The Orchard

by David Hopen

“What tryouts?”

  “For the basketball team. We’re all on it.”

  “Are you any good?” Evan was perched on the railing of the balcony, raised above us. “I’d guess you’re not.”

  I’d played basketball for a fair portion of my childhood. In Torah Temimah, I hovered around the top tier of my class, though this necessitated little more than competent dribbling abilities and mediocre hand-eye coordination. Our freshman year team practiced three times in six months and played but one formal game, an exhibition match against a local Chofetz Chaim. Mordechai, our best player, was forced to retire after his parents realized he was leaving mishmar early to shoot hoops. Our team folded shortly thereafter. “I’m decent.”

  “How decent is decent?” Oliver asked.

  I hated when they studied me. I worried that, if they thought about it long enough, the sheer absurdity of my presence would eventually dawn on them. As it was, I overheard whispers in the halls, noticed faculty members gawking at the sight of the poorly dressed, wildly self-conscious Brooklyn expatriate climbing into extravagant cars with the likes of Noah Harris and Evan Stark. Such observations bothered me less, perhaps because on some level I enjoyed the strange phenomenon of having my private life differentiated from the anonymous ones around me. As someone who often neglected to muster appropriate interest in my own life, who failed to visualize what my face looked like and who felt incapable of imagining how it registered to other people, I found such limelight not entirely unpleasant, even during moments when I loathed that my reputation was becoming fixed to their lot.

  “You’re coming tomorrow,” Noah said. “We’ve got three or four open spots this year. If it turns out you’re trash, we’ll tell Rocky you’re useful entertainment. Good for camaraderie.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh man,” Oliver said, sifting through YouTube for highlights of Noah’s junior year of basketball, “he’s going to hate Rocky.”

  “Our coach,” Noah said. “Few loose bolts, but stellar dude.”

  “He was a high school phenom,” Amir said. “But tore his ACL during his freshman summer at Villanova. He did have a professional stint overseas, though.”

  Oliver laughed. “Yeah, in Scandinavia.”

  “You’ll be wild about the man,” Evan said, grinning nastily. “Especially if you have a taste for a wide sampling of physical torture.”

  * * *

  THEIR DEPICTION OF ROCKY WAS grossly understated. Bald, undersized—a self-proclaimed six feet that more closely resembled a Napoleonic five-ten—and heavily tattooed, Rocky was a vortex of energy, anger and ego, constantly moving, barking insults, snatching the ball at times to run the drill himself.

  “Rocky, this is Drew Eden, the new kid,” Noah said, bringing me over to shake hands.

  Rocky grabbed my hand, his face inches from mine. “Got what it takes?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you have what it takes?” He crunched my hand until it began to ache. Noah motioned for me to nod.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m no ‘sir.’ I’m a fucking beast.”

  I extracted my hand. “Oh, right.”

  “If you don’t have that same fire, the fuck off my court with you.” He thrust a ball into my chest and sent me to the baseline to stand beside Oliver.

  “Intense, huh?” Oliver asked.

  Everyone around us began intricate stretching routines. I improvised by bending over toward my feet. “You enjoy this?”

  Oliver shrugged, readjusted his shorts. “Honestly, I just chill on the bench.”

  Rocky blew his whistle, lined us up at center court and gestured for Noah to join him.

  “He’s obsessed with Noah, if you couldn’t tell,” Oliver whispered. “He’s his all-time favorite player. Honestly, everyone’s obsessed with Noah. He’s Zion Hills’s very own Swede. He’s like, I don’t know, freaking Thor.”

  “This is Noah Harris.” Rocky paced back and forth, as if preparing soldiers for a military operation. “If you don’t know Noah Harris, raise your hand.”

  No hands went up.

  “Thought so.” He flexed his arms. On his left bicep, I made out the silhouette of a rhinoceros and the Jordan Jumpman logo. “Who wants to tell me why we all know Noah Harris?”

  Donny, from the opposite site of the baseline, raised his hand. “He’s our captain.”

