The Opposite of Hallelujah

by Anna Jarzab

  She smiled. “Thanks.”

  A week later, Pawel and I sat across a table from each other in the physics lab with the flask between us. Mr. Tripp was in his adjoining office with the blinds half closed.

  “Okay,” Pawel said, staring at the flask. “Now what?”

  “I showed Mr. Tripp a list of the equipment we’re going to need,” I told him. “He promised he’d help us get our hands on it. He says he has a friend at the physics department at Northwestern who might rent some of it out to us.”

  “So we just wait?” Pawel asked.

  “No,” I said. “I thought we could go over methodology. I made this for you.” I pulled a small stack of papers out of my bag and handed it to him.

  He took a minute to look it over. “This seems really complicated. Are you sure we can pull this off?”

  I nodded. “I’ve gone over everything about a thousand times. Although I fully acknowledge it might not go exactly as planned.”

  “You mean we might fail?”

  “What would you rather do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Pawel said. He paused for a moment, as if he had something more to say. Then he said it. “Actually, I was thinking maybe we could create a Rube Goldberg machine.”

  “What’s a Rube Goldberg machine?”

  “You know, like a contraption that does something simple in a really convoluted way,” Pawel said. “I’ve been sort of obsessed with them since I was a kid. I used to make them out of K’nex.”

  “If you wanted to do a different project, you should’ve said something when we had to turn in a proposal,” I said. Amazing. I’d done all kinds of research on single-bubble sonoluminescence, purchased the flask, and requested the materials from Mr. Tripp, some of which were going to be difficult and expensive to lay our hands on, and now he was telling me he wanted to submit a useless invention made out of a children’s toy. “Unbelievable.”

  “Jesus, Caro,” Pawel said, kneading his forehead. “I know you’re not thrilled to be working with me, but you could at least pretend to listen to my ideas.”

  “I’m listening. I’m just telling you that the deadline for turning in our proposal has passed and we can’t change our project now,” I said. “I don’t know what you want me to do about that.”

  “You know what? You’re totally right. I should’ve said something earlier.” He leaned away from the table and folded his arms across his chest. “Why don’t you just tell me what you want my help with? I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”

  “Well, how about, since I’m already familiar with the procedure, you be in charge of recording our observations?” I proposed. “Then we can do the write-up and presentation together.”

  “Okay, that sounds good,” Pawel said, running his fingers through his hair. I loved it when he did that. It made him look sweet and pensive. I blinked a few times to clear my head and when I looked up, Pawel was staring at me.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I just had something in my eye,” I lied. “It’s gone now.”

  “So … are we done for today?” He didn’t wait for me to answer; he just started packing up his books.

  “Sure,” I said.

  He gave me a tight smile as he slid off his stool and onto his feet. “See you later,” he said, walking to the door.

  “Hey, Pawel?” I called out. He turned, and I bit my lip, unsure now about saying what I’d been planning to say.

  “Yeah?” His eyes searched for mine, but I kept them trained on a large crack in the linoleum.

  “I don’t not want to work with you,” I said. “I just thought it was going to be weird and I didn’t want you to think—”

  “I don’t,” he said. I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the smile in his voice. “We’re friends, right?”

  “Right,” I said, letting my breath out slowly and trying desperately to fight the floaty feeling. The last thing I needed was to blurt out the truth about the friend thing—that it wasn’t what I wanted, that I wanted much more.

  “Then it’s kosher,” he said. “Have a good night.”

  “You too,” I managed to say, hoping he didn’t hear the crack in my voice as he left the room.

  When he was gone, I knocked on Mr. Tripp’s window and waved. He waved back and gave me a thumbs-up, which, dorky as it was for a teacher to give his student a thumbs-up, made me feel a little better.

  I decided to walk home. It wasn’t dark yet, and though it was November, we hadn’t had our first snow, so the air was brisk and sharp and clean-smelling. It felt good in my lungs. I bundled up in my puffy coat and wrapped my scarf around my neck to keep the chill out. I turned on my iPod, blasted my favorite sad, sweet song from a folk pop artist I liked, and trudged home, feeling sorry for myself, but not as much as before. Things were not great, but they definitely could’ve been worse.

