The Trouble with Good Ideas

by Amanda Panitch

  Her mouth opened in a smile. My stomach lurched. One side of her mouth was surrounded by normal lips. The other side? There was a worm curled into the crumbling dirt of her skin, its two ends lashing against her face where her lips had once been.

  “Elsa,” I said, and my stomach lurched again, just from calling a creature like that by a human name. “You have to let them go.”

  She waved her left hand in the air, and one of the blades hanging off the machines lurched, swinging close to Matty. Matty screamed, pressing back against Jed, which made him stumble closer to the machines on his side. Elsa was using her golem magic to terrorize my cousins. But when I looked closer, I saw what it had cost her. Part of her hand had crumbled off and pattered to the floor.

  “I waited for you,” the golem continued. “I wanted you to see what I’ve done. It wouldn’t be any fun if you weren’t here. This is what you want, isn’t it?”

  What I want? This was nowhere near what I wanted! The golem was supposed to be good and helpful and true. She was supposed to take care of Zaide so he wouldn’t hurt himself. She was supposed to help me keep my family together, make things easier. Not let Zaide break his hip falling from a ladder, not threaten to impale my cousins with rusty farm equipment.

  But then I remembered a sign I’d seen one time inside a fancy sandwich shop that had maybe the best turkey sandwich I’ve ever had in my life. It said MADE WITH LOVE. I swallowed hard. I hadn’t made the golem with love. I remembered biting my tongue with frustration as I’d mashed up her clay. I’d been resentful of everyone when I’d made her—of my parents for not listening, of Matty and Jed for their denial. And she’d absorbed that, the same way she’d absorbed my desire for popularity and impressive family stories, my desire to understand people.

  “This is not what I want,” I said, struggling to keep my voice under control and not let it turn into a shrill screech. “I want you to let them go, whole and healthy, so that they can go home with their family.”

  Uncle Marvin and Aunt Jessie weren’t in here with Jed and Matty. What had Elsa done to them?

  I pushed them to the back of my mind. First, we had to get rid of the immediate danger in here with us. “Please, Elsa,” I said. “If you let them go, I can help you.”

  I stepped closer to her. “I can fix your face. Make you look pretty again. Isn’t that what you want?” Another step. She watched me as if hypnotized. If I could just get close enough to rip out her shem-stamped tongue, I could end all this right now. “Let me fix you, and then we can both be beautiful and popular again.”

  She didn’t have to know that Zaide’s words were coming back to me, whispering silently in my ear. I couldn’t fix everything. There were some things you just couldn’t control. I’d created the golem to take care of Zaide, but it was impossible. Taking care of Zaide wasn’t up to me. Some things could be up to only Hashem. Or whatever was out there.

  I had almost reached the golem. Only a few more steps, and—

  The golem’s worm-lips twitched into a sneer. I stopped short, my heart racing. “Do you think you can fool me again? I won’t let you trick me. You have to help me, whether you want to or not!” The blades around Matty and Jed clanged as if in agreement, drawing screams from my cousins.

  I needed more time. More time to come up with a plan. There had to be something else I could say to fix this. To get more time, I had to get away from Elsa. She wouldn’t hurt my cousins if I wasn’t here to see it. She’d want to make sure hurting them hurt me.

  So I plunged into the garage.

  Shadows sprang up around me, menacing and awful. Every single one looked like the golem leering at me, about to pounce. I pushed my way through a rack of musty coats. Past a shelf of old magazines. Beneath a chandelier propped on the edge of a high shelf.

  I jumped back just in time for the shelf to fall and the chandelier to shatter at my feet. I flung my arm over my face; bits of glass stung as they hit my skin, but I didn’t feel the wet ooze of blood. Matty was screaming her head off somewhere in the background. I hoped she was okay. She had to be okay. Maybe the noise had scared her.

