Hold My Hand

by Michael Barakiva

  “I’m sorry, Kadarine, but Alek’s actions are intentionally antagonistic, and I’m afraid that this behavior would interfere with the other students’ learning. If you’d still like Alek to attend services, he can do so with you. Maybe after a year of this probation, we can reconsider his role in the classroom. And as for the Christmas Eve service, Mrs. Stepanian will ask the student who received the next-highest grade to read his or her paper.” He looked at Nic. “I’m sure he will be grateful for the opportunity.”

  “It’s me.” Nik, who hadn’t spoken for the entire session, suddenly spoke up. “My essay got the next highest grade.”

  “Then you’ll be reading it at the Christmas Eve service.” The reverend father clasped Nik’s hand heartily. “Congratulations, son.”

  16

  “I mean, you’re not actually going to do it, right?” Alek spoke to his brother from the back seat of the car as Nik drove their family home from church. For once, his parents hadn’t criticized Nik behind the wheel. Even when he forgot to signal before changing lanes and almost rammed them into an eighteen-wheeler. “Guys,” Alek said, addressing his parents, “you’re not going to let him do it, right?”

  “You turned it down, Alek,” his father reasoned. “Why does it matter to you whether or not your brother accepts the honor?”

  “It’s going to be someone,” his mother chimed in, from the passenger’s seat. “Why not Nik?”

  “Because Nik doing it is basically an endorsement of all of the church’s worst positions! It would be like agreeing to perform at 45’s inauguration!”

  “That’s enough, Alek,” his father said from the back seat, next to him. “Aren’t you being just a bit hysterical?”

  Alek stared out the window, holding back tears of anger, wondering if he’d survive hurling himself out of the car at its current speed. The major reason he didn’t pursue this line of action was that he didn’t want to abandon Señor Huevo to this pack of hypocrites.

  Nik remained suspiciously, annoyingly, smugly quiet.

  To make it worse, Alek suspected that Nik was intentionally driving poorly, because now he could get away with it. He waited as long as possible to put on his blinker before making a turn, changed lanes so abruptly that the move was basically horizontal, and instead of coming to a full stop when faced with those octagonal signs, he just slowed down, daring their parents to criticize their new favorite son. But the Khederians said nothing.

  Route 33 continued, unchanging, even more anonymous because of the snow covering the few landmarks that distinguished it from every other highway in every other suburb in every other state.

  When they finally pulled into the driveway of their home, Alek didn’t even wait for Nik to turn the car off before jumping out and slamming the door behind him.

  * * *

  “What’re you wearing?” Alek asked Becky on the way to Ethan’s house on New Year’s Eve, on his birthday gift.

  “You are such a perv,” Becky responded. “What’re you wearing?”

  “Nothing fancy—jeans, button-down. It’s not like we’re doing anything special, you know.” Alek had dreaded making plans with Ethan on New Year’s Eve, but now that he was actually walking over to Ethan’s house, he felt a few of those familiar old butterflies flapping in his stomach.

  “I am rocking this skirt with a hemline that swoops down one side. But look, I have to go. Dustin’s going to be here any second and my parents have insisted on spending some time with him today before they head out to whatever fancy schmancy party they’re going to and Dustin and I go to Dev’s party, where John will be with the trombonist and Mahira will be with her new boyfriend from choir. I don’t even need to tell you how many things could possibly go wrong, and as I’m sure you can imagine, I’m hoping for all of them.”

  “Happy New Year, Becky.”

  “You too, weirdo.”

  Alek hung up by snapping his phone shut, grateful, at least, that he could accomplish the act without having to take off his gloves, the way he would’ve needed to if he’d had a smartphone. His parents had offered to drive him to Ethan’s, but he didn’t mind the walk. It was cold—he could see each exhale, and he could feel the tip of his nose was turning red. But it wasn’t that kind of bone-chilling cold that a gusty wind produced. It was just cold, and he could live with just cold.

  When Alek came home, he could tell if his parents had been cooking by the smells that greeted him, even before he opened the front door. The savory welcome of onions or garlic sautéed in olive oil were pretty much standard. Alek could usually make out additional ingredients (cumin’s muskiness, allspice’s nuttiness, thyme’s fragrant bouquet, or cayenne’s sinus-clearing heat). Sometimes, he could even guess the dish itself, all from the odors that met him.