  19

  I almost forgot about Hannah’s doctor’s appointment. My science fair project, which had started out as just one more annoying class assignment, was occupying most of my thoughts and nearly all my time. Mr. Tripp and Pawel were right to doubt our ability to successfully complete it. Single-bubble sonoluminescence was way above our skill level. But when Mr. Tripp offered us the opportunity to back out, to choose something easier, and once again Pawel suggested the Rube Goldberg machine, I got this sudden feeling that if I didn’t go through with it, then that would say something about me. I wanted nothing to do with some high school–level project. I needed to do something bold and risky and inventive. I wanted to prove that I was capable. And I didn’t care if I failed.

  Mom reminded me of the appointment as I ran out the door to catch the Reb bus to school. “The nutritionist, Caro,” she said, waving a piece of toast at me haphazardly. Hannah was upstairs, still asleep probably. She had agreed to this “health assessment,” as they called it, but she hadn’t given up her strange habits, and she wasn’t eating any better.

  Clearly, she was unhappy about the appointment. She and Mom picked me up after school and Hannah was silent the whole way to the doctor’s office. The nutritionist’s office was three towns away, and traffic was making us late. The air in the car was clotted with tension; Mom drummed anxiously on the steering wheel and Hannah bit her fingernails, lost in thought. It was as though we were all being ferried by some intangible force of the universe toward an unknowable doom, and even though I knew this was for Hannah’s own good, a part of me wished desperately that we could turn back, go home, and bury our heads in the sand the way we had been doing, because it was safer there, where the shadows of oblivion hid the darker truths well.

  The atmosphere in the waiting room was no better. Most of the other patients were normal-looking, all women, and I wondered how many had once been where Hannah was now, and how many had come from the opposite direction, who were there to get skinnier.

  There was one girl, though, younger than Hannah but older than me, who stood out. She sat in a corner with one leg pulled up, her chin resting on her knee. She surveyed the rest of us coolly and dispassionately, as if we were specimens in some human zoo and she was an alien observer. Her hair was pulled up in a messy ponytail high on her head, and her clothes, a simple ensemble of rumpled T-shirt and jeans, hung off her body in a grotesque way, improbably thin arms and legs jutting out from nowhere, like she was made of matchsticks.

  I couldn’t help comparing her to Hannah, who sat as far away from the matchstick girl as possible; next to her my sister looked less fragile and wasted, but there was some strange assonance between them, as if they were vibrating at the same frequency, connected by a thread of understanding. The matchstick girl’s eyes landed on Hannah and remained there. She didn’t appear to be ashamed by her bold-faced staring, and Hannah squirmed beneath the weight of her gaze, the heaviest part of her, and refused to look in her direction. Even after the matchstick girl was called in, she left an invisible thumbprint on the room. I couldn’t quite shake off how she had made me feel.


  She hadn’t come back by the time Hannah was summoned. I looked up sharply when I heard her name called, following it to its source, a sweet-faced young nurse who was obviously tired from a long day. Hannah hesitated before standing up, and she and Mom followed the nurse while I, according to a preordained plan, stayed behind with my homework. Twenty minutes later the matchstick girl returned. She placed a clipboard on the receptionist’s desk with a loud clatter and wordlessly grabbed her coat from the rack near the door. She took one last long glance at all of us before turning and leaving, her eyes passing over me as if I wasn’t there. I wondered what she was looking for, but I was glad she was gone; she brought up in me a sort of primal protectiveness of my sister, and even though the thought was absurd, it seemed as though if I could shield Hannah from the matchstick girl, then I could shield her from the disease itself.

  When I saw Hannah and Mom emerge from the labyrinth of exam rooms, I jumped up, eager to get out of there. Hannah had some papers to fill out, so Mom offered to go pull up the car while I waited with my sister.

