The Opposite of Hallelujah

by Anna Jarzab

  “He did?” she said flatly.

  “He says it’s normal.”

  “Who’s Father Bob?” Hannah asked.

  “Just this priest my parents—Mom and Dad—made me go to a while back,” I said.

  “For what, an exorcism?” She smiled at her own joke.

  “Um, not really. Sort of. Symbolically, I guess.”

  “Do you want to sit down, Linda Blair?” she asked, patting the comforter.

  “Sure. Your pop culture references are a little dated, you know.” I sat on the edge of the bed, twisting my hands in my lap. Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced at Hannah. The warm yellow light of the table lamp picked up the gold highlights in her hair and cast shadows that fell softly on her face. When I’d seen her at the train station, I’d thought my memory had been overly kind to Hannah’s looks, or maybe it was just that life and age had eroded some of them. She had looked gaunt and drawn, tired and pale and fragile, like a porcelain doll that had been badly propped in its stand. But now I could see that she was just as beautiful as she had always been. I was struck by a sudden envy: why couldn’t I look like that? I was plain and unremarkable-looking, loud and unrefined. I was a bull in a china shop, and she was the china.

  “Tell me about your symbolic exorcism,” she said, giving me a curious look. I felt my face grow hot.

  “Okay, well, ‘exorcism’ is a strong word. Mom and Dad just thought I wasn’t adjusting properly to you being gone,” I said. “Wasn’t adjusting properly” was a pretty vague euphemism for “told everyone you were dead,” but it seemed stupid, when we were talking so nicely, to ruin it with details.

  Hannah looked away guiltily.

  “Don’t worry about it, I was fine,” I rushed to assure her. “Anyway, they made me talk to Father Bob—you really never met him?”

  Hannah shook her head. “We don’t all know each other.”

  “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Well, he’s the pastor of St. Robert’s now.”

  “So what did you and Father Bob talk about?” Hannah asked.

  “Just, you know, God. And you. He used the word ‘vocation’ a lot.”

  “That sounds about right.” She gave me a tight smile. Did she resent being talked about like that, like her life choice constituted a tragic event I had to be coached through? If she did, she didn’t say it.

  I cleared my throat, suddenly uncomfortable and eager to bring the conversation to a close. “My point was: faith and doubt. One can’t exist without the other.”

  “That’s a good observation,” Hannah agreed, although she didn’t seem particularly impressed by it. She’d probably heard it all before.

  “Well, remember, it wasn’t mine. It was Father Bob’s.” I glanced at the clock. It was almost midnight. “I’ve got to go to bed. School tomorrow, first day.”

  “That’s exciting,” Hannah said brightly.

  “Not really,” I said, getting up from the bed. “Thanks for accepting my apology.”

  “Thanks for apologizing,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  6

  By the time I made it to the kitchen the next morning, in my pajamas, Hannah was already there, dressed, making breakfast and brewing coffee. She looked tired, but there she was, at seven a.m., puttering around like the day had already begun. I was still holding out hope that I was dreaming, that I would wake up in my bed with three or four hours left to sleep. But no—it was the first day of my junior year, and Reb was going to pick me up in forty-five minutes.

  “Good morning,” Hannah said.

  “Is it?” I grumbled. I didn’t know how she could bear to be up at that hour, especially since I knew she hadn’t gone to sleep until late the night before. I had dozed off at almost two a.m. to the sound of her slight weight pressing against my ceiling.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Are you allowed to drink coffee?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t like it.”

  “Oh, okay. Do you want some tea?” I shook my head. “What about food? Are you hungry? I can make you some eggs or pancakes or whatever you want. I’m well versed in breakfast foods.” I noticed that she wasn’t eating, just carefully nursing a glass of water. There was a bowl of grapes on the counter, but she didn’t touch them. I wondered if she was fasting. Father Bob said that was one of the ways nuns prepared themselves spiritually for prayer. But that was silly: she wasn’t a nun anymore, after all.

  “No, thanks. I don’t eat in the morning, usually. Not on school days—no time.”

  “Then what did you come in here for?”

  “Something to drink.” I took a carton of orange juice out of the fridge and poured myself a glass. “I’ll just bring a granola bar with me,” I said. I narrowed my eyes at her. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  “Oh,” she said cagily. “I already had something.”

  “How long have you been up?”

  “Since five,” she said, as if that was completely normal.

  “You didn’t even go to bed until two! That’s craziness.”

  “It’s a force of habit,” Hannah said with a sigh. “You should go get ready. Do you want me to pack you a lunch?”

  I should’ve known the previous night’s heart-to-heart with Hannah was a bad idea. Now she thought we were buddies—or worse, she thought she was my mom. Lecturing me about eating breakfast? Offering to pack my lunch? Nobody had treated me like that since the fifth grade, and even then I’d resented it. What did she think I was, some kind of baby? When she was my age, she was reading advanced religious tomes and secretly plotting her escape to a nunnery. It doesn’t get much more grown up than that.

  Just then, Dad trotted in, yawning and running his fingers through his hair. “G’morning, girls,” he said.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, draining my juice glass and beating a quick exit. He called after me and I slowly retraced my steps—backward—to the kitchen.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “How are you getting to school?”

