The Trouble with Good Ideas

by Amanda Panitch

  But my tongue was frozen. None of it would come out. It was like there was so much I wanted to say that my brain just short-circuited.

  An ugly expression flickered over Isabella’s face. “So you won’t help me? That’s not surprising. My dad says that Jews are selfish and greedy monsters.”

  Monsters? Then I remembered her running her fingers through my hair and massaging my scalp and … She’d been looking for horns. That was another absurd Jewish myth. That we had horns. That we literally weren’t people.

  Tears prickled my eyes. I would shave my head right now if it would help show I was a person just like her.

  My phone buzzed in my hand. I didn’t have to glance down to know it was my mom. My whole body was itching to get out of here. I didn’t have time for a perfect comeback. I just left. Who knew if the front door would lock behind me, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t ever coming back.

  I was waiting at the passenger-side door of my mom’s car before it even stopped. I didn’t throw my backpack into the back like I usually did, just hopped in front and shoved it between my legs.

  “What happened?” Mom asked. She looked over her shoulder and began to back out of the driveway. “You were so excited to hang out with this girl.”

  For some reason, now that I was actually getting away from Isabella and her house, the anger caught up with me. It swelled inside me, pushing my chest forward. Only, when I opened my mouth to yell, it was a sob that came out.

  “Oh, Leah.” A clicking noise from the turn signal, and my mom was pulling to the side of the road. “What happened?”

  Before I could answer, she leaned over and hugged me. It was an awkward hug, since we were sideways and kind of forced to stay that way thanks to our seat belts, but it made me feel better nonetheless. Better enough that I told her exactly what had happened.

  She was quiet while I spoke. When I finished, she sighed. “You know what Zaide says,” she said. “The one thing that brings together the right and the left, the rich and the poor: making things up about the Jews.” I’d definitely heard him say that before, only he used a way more vulgar expression for what everybody did.

  It was a horrible thing to hear, but a laugh bubbled out of me anyway. The laugh tasted bitter in my mouth. I’d wanted to be Isabella’s friend ever since I moved here. No, I hadn’t wanted only to be her friend: I’d wanted to be just like her. And what had that gotten me? Nothing but a rotten feeling. “So what am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Her family didn’t even know me. And yet they don’t think of me like they would think of anybody else, just because of what I am.”

  She sighed again. “If I knew how to answer that, I would tell it to myself,” she said. “We get bomb threats at temple all the time from people who don’t know us or anything about us, but think they know everything.”

  My shoulders slumped.

  “But I think that if people are going to hate you no matter what, you might as well be unapologetically yourself,” Mom continued. “It’s not like they’re going to hate you more for it. You might even change some minds, though you shouldn’t expect to and it’s not your responsibility.”

  I sniffed. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Then again, the only thing I wanted to hear right now was Leah, wake up. It sounds like you’re having a nightmare. Are you ready to go over to Isabella’s and meet her family, who I hear love the Jews? “What should I do, though? I’m going to have to face her in school on Monday.”

  My mom looked very old for a second. I didn’t usually notice the wrinkles around her eyes or mouth, but right now they carved themselves deep into her face. “She’s not your friend anymore. You can’t be friends with someone who doesn’t see you as a person.”

  “But then what…” I couldn’t handle being thrown into the wilds of the cafeteria again. Not when I’d only just found a home.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said anyway.

  She looked at me a second longer. “It’s going to be okay,” she said.

  I knew it, and she knew it. That she was lying.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I SPENT ALL WEEKEND WISHING for some freak meteor to come and strike all Mondays from the plane of existence or at least come and hit my house so that I wouldn’t have to go to school. None of my wishing worked. I spent all of first and second period with my head down, frantically trying to find a solution for what I should do in the cafeteria. When lunch rolled around, my mind was as blank as ever.

  Maybe I should eat in the bathroom. Wasn’t that what bullied kids always did in books and movies? I stopped by the bathroom, my lunch bag grimly clutched in my hand, only to find a line and a group of girls from my class clustered giggling in front of the mirror.