  Standing outside Ethan’s door on New Year’s Eve, Alek felt his nervousness evaporate, like the excess liquid of a sauce being reduced, when he inhaled the undeniable smell of cooking. Or, at least, something similar to it.

  After a few unanswered knocks, Alek opened the door himself. “Hello?” he called into the cloud of smoke hovering ominously at the entrance to the house. “Hello?”

  “In here!” Ethan hollered over the music blasting from the kitchen.

  Alek cleared some space on the small table by the front door for Señor Huevo, safely ensconced in his tea-box house. After a moment of deliberation, Alek decided to remove the box lid so that Señor Huevo wouldn’t feel claustrophobic. Then he began the ritual of shedding his winter layers: gloves, boots next, then jacket, and then finally his woolen scarf, which he stuffed into one of the jacket sleeves so that he wouldn’t lose or forget it.

  “Wish me luck, Señor Huevo.”

  Señor Huevo did not respond, but Alek felt like he received his blessing nonetheless.

  He followed the trail of smoke into the Novick kitchen, undoubtedly the most underused room in the house. What he saw when he entered was just some yellow tape away from being a crime scene.

  Ingredients were strewn haphazardly on the L-shaped counter, the stovetop, the kitchen table, even inside the sink. Knives lay on cutting boards that were stacked on top of one another with the herbs or vegetables abandoned midchop, as if a deranged cook decided last-minute to change the recipe altogether. The refrigerator door was ajar. Three of the four ranges were lit, with pots and pans sizzling away. The oven itself was emitting smoke like a witch’s cauldron.

  “Everything okay in here?” Alek asked gently.

  “Of course!” Ethan, apparently, wasn’t going to let the impending culinary disaster bring him down. “I thought I’d make us a little dinner to celebrate New Year’s Eve!”

  Alek struggled to reconcile the tragedy he was witnessing with Ethan’s chipper mood. “And how’s it going?”

  “Great, I think. The garlic bread is baking in the oven, the mousse is setting in the fridge, and I’m almost done with the coq au vin.”

  “You made coq au vin?” Alek said, correcting Ethan’s pronunciation, which was more butchered than the chicken carcass on the counter. “That’s—really complicated. Like, way more complicated than something I’d try. How’d the trial run go?”

  “The what?” Ethan asked, struggling to peel a few garlic cloves.

  “You know—the trial run you do when preparing a dish you’ve never made before. To work out all the kinks and stuff.”

  “That’s a thing?” Ethan scoffed. “No way.”

  As if to corroborate Alek, a frying pan sizzling with bacon started hissing and splattering oil. A few drops landed on Ethan’s arm (who cooks in short sleeves? Alek thought to himself. And without an apron!). He howled as the oil burned him but recovered quickly. “I just downloaded a few recipes online, mixed and matched until I thought it sounded good, and gave it a whirl.”

  “You compiled recipes you’ve never made before?”

  “Sure! And when I didn’t have the ingredients, I just substituted with whatever was in the house.”

  Alek hoped tha
t he was able to keep his groan internal. “For example?” He gently slipped the serrated knife Ethan was using to hack an onion out of his grasp and deposited it in the sink, then fished out and rinsed the closest thing he could find to a proper chef’s knife, and slipped it into Ethan’s hand, hilt first, of course.

  “I didn’t have enough bacon, so I added some sausage. And we didn’t have any red wine, so I used some beer.”

  “You used beer in coq au vin?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “You know that coq au vin means ‘chicken in wine.’ That’s sort of the whole point of the recipe.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be…” The ringing of the fire alarm cut Ethan off. “Damn it!” He jumped up, unsuccessfully trying to swat the alarm into silence.

  “Here—let me.” Alek picked up a broom propped against the kitchen counter and guided the handle to the red button on the fire alarm, gently quieting the maddening beep beep beep.

  “So let’s see.” Ethan consulted three different recipes he’d printed, each stained with different liquids. “Now I put the chicken back into the Dutch oven with the sausage and bacon and beer and onions, and then put all of that in the oven.”

