by Ariel Kaplan
I had to think back. Middle school seemed like it was a really long time ago; I could barely remember being the same age as Rachel Miller, which was probably a good thing. What did I like back then? I liked that Young Justice cartoon about all the teenage superheroes. I liked Star Wars. I liked books about dogs where the dog doesn’t die at the end. I liked babysitting my neighbor’s cat when she went on vacation; she was a Persian, so I would have to sit on the couch with her, brushing her over and over while she purred and nibbled on my forearm.
I said, “On Sundays, my mom and I used to get up early to feed the ducks. We used to thaw out frozen peas and take them down to this pond by our house.”
“Peas?”
“They’re better for them than bread,” I explained.
She looked at me skeptically. She said, “Ducks.”
“Ducks.”
“Hang on,” she said, and then she got out of the car.
“Are you coming back?” I called after her, but she’d left me alone. I went to turn the radio on, but she’d taken the keys with her. “Oookay,” I said to no one. “I guess I’m just going to sit here.”
I absentmindedly played with the bottles of nail polish in her cup holder—the chrome color she usually wore and a dark red called Evening Sherry. I opened the chrome and swiped a stripe down my left thumbnail. It was pretty, like a silver-scaled fish.
Emily reappeared a moment later with a paper sack in her hand. “What is that?” I asked.
“Peas,” she said, pulling out a box of Farmer Jackson’s Finest and nodding toward the convenience store on the other side of the parking lot. “There’s a pond behind Blanchard. Shira used to skip there freshman year.”
“You want to feed the ducks?”
“No,” she said. “You want to feed the ducks.” She drove out of the parking lot and back around the far side of Blanchard, where there was nothing but a neighborhood of nice houses and—yes—a pond. There were several little duck families, mallards with shiny-headed fathers and demure-colored mothers and fuzzy yellow babies.
“Babies!” I said. “There are baby ducks!”
“Hope there aren’t any turtles in there,” she said. “They eat the babies.”
“No they don’t.”
“They do.”
“Why did you tell me that? Ugh.” I threw a handful of peas at her, and she laughed.
“They’ll be fine,” she said. “Duck parents are very protective.”
“Right. Good on the duck parents.”
We took turns tossing peas to the ducks. I don’t know why I like them so much—the ducks, I mean, not the peas. Maybe it’s the quacking. It’s a nice noise for an animal to make, quacking. Quack. Quack. It’s a good sound.
“Did you just quack?” Emily asked.
“What? No.”
“You did. You said quack.”
“I did not. Shut up.”
“Quack,” she said. “Quack, quack.”
“You have food in your teeth.”
“Oh. Really?”
“No. Just stop quacking.”
She stared out at the pond. After a while she said, ‘You’re right, though. It is kind of meditative.”
I nodded. It was such an odd thing, just to exist with no real purpose. The sun was hot on the top of my head, the air smelled like wet grass (which was soaking through my jeans), and I was kind of happy. There was nothing at all besides the pond and the ducks and the sky and the peas. And Emily, I guess.
“Did you watch Young Justice when you were a kid?” I asked.
“Oh. Sure,” she said. Then, smiling, she added, “I had a huge crush on Nightwing when I was twelve.”
“Right,” I said. “Because he’s a—”
“A hacker, yeah.”
“I had a little bit of a thing for Kid Flash,” I said. “Also, maybe for Aqualad.”
“ ’Cause he’s broody.”
“ ’Cause he’s broody. Superboy, though…”
“Oh, no. Hard pass.”
“Yeah, definitely not.” Two of the ducklings were chasing each other while their mother looked on. It was sort of amazing to watch them; no matter where the mom went, the babies followed as if they were tied to her by an invisible string. I wished I could have picked one up and touched its fuzzy yellow dandelion feathers, but I was pretty sure Mama Duck would not have appreciated it. I tossed a few peas to the tiny siblings to break up the fight. Behind them was a bed of pansies, which reminded me of Bebe’s Ophelia card. “So I was wondering,” I said.
“The Blue Beetle,” she said, pointing at me. “I would definitely go out with the Blue Beetle.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes, the Blue Beetle’s awesome, but I was wondering about the whole ‘syndicate’ thing. Why Ophelia? We are talking about the Ophelia that’s in Hamlet, right? The one who commits suicide?”
“Does she?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”
“I’m pretty sure she does,” I said. “We read it in English last fall.”
“Ahhhh,” Emily said. “But remember, Hamlet came out in 1603. Six years after Romeo and Juliet, which features another girl who”—she made air quotes with her fingers—“ ‘dies’ under mysterious circumstances.”
I tossed a few peas to Big Mama, who had to eat fast before her babies got there. “So your theory,” I said, passing the box back to Emily, “is that Ophelia’s suicide was a redo of the fake death plot in Romeo and Juliet?”
“And not just that. Gertrude was in on it.”
“Wait. What?”
“Think about it,” Emily said. “Gertrude tells her unstable, homicidal son that his girlfriend is dead, after he’s already killed three other people, including two of his own friends.”