  I backtracked. There was a bathroom on the second floor that people never used because it was so far out of the way. I’d eat there. But when I went to go into the staircase, one of the monitors stopped me. “Where are you going?”

  “Um, the bathroom,” I said weakly. My palm was starting to sweat. My lunch bag was going to slip out of my hands and explode all over the floor, and everybody was going to laugh at me.

  The monitor pointed behind me. “There’s a bathroom over there. Use that one.”

  I dragged my feet as I walked away, yelling at myself in my head. Stupid! You should have said your locker was up there, or you had to talk to a teacher. But it was too late now. There was nowhere to go but the lunchroom.

  I entered with my eyes trained straight ahead. I pretended I was one of those horses pulling carriages my parents and I saw in Central Park that time we went to New York City: wearing blinders that kept me from seeing anything to my sides. Was I imagining it, or did I hear whispering? Whispering that had to be directed at me? The back of my neck burned. My heart fluttered. It wasn’t too late to turn around.

  No, wait—it was. Because I could hear the golem talking to me. I must be close to Isabella’s table. Though I wouldn’t know it, not with my blinders on. “Leah, where are you going?” she asked. Her voice was very loud. “Leah, I have a seat saved for you right here!”

  My feet slowed. Would it really be so bad, to go and sit next to Isabella and pretend that nothing had happened?

  My mom’s voice echoed in my head. You can’t be friends with someone who doesn’t see you as a person. She was right. I couldn’t sit there next to Isabella and pretend to laugh and talk, all the while knowing that she—and who knew who else at that table?—saw me as nothing more than a curiosity.

  As I walked past, Elsa asked, “Isabella, did something happen at your house? Is she mad at you or something?”

  “I have no idea.” Isabella’s voice sounded airy. “She’s kind of weird anyway, isn’t she? It’s probably better if she…”

  I couldn’t hear her as I moved farther away. I was glad about that. I could only imagine what she was going to say next. It’s probably better if she sits somewhere else, where her giant nose won’t put our whole table in shadow.

  The Three Ds still sat at their usual table in the back. It had been only a little over a week since I’d sat with them, but it seemed like it had been an entire year. They stared at me as I approached, not even pretending to glance around or anything.

  The stares did not look friendly.

  In fact, they looked more like glares.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to soothe the anger in the air with the warmth in my voice. It did not work. If anything, their faces hardened. “Um, is it okay if I sit here again?”

  Silence. Something twisted in my chest. Maybe it was a symptom of a heart attack.

  Dallas finally broke the ice. “What, you want to stoop to our level now that you got rejected or whatever by the popular kids?” she said, her voice like acid, and my chest twisted again because she was right. She was right, and it did not make me look good. Or feel good about it. “I’m so honored to know we’re good enough for you now.”

  “That’s not it at all,” I said, though my voice came out weak. My stomach swam with something covered
in tentacles. “You see the girl over there, the new girl? That’s Elsa, my neighbor. She asked me to come sit with her, and—”

  “You know we’ve been trying to be friends with you all year, right?” Deanna butted in. She was glaring at me for real now, her eyes hot under thick black brows. “I invited you over and everything. We kept talking to you and asking you questions, and you kept giving us these short little answers and playing on your phone, but you kept on sitting with us, so we figured you were just shy. But then we saw you over there”—she pointed emphatically, like I had no idea where she was talking about—“and you were chatting away with Isabella and her friends.”

  “Which means you just didn’t like us.” Daisy looked wounded rather than angry, her eyes huge and sad.

  My heart was galloping. I couldn’t seem to get enough air. They were wrong. Because they hadn’t wanted to be my friends. I’d been sitting here for ages, and they’d been looking at my nose, and they hadn’t invited me to their party, and … and …

  “So you can go off and sit with Isabella and them again.” Dallas set her juice box on the table hard. A little spurt of juice came up through the straw and splashed on the table, but she didn’t go to wipe it away. “You can’t sit with us.”