  “Can I give you a hand?” Alek dubiously eyed the pot masquerading as a Dutch oven. His mother would never cook with such a shabby pot, let alone place it and its potentially meltable handles into the oven.

  “No need.” Ethan picked up a plate holding a pyramid of chicken parts and dumped them into the pot unceremoniously, splattering liquids everywhere. He grabbed a towel and, using it as a makeshift pot holder, opened the oven door with his knee. When he went to put the pot inside the oven, however, he discovered the two racks were too close to each other for the pot to fit.

  “Are you sure you don’t—”

  “Nah, man, I’m good.” Hugging the pot to his body with one hand, Ethan reached for the top rack. Since the garlic bread was already baking inside, however, the hot rack burned his flesh the second he made contact. He flinched and dropped the pot of something that not a single person would’ve guessed was coq au vin.

  Bacon, sausage, beer, hacked vegetables, and raw chicken spilled all over the kitchen floor.

  Ethan, who usually moved with a skateboarder’s agility, just stood looking down at the mess he’d made.

  “I screwed it all up, didn’t I?” Ethan surveyed the scene with honest eyes. “I had this idea that you’d walk in and I would’ve made this beautiful meal for you, and it would’ve all been perfect, and you’d see how hard I worked and how much I cared, and everything would be great again. But I screwed it up, just like I mess everything up.”

  He crumpled on the tiled kitchen floor like a marionette whose strings had been snipped.

  “Hey—it’s okay. It’s okay!” Alek put on a set of ancient moss-green oven mitts and picked up the pot before all its contents spilled out. “It’s the thought that counts, right?” He began turning off the burners on the range before the fire alarm sounded again or, more likely, the house burned down. “And besides, I’m sure it would’ve been delish.” He felt great relief, actually, since the accident allowed him to get out of sampling the contents of the pot and risking salmonella. Instead, he inhaled the aroma, which almost made him gag. But he put on a good face anyway. “Mmmm!”

  Ethan looked up from the kitchen floor. “Alek Khederian, you have always been a hundred percent honest with me. Don’t stop now. Admit it—this would’ve been a disaster.”

  Alek contemplated the culinary pandemonium before him. “At best,” he agreed. “But don’t worry. I know exactly what to do.”

  “You do?”

  Alek nodded. He picked up the receiver to the Novicks’ landline and dialed from memory. “Hi, Mr. Lee? It’s Alek, Mrs. Khederian’s son—please don’t hang up! Are you still there? Okay, good. Happy New Year to you, too! How does the broccoli look today?”

  * * *

  “Four of these is never enough.” Alek smeared the last remaining pancake with plum sauce and deposited a healthy serving of moo shu gai pan on top. “Do you think there’s something we don’t understand about this dish? Or that it’s just a conspiracy to get us to pay more for an extra order of pancakes?”

  “Definitely a conspiracy.” Ethan slurped his hot-and-sour soup with relish. “What do you think people do in places where there isn’t any Chinese food delivery?”

  “You think such horrible places exist?” Alek asked between bites. “I’ve always wondered—why is it called an egg roll? Is there supposed to be egg inside? Or is the roll itself made with egg?”

  “How about duck sauce?” Ethan said, riffing along. “Where’s the duck?”

  “This is most certainly not made with duck,” Alek said, holding up one of the little orange-red plastic packets. “This is made with Red Number Four, sugar, and an extra dose of something carcinogenic, I’m sure.”

  “And who’s General Tso?” Ethan gesticulated with his chopsticks. “Was he, like, a real general in Chinese history? Like their version of George Washington?”

  “When I first heard about wonton soup, I thought it was called wanton soup, and I kept on imagining this, like, really dangerous, irresponsible soup that didn’t have a care in the world.”

  Alek and Ethan enjoyed each other’s laughter. They spent the remainder of the meal riffing like this, as they might’ve in the past.

  “Sorry about a few days ago, at the diner.” Alek fished the fortune cookies out of the takeout bag, choosing one for himself and handing Ethan the other.

  “No prob—it sounds like you’ve been really busy lately.”