  “Reb’s picking me up.”

  “Oh, good. Okay, well, I can drive Mom to work and leave you her car, Hannie, just in case you want to go somewhere today,” he said.

  “That’s okay, Dad, really,” Hannah said, squirming a little.

  “No, it’s not any trouble. I’m sure we’ll be doing it a lot for this one”—he jerked his thumb at me and smiled—“now that the state of Illinois has deemed her worthy to drive.”

  “Fools,” I said, and he laughed. Dad joked, but you could tell he was proud of me for getting my license, especially after the countless hours he’d spent at his own risk trying to teach me to drive. At the time, Mom said he was more excited than when I took my first steps as a baby.

  “No, I don’t need the car.”

  “Are you sure? Because it’s fine with me—” he pressed.

  “Dad!” she shouted, throwing the dish towel she’d been holding down onto the counter. I started like a skittish kitten. It was the first time I’d seen Hannah even raise her voice. “I said I don’t need the car, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, chastised. Hannah stalked out of the room, still steaming. Dad turned to me with sad eyes and asked, “What did I do?”

  “She can’t drive,” I pointed out. I couldn’t believe I’d figured out what was bothering Hannah and he hadn’t.

  “Sure she can, I taught her myself,” Dad said.

  “Her license is definitely expired, and when do you think she last drove a car?” I said. “Eight years ago?”

  “Oh.” Then, in typical Dad fashion, he rallied. “Well, she’ll just have to relearn. That won’t be hard—when she was your age, Hannah caught on really quickly, and this time it should be even easier for her.”

  That didn’t seem like the only problem, judging from Hannah’s reaction. “Maybe she’s afraid,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Dad said, but he didn’t look convinced. “And if she is, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But you need to get ready for school.
When’s Reb coming?”

  I glanced at the clock on the microwave. Shit. I had no idea it was that late already. “In fifteen minutes,” I said, switching into panic mode.

  “You’d better change, then,” Dad said, settling down at the kitchen table with a cup of Hannah’s coffee and the paper. “Unless you want to go to school in pants with sheep on them.”

  All my friends, especially Reb, really bought into the first-day-of-school-outfit ritual. They shopped all summer for the perfect clothes, as if there was something about the first day of a new year that made you more visible than usual. I, however, didn’t care that much, which was good, because that morning I didn’t have time to care. I took my patented five-minute superfast shower, blow-dried the roots of my hair and left the rest to air-dry, wriggled into a pair of old jeans, and pulled on a T-shirt I’d ordered off the Internet that said FIJI IS FOR MERMAIDS.

  Aside from the first-day-of-school thing, a lot of girls in my position would’ve dressed up to the nines in the hopes that their ex-boyfriends might see them and instantly regret their hasty decisions to break up, but that wasn’t my style. First of all, I was so angry with Derek I didn’t want to get back together with him; I just wanted him to drop off the face of the earth so that I could forget he ever existed. Second of all, I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of thinking I tried to make myself look extra beautiful just for his benefit. Third of all, I’d briefly considered it, but I knew it wouldn’t work.

  I did put on some makeup, though. There wasn’t any reason to show up looking like I’d just emerged from a coffin. I did have a little bit of vanity.

  Just as I was leaving my bedroom, I heard Reb honk from the end of the driveway. As I bounded out the front door and down the driveway, she started to pull away.

  “Hey!” I cried out. “I’m on time!”

  She stopped and I got in on the passenger side. Reb looked at me and grinned. “Just checking to see if you were paying attention.”

  “What happened?” Erin asked, pouncing on me at my locker.

  “It’s over, can we please not talk about the ‘why’ part and focus instead on the ‘what now’ part?” I pleaded. “Like, what do I do now to ensure that people aren’t laughing at me behind my back for all eternity?”

  “Hell if I know. This all could’ve been avoided if you’d just broken up with him first, like I told you to.” Erin shook her head. “Why didn’t you call me back last night?”

  “To avoid this exact conversation,” I said.

  “Ease up, Erin,” Reb said. “I know this is hard to understand, but this situation isn’t actually about you.”

  “Oh shut up,” Erin said, but lightly. The three of us were constantly sniping at each other, but always out of love. Well, almost always out of love.

  “Let’s get to class, the bell’s going to ring in about five seconds,” I said. We had our first class, Advanced French IV, together. It was the only high-level course Reb was enrolled in, but Erin and I were both AP-track students, so we had most of our classes together. Reb kicked our asses in French, though.

  We had the same French teacher as the past year, so we generally knew what to expect, but Madame Hubert was in an especially foul mood that morning. None of us was really thrilled about having to sit in a stuffy classroom speaking another language at eight in the morning, but she was pretty fired up about something. She snapped at Reb, Erin, and me for being late, even though the bell didn’t ring until after we’d dropped into our seats, and almost broke the projector screen by pulling on it too hard. I heard someone whispering in the back that Madame and her husband were getting a divorce, but I had no idea how they could have known that. Whatever it was, Madame was totally losing it, and I texted as much to Reb, who looked at me from the other side of the room and nodded.