  “But I thought … I thought…” My voice came out as a squeak. This was wrong. This was all wrong. My head was spinning. How could I have gotten it so wrong?

  I took a step back. I couldn’t handle their eyes on me. I sucked in a breath, but it was like trying to squeeze a whole lungful of air through Dallas’s juice box straw. It wasn’t going in. I was going to die here, under all these judgmental eyes.

  “Leah Nevins. Leah Nevins.”

  The sound of my name prickled over me like static. I looked around to find where it was coming from, and I realized that it did sound like static. It was coming from the loudspeaker, which was barely audible over the din in the cafeteria.

  “Leah Nevins, please report to the front office.”

  Deanna scoffed. “Maybe they’re giving you detention for being a sucky friend.”

  My eyes stung, but I had no retort for that. Except: friend? Why couldn’t they have called me that before? I spun and walked away.

  I’d never been so happy to be called down to the principal’s office. My heart slowed, and I was able to suck in more air once I was safely in the quiet emptiness of the hallway. I walked as quickly as I could, my footsteps loud on the scuffed tile floor. My relief was slowly trickling into worry. I might never have been so happy to be called to the principal’s office … because I’d never been called to the principal’s office. For all I knew, the office might actually have been a dungeon, with thumbscrews scattered about and chains hanging from the ceiling to stretch misbehaving students. Like me? I racked my brain for anything I could possibly have done to get myself in trouble. I’d yawned in class this morning and the teacher had given me a look, but I didn’t think that was principal’s-office worthy.

  The confusion grew from a seed into a creeping vine when I entered the office to find my dad sitting in one of the principal’s nubby orange chairs. The chairs were kid-size, meant for students waiting to see the principal, so his tall body looked strange in it, his knees crumpled up toward his chest. He stood as soon as he saw me, though.

  “Leah,” he said, and the seriousness in his tone made me stop short in my tracks. All my thoughts about Isabella and the Three Ds and the various lunch table catastrophes flew out of my mind. Something bad had happened. I immediately thought of my mom. Why else wouldn’t she be here, if she wasn’t flattened on the side of the road or—

  “It’s Zaide,” my dad said, and I brought my hand up to my mouth. To prepare myself for what was coming? I didn’t know. “We need to go right away.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BEFORE TODAY, I’D BEEN TO a hospital twice. The first time was when my grandma on my dad’s side was sick, but I barely remember that because I was like three years old. All I could remember was the shelf of get-well-soon bears in the gift shop, all smiling at me beneath their beady black eyes.

  The second time was when I was eight years old, and I was trying to balance on the curb at a parking lot, and I sliced my palm open on the jagged edge of a license plate and had to get stitches. We sat in the emergency room for two hours while blood ran down my fingers and made a puddle on the floor. A little kid running around slipped in it and fell and hit his head. It was a convenient place to do that. And even though he seemed perfectly fine aside from a little bruise, they rushed him back before me, which was unfair if you asked me. Which no one did.

  This time was worse. Way worse. Dad spoke with the woman at the front desk and then zipped us upstairs in a shiny metal elevator that pushed us into a blindingly white hallway that smelled like Lysol and something else. Like death. Except I didn’t know what death smelled like. It could actually have been meat loaf or something.

  I floated down the hallway as if I were in a dream, tethered to this white world by only my dad’s hand. We passed open doors and closed doors, some with name tags on them. I peeked through the open doors and cringed at everything I saw. A kid in what appeared to be a full-body cast, parts of it suspended from the ceiling. An old woman moaning in pain. Another old woman—not super old, though, like Mom old—lying still in bed, staring blankly at the TV overhead. The TV was off.

