by Anna Woltz
And as I finally sink my teeth into a hot parcel of black beans, salsa, sour cream, grated cheese, guacamole, and intensely juicy, tender grilled steak, I know it’s true.
“Oh. My. God,” I say with my mouth full. “This is the best burrito in the world. Seriously. This steak is so incredibly tender. Oh, and the guacamole!”
For the first time, I see a big grin on Seth’s face. There’s salsa on his chin, but right now I can even handle that.
“We come here at least once a week,” he says. “We can’t go without it any longer.”
I look at Abby, who’s licking sour cream off her fingers. Then at her brother, who’s taking another bite. And I’m so jealous that it almost hurts. I want to eat here every week too.
I don’t want to just be on the run here for a while. I want to live here.
• • •
As soon as we’re back home, I put another load in the washing machine. I’m exhausted and I want to go to bed as soon as possible, but I hesitate when I see how disappointed Abby looks.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She twists the tip of her braid around her finger and doesn’t reply.
“Watch out!” Seth is sitting on the couch with his laptop. “She was digging around in the freezer this afternoon. I’m afraid she’s seen it in the movies: When girls are home alone, they have to do ‘girl things.’ Like painting their nails. And crying into ice cream cartons.”
“Not crying!” says Abby. “Just eating ice cream in front of the TV. I thought it’d be fun. I mean … ” She looks at me shyly. “We’ve got cookie dough … And we could wear our pajamas … ”
“Count me out,” Seth calls from the couch.
“Hey!” says Abby, glaring at her brother. “I’d rather be a boy too. But I’m a girl. And I don’t have a sister. And Mom’s always working.”
“Well, Mom has to earn enough money to take care of three people.”
“I know that!” She sighs. “I’m not a baby.” She walks off. “Forget about it. It’s not like I care.”
I look down at the floor. And then I go after her.
A quarter of an hour later, we’re sitting together, watching The Simpsons. Abby wanted both of us to eat out of one gigantic tub, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“You think I’m gross,” she said miserably. Her eyelashes were still wet with tears.
“That’s not true!” I cried.
“Yes, it is. You don’t want my spoon to touch your ice cream.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s not you. I mean … Did you know there are more bacteria living in your mouth than there are people on the planet? You’ve actually got more than seven billion bacteria in your mouth!”
“Really?” She looked a bit happier again. “I’m going to tell my friends that.” She fetched two bowls from the cabinet. “So you wouldn’t eat from the same tub as your mom? Or your dad?”
“No one. I swear.”
When we sat down on the couch, Abby hesitated.
“Can my pajamas touch your pajamas? Or are there lots and lots of bacteria living on pajamas too?”
I didn’t ask when her pajamas were last washed. I just said it was okay.
So now she’s sitting ridiculously close to me, digging into her ice cream. I can see that Seth is secretly watching The Simpsons too, out of the corner of his eye.
“I’m pretending you’re my sister,” Abby whispers to me.
I don’t tell her that I’m doing the same.
Six in the morning.
It’s dark outside and the city is finally quiet, but I’m wide-awake. I’m sitting at the computer in Seth and Abby and their absent mom’s chilly living room. My eyes are flying across the screen. My finger is clicking away like crazy. “Oh my God,” I whisper very quietly. “Oh my God!”
Dozens, hundreds of pages, full of news about Hurricane Sandy. Tomorrow evening or tomorrow night, she’s going to race across the city. Mayor Bloomberg is advising us to stock up on food. And bottles of water. And candles and matches and flashlights.
The weather sites explain that Sandy could be the worst storm in history. The hurricane that’s approaching from the south is going to collide, above our heads, with ice-cold air from the north and a winter storm from the west. And it’s also a full moon tomorrow. That means the water’s extra high and there’s an even greater chance of the city flooding.
I shiver. The lamp next to the computer throws a circle of light onto the keyboard, but the rest of the room is filled with shadows. When the wooden floor behind me creaks, it gives me the fright of my life. I turn around and see Seth standing in the middle of the room.
His hair is sticking up and he’s not wearing a T-shirt.
“Jet lag?” he asks with a voice that’s only just woken up.
I nod. He picks up his hoodie from the couch, walks to the open kitchen, and turns on the coffeemaker. Silently, he studies a newspaper on the counter. I wrap my robe more tightly around my bare legs, and suddenly I’m aware again just how strange it is that I’m here.
“Have you seen this?” I ask. He’s not looking, but I still point at the computer screen. “They’re shutting down the entire subway system tonight. As a safety precaution. And there are going to be shelters all over the city for people who have to be evacuated.”
He doesn’t reply, so I go on talking.
“Half of New York could flood. And there might be a power failure!”
Finally, he looks up. “And two airplanes can fly into two skyscrapers, fifteen minutes apart. But it doesn’t usually happen.”
It’s like someone double-clicked a file inside my brain.
I instantly see the pictures in my head. They could have come from a movie, but they’re real. A bright blue sky, two sunny white towers. An airplane crashing straight into the first tower. A ball of fire and black smoke, an airplane-shaped hole in the building. And then everything goes on repeat: another airplane. Another explosion. Another thousand deaths.