  “No, Donny, that’s not fucking why. It’s because he’s the best player in this school, and when you’re the best player in your school, you command respect. Why do I know this? Because I was the best damned player in my school, too.” Noah turned pink. It was the first time I’d seen him look uneasy. “It’s called working on your craft,” Rocky continued, “mastering it until you earn respect not from everyone around you, not from your entire community”—the veins in his forehead throbbed—“but from yourself.” He dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper. “That’s what this game is, boys. That’s the point of this goddamn life. Got that?” We nodded obediently, pretending this was even vaguely meaningful. “Good. Now, Evan Stark, Amir Samson, Gabriel Houri and, uh, fuck it, Donny Silver, step forward and face your teammates. This is our starting five. That means there are seven open spots. Nobody else is guaranteed anything, even if you were on the team last year, even if you consider yourself God’s gift to this sacred sport. Even if your father is a major donor to this school, Bellow excluded. Understood?”

  He divided us into groups, pushed us through drills: suicides, wind sprints, cone dribbling, layups in which we tried finishing at the rim as he attacked us with a large foam cushion.

  “God damn you straight to the bowels of hell, Silver!” he screamed when Donny bricked his shot and tumbled to the floor. “If you don’t have heart, there’s no place for you here!”

  I played poorly. I knocked down some jumpers—a random stretch of good luck, seeing how rattled Rocky made me—but I was slow and out of shape and managed to botch a fair number of the exercises, running the wrong route in one play and, in another, losing control of the ball and accidentally kicking it out of bounds.

  “What the fuck is that?” Rocky roared, sending me off to run ten laps for “lacking purpose with the ball, on the court and, as far as I can tell, in life.”

  For the final twenty minutes we scrimmaged. This was my worst showing, considering how long it took me to lumber up the court—gasping, chest burning, mouth completely dry—and the fact that my random assortment of teammates was reluctant to pass my way. The part I enjoyed most was being taken out, as it gave me a moment to catch my breath.

  At the end of practice, Rocky assigned the starters to play together. Donny, at center, was a train wreck, using his weight to ram us in the post but consistently bungling layups, much to Rocky’s disgust. Evan was a stretch forward, a fantastic defender with an abundance of confidence who attacked relentlessly and made the right play over and over. Gabriel was small forward—a filler player, mostly, with little talent other than rebounding and running sets efficiently—while Amir played shooting guard, providing high-volume three-point shooting.

  Then, at point, there was Noah, somehow exceeding all hype. He utilized speed and sheer strength, shooting from any distance and dribbling under his legs, behind his back and through defenders at a marvelous speed. He threw breathtaking full-court passes, dished through preposterous angles and pulled up on fast breaks, spinning in every direction to find himself uncontested under the rim. He was, without question, the best player I’d ever seen, but I was even more impressed by his demeanor. He was demonstrative and barked instructions, but never derisively, making certain to avoid dominating the ball and to comfort poor Donny after he was castigated by Rocky.

  “Noah,” I said in the car after practice ended, too sore to move but in awe of what I’d witnessed, “that was the most unbelievable—”

  “Ari,” he snapped, cutting me off. “I don’t want that crap from you of all people.”

  Strangely gratified, I nodded and fell silent.

>   * * *

  AFTER TALMUD THE NEXT DAY—a dull class in which we discussed bein hashemashos, that delicate blink of an eye when night enters and day departs—I heard my name on the intercom.

  “Why would they call me?” I blurted stupidly, gravel-voiced, looking to Amir for help. “Is that bad?”

  Amir gathered his things impatiently. “Relax. If you were in real trouble Bloom would probably call himself.”

  I made my way to the front office. The secretary, Mrs. Janice, a kindly, forty-something-year-old with a Southern accent and horn-rimmed glasses, directed me to a back office. I was to meet Mrs. Ballinger, Mrs. Janice told me, director of College Guidance. Confused, I walked up to the office and knocked.

  “Enter.”