  Zaide’s room was at the end of the hall. We entered to find Mom already there, sitting beside Zaide’s bed and holding his hand. His eyes were closed, his chest moving evenly up and down. His mouth gaped open, though, exposing his jumble of teeth. I hung back in the doorway. There were tubes and lines going in and out of him; a bag by the side of the bed was full of yellow liquid that had to be urine. A thick white cast covered half of one side of his body, starting at his waist and stretching down his leg.

  Dad tugged me farther inside the room, but I resisted. My insides swirled with horror. This wasn’t right. Zaide shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t be Zaide. He didn’t even look like Zaide.

  He just looked like an old, old man.

  “You’ll get to sign his cast, Leah.” My mom’s voice creaked with exhaustion, like she hadn’t slept in days. Even though she’d slept later than me this morning. “Isn’t that nice?”

  Are you losing your mind? is what I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “What happened?” Dad had told me a little bit on the ride over—that Zaide had broken his hip and that broken hips were very serious for old people, who had fragile bird bones—but he didn’t know how it had happened. I’m just as clueless as you, Leah, he’d said, which was something he said sometimes when it was not true. I hoped I wouldn’t feel clueless and lost at fifty or however old he was.

  My mom’s lip twitched, and I realized that she’d said that about the cast because otherwise she really might lose it, having to think about all this. So I said, “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” but she was already talking. The lip twitch stopped, and she didn’t burst into tears, so maybe it was good for her to get it out.

  “I stopped by his house this morning as I was heading in to work. His car was there, but he wasn’t inside, and I panicked.” Her eyes got faraway, and I knew she was thinking about those Alzheimer’s people she’d told me about. The ones who forgot where and who they were and wandered off and got hit by a car or fell off a cliff. “I was about ready to call nine-one-one when I heard him moaning from the side of the house.”

  I sucked in a quick breath. I could picture the scene: Zaide, crumpled on the ground, his skinny stick legs bent beneath him. Bald and pink like a baby bird fallen from the nest before it could fly.

  “The TV wasn’t working.”

  We all turned toward the bed. Mom made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a sob. Zaide’s eyes were open but dreamy. Like he still wasn’t all the way here because he was busy looking at something somewhere else.

  “I had to fix the antenna,” he said. It was even harder to understand him than us
ual because in addition to the thick Yiddish accent and no-teeth lisp, his voice was slurred with whatever pain medication they had him on. “The TV wasn’t working. I had to fix it.”

  Mom squeezed his hand. “You should rest,” she said, her voice trembling a bit. “Close your eyes.”

  “I had to fix it,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “The ghost couldn’t stop me. None of her threats could keep me inside.”

  I froze, certain that my whole thing with the golem was about to come crashing down on me, and maybe I would deserve it because Zaide being here was at least partially my fault. But my parents only sighed. Both at once, like they’d rehearsed it out in the parking lot before my dad had come to get me. “Ghosts aren’t real,” my mom said patiently. “You should get some rest.”

  Ghosts might not have been real, but golems … if the golem was threatening him, I should know. Anger rushed hot through me. “Zaide, what ghost?”

  “Leah,” my dad began, like he was about to lecture me, but Zaide was evidently eager to talk about it.

  “Maria’s ghost,” he said blearily. He closed his eyes and didn’t open them again, and my heart nearly stopped, but then they slowly opened. “She’s back.”

  “Who’s Maria?” I asked, but he continued on as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “She tells me to do things,” he said. Mom and Dad exchanged a look over Zaide’s bed. Oh no. This wasn’t good.

  I tried to stop him. “Zaide, maybe you should get some rest after—”

  “If I don’t want to do them, she tells me she’ll tell everyone what happened, and my family will suffer.” He blinked again, and when he opened his eyes, he looked bewildered. “I didn’t mean it. I … Maria…” He launched into something in rapid Yiddish or Polish. His breathing came faster and faster, his eyes wilder and wilder. He bucked in his bed, pounded those frail bird arms against the railings. He shouted something I didn’t understand. Then everything blurred before me, and I was being ushered out into the hallway while nurses rushed in.