  About halfway through class, as Madame was lecturing us in rapid French about the Impressionist movement (Advanced French IV had a serious French culture component) and clicking through slides so quickly it was hard to know which one she was talking about, the door swung open and a new boy strode in.

  New Boy was average height, well muscled but not too thick, with dark blond hair that he wore longish, but not rock-star long—more like teen-heartthrob long. The room was dark, so I couldn’t make out much more than that. He paused at the door and glanced around for a second, finally locating Madame at the back of the class, still clicking furiously through slides. I rubbed my eyes and yawned.

  New Boy walked up to Madame and handed her his tardy slip, which she took with a tortured sigh. “Pah-well Sob—”

  “Pavel,” he said. “The ‘w’ makes a ‘v’ sound.”

  “Sorry,” Madame said in French. If there was anything she understood, it was the importance of proper pronunciation. “And how do you say your last name?”

  “Sob-chak,” he said. “S-o-b-c-z-a-k.”

  “Sob-chak,” she repeated. “Okay, Pawel. Take an empty seat.”

  He gave her a small two-finger salute and dropped into the chair right behind me. I turned back to the slides as Madame prattled on about Monet. A minute later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and saw Pawel twirling a pencil between his fingers.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “What the hell is going on right now?” he asked, gesturing with his pencil toward the screen.

  “Madame is lecturing about Impressionism,” I said. This didn’t spark any recognition in his eyes, so I explained further. “For our cultural component.”

  “Uh, what?”

  “Don’t you speak French?” He at least knew enough to understand what Madame had been saying to him earlier.

  “Well, yeah, but what’s a cultural component?” he asked.

  I shook my head at his ignorance. “In Advanced French IV, we’re not just supposed to learn the French language anymore. Madame is going to teach us other things, but in French. And we’re going to have to write papers.”

  “About what?” He looked perturbed by this information.

  “French literature, French art, French history,” I said. “Didn’t they tell you that when you signed up to take the class?”

  “No,” he said. “They didn’t tell me anything, they just plugged all the classes I’ve already taken into the computer and it spat out this schedule.” He handed me a folded piece of paper.

  I looked over his schedule. “You’re on the AP track,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Super.”

  I gave the paper back. “Well, why don’t you just go get it changed?”

  “I probably will,” he said, his eyes drifting toward the screen at the front of the room, where Madame had just put up a picture of Monet’s The Cliffs at Etrétat.

  I nodded, then directed my attention once again to Madame’s lecture. A couple of minutes later, I felt another tap on my shoulder.

  “What?” I asked with a little glare.

  “My name is Pawel,” he said, extending a hand for me to shake.

  I took it and smiled, feeling a little guilty for snapping at him. “Caro,” I said.

  “Cool.” He dropped my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “You know, flirting with New Boy only works if your ex is actually there to witness it,” Erin said as we walked toward physics class, post-lunch.

  “Erin, keep your voice down,” I hissed. “I wasn’t flirting with him. He just asked me why Madame was spitting about Impressionism, and I told him.”

  “He shook your hand,” Erin pointed out.

  “Yeah, and it was totally hot,” I said sarcastically.

  “You don’t have to get defensive,” Erin said. “It’s a good strategy. I’m just pointing out that in order for it to be effective, Derek’s going to have to see you flirting with New Boy.”

  “Okay, again, I wasn’t flirting, and also, his name is not New Boy,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s weird and foreign and instead of saying it wrong, I think I’ll just call him New Boy
,” Erin said. “He is new, right?” Even Erin, who was highly social, didn’t know everyone at our school, which was huge, the size of a small university.

  “I think so,” I said. “He’s on the AP track.”

  “Hmm, interesting.”

  “For now. I think he might try to have some of his classes changed. He didn’t seem thrilled about French IV’s culture component.”

  “Wuss,” Erin said. “Well, whatever. And you were flirting—I saw that smile.”

  “He’s cute,” I said. “And I think his eyes are green, which is rare.” I knew they were green; I noticed it right away. How could I not, with his face inches from mine?

  “He is cute,” Erin agreed. “Funny name, though.”

  “I think it’s Polish,” I said.

  “Maybe I’ll just call him Polish Boy instead,” Erin said. “So where were you this weekend? I didn’t see you at all.”

  “You saw me Friday,” I pointed out.

  “Well, yeah, but not after that.”

  “I told you, I had a family thing.”

  “Oh, yeah. How’d that go?”

  “Fine, I guess.”

  “What was the nature of this ‘thing’?” Erin was such a busybody, always in everybody’s lives, sniffing out rumors and gossip like a truffle pig.

  “No big deal. We just went into the city for a while.”

  Erin narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “Why?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it right now, all right?” I rubbed my forehead. “I’ve got a headache.”

  “Want some aspirin?” Erin asked, riffling through her purse. She always carried a bottle of aspirin, because she got headaches a lot. Reb said it was all that gossip putting pressure on her brain.

  “No, thanks, it’ll go away on its own,” I said.

  “Caffeine,” Erin prescribed. “You need caffeine.”