  “So close,” the golem hissed. I couldn’t tell where her voice was coming from; somehow it seemed to be coming from all around me, like it was being carried on the wind. “You’ll have no choice but to help me if you’re hurt so bad you can’t move…”

  The hat rack Jed and Matty and I had laughed at what seemed like so long ago crashed over in front of me. The golem laughed cruelly somewhere in the background.

  I needed time to think. But I couldn’t stop to think or something would smash my head in. I wished I could call for a time-out. But this wasn’t like a sports game. I wasn’t even good at sports. So that was probably a good thing.

  Something I couldn’t see crashed just behind me with the splintering sound of broken glass. Jed and Matty screaming was a background noise at this point. I had to figure out what to do!

  I kept running ahead … and hit a wall. Literally. For the first time, I’d made it to the very back of the garage.

  There wasn’t treasure back here after all.

  I spun. On my right, a massive chest of drawers loomed over me. On my left, I could see the side wall peeking out through a cluster of old lamps. The only way to go was the way I’d come from.

  Where Elsa was standing now. She took a step closer to me, her half-dirt face twisted into an expression of triumph. “There you are, Leah,” she said, moving closer. Grains of dirt scattered behind her as she walked. “But you wanted me to find you the whole time, didn’t you?”

  “No,” I said because obviously I didn’t want to be crushed by a chandelier, but she only snorted. It sounded like a footstep crunching on gravel.

  “You say that, but you forget that you created me as a reflection of you,” she said. “All those things you were thinking about while you formed me—I saw them. I understood them.”

  “Then you understood them wrong,” I said desperately. “I love Matty and Jed. I would never want to hurt them.”

  Elsa giggled. It sounded odd coming from her monstrous dirt face. “I understood everything right,” she said. “Maybe I don’t need to threaten your cousins or hurt you to make you do what I want. Maybe I can help you, and you can help me.”

  Help me? But …

  “You don’t like yourself,” she continued. “And that feeling was in every other feeling you gave me. You hate your nose. You hate your family history. You hate how other people see you at school. So what’s the solution for that?” Her worm-lips widened, her dull black stone eye glistening strangely. “Let me help you.”

  “No!” I cried. I wasn’t sure if I was yelling in response to her offer of help or the thing about me not liking myself. Because she was definitely wrong about that second thing. Or … was she?

  Zaide had talked about things we could and couldn’t change. I couldn’t change who I was. But I could change how I felt about it.

  “Yessss,” the golem hissed, stepping forward again. “I can get you back in with Isabella Lynch. I can help get you money so you can get that nose job.”

  And how I felt about it was … I didn’t want to be friends with Isabella Lynch anymore. I didn’t want to be like Isabella Lynch anymore. I wanted to be friends with people who liked me for who I was.

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “That’s not what I want. No matter what my nose looks like. Not if it means being rotten on the inside.”

  Elsa just hissed as she came closer. Dirt crumbled from her chin. Was she losing even more of her humanity now? “You gave me how you feel. I know better than you, Leah.” She gave me a ghoulish smile. “But fine. If you won’t let me help you, I have no problem forcing you.”

  I took a step back but just hit the wall again. I’d given her my feelings. She wanted the same things I’d wanted, to fit in and be popular, only I hadn’t treated her like she’d fit in. Shame flickered through me. I’d treated her like something not human—which, technically, she was—by ord
ering her around, making her hide herself when other people were nearby …

  Maybe I could use this. “Elsa,” I called. She scowled at me. “I understand how you feel. Like, exactly. I’m sorry for the way I treated you.”

  She furrowed her brows at me. One normal, one that looked to be made up of tiny pebbles of gravel.

  “What you’re missing is that people change,” I continued. “I’m different from the way I was when I made you. My feelings are different. Like I was just saying.”

  Her scowl was slipping away, replaced with a wormy lip twisted in thought.

  “Maybe we can be different together,” I encouraged. Though every cell of my body screamed to be farther away from the golem, I took a step closer to her. Then another. The screaming intensified, but I kept going. “You don’t have to work for Zaide anymore. We can be friends together. Hang out. All of that stuff.” The things I wanted the Three Ds to say to me. Though they’d kind of said all this, hadn’t they? Just not so obviously. “I don’t want to be friends with Isabella Lynch anymore. I don’t need to be popular to be happy. And neither do you. Come here. Give me a hug.”