  “How was it?” I asked as Hannah bent over the forms, pen in hand, marking boxes with careful checks. She just shrugged.

  Hannah had just finished sliding the pen back into the cup on the receptionist’s desk when the door opened and a woman bustled in, an infant carrier in one hand and a boy of maybe three clutching the other. The little boy was babbling and the baby was screaming its head off as the woman worked to divest herself of her various accoutrements and navigate her team out of the small hallway and into the waiting room.

  I glanced at Hannah. “Ready to go?”

  But Hannah’s face had blanched, and she turned it away from me, searching for something in her purse.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. She mumbled something in reply but I didn’t catch it. “What?”

  The woman had removed her scarf and coat and hung them precisely on one of the hooks in the hallway, and with the little boy on her hip and the carrier in her hand, she passed us, only at the last moment looking over.

  “Hannah?” she said. I was completely surprised, and it occurred to me then that I often thought of Hannah as if she was a ghost only I could see. Hannah’s head swiveled slowly toward the woman, and her face was as expressionless as I had ever seen it, but in that way my sister had that I now knew hid a churning ocean of feeling underneath.

  “Amanda Brenner,” Hannah said, the name coming out in a sudden whoosh.

  The woman laughed. “Amanda Taylor now.” She wiggled her left hand and a diamond the size of a boulder sparkled in the overhead fluorescent lights. “I can’t believe you’re here! I had no idea you were still in town—it’s been so long and nobody’s heard a thing about you. Are you on Facebook?”

  Hannah squinted at her. I had explained Facebook to her already, but she had probably given it no other consideration, had definitely not thought about it as something she should be on. “No,” she said flatly.

  “Well, that explains it, then,” Amanda said. “You should really be on, we’ve got a nice big group of old St. Robert’s people on there, and our fifteen-year reunion is coming up. You don’t want to miss that, do you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Hannah said, nearly shaking. “We need to go. Our—someone’s waiting for us outside.”

  “Is this your sister? Of course she is, you can see it in her face. Amanda,” she said, offering her hand for me to shake. I took it because I didn’t know what else to do, but something inside me rankled as she said her name again, and when our palms touched, I knew why—Amanda Brenner. Hannah’s middle school torturer, from the letters to St. Catherine I had read not long before. It was hard to imagine this woman, a bit harried but obviously wealthy and well put together, as a child of twelve, but it was completely believable that she had been a mean one.

  “Caro,” I said.

  “And you’re what? Eighteen?” Amanda asked.

  “Sixteen,” I said.

  “Oh, God, sixteen!” Amanda laughed again. There was a manic edge to it, probably the result of being a young mother with two children, one of whom was still squalling intermittently from the carrier while the other was doggedly attempting to put every single block in the little toy chest into his mouth. Not that Amanda seemed to notice either of these things, but maybe it was like ambient noise to her by now. “Is it possible we were ever that young, Hannah? It seems like a lifetime ago.”

  “Amanda, I’m sorry—”

  “I just can’t believe I’m running into you here of all places. Are you a patient of Dr. Willett’s?” She didn’t wait for Hannah to respond before barreling forward with her relentless questioning. “Isn’t she the best? I’ve been working with her to lose some of this baby weight. It’s totally true what they say, it just falls off with the first one and after the second one it sticks to you like glue!”

  “I’m a patient of Dr. Adrian’s,” Hannah said. Amanda didn’t react to that; I highly doubted she was even listening.

  “So what have you been up to these days?” Amanda asked, tilting her head like a cocker spaniel. “Are you married? Kids?”

  “No, I—” Hannah didn’t want to explain it, and I wanted to help her, to save her from having to give this woman access to any part of her life at all, but I didn’t know what to say to stop it.

  “Oh, wait, I think I heard something about …” Hannah stiffened as Amanda searched for the most diplomatic way to put it. “A convent? Is that right?” She said the word “convent” in a hushed tone, as if it was a dirty word she was hoping her little ones wouldn’t pick up.