  It was a gaudy office: shelves lined with SAT aids and application guides (Dream Schools, Part Two; How to Write the Perfect Essay and Avoid Shaming Your Family), a bulletin board of banners (crimson, cardinal red, baby blue), every inch of every wall adorned with photographs of Mrs. Ballinger and bright-faced students, acceptance letters in hand. Behind a sparse desk, on which a single folder of documents was spread, sat Mrs. Ballinger: platinum blond, diminutive, middle-aged, sour-faced. She looked as if she’d been plucked from an Upper East Side prep school. I recognized her from the pictures on the Ivy bulletin board.

  “Name?” she asked disinterestedly.

  “Ari Eden.”

  “Take a seat.” She motioned to a wooden chair, on which ROSS BALLINGER, HARVARD LAW, CLASS OF 2003 was emblazoned. “My eldest,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, blinking stupidly, attempting to rouse appropriate appreciation for this unsolicited fact. “Nice.”

  She pointed to a picture on the corner of her desk, in which she was being hugged by two girls and a boy. “Ross, Ashley, Zoe.” I nodded with feigned interest. “Harvard, Chicago, Virginia,” she rattled off. “Not too shabby, huh?”

  “Right,” I said, still struggling to understand why I’d been summoned. “Very cool.”

  “Before we start, your name is . . . Ari, you said? Or Andrew? I have conflicting information.”

  I frowned. “Ari.”

  She made a note. “Know why you’re here, Ari?”

  “No,” I admitted, knitting my brows in discomfort upon realizing she was reviewing my Torah Temimah transcript. “Not particularly.”

  “That’s perfectly fine. My name is Mrs. Ballinger. I get you into college.” She smiled with pity. “Now, did you receive any sort of college guidance in your previous school?”

  A small terror gripped me. I shook my head.

  “I didn’t think so, judging by its . . . methodology, let’s call it.”

  “Is that bad?” Perhaps there’d been some grave error on the part of Torah Temimah that invalidated my entire educational history. I began wondering whether, technically speaking, the school was, in fact, even accredited?

  “Everything’s fine,” she said. “Just seems they weren’t exactly gung ho on college, were they?”

  “Not really.”

  “As a point of reference, what percentage of the graduating class attends college, would you say?”

  “Er,” I stuttered, “a small one.”

  She glanced at her nails. “What kind of school is that?”

  “An exceedingly religious one.”

  “Hm.” She examined my transcripts once more. “The first question I should ask is if you’re even interested in attending college. I’ll tell you now that approximately ninety-nine percent of our graduates attend college. It’d be a clean one hundred percent if not for an unfortunate incident, which I won’t get into now.”

  The truth was I knew virtually nothing about college. I’d heard, of course, of places like Harvard, I had some general familiarity with some of the New York schools and knew that my mother had, briefly, attended Barnard. Still, college was always a distant world, and for most of my friends it was a taboo topic, something reserved for those indifferent to serious Torah study. I suppose I fostered some general expectation that, eventually, I’d wind up at a local university, considering that both my parents had earned degrees, but this was something my family never discussed. “Of course,” I said flatly, unwilling to reveal too much about the life from which I came.

  “I hoped as much. And your parents?”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re on board?”

  “I believe so.”

  “So you’ve discussed it with them?”

  “No,” I admitted, “not exactly.”

  She frowned. “We’ll have to sit down with them. Not to worry,” she added, seeing my concern, “it’s standard. I’ve already had preliminary meetings last year with our more ambitious students.” I pictured Amir and Davis, flanked by scowl-faced parents, jostling to be first into her office. “The important thing at present is to get you thinking about which colleges you’d be interested in and which ones you’d have a shot getting into. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I should tell you, Ari, that I play hardball. I worked for twelve years in the admission offices of Duke and Brown. I have a fairly strong sense of the terrain, I avoid circuitous talk and I treat you like an adult. If you’re not getting in somewhere, let’s not waste our time.”

  I nodded, steeling myself for a bleak view of my future.

  “To be frank, I don’t think the reputation, or lack thereof, of your former school will do us any favors. I don’t want to say your old classes and grades are . . . meaningless, per se”—she paused, tactfully—“but I assume they stand in stark contrast to the classes you’re taking here. Would you say this much is true?”

