The Opposite of Hallelujah

by Anna Jarzab

  “It’s too late to go to the vending machine now,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” Erin said.

  “Hey, French Girl!” Erin and I both turned, not really because we thought we were being called, but because it was a bizarre way to address someone. Plus, the person said it pretty loud, startling us.

  As Pawel approached, it was clear he’d been talking to me. “Hey, wait up,” he said.

  “Did you just call me French Girl?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he admitted, looking sheepish. “I forgot your name. I have a terrible memory.”

  “That’s okay, we’ve been calling you New Boy,” Erin told him, smiling flirtatiously. The girl was incorrigible.

  “She’s been calling you that,” I said. “My name is Caro.”

  “That’s right!” He snapped his fingers. “I knew it was something weird.”

  “Says the guy named Paulo,” Erin said, rolling her eyes.

  “Pawel,” Pawel and I said. We looked at each other and he laughed. “Jinx,” he said.

  “Whatever. You two go ahead and talk amongst yourselves. I refuse to be late to physics.” Erin patted my shoulder and took off.

  “Erin,” I said, gesturing at my retreating friend.

  “I’ll probably forget that,” Pawel told me.

  “Okay, so what’s up? I have to get to physics, too,” I said, gazing after Erin forlornly.

  “Building 2, room 307?” Pawel asked.

  “Um, yeah?” I briefly considered the possibility that Pawel might be a crazy stalker.

  “Me too.” He breathed a sigh of relief. “I have no idea how to get there, and I thought maybe you’d be going in the same direction. Well, I hoped you were. Can I walk with you?”

  “Well, it would be awkward for you to just follow me there,” I said, smiling. “So yeah.”

  “Thanks. So what’s your real name?”

  “Carolina,” I told him, picking up the pace. We would probably be late enough as it was, and I knew our physics class would be organized in lab groups of four per table. I expected Erin to save me a seat, but it might not be possible. She was quite popular in science classes and well known in the geek world for being a great partner, because she understood everything and would take the lion’s share of the work.

  “I have a cousin named Carolina,” he told me. “We call her Karolcia.” He pronounced it Ka-ROL-cha.

  “That’s way prettier than Caro,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “They both have their charms.”

  “Karolcia,” I repeated. “So you’re, like, really Polish, huh?”

  He laughed loudly. “As opposed to fake Polish?”

  “As opposed to kind of Polish, the way I’m kind of Irish,” I said.

  “My parents are from Poland,” he said. “If that’s what you mean.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I would call ‘really’ Polish. Do you speak Polish?”

  “Yeah. I had to do years and years of Polish school as a kid.”

  “You speak Polish and French?”

  “Well, I mean, once you know one language, it’s easier to pick up another one,” Pawel said. “And French is a breeze compared to Polish.”

  “Easy A, then, I guess.”

  “Yeah, pretty much.” He ran his fingers through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Stairs,” I said, opening a door to my right that led to a staircase. It was almost empty now, which meant the bell would ring any second, which it did. “Damn.”

  “You care about being late?” Pawel asked, sounding surprised. He had this lazy, casual way about him that suggested he didn’t take boundaries like schedules and school bells all that seriously.

  “A little.” I cared a lot, actually, but I knew he’d probably think I was a huge tool if I said so. “The likelihood of getting to be in Erin’s lab group is slim to none now.”

  “So you’re one of those girls who has to be with her friends, like, every second, huh?” He gave me a curious expression, like he was trying to figure me out.

  “No,” I insisted. “Erin’s just really good at science. Everybody wants to be in her lab group.” I was also good at science, so it wasn’t like I was going to fail without Erin, but I didn’t want to get stuck with a bunch of slackers who would heap all the work on my shoulders.

  “Sorry,” he said, grinning. “I guess you’ll just have to struggle through on your own.”

  “Thanks for that.” I stopped in front of room 307. “This is us.”

  Pawel opened the door for me. “After you,” he said gallantly. I shook my head at him and walked into the classroom, where Mr. Tripp was already going over the syllabus.

  “Glad you could join us,” Mr. Tripp said sarcastically. “What are your names?”

  We told him and Mr. Tripp pointed right in front of him to lab tables one and two, each with one empty seat. Erin was at table number three, on the other side of the room. She gave me a sad face as I trudged to table one and dropped my bag onto the floor. Unfazed, Pawel did the same at table two. He was sitting right behind me again, but this time his back was to me.

  Mr. Tripp handed us each a syllabus and then resumed going over it line by line, pacing the room as he read. When he had passed us by, Pawel leaned back and whispered, “This is going to be the best! Class! Ever!”

  I laughed softly. “You know it.”

  “That is the most humorless man I have ever met,” Pawel said.

  “Just wait until precalculus,” I said. “You do have that, right?”

  “Yup. Pure unadulterated fun.”

  7

  Pawel was hard not to like, and it didn’t escape my notice that I wasn’t the only person paying attention to him. We didn’t have all our classes together. He wasn’t on the AP track for English—“Reading is for readers,” he said, only half kidding—and even though he’d tried to get into the film appreciation class when he’d enrolled, it was a popular elective with a waiting list.

