The Opposite of Hallelujah

by Anna Jarzab

  “It must feel like a long time ago,” I said. Eleven years. That was how long it had been since Hannah had been where I was. I glanced at Hannah; she was sitting behind our mother, facing the same direction, and I was surprised to notice that they had the same profile, the same perfect, straight nose. Absently, I touched my own nose, wondering if I had it, too.

  Hannah stared out the window. “It really does.”

  4

  Mom and Dad had changed Hannah’s room (or, I guess, my old room) into an office–slash–sewing room a couple of years earlier. Mom had run around the entire week since we’d found out Hannah was coming home, trying to approximately re-create Hannah’s old space, but it didn’t really work. Her aversion to clutter won out over her desire to make the room look like it had eight years before, so most of Hannah’s possessions—stuffed animals, school notebooks, journals, her eraser collection—stayed in the garage. Her books had migrated to my shelves about a year after she’d left, when our parents finally had to admit she was gone, and the walls were bare. They had bought her a new set of furniture from Ikea, new bedding and curtains, had the carpet shampooed, and scrubbed the room from top to bottom. It was less like Hannah’s old room than ever.

  The new Hannah appreciated the ascetic cleanliness, though. “It sort of reminds me of my cell,” she said when Mom asked. Mom looked at her in horror, but Hannah just angled her head and gave a closed-mouthed smile. “I love it, Mom, it’s great. Neat and simple.”

  “Are you sure?” Mom’s eyes crinkled at the corners with worry; behind them her brain was whirling like the Tasmanian Devil, trying to process Hannah’s comment and recalibrate accordingly. In no way did she want to remind Hannah of the convent, although she probably couldn’t have explained why. Was it because Hannah had left the cloister and Mom didn’t want to remind her of her former unhappiness, or was it because she didn’t want to tempt her back to it? “We can go to Target tomorrow on the way to the mall and pick up some new things. More colors, maybe.”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” Hannah insisted. “More than fine. Fantastic. I hope you didn’t go to too much trouble.”

  “It was no trouble at all,” Mom said, beaming. “I’m going to go start dinner.”

  “Do you want help?” Hannah asked. I did not ask, trying as always to fade quietly into the background and praying Mom forgot I was there. I hated helping with dinner. In our house, whoever didn’t cook dinner had to do the dishes. I much preferred that.

  “No, you should rest,” Mom told her. “Caro can help me.”

  I let a quick breath out through my nose.

  Hannah glanced at me. “Mom, really. I do that—I used to do that all the time. I like to cook.”

  “No,” Mom said firmly. She put her arm through Hannah’s. “You can come sit in the kitchen and talk to me, though.”

  “Okay,” Hannah agreed, walking with her into the hallway and down the stairs. I followed, my eyes trained on their retreating backs.

  They say idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and Hannah must have subscribed to that philosophy, because she refused to do nothing while Mom and I prepared beef Stroganoff—her favorite, or it had been eight years earlier. She begged for something to do, so I passed her an onion and commanded, “Chop.” She took the knife up and began turning out thin, perfect slices of onion without shedding a tear.

  “Caro,” Mom said, grabbing my arm.

  “What?”

  Mom cocked her head at Hannah and gave me a stern look. Talk to her. I shook my head, but she persisted. I sighed.

  “You must be a really good cook, Hannah,” I said.

  “No,” Hannah said. “I’m not at all. But everyone had to cook, and I had plenty of turns, so I can do the basic things.” She gestured with the knife toward her pile of onions. “Ta-da.”

  I nodded. “That’s pretty impressive. What kind of stuff did you guys eat, um, in there?”

  “Normal stuff,” Hannah said. “We raised our own vegetables, so everything was really fresh. Lots of meat and potatoes. Lots of stew. I don’t know.” She shrugged. It was hard to gauge how much to push her to talk about the convent, but it was the only point of reference I had. I foresaw a whole lot of awkward silences in the near future.

  I shot Mom an I gave it the old college try look and went to the pantry to grab a bag of egg noodles.

  “What do you think you might want to do after high school, Caro?” Hannah asked.

  I hesitated. “I … don’t know. Don’t worry, I don’t want to become a nun or anything.”

  “Caro!” Mom looked like she wanted to lock me in my room until I learned some manners. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that was probably never going to happen.

  “I wasn’t suggesting that,” Hannah said, looking down at the cutting board, where her onions sat gleaming. “Either way. If you wanted to, I certainly wouldn’t try to talk you out of it.”

  “You wouldn’t?” I asked. Mom glared at me, but I was genuinely curious now. “Didn’t you hate it?”

  “I didn’t hate it,” Hannah said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Then why did you leave?”

  Hannah looked up from the counter at me and smiled a smile that was like the shutting of a door. “It’s complicated.”

  “I bet,” I said, returning to my task, which was starting to seem impossible. “Mom, I think we’re out of egg noodles. Do you want to use penne instead?”

  “No, we have some,” Mom said. “Look harder, Caro.”

  “I’ve looked, there’s none here.”

  Mom narrowed her eyes at me. “What do I get if I find them?”

  “Um … the credit?”

  “Look harder.”