“Were you here?” I ask. “Were you living in New York on September eleventh?”
He nods. And then he sighs. “Coffee?”
No one’s ever asked me if I wanted something to drink in that kind of tone before. It’s practically screaming: I don’t want you in my home. If this hurricane weren’t on the way, you’d be out on the street.
“Yes, please,” I say politely. I still don’t like coffee, but that doesn’t matter. “So?” I ask. “Do you remember the attacks?”
“I remember what it smelled like.” He hands me a mug of inky black liquid and sits down next to his laptop on the couch. And then he suddenly shakes his head as if he’s made up his mind. “You know what? I’m not in the mood for this. I’ve had it with pretending nothing’s wrong.”
I don’t react.
“Don’t you see how weird this all is? You appear out of nowhere. First you spend a night in that guy Jim’s bed. Then you have a panic attack and you have to come wash all your clothes at our place. You jump at every sound and you look like it’s the end of the world—except for when we’re eating burritos, and then, for half an hour, we’re best buddies. But no matter what happens, we’re not allowed to ask you any questions. When Abby tried it yesterday, you totally froze.”
I can feel it happening again. What he calls “freezing.”
“Sorry,” I say stiffly.
He runs his hand through his dark hair. “It’s too bad I’m not nice, like Abby. But I had plans for this weekend. The website I’m working on has to be finished tomorrow. But then my little sister arranges to meet some psycho off the Internet, and we have to calm down Aunt Leah and so we stay overnight at her place, and then, to top it all off, you turn up … ”
I don’t answer and, after a while, he just shrugs. “Forget about it. It doesn’t matter.” He picks up his laptop and opens it.
I know exactly what he’s doing now. People are right to give up. To give up on me. But it’s not exactly fun.
Silently, I look
down at my hands. At the white, split skin. At the cracks in my fingers and the rawness around my nails.
“Okay,” I say. “What do you want to know?”
He looks up.
“Simple.” His eyes are as black as the coffee. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see New York.”
“But why are you here alone? Where are your mom and dad?”
“In Amsterdam.”
“Do they know you’re here?”
“No.”
It’s a while before he says anything else.
“Did you run away?” he asks finally. He sees me nod. “Why?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes,” he says, and suddenly he’s the boy who sat beside me in the darkness again. The boy who made sure I didn’t die. “I really want to know.”
I can feel something resisting inside my stomach. It hurts, but I need to stop paying attention to it.
I’m standing on the highest diving board. And I’m about to jump.
“Okay,” I say. I don’t look at him. And then I jump. “My totally messed-up father isn’t just my dad. He’s also my high-school principal.” I stop again. He was the principal, I keep forgetting about that. Now he isn’t anything.
“My school has a thousand students, so it’s not like I know everyone there. But there’s this one older girl who I do know. Everyone knows her. God knows why, because it’s not as if she’s funny or nice. But she is popular, and she always has been. You know, think of any high-school movie and imagine the prettiest cheerleader. Well, that’s Juno.”
Seth nods. “I can’t stand her already.”
Outside, New York stays silent as the earth slowly turns to the east. Hurricane Sandy is raging above the Atlantic right now. The city is waiting.
I clear my throat. “Juno’s mom—who, incidentally, is a woman who thought it was a great idea to name her daughter after the Roman goddess of marriage … Well, last Tuesday, that mom found sixty-seven text messages on Juno’s cell phone. The messages weren’t sent by her friends or her aunts or a guy she’d met on vacation, but by my father.”
“Jesus.”
I nod. “My dad, the school principal, sent sixty-seven text messages to a seventeen-year-old girl. He started in April and sent the last one on Monday.”
“What was he writing to her about for all those months?”
“You really want to know?”
Seth nods.
“Well, I don’t.” My hands are trembling. I clench my left hand, but I can’t feel the cut anymore. “It wasn’t just the messages either. They met up with each other. At a café. Can you picture it? My fifty-year-old dad in his scruffy sweater and corduroy pants. And Juno sitting there next to him. He says he was giving her extra math tutoring. And nothing else.”
“Do you believe him?”
“The whole thing makes me sick.” I shake my head. “So I don’t want to hear what that man has to say about his ‘side of the story.’ It just makes me want to puke.”
All the fences inside my head are flat on the ground. As I gaze out over the landscape, I feel sick.
For fifteen years I thought we were a family. But now I know that, all that time, my dad was just playacting. The thought of him sitting there for minutes—maybe even hours—with his cell phone in his hand, trying to decide what to say in his text messages. The thought of him looking at her for all those months. The thought of us sitting at home around the kitchen table and him thinking about her. It’s driving me crazy.
• • •
And there’s something else.
My mom spoke to me just once last week. Really spoke to me, I mean. And what she said was that I shouldn’t take it so hard. That men sometimes forget their good sense—and that’s just the way things are.
How messed up is that? My mom should be even more furious than me. She should be screaming and howling and threatening to leave my dad.