  “I can’t believe you’re taking that class,” he said miserably as we gathered up our books after physics. “Lucky. This is the part of being a transfer that sucks.”

  “Is there a part of being a transfer that doesn’t suck?” I asked. We left the classroom and descended the stairs, emerging into a long hallway that connected the two main buildings.

  “New friends,” he said after a long pause, catching my eye before turning his head toward a large student painting that had been hung on the wall. “Damn, that’s ugly.”

  We stopped and stared at it. It was pretty hideous. At first, it looked like the artist had just painted the whole canvas navy, then dumped globs of different paint on it. The globs were horrible colors, like puke green and salmon and urine yellow. After looking at it for a few seconds, I could see that there was a three-dimensional aspect to it; the artist had taken what looked like pieces of trash (candy wrappers, bottle tops, packs of cigarettes) and glued them onto the canvas, then covered them with the paint. I looked at the little plaque near the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas. It said the name of the artist, and then the name of the piece: Waste.

  “Wow,” Pawel said in mock awe. He shook his head and scoffed: “Art.”

  I laughed. I didn’t have much of an eye for art, either. The creator of Waste could’ve been the next Picasso and I wouldn’t have known it. The only art I’d ever really responded to was the work of M. C. Escher, a Dutch graphic artist from the early twentieth century who was famous for his woodcuts and lithographs. Dad loved Escher, and we’d had several prints of his hanging in our house for as long as I could remember. I think I responded to them because they were inspired by mathematics and featured geometrical paradoxes, exploring and showcasing the beauty of the impossible world. Art I didn’t get, but math—math I got.

  He pulled me backward to look at it from a greater distance. “Does it have wings?”

  I squinted. There was a darker part of the canvas that had the vague outline of a person, and t
he trash seemed to fan out from it to form large wings, like those of an eagle. “Yeah,” I said. “I think it does.”

  “What are you looking at?” The voice belonged to Derek, and it was coming from behind me. I turned slowly, appreciating the paralyzing irony that he would show up when I was less interested in seeing him than I had ever been—and talking to another guy, to boot.

  Pawel jerked his thumb toward Waste. “This monstrosity,” he said, offering his hand for Derek to shake. “Pawel.”

  “Derek,” my ex said. “You new?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool.” Derek turned to me. Pawel shifted awkwardly; he seemed to sense that he had been dismissed, but wasn’t quite willing to leave. “How’re you doing, Caro?”

  “Fine,” I said coolly. It was just like Derek to think that we could be buddies so soon. I could feel my cheeks growing hot from embarrassment. I didn’t particularly want to see him at the moment. I wished he would just go away.

  “Hey, Pawel, do you mind if Caro and I have a sec?” Derek asked.

  I opened my mouth to protest but before I could get a word out, Pawel shrugged and said, “Sure. See you … later, Caro.”

  I gave him a little wave. “See you.” When he was out of earshot, I demanded, “What’s up, Derek?” The annoyance in my tone was unmistakable, but he didn’t seem to get the hint. Typical. It was amazing how differently you saw some people once the fog of flattery and attention had burned away.

  “I just wanted to see how you were,” he said. “You were pretty upset yesterday.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Really? You seemed pissed.”

  “I was pissed.”

  “That was what was confusing,” Derek said. “I thought you might be sad or something, but you were just really angry. Not that I wouldn’t be angry if the situation was reversed, but still, it seemed like a weird reaction. Seriously. I was worried.”

  I drew in a deep breath. Derek didn’t know when to quit sometimes. I highly doubted he had spent even a millisecond of his precious time worrying about me, but he needed an excuse to bring it all up again. Just because he didn’t want to reel me in didn’t mean he didn’t want me on the hook.

  “Forget it,” I told him. “Things didn’t go as I planned and I’ve been under a lot of stress and I just … lost it. I’ll be fine. I am fine.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.” Derek nodded in the direction Pawel took off in.

  “Pawel’s a cool guy,” I said, hoping that my saying so didn’t make me sound too defensive. I mean, what did I care what Derek thought?

  “Where’s he from?” Derek asked.

  “Don’t know. I only met him this morning,” I said. “If you’re so curious, why don’t you ask him?”

  “Maybe I will,” he said.

  “You do that,” I told him. Why did he care so much about Pawel, anyway? Unless he was jealous. Served him right. “Okay, must get to class.”

  “Yeah, me too. Later.”

  “Bye.”

  He walked off. I stared after him. I felt weirdly out of step. Things were changing fast. Derek had been my boyfriend, and now he wasn’t. Hannah had been a nun, and now she wasn’t. I didn’t know how to act normally around either of them. I liked things clearly defined; it was how I made sense of the world. People were either this thing or that thing. Gray areas made me nervous; ambiguity was to be avoided at all costs. That was why I liked science and math. Two plus two always equals four, always, and you don’t have to explain why; that’s just the way it is. There are rules, constants. The speed of light is 186,282 miles per second, no matter what. Rules and constants comforted me; even variables had a feeling of stability to them, because they were always part of an equation that you could solve. But what if it was all variables? What if you never knew what was coming next? What if you couldn’t predict which things would change and which things would stay the same? What if there was nothing you could really count on, not even yourself?