  I did another halfhearted search through the pantry before calling it quits on the egg noodles. “Okay, a week of dishes.”

  “With no complaining?”

  “With minimal complaining.”

  “Even if you make dinner?”

  “Even if.”

  “Deal.” Mom walked to the pantry, and within a minute she’d found a bag of egg noodles shoved behind a giant Costco pack of Stove Top stuffing. She handed them to me with a self-satisfied smirk. “Be sure to put the rubber gloves on before you wash. A week of that will give you dishwater hands.”

  “Thanks for that helpful tip, Martha Stewart, I’m going to write that down,” I said good-naturedly.

  “Next time let me look first,” Hannah suggested, in an attempt to get in on the joke. I jumped; I’d forgotten she was even there.

  I didn’t hear from Derek at all that day, or the following morning. I spent the entire night tossing and turning, and I wasn’t the only one. Hannah’s bedroom was right above mine, and even though she’d supposedly gone to bed right after dinner, insisting she was tired, I could hear her treading the carpet restlessly above my head into the wee hours of the morning.

  It was a strange sound, louder and more anxious than the lazy creaks and settling noises the house usually made. The things we think about at night, in the dark, are much more phantasmagorical than the things we think about when the sun is up; as I was kept awake by Hannah’s footsteps looming over me, my mind wandered, not to what she was doing at that moment, but what it had been like for her in the convent. I’d never been in her room there, and it had never been described to me, so I imagined it—dark and cold and empty, Hannah in the center of it, alone and lonely, dreaming of escape.

  I slept through Sunday breakfast. Mom had taken Hannah shopping, and by early afternoon, they still weren’t back. We were less than twenty-four hours away from the start of junior year, and Derek still hadn’t found the time to let me know he was alive. Well, I knew he was alive. He’d updated his Facebook around midnight, and again at noon on Sunday. I left a comment on his wall but got no response. A couple of hours went by and I called him. No answer.

  “Hey, Derek, it’s me—Caro—you know—your girlfriend,” I said, pressing the heel of my palm into my forehead. That was the fi
rst time either of us had used that word to describe me. I shouldn’t have been the one to do it. “Anyway, I was just calling to talk, see how you’re doing, maybe see if you’re free tonight to get together or whatever. So, um, call me back. Okay … bye!” I shut my phone and flopped backward onto my bed, burying my head under a pillow. I hated myself so much in that moment.

  “Do you think he’s avoiding me?” I asked Erin over the phone minutes later. I didn’t really want to talk to her about this, but I thought maybe if I was on the phone with somebody else, he would call. Staying off the line and staring at it, waiting for it to light up, hadn’t worked. Maybe directing my focus elsewhere, making myself a little bit less available, would. I don’t know where I get this stuff, honestly.

  “Um … no, probably not,” Erin said. It was obvious to me that she was barely listening.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m on IM,” she told me.

  “With Peter?”

  “No, Joe.”

  “Joe Price?” Joe was another guy from our high school. I didn’t know him very well, but he had dated our friend Jessica the previous year, with more or less disastrous results. They’d broken up in March, but it still seemed wrong for Erin to be hitting on him—if that was what she was doing. I’d give most people the benefit of the doubt, at least at first, but Erin used IM as a tool of seduction. She was much wittier and braver over the Internet than in real life, and she used that to her advantage, to reel them in.

  “Yeah, we’ve been chatting all summer, pretty much,” Erin said. “I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d think I was betraying Jess, but really, they broke up a long time ago, and it’s high school.”

  I drew a deep breath. “Okay, whatever. You didn’t sound too sure when you said Derek wasn’t avoiding me. Do you think he’s avoiding me? Tell the truth.”

  Erin sighed. “I don’t know. It’s hard to say. You two have been apart for months, so while I wouldn’t normally tell you to worry, if everything’s fine between you, then he should be dying to see you, if only to get some action. Summer camp can be a lonely place for a guy with a girlfriend back home, if you catch my drift.”

  “I catch it, thanks for that.” I shook my head. “So you’re saying he got with some other girl at camp?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Okay, so you’re saying he wants to break up?”

  “Again, not what I said.”

  “Then what? What was your point?”

  “I didn’t have one! You asked a question and I answered it: yes, it is weird that he hasn’t called.” Erin paused. “So, what are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. What would you do?”

  “Break up with him first,” Erin was quick to say. “Never get dumped. That’s my motto. Never, ever, ever get dumped. It’s totally humiliating. If you think someone’s going to break up with you, you should launch a preemptive strike.”

  “You should really cut back on the military history documentaries,” I advised.

  “My grandma had the TV set permanently on the Hitler Channel this summer,” she told me. “I didn’t have a choice.” Erin called the History Channel the Hitler Channel, because every time she switched it on, they were showing a program about World War II. Erin swore that at least a third of the time, the first word she caught was “Luftwaffe.”

  “Try reading a book next time.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You really think I should break up with him first?” I asked, twisting a chunk of hair around my pointer finger. It was a nervous habit I’d had since childhood.

  “I think you should do whatever you feel like doing,” Erin said. “But yes, I think you should break it off first. Even if he doesn’t think he wants to break up, if he’s not breaking down the front door to see you, his head’s obviously not in the game.”