  She moved until we were close enough to touch. Close enough for her to reach out and plunge her fingers into my chest and rip out my heart.

  But she didn’t.

  She smiled, pleased. Those wormy lips of hers opened, showing her teeth and a pink flash of tongue—

  I dove at her, my right hand going straight for her mouth. She shrieked. The non-dirt half of her mouth snapped at me with sharp-looking teeth, but the other half didn’t have sharp teeth to snap. So I jammed my fingers into the dirt half, trying to ignore how oozy and slimy the worm-lip felt.

  My fingers closed around her tongue. It still felt fully tongue-ish, fat and wet and gross, though on the top of it I could feel the imprinted letters of the shem. I grimaced as it lashed in my grip, trying to escape. One of my teachers had told us once that the tongue was the strongest muscle in the body. I believed her now.

  The golem suddenly stopped struggling. She stared up at me with pleading eyes. Well, eye. “Leah,” she said, or tried to say. It came out more like luh-uh. “Dun do thus.” She clenched her fingers into a fist. Was she trying to use magic?

  Something creaked horribly behind me. I closed my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I pulled.

  It happened so fast. Her tongue came free in my fingers, shriveling into a damp scrap of paper by the time I pulled it from her mouth. Her body crumbled into dirt.

  Not fast enough, though, to stop the tower of lamps from falling on me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I FELL HARD UNDER THE lamps, shielding my head from any shattering glass. My ankle twisted painfully beneath me, but I pushed the agony out of my mind as I struggled to stand. I had more important things than myself to worry about right now.

  Getting Matty and Jed out took kind of a while, considering none of us really wanted to touch the sharp, rusted blades. Also, they both looked like they’d seen a ghost, their eyes wide and faces drained of all color. But eventually I managed to create a big enough opening for them to squeeze through and out, so all was well. Or as well as things could be, I guess.

  Of course, the jagged pain coursing through my right ankle had me biting back a scream every time I limped on it, but I could deal with that later.

  Later came after we rescued Uncle Marvin, Aunt Jessie, and my dad. I’d wondered why my dad hadn’t come running inside after me while I was in there battling for my life, but our discovery explained it. He had indeed walked up to the door … and promptly collapsed into a deep sleep on the threshold. Aunt Jessie and Uncle Marvin were inside snoozing on the couch. More golem magic, apparently. We were panicked a little at first, but all we had to do was shake them and scream into their faces, and they woke right up, groggy and bewildered but otherwise okay.

  They said there must have been some kind of gas leak that made them pass out and that we had to get out now, now, now, and they’d call 911. They did ask a lot of questions about the mess in the garage that they’d glimpsed through the open door, which dropped off as soon as I tried to limp down the stairs and stopped biting back that scream. Then everybody except Aunt Jessie—who stayed to direct the firemen—piled into our car and drove right to the hospital. I was on a different floor from Zaide as they put a brace on my ankle. I pretended to be too dopey on pain meds to answer any questions, and then suddenly I blinked and I was at home. In my bed. Alone.

  It was actually kind of a relief—that Jed and Matty weren’t there. I didn’t really feel like answering their questions just then. I knew that they deserved answers after all they’d been through, but surely they could wait until I was feeling—

  “Is she up?” My door banged open, slamming into the wall with a crash.

  Well. If I hadn’t been up before, I certainly would be now.

  Jed and Matty filed into my room, closing the door behind them, gently this time. “Hey, guys,” I said feebly, dropping my head back onto my pillow like it was too heavy to hold up. “I’m kind of … tired…”

  “Not too tired to talk to us,” Matty said firmly. She grabbed my desk chair and dragged it over beside my bed, taking a seat. Jed stood next to her, resting his hand on the back of the chair.

  Both stared at me grimly. I waited for them to start talking, but they just kept staring.