  Hannah nodded.

  “So you were a nun?” Amanda pressed. I started to see the meanness in her. She wasn’t stupid; she saw Hannah’s reaction to her for what it was. She looked frivolous, but I could tell that she was shrewd and her questions weren’t as innocent as they appeared. “Are you out now? What was that like?”

  “I—” She was trying her hardest, but Hannah couldn’t grab on to the magic words, the ones that would make Amanda disappear.

  I dug into my pocket and brought out my cell phone, pressing it hard against my ear. “You’re outside, Mom? Okay, okay. We’re coming! Sorry.” I turned to Hannah. “That was Mom, she’s been waiting at the curb for ten minutes and she’s really annoyed.” I flashed a cold smile at Amanda. “God, you’d think it was some big emergency or something.”

  “I didn’t hear a phone ring,” Amanda said, reaching down to pat her son’s head as he slammed his little fists into her kneecap.

  “It was on vibrate. Nice to meet you, Amanda. Good luck with that baby weight,” I said spitefully. I took Hannah’s hand and dragged her past Amanda to the door. “Oh, and I think your kid just spit something up. Take care!”

  Hannah didn’t speak until we were in the elevator on the way to the building’s main lobby. She released a long breath and smiled at me gratefully.

  “Thanks, Caro,” she said. “I just—I hate that girl.”

  “Yeah, she’s totally awful,” I said.

  “She was really mean to me when we were kids, and then she acts like—Well, it’s fine. It’s over. I just wish I’d said something better than ‘um’ and ‘I’m sorry’ over and over again,” Hannah said, closing her eyes and leaning her head against the wall. “But when I saw her, it was like I was twelve, you know?”

  I nodded. “What I find particularly disconcerting is the fact that she’s breeding.”

  Hannah smiled. “I appreciate you getting me out of there. I was practically rooted to the floor.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve got your back.”

  “I know you do.”

  When we got home, Hannah told Mom that she wasn’t going to see Dr. Adrian anymore.

  “Why not?” Mom asked. “I thought you liked her.”

  “She was fine,” Hannah said. “But I’m not going back.”

  “You can’t just not go back! You haven’t even done anything yet,” Mom said. “How do you expect to get better
if you won’t work at it?”

  “I’m fine,” Hannah insisted. “I only went because you wanted me to. I don’t need help and I don’t need to work on anything.”

  “That’s just not true,” Mom said. She darted her eyes at me, as if she was considering asking me to leave the room, but then she sighed in resignation and said nothing. “You’re—you need help, Hannah. You’re not well.”

  “I’m not sick,” Hannah shot back.

  “I know you saw that girl in the office today,” Mom said. “And I know she rattled you, but if you don’t stop, you’re going to become like her and I—we can’t bear to see that happen to you, Hannah, we just can’t.”

  “I am not that girl!” Hannah shouted. It was almost too much to believe, the way nervousness and fear had transformed Hannah. I felt as though I was watching a movie, actors who looked a lot like my family playing out an impossible scene. It was almost Escheresque, with how familiar and yet completely unreal it felt.

  “You’re right, Hannah,” Mom said bitterly. “You’re not that girl. Because that girl is trying to get some kind of help, and you refuse to even acknowledge that you have a problem. And that’s what scares me. I feel as though you’re slipping through our fingers, sweetheart.” Her voice trembled, and it occurred to me that I might, for the third time in my life, see my mother cry. I considered leaving immediately; that was something I didn’t want to see, as if it might break some sort of spell or truce and bring the whole world tumbling down.

  “I couldn’t bear to lose you,” Mom told Hannah, who refused now even to look at her. “Not again.”

  Hannah stood abruptly. “I’m going for a walk,” she said, although I’m not sure who she was telling, since she seemed to be speaking not to either of us but at some phantom in the distance. “I don’t want anybody to follow me.” She whisked her jacket off the back of her chair and stormed into the hallway, where she startled Dad, who was coming in to see what all the commotion was about.