. “I know you’ve been struggling lately. I’ve wanted to talk to you about it, but things have been so busy with Zaide and with the new job, and—”
“I’m not struggling,” I said. Had she overheard my talk with Matty and Jed? Well, Naomi might have stolen my friends from me, but I still had plans to go over to Isabella Lynch’s house, for heaven’s sake.
“I mean with Zaide,” she replied. “I went through the same thing with my great-grandmother. Zaide’s mother. I was nine when she died.”
My knife slammed into the cutting board, separating the woody stem of a fig from its seedy flesh. It was probably hard enough and sharp enough to cut off a finger if I missed. “Zaide’s not dead,” I said, not looking up.
My mom kept on talking like I hadn’t just made an important point. “Bubbe Anna was eighty-nine years old. Fit as a fiddle in body. It was her mind that started to go near the end. She started forgetting my name, or thinking I was my mother or grandmother or a stranger.”
She took a deep breath. The spongy sounds of her mixing stopped. I was tempted to look over in support in case she was upset, but I had a lot of things to chop. And my hands were sticky. And also if I looked at her, I might cry.
“She passed away before my parents could talk about moving her somewhere that would be safer for her,” Mom continued. Her voice was lower now. Yeah, she was definitely trying not to cry. I blinked hard to keep my cutting board from going blurry. I definitely did not want to miss with my knife. “It was very hard. I loved my bubbe.”
The Trouble with Good Ideas Page 9