  “Yeah, getting kicked out of Saturday school has really taken up a lot of time.” Alek caught Ethan up on everything that had happened with Arno, the reverend father, and his family in the last week.

  “I’m proud of you.” Ethan beamed. “You always do the thing you think is right. I’ve always dug that.”

  Alek smiled. Ethan was the only person he knew who would’ve listened to that story and arrived at that conclusion.

  Ethan cracked his cookie open and read out loud from the little slip of paper inside. “‘You like Chinese food.’ Okay—(A) that’s a pretty good guess since that’s what I ordered.”

  “And number two,” Alek picked up, “that’s not a fortune. That’s a description.”

  “Exactly!”

  “‘You will amass great wealth.’” Alek folded his paper and put in his pocket. “That’s more like it.”

  “You will amass great wealth. In bed,” Ethan joked.

  “You like Chinese food. In bed. With sheep,” Alek played along. “What about you—what’ve you been up to?”

  “You know—burning vegetables, burning chicken, burning beer. The usual.” Ethan laughed.

  Ethan had shrugged off the trauma of his failed meal as effortlessly as he did everything. This ease, Alek knew, was what had made him like Ethan so much when they met. And it still did now. And it’s what made it possible, over the course of their meal, to slowly find their groove again. A few bites later, after they’d eaten their fortune cookies and compared their fortunes, they embarked on the task of restoring the kitchen.

  They cleaned up the remnants of the Chinese food first, placing leftovers in Tupperware, putting the Chinese food containers in the dishwasher (top shelf, Alek insisted, where there was less heat and the chances of plastics releasing dangerous chemicals was lower). They moved on to the grand project of cleaning up the aborted meal itself. Alek threw away everything that was unsalvageable, like the mostly raw chicken, and gave Ethan copious instructions for what he could do with the rest.

  “The mousse actually came out pretty good, although it’s a little watery. With some heavy whipped cream and a touch of confectioners’ sugar, or a dollop of crème fraîche, I’m sure it’d be delish.”

  Even though Ethan nodded studiously, Alek felt like he was giving directions to someone in a foreign language, who barely understood what he was saying, let alone where to
turn right.

  They fell into an easy rhythm, Ethan holding the garbage open while Alek scraped the leftovers off the plates, or Alek grabbing the dustbin when he saw Ethan begin to sweep the floor as they neared the end of the work.

  By the time they finished, the kitchen sparkled cleaner than Alek had ever seen it. They stood amid the shining surfaces, the low rumble of the dishwasher underscoring their silence.

  “So,” Ethan started, “… you wanna come up?”

  “Up?”

  “To my room.” As if he could read Alek’s mind, Ethan said, “I just want to play you a song.”

  Alek nodded yes and followed Ethan upstairs, his extra-thick winter socks bouncing up the carpeted floor to Ethan’s room.

  Where he was shocked to find the walls bare.

  “Where’d they all go?” The collage of men, celebrities and models, half-naked or more, that had adorned every surface of Ethan’s room were gone, as if they’d never been there.

  “I needed a change.” Ethan shrugged. “To put away the clutter. Help me think straight.”

  “But now it looks like everyone else’s room. Before it was so…”

  “So what?”

  “So Ethan!”

  The shock of Ethan’s bare walls hit Alek so viscerally, he felt like he might start to cry.

  “Hey, man—it’s okay.” Ethan sat Alek down on his bed. “They’re just pictures. And besides, this will allow me to put up something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know—I’ve got a few ideas. But for now it’s nice to have an empty canvas.”

  “Tabula rasa.”

  “Is that Armenian?”

  “Latin. It means ‘blank slate.’ The Romans used to take notes on wax tablets. Then they’d heat them up and smooth them out to erase them when they needed to be used again.”

  “Out with the old…”

  “Exactly. Feels especially appropriate, you know, with it being New Year’s Eve and all.”

  The pause between them lingered. But this was not the silence of awkwardness. This was the silence of something else. Alek suddenly felt all of his senses heighten. He could smell the detergent on Ethan’s recently laundered sheets, the traces of sandalwood incense that he’d probably burned that afternoon. He could feel the surprising roughness of the down comforter, the warm draft of hot air blowing into the room from the vent behind him.