So why isn’t she?
• • •
“What happened next?” asks Seth.
“All hell broke loose.” I shrug. “I’m at the same school, and everyone knows I’m his daughter. Juno had kept it to herself for months, but as soon as her mom found the text messages, Juno told her best friend. Within a couple of hours, the whole school knew. And within a day, the whole country had heard the news. It was a nightmare.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He’s trying to comfort me, but I’m not done yet. I jumped off the diving board, but I still haven’t hit the water.
“You wanted to know, didn’t you?” I ask. “Why I ran away?”
He nods.
“Well, that’s just the half of it.”
The other half really should be easier to talk about. And yet I hesitate.
“Did your dad do something else?”
“No.” I pick up the pen from beside the keyboard and start scribbling on a yellow sticky note. “Other people did the rest. On the Internet. They heard about my dad and suddenly everyone had an opinion. They thought he was a sleazy asshole. Well, they’re right about that. But they didn’t stop there. Now they’re calling him a rapist. A pedophile. And they’re yelling that he should be sent to jail.”
I take a swig of the coffee, which is way too strong for me, and I start coughing. Seth waits until I can breathe again.
“You wouldn’t believe how disgusting people can be on the Internet. How cruel they are. Every hour there were more threats. I didn’t even know some of the words they were using. Really. I had no idea there were people out there who sit at their computers dreaming up so many different ways to kill someone.”
Seth looks down at his laptop and says nothing.
“They said they were going to come to our house. They wrote what they thought about my mom. And what they wanted to do to me. They were very clear about it. If our house went up in flames and we were burned alive, the world would be a better place.”
I keep trying to remember they’re only words. So far those people have done nothing. Not for real. Our house hasn’t been set on fire. My dad hasn’t been hanged. But still, those words mean something. Real, living people have written to say they wouldn’t care if I burned to death.
“Did you report it to the police?”
“Yes. They’re going to look into it. At least they said they were.” One last scribble. The yellow sticky note is totally black now.
I put down the pen and look at him. “I had to get out of there. I had no choice.”
He nods without saying anything.
I go on looking at him and suddenly wonder how many addresses there are in New York. Of all those millions of apartments, “Mr. Greenberg” picked Seth and Abby’s for his scam.
He couldn’t have made a better choice.
I’ve come back to bed.
I had no idea what was supposed to happen next, with Seth in the living room. But I couldn’t just sit there as it got light outside, while he thought about the gaps in my story.
What was in those sixty-seven text messages.
How things started between Juno and my dad.
Where my mom is in all this.
What those men on Twitter wanted to do to me.
• • •
I’m lying in their mom’s bed, but I don’t close my eyes. A dark procession of Twitter handles is parading around inside my head. All those nicknames of people I don’t know, people who say they hate me and my family.
What good are words when they no longer mean anything? Where do you stand when someone writes: no wonder ur dad dont wanna fuck u. ur way 2 ugly—and the police just tell you to ignore it?
“Where do you want to go?” says Abby in a serious voice. She’s wearing a yellow hat with an orange duck’s beak at the front. “Trader Joe’s is the best, but it’s also the farthest away. Kmart is cheap and it’s usually total chaos there. I know the whole family at the cute little Korean food store. And Whole Foods is expensive and snooty and superyummy.”
We’re standing on the street with four empty shopping bags. Seth thinks it’s dumb that I want to stock up on food, but I’ve told him I’ll pay for everything. I can withdraw cash again now, so that’s not a problem. All he has to provide is an empty kitchen cabinet.
“I’ll take Abby with me,” I whispered to him. “Then you’ll have some peace and quiet to work on your website.”
And he nodded. “Okay, then.”
Our six a.m. conversation has, without any discussion, been placed on the “this didn’t happen” list. Or maybe more like the “this almost didn’t happen” list.
But Seth’s stopped looking at me like he wishes I’d dissolve in hydrochloric acid.
And when he said it was okay for me to open a new jar of Nutella even though the old one wasn’t empty yet, I managed to say “thank you.”
• • •
“You choose,” I say to Abby. “I don’t know the stores anyway.”
She swings the shopping bags, looks up at the uniformly gray sky, and then starts laughing. “Let’s go to all four of them!”
On our way to the first store, I still think that I’m making a fuss, with all our bags and our serious plans. But three hours later, I know that half of New York—and I mean literally half of New York—is stocking up on groceries today because there’s a hurricane on the way.
I’ve never seen such long lines for the checkout before. They coil like snakes through the stores and never get any shorter. Some New Yorkers read a book while they’re waiting; others just grin and look around. At Trader Joe’s, a staff member is standing at the end of the snake with a big sign saying END OF LINE. Because otherwise you’d never believe a line could be that long.
I stand by the sign while Abby runs around fetching food. The “hurricane checklist” we picked up online is flapping in her hand. The power could fail, so we need to buy food that will keep without a refrigerator. Cans of soup, crackers, peanut butter, and also—it’s on the list, right there in black and white—“comfort food.” Food to make you feel better.