  I couldn’t take the uncomfortable silence. “What do you want to talk about?” I asked them.

  Matty’s eyes nearly bulged out of her head. “Are you seriously asking me that right now?”

  “Asking us that,” Jed corrected. This would usually be the time when he’d make a joke or something to break the tension, but this was evidently too serious a moment.

  I sighed. “I can tell you what happened, but you’re not going to believe me.”

  This made Jed snort a laugh. “I’m pretty sure our minds are open right now. After what we just experienced and all.”

  I sighed again. Tried to sigh as long and loud as I could, to demonstrate how much I was suffering not only with this badly sprained ankle but with the emotional pain they were inflicting upon me, but they seemed unmoved. So I told them. I told them everything. I bared all, down to what I was feeling and thinking. From me worrying about Zaide and how everything would change, to Zaide telling me the story about the golem, to me finding the envelope of dirt and the shem. To me mixing up the golem in the soup pot and trying to disguise her as a friend. To everything that ensued.

  “So I think this is an example of something he said that can’t be fixed,” I said mournfully. “No more chess with Zaide. You guys will keep on getting awards in soccer and baseball and going to your school far away, and we’ll never see each other.”

  “You forgot to mention that I’m going to fail math class,” Jed said.

  My eyes narrowed. “Don’t even joke about that.”

  Jed thumped down on the bed beside me. “But that’s all I do well.”

  Despite myself, a tiny smile twitched at my lips. “That’s not true.”

  “Right,” Matty chimed in. “You also beat people up.”

  “That too,” he bragged, and now we were all more relaxed. Which might have been the whole point, I realized, of him making a joke.

  “Anyway,” Matty said. “Leah, why did you think it was a good idea to build that thing in the first place?”

  The words stuck in my throat. I had to clear it to get them to come out. “Zaide needed someone to look after him.” My voice was tiny. “He needed help.”

  Matty rolled her eyes. “Not buying it.”

  I got defensive. “But that’s why—”

  “There has to be more to it.” Matty talked over me. “Or else you would have ended it when you realized she was doing a terrible job.”

  She knew me too well. Usually I liked it, but now it made me want to cry. “I didn’t want to lose you guys, either.” If I kept my voice as tiny as possible, maybe no tears would fall. “I didn’t wan
t our Saturdays to end.”

  That left the room quiet. Matty stared at me. Jed stared at me.

  And then Matty sighed. “We don’t want to lose any of that, either,” she said. “You know, I realized in the garage as those rusty blades were spinning toward our faces … we’d kind of been pretending that this all wasn’t happening. That Zaide wasn’t … wasn’t…” Her voice trembled, and she looked down. Which made me realize: She hadn’t been in denial because she didn’t care. She’d been in denial because she cared too much. Which, somehow, made it all easier for me to deal with.

  She cleared her throat and looked up. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “We’re getting older. Of course things are going to change. But … at least we can go through it all together.”

  She grabbed my hand and squeezed. I squeezed back. It was me trying to say all the things I suddenly couldn’t say because my throat had swelled up with tears.

  “Like Matty said, things are going to change,” Jed added. I waited for the punch line, but his voice was dead serious. “But not the most important things. Whether we see each other every Saturday or not, we’ll always be cousins. We’ll always be friends. That’s something we can make sure of.”

  He was right. Even if we didn’t have our Saturday afternoons anymore, we could still make an effort. We could still stay friends. We’d all have to try harder, but to throw back to my conversation with Zaide, it was something we could fix.

  Jed cleared his throat. “And I’ve already talked to my math teacher about getting a tutor at school,” he said. “Zaide said he was proud of me.”

  And also … maybe at school, I could change if I stopped trying so hard to keep everything the same. Change could be okay. And maybe acting like I cared about myself, like I thought I was worthy of being liked, was the first step toward changing the thoughts in my head.

  Matty smiled at me. “He’s right. I’m in.”

  I knew what I had to do. It would hurt to say it, but she was right. I had to try. “Me too,” I said. “Matilda.”