  As soon as I got home that afternoon, I went straight to my room. My phone rang immediately. “Hey, Reb,” I said, propping the phone against my ear with my shoulder and rummaging through my bag for my physics book. “What’s up?”

  “I heard two interesting pieces of gossip,” Reb began. “First, you and Derek are friends again. That was quick.”

  “Who’d you hear that from?” I asked.

  “Eesha saw you guys talking in the corridor between periods,” Reb said. “But she insisted that it didn’t look romantic.”

  “It wasn’t,” I told her. “And we’re not friends again.”

  “Good. You need a break from him. I cannot take any pining.”

  What happened to all the sympathy I’d gotten the day before? As this situation had reminded me, things changed awful quickly in high school. “Um, okay. What’s the second piece of gossip?”

  “New Boy. Erin told me you’re in love.”

  I sighed. “I’m not in love with Pawel.”

  “So he has a name,” Reb said. Clearly she hadn’t been paying attention in French class. “What else?”

  “That’s it. His name is Pawel Sobczak and he’s a transfer.”

  “From where?”

  “No idea.”

  “Well, whatever, you’ll find out tomorrow. What’s he like?”

  “Very cute,” I said, brightening. “Funny. Nice. Smart, but not too smart. Not one of those guys who thinks he’s smarter than you and lets you know it.”

  “Is he smarter than you?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Boy, do you have a type,” Reb said.

  There was a knock at my door. I practically jumped out of my seat; I wasn’t used to having someone else home on weekday afternoons and had forgotten that Hannah was probably around somewhere. “Who is it?” I called, just to be sure.

  “Hannah.”

  “Reb, I gotta go,” I said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Pick you up in the morning?” she asked.

  “You bet. Seven-forty-five sharp.”

  “Or I leave without you.”

  I hung up. “Come in.”

  Hannah walked into the room and stood at the foot of my bed. She looked gaunt and tired, and her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. It struck me again how skinny she was. There were circles, dark as bruises, under her eyes, and her clothes, baggy and wrinkled, hung on her body like curtains. Whatever perkiness she’d had that morning had vanished, like she was too tired to fake it anymore that day. The spell had certainly worn off.

  “Did you just wake up?” I asked, and she nodded. “What do you need?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She pulled her hands, with their long, thin pianist’s fingers and pale skin stretched over knobby knuckles, up into the sleeves of her T-shirt, rubbing her fists together through the fabric.

  “I have homework,” I told her.

  “Yeah. Okay.” She paused in the doorway on her way out. “Do you want to watch a movie or something later?”

  “A lot of homework,” I non-answered.

  “Okay.” Hannah ventured a smile. “How was school?”

  “Fine.” I was already bent over my physics book, running my eyes over the same sentence again and again. I wasn’t really planning to start my homework for at least another hour, but I hoped that my looking busy would discourage her from sticking around.

  “Anything interesting happen?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “I was walking to the laundry room and I overheard you say something about a boy?” she pressed. “Something about being in love?”

  “You were eavesdropping?” I snapped. All I needed was for her to go tell my parents I was in love, especially since it wasn’t even true.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I just thought … we had a nice talk yesterday.”

  “I really have to get started on this science homework,” I said. I knew it was mean, but she made me feel uncomfortable, standing there expec
tantly but not really communicating what she wanted. One friendly conversation didn’t make a relationship, and I still didn’t know how to navigate ours, whatever it was.

  “All right. I guess I’ll see you later.”

  “Later,” I said, turning back to the text and my empty notebook. “Can you close the door behind you?”

  As soon as I heard it shut, I rolled away from my desk, propped my feet up on the bed, and opened my laptop.

  Let’s face it: everybody cyberstalks. It’s a fact of teenage life in this century, and I’m okay with that. It was like a tacit agreement among us: everybody liked to know other people’s business, so we put up profiles and we took the opportunity to spy on each other from the comfort of our own bedrooms.

  Pawel Sobczak didn’t appear to have gotten that memo. After diligent searching on several social networking sites, not to mention Google, all I was able to pull up was a water polo record from his old high school, which turned out not to be very far away. No profiles, no website, not even an old email address. Was he from the Dark Ages? I called Reb.

  “No profile, huh?” she said, crunching on something. “Interesting.”

  “Creepy,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. Maybe he’s just a private person.”

  “Nobody is private these days,” I pointed out.

  Reb laughed. “Says the Facebook addict.”

  I could think of one other person who didn’t have a profile—my sister. If that was privacy, well, then I wanted nothing to do with it.

  “Who cares if he has a profile?” Reb asked. “I thought you weren’t in love with him.”

  “It’s not love,” I insisted. “It’s just a little harmless curiosity. Besides, you were the one asking all the questions about him,” I reminded her defensively.

  “Oh, Caro.” Reb chuckled. I could see her shaking her head on the other end of the line. “You’re never more transparent than when you like a boy.”

  “Um … thanks?” I glanced at the clock on my nightstand. “I’ve got to go. I have tons of homework.”

  “See you tomorrow, loser.”

  8