“You think she lied. To protect Ophelia from Hamlet.”
“Exactly,” she said. “She was playing in a rigged game. Hamlet and Claudius had all the power. So she hacked the narrative.”
“Um. Then shouldn’t you be the Gertrude Syndicate?”
“No,” Emily said. “The Gertrude Syndicate sounds awful.” She tossed the last handful of peas to the crowd of babies. “Sometimes you have to wink at accuracy for the sake of aesthetics.” She stretched her arms over her head, then balled up the empty box and stuffed it back in the bag. “We’re out of peas,” she said.
We both got up and walked back toward the car. I wanted to ask Emily if she’d done all this because she felt sorry for me, but I already knew that she had. Still, though. A pity duck-feeding was better than nothing. She drove me home, and we listened to the radio. Halfway through the second song, I realized she was humming. So I hummed, too.
After she dropped me off, I pulled out my phone and started a memo. I titled it Mischa Abramavicius Bucket List.
Number One: Feed ducks.
I put an X next to it.
Number Two: I looked down at my silver-striped thumbnail. Find signature nail polish.
I stream-of-consciousnessed the next few things on the list.
Go ice skating at Rockefeller Center.
Swim with the moon jellies in Palau.
See the terra-cotta soldiers in Beijing.
Tell Nate I love him.
I looked at that last one for a long time. And then, like a little coward, I deleted it.
The next day was an in-service day. Normally, I would have used it to study. I was behind in every subject, and my teachers were starting to notice; I was getting lots of notes on quizzes that said things like Let’s talk or Come see me. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to go see them. What would I say? “I thought your class was relevant to my future, but as it turns out, I was wrong!” So after I spent the morning adding things to the Mischa Abramavicius Bucket List and watching Star Wars (plus two episodes of Young Justice), I was on my
way to do the most unpleasant task of my life: I was going to tell my mother about Revere.
I could have waited for her to get home, but I thought it might make more sense to tell her in a neutral, semipublic location, where she’d be less likely to melt down. Or, at least if she stopped breathing, it would be easier to find the paramedics.
I was going to tell her. I was going to tell her today. Today would be the day.
Yep, today.
I took the bus to the Metro, and the Metro into Arlington, never mind that it cost me almost eight dollars one way. I swear, DC must have the only public transit system in the world built exclusively for rich people. After I got off the train, I left the station and turned my toes in the direction of my mother’s office, which was five blocks away.
My steps started out confident. Measured. Even.
I was going to come clean. I wouldn’t have to lie anymore.
But.
Here’s the thing that kept ringing inside my brain, every third step. This isn’t my fault.
It isn’t my fault.
It isn’t my fault.
On the third block, there was a street preacher.
Arlington isn’t exactly the kind of place where one normally finds street preachers. Unless maybe they’re ironic street preachers. Maybe that’s what this was. An ironic mission. I braced myself to hear about Jesus’s ambivalence.
“You have to be accountable!” he said to me as I approached, because I was too lazy to cross the street like everyone else. “Accountability is the cornerstone of a civil society!”
This was a little odd, coming from a street preacher. He had a short beard and was wearing a light blue button-down shirt. He was a little better dressed than you might expect.
“People need to take responsibility for their actions!” he cried.
I stopped just past him and turned around. “Accountability?”
He glanced at me and frowned.
“Accountability means owning your screw-ups,” I said. “Accountability’s good.”
He looked a little uncomfortable. “Right.”
“So what about when you have to own up to something you didn’t do?”
“Hang on,” he said, touching the side of his face. “To be clear, what are we talking about here?”
“That doesn’t matter. Just, is it right or wrong to take the consequences for someone else?”
“Well, wrong. Usually.”
“Usually?”
“Nothing’s absolute.”
“Ugh,” I said. “That’s not even an answer.”
He sighed and looked down at his shoes. He looked kind of familiar. Or maybe it was the voice. I’m usually better at remembering voices than faces. I’m not really sure why that is.
He was looking at me, too. He said, “Have we met somewhere before?”
I was pretty sure we hadn’t, because I don’t usually talk to street preachers. “I don’t think so?”
He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “Debra Miller’s seder. You were there two years in a row. You’re Nate’s friend.”
The truth is I go to the Millers’ seder every year; Mom’s agnostic and doesn’t really go in for that kind of thing, so if I want my parsley-and-salt-water fix, I have to get it elsewhere. I scanned his face: dark brown hair, blue eyes, dark brown beard. Wait. The beard. “Rabbi Perez?”
“Actually, it’s just Doug now,” he said, which was when I remembered why he’d stopped coming to Debra Miller’s seders: he’d quit. Or retired, I guess. His contract came up for renewal, and he just walked away.
“You preach on the street now?” I said incredulously. “I mean, no offense.”
He laughed, hard. “What?”
“You were preaching! On the street! About accountability!”
He laughed some more. Then he took a Bluetooth earpiece out of his ear. “I run the bakery across the street,” he said. “One of the managers forgot to order coffee and tried to blame somebody else.”
I put my hand over my eyes.