  “I’d say that’s already been proven true.”

  She smiled pleasantly. “And how has the transition been?”

  “Pretty good, thanks. I’m working hard.”

  “That’s what we ask of our students.”

  “I’m taking honors classes,” I pointed out.

  “Which is laudable, plus great for your transcript. Upward movement: that’s what I preach. Moving up is markedly better than moving down. Keep at it and let me know if you need help, will you? I want you to succeed here, so if some classes prove a bit of a stretch, we can always figure out . . . other accommodations. Sound good?”

  I returned her half-patronizing smile. “Okay.”

  “Manage expectations, Ari. That’s the goal. For all I knew, you could’ve marched in here and insisted on, oh, I don’t know, Dartmouth!” She laughed, expecting me to join in, but stopped abruptly when I didn’t. “No matter. So, we’ll meet with your parents and start drawing up schools within your range. Good?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good.”

  “One last thing: the SAT. Have you begun studying?”

  A dull ache came on in my temple. I was desperate, all at once, to be away from her collection of banners, from those glazed smiles on her walls. “I have not.”

  “Didn’t think so. What about the PSAT? Have you taken that?”

  “I—what is that?”

  She sighed, glanced at her iPhone. “You’ll need to start immediately on the SAT prep, dear, seeing as you should take the November test. In fact, here, take this name, it’s a local tutor I regularly send students to. He’s pretty affordable.” She scribbled a name and number on a card, smiled sweetly while I looked it over and dismissed me from her office.

  * * *

  CONSIDERING MY MOOD, NOTHING SOUNDED less appealing than enduring an uncomfortable lunch on the balcony. I grabbed my brown bag from my locker and made my way to the cafeteria, resolved to find an abandoned corner and eat in silence.

  The cafeteria, however, hardly made for a peaceful backdrop. An unruly line for hot lunch formed in front of Gio, the custodian, a short, well-built man beloved by the student body for the jaw-dropping jokes he delivered in a mix of Italian and Estonian. Rabbi Feldman chased down a freshman who had attempted to skateboard over a lunch table. Flirtatious junior boys flung yogurt at sophomor
e girls. I picked a mostly empty table in the far left corner, slumped down and unwrapped a particularly depressing tuna sandwich.

  “New kid?” I looked up and saw a girl across the table, a few feet to my right. She had red-brown, bushy hair and reflective fawn eyes. Her face hovered inches from a physics textbook.

  I wiped my mouth. “Pardon?”

  “Sorry if that was rude,” she said. “You are the new kid, though, aren’t you?”

  I blinked, nodded.

  “Haven’t seen you here before.”

  “In school?”

  “In this cafeteria.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, this is my first time eating here.”

  “Really? Where do you normally eat?”

  I put down my sandwich. “You know, wherever,” I said, deciding it was probably best not to mention the balcony.

  She returned to her textbook with a smirk. “You eat on the third floor. Everyone knows that.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Wouldn’t you say?”

  “You didn’t even know who I was.”

  “Sure I did. I just didn’t know if you were going by your Hebrew name or not.” She picked up her mechanical pencil, bit the eraser. “Oh, come on,” she said, rolling her eyes at the look on my face, “it’s somewhat difficult not to notice when the sacred tribe of Stark adopts someone lifted from a Chaim Potok novel.”

  I attempted to conjure something trenchant. Nothing came to mind. Instead, I gaped.

  “Kayla Gross.” She put up her hand in an ironic half-wave. “So it’s Ari or Andrew?”

  “Aryeh, actually.”

  She laughed a harsh, deep-throated laugh that made her flushed face wrinkle. “So where are they?”

  “Who?”

  “Your guardians.”

  “Funny.”

  “They do look after you, don’t they?”

  I picked at the crust of my white bread, flinging pieces on the table. “Is that what everyone thinks?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” She twirled her pencil between her fingers. “I hardly talk to anyone in this school.”

  “Why, what year are you?”

  “I’m in classes with you, for God’s sake.”