  “Don’t you mean his heart?”

  “Uh … no.” I heard the IM ping in the background. “Caro, I’ve got to go, Joe wants me to meet him for coffee in ten. Are you okay to be on your own?”

  “Yeah,” I said. What did she think I was going to do, stick my head in the oven because I hadn’t heard from Derek in forty-eight hours? Not likely. “I’ll live.”

  “Great. See you at school tomorrow.”

  I hung up the phone and paced my room for a while, thinking about what Erin had said. It was typical Erin advice—get out clean. She’d dated a lot of guys and considered herself an expert at playing the game. But I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t Erin; I was me. What would I do? I had no idea.

  A few minutes later, there was a knock on my door.

  “Come in,” I called. Hannah poked her head through the door, as if she was trying as hard as possible not to disturb my privacy or pry. She glanced around the room with interest, and I felt a geyser of protectiveness surge up inside me until I realized that she was just trying to remember what the room had looked like when it had belonged to her. “What’s up? I didn’t hear the garage door.”

  “I was tired, so Mom dropped me off and went back out, to the grocery store, I think.”

  I nodded, waiting for her to elaborate, but she just stood there, running her eyes over every inch of the place. “So … how can I help you?”

  “Oh, right. I wanted to see if you were interested in taking a walk,” she said.

  “I thought you were tired,” I said.

  “Of shopping,” Hannah told me with a sheepish smile.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I’m kind of busy.”

  “Busy doing laps around your bed?”

  “Busy trying to decide whether or not to break up with my boyfriend before he breaks up with me,” I said, chewing on my thumbnail. I shouldn’t have told her that. It was too personal, and it wasn’t like she was going to have any useful advice for me on the subject.

  “Oh.” She looked embarrassed, like she’d trespassed on me in some way. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Thanks,” I said. She closed the door, and as I heard the click of the latch, I thought maybe I should call her back. But then what? I wasn’t going to get her involved just because I felt guilty about not needing her around.

  But I couldn’t keep my thoughts to myself, so I called Reb. The first thing I did was sell Erin out.

  “Erin’s out on a date with Joe Price,” I told her.

  “That’s kind of skanky, don’t you think?” Reb asked.

  “Totally,” I agreed. “What does she think she’s doing? Jessica’s going to run her up the flagpole if she starts dating him. And what was all that crap with Peter on Friday night, if she’s going to hook up with Joe?”

  “Maybe she’s keeping her options open. It’s not unheard of,” Reb pointed out.

  “How can she like two guys at the same time? I can barely keep my head on straight with one.”

  “Derek issues?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “The tone of your voice. You sound a little bothered.” She paused. “Also, common sense.”

  “Derek hasn’t called since he got home from camp. He texted me yesterday when I was getting—when I was with my family, saying he’d call me later that night, but he didn’t. I called him today, but no answer. Do you think he’s trying to avoid me or something?”

  Reb hesitated. I reminded myself that it didn’t necessarily mean anything, that she always took her time before answering the hard ones.

  “Reb?”

  “I’m thinking. Did you talk to Erin about this?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “To break up with him before he breaks up with me.”

  “Flawless.” I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. She and Erin didn’t always see eye to eye on things like this. And by “didn’t always see eye to eye,” I meant never did.

  “So you think that’s what I should do? You think he’s going to end our relationship?” Say no, I thought, but only because I belie
ved she would say yes.

  “I have no idea,” Reb said. “It’s hard to say. But not calling after you guys have been separated for most of the summer isn’t a good sign.”

  “Ugh, why won’t anyone just say what they think?” I cried, knocking my head softly against the wall.

  “Okay, you want to hear what I think?”

  “Yes!”

  “He’s probably going to dump you.”

  “What? Seriously?” I wanted to throw up.

  “Yes. Derek is a cool guy, but he’s not the relationship type. He likes girls in general, but I don’t think he wants to be with one girl specifically. Even if that one girl is as awesome as you are, Caro,” she added, because she’s a good friend like that.

  Even though I hated what Reb was saying, I couldn’t disagree with it. Derek had always seemed out of my league, not because he was smarter or better-looking or more popular than I was, but just because he never seemed to need anyone. He held everybody at arm’s length; he was friends with a lot of people, but best friends with nobody; he liked a lot of girls, but he didn’t love any of them. When he started to pay special attention to me, at first I couldn’t trust or believe it, but when he finally won me over, I thought I’d changed him, or his feelings for me had. Maybe he’d thought that, too, for a hot second, but it was becoming very clear to me that we were both wrong.

  I sank onto my desk chair and put a hand to my forehead. “So how do I do this?”

  “Break up with him?”

  “Yeah. I’ve never done it before. Obviously.”

  “You sure you want to do that? I mean, without talking to him first?”

  “If I talk to him first, he’ll beat me to the punch,” I said. “Erin’s right, getting dumped is completely humiliating. I won’t be able to show my face at school tomorrow if that happens. I have to do it, and I have to do it tonight.”

  “Okay,” Reb said. “Let’s come up with a plan.”