“Listen,” he said. “Do you want a donut? You seem like you could use a donut.”
I wasn’t especially hungry, but I also wasn’t quite ready to meet my maker yet (by that I meant my mother). So I said, “Sure, I’ll eat a donut.”
I followed Rabbi Doug into the bakery, which was called Tom Bombadil’s. To the women behind the counter, Doug said, “Hey, gimme a chocolate glazed. And she’ll have…” He looked at me with his eyebrows raised.
“Uh,” I said. “Maple, I guess.”
“Maple,” he repeated.
I sat down at the table in front of the window, and one of the women dumped a maple-iced donut in front of me on a piece of waxed paper.
“So how are the Millers?” he asked. He mimed someone swinging a baseball bat. “They’re still obsessed with the—”
“The softball, yeah,” I said. “Yeah, Rachel’s still playing softball. Nate’s going to Emory. They’re good.”
“Emory,” he said, nodding approvingly.
“Yeah. Um, so, if you don’t mind my asking, why did you quit? Not that this”—I looked around the bakery—“doesn’t look great and everything, but…”
He had the expression of a man who’d had this conversation way too many times already. I said, “Actually, never mind.”
“No, no,” he said. “It’s okay. Being a rabbi was just a bad fit. I wasn’t happy. So I couldn’t make anyone else happy, either.”
“So now you make people happy by selling them donuts.”
He smiled. “There you go. So. I believe you wanted to discuss accountability.”
“Oh. No. I don’t want to dump my problems on you.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It seems to be an important subject for you.”
I nodded and took a bite of my donut. It was pretty good. Maple-y. I like maple. “You really think accountability’s the cornerstone of a civil society?”
Doug took a bite of his chocolate glazed, which left little icing crumbs in his beard. “Did I say that? Yeah, well. It’s certainly something we all struggle with, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. “I guess nobody likes getting in trouble,” I said.
“Well,” he said. “I think it’s more than that. People aren’t always accountable to themselves, either, you know? They have this fragile, ah, what’s the word? A fragile self-narrative. Where they imagine themselves as the hero. Of everything, pretty much. But you know how many people are really the hero?”
I shook my head.
“Not many. Not many. But no one wants to be confronted with that, right? You’re just a regular schmo who screws up? It’s painful. People like to avoid pain.” He called to the counter, “Can I get a coffee over here?”
“We ran out of regular an hour ago!”
“Blech. I’ll take the decaf, that’s fine.”
I mulled it over. It wasn’t that what he was saying was wrong, exactly; it just didn’t apply to me. Except for one thing: I was avoiding telling my mother the truth because I knew telling her would be painful. For both of us. And again, it wasn’t my fault.
One of the counter ladies brought him a paper cup of coffee. “So,” he said to me, after he’d stirred in a packet of fake sugar, “why are you so interested in the subject?”
I decided I had nothing to lose by telling my life story to a random ex-rabbi and seller of donuts. Maybe this is why Nate likes going to therapy; you get to spill your guts and it doesn’t really matter if the other person still likes you afterward. I said, “I may have let my mother think I got into a college I didn’t actually get into.”
“You may have,” he said. “Interesting. And why did you do that?”
I scowled at the table. “It seemed like the best option at the time. Can I get a coffee, too?”
&n
bsp; “Ask at the counter,” he said. “The best option, or the easiest?”
I got up and went to the counter, where the woman handed me a cup of coffee and pointed me toward the milk and sugar. “Take your pick,” I said as I doctored my coffee. “But it’s not really the point right now. She thinks it, and I have to make her unthink it.”
“So what’s keeping you from just telling her the truth? You think she’ll be disappointed?”
I sat back down at the table. “It’s a little worse than that,” I breathed. “I didn’t get in anywhere else, either.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, shoot.”
“It wasn’t my fault!”
He gave me a look that said, Sure, kid. “Okay. So…what? You bungled your SATs?”
“No. Just take my word for it. Somehow my applications got messed up, and the result was I didn’t get in anywhere.”
“Your applications.”
“Yes.”
“Got messed up.”
“Yes.”
“You know,” he said, “there’s this river in Egypt—”
“I am not in denial!”
“Okay,” he said soothingly. “Okay.” He puffed up his cheeks and blew out a breath. “It’s just. Just.”
“You don’t believe me,” I said.
“Well…”
“This won’t work if you don’t believe me,” I said. “Take my word for it. It wasn’t my fault.”
He frowned. “What was your name again?”
“Mischa.”
“Right,” he said. “Mischa. So weren’t we just talking about accountability?”
“Yes,” I said. “And this is why. If I act like it’s my fault, then I’m covering for the person who actually screwed me over.”
“And that person is…who?”
“That’s the problem. I don’t know.”
He chewed his donut for a while. “This is quite a situation. Do you…Forgive me, but do you often feel that other people are trying to ‘screw you over,’ as you put it?”
I narrowed my eyes. “No. Actually. Take my word for it; I’m not paranoid.”
“Okay,” he said. “So you’re not paranoid.” He took a long drink of coffee, probably because he didn’t know what else to say.