by David Hopen
“Master plan? I seem like I have such a thing?”
“Yeah, actually,” I said. “You of all people absolutely do.”
She hesitated, though instinctively I knew this was for effect, that she absolutely intended to open herself to me. “I want to go to Juilliard,” she said. “I’ve wanted to go ever since I was a little girl. But my parents want Penn.”
“Why’s that?”
“They met there. Fell in love there. Had their wedding there. It’s where they want me to be a premed and meet my spouse, just like they did.”
We stopped walking, peered silently into the water. Lightly, she ran her fingers through her hair. What I wanted was to confirm for her that this arrangement seemed unfair, particularly given the simple and indisputable fact that she was a singular talent. Instead, too neutrally, I asked: “So what’ll you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” I said, “you’ll just get into both. Then you’ll decide.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“You don’t think you could get into Penn?”
“I do think I can get into Penn.” She said so confidently, though without haughtiness. Only people with absolute knowledge of their self-worth, I found myself deciding, are capable of appearing so effortlessly poised. “It’s Juilliard I’m worried about.”
“I don’t think you need to worry. You’re a prodigy.”
She stiffened, leaning against the railing separating us from the water.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I despise that word.”
“Really? If anyone ever called me a prodigy, I’d probably break out in dance.”
A brief moment of wind tearing over water. Sophia shivered slightly. I wanted, more than anything, to hold her. “What makes you so confident in me?” she said.
“You’re Sophia Winter.” For weeks I’d been shouting her name in my head. In the safety of my interior life, her name conjured intimate worlds. It provided warmth, it induced euphoric helplessness. Her very name was an object of abstraction to which I tethered fever dreams I dared not pursue. Saying it aloud felt like relinquishing some secret.
“I’ll end up in medical school,” she said. “I know it. I’ll end up like everyone else.”
I prayed she couldn’t see me reddening in the dark. “You’re not like anyone else. Not remotely.”
“My parents want me to be. I want to be. But unfortunately you’re right. I’m not.”
We walked onward again without speaking.
“What about your parents?” she asked, realizing I had either too much tact or too little audacity to challenge her previous statement. “What do they do?”
“My mother’s a teacher,” I said. “My father’s an accountant.”
“Really? I assumed he was a rabbi.”
“He wishes.”
She leaned toward me. Our hands, swinging at our sides, inadvertently brushed. “He’s that religious?”
“He’s extremely—serious, let’s call it.”
“But your mother?”
“Yeah, I mean, she is, too, though maybe not as much.” Providing insight into my parents’ spiritual lives would have been grounds for kareth back in Brooklyn. “She was raised differently.”
“How was she raised?” Sophia asked. “The way we were?”
I tried imagining a childhood among my current friends. Would seventeen years of shared experience have altered my place in our hierarchy? Was it Brooklyn that made happiness feel permanently underemphasized, my relationship with my surroundings irreparably tenuous, or would I have felt such things, even worse things, living only in Zion Hills? What would it be like to unlearn loneliness? “You and I weren’t raised the same.”
She smiled knowingly. “Sorry, forgot for a moment.” She clutched at her bare shoulders. “But they like it here, your parents?”
“My mom does,” I said. “Actually, she loves it.”
“I hear from Rebs that she’s become fast friends with Cynthia.”
“Yeah, she’s pretty taken with her,” I said. “The entire lifestyle here, really.”
“What about your father?”
“I don’t know.” Then, rocking on my feet: “No, truthfully.”
“And that’s because—what?” she asked. “Because women wear pants? The school’s coed? There’s less Torah learning?”
“Yeah, partially. But I also think he misses being in a culture where everyone’s constantly preoccupied with one thing.”
“Fashion?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Avodat Hashem. It’s a difference in priority. Or obsession, maybe, I don’t know. As in, do we consciously consecrate every element of our waking lives to growing closer to God, or do we live within a structure that allocates some time for worship, other time for existing in the greater world and then time for synthesizing the two.”
She thought this over, though I sensed she was only pretending, that she had formulated a response immediately and was delaying for my sake. “Do you agree more with your mother or father?”
“I mean, coming here was a substantial culture shock.”
“Certainly looked like it. But now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m still figuring it out.”
She grabbed my elbow so that we stopped walking. “I want you to tell me something.”
“What?”
“Anything.” Hands clasped together. Her right thumb probing her left wrist. Nervous blinking. “A secret.”
“I don’t have secrets,” I said.
“We all have secrets. I want to hear something you’ve never told anyone.”
I studied the discrete features of her face: her precise eyebrows, the faint lines in her forehead, the freckle below her left ear. I was so close to her that I could no longer really see her, so close to her that she was a blur of music, breathing, light. “My friends,” I said quietly. “From Brooklyn. I don’t like them.”
Her look of utter calm disconcerted me. Should I ever receive the full glare of her attention, I knew then, I’d have no hope of hiding. “So?”
“What do you mean ‘so’?”
She looked at me as if she were only peering into a mirror. “How long have you known them?”
“Only my entire life. They’re supposed to be my best friends.”
“People drift,” she said, unimpressed. “Everyone drifts.”
“But what if I never liked them,” I said in a voice I didn’t recognize. “What if sometimes I hated them. When I was with them I felt like I was by myself.”
She looked at me, unblinking. “I know what it means to be alone.”
A pause. “Well,” I said, “your turn.”
The night was beating heavily on us. Her gaze stayed on me, unfazed. “I wish this were a date.”
The floor shifting beneath me, happiness ringing from all four corners of the earth. “I’ve never actually been on a date,” I found myself admitting. I winced, waiting for the insult, but she remained still, observing gently. She was heart-wrenching, she was thoroughly unattainable. My knees, all at once, felt weak, as if I’d been walking for hours.
“I like that idea very much.”
A couple approached from the distance, waving madly. “Thought we lost you,” Noah called. “Let’s get out of here.”
* * *
“I APPRECIATE YOU COMING, PARTICULARLY during the holiday,” Mrs. Ballinger said dryly. We were in her office, my parents on either side of me, everyone doing their best to smile sweetly. I’d been sitting in the dining room the night before, working through an unpalatable stretch of biology, when my mother interrupted to tell me the Academy had called to request a college guidance meeting.
“Must be a good sign,” my mother said, beaming. “They wouldn’t meet with just anyone, would they?”
“Actually they would,” I said, imagining Mrs. Janice’s Southern drawl on the other end of the phone. “In fact, they literally do.”
“So. Ari.” Mrs. Ballinger drummed her ring-laden fingers on her nearly empty desk. “You’ve had ample time to get acclimated since our previous conversation.”
“Yes,” I said after too long of a beat, realizing she expected her statement to elicit some response.
“And how have things been?”
“Better,” I said evasively.
She peeked into a folder containing my grades. “Academically, too, you’d say?”
“For the most part.”
My mother, to my left, shone with pride. “We’re proud of how he’s doing. I just have to say that, Mrs. Ballinger.”
Mrs. Ballinger and I met eyes. “Yes,” she said curtly. “Certainly be proud. Never an easy adjustment, particularly this late in the game. Still, I’d prefer to see some grades raised ever so slightly.”
“Oh?” Now my mother looked distraught, as if she’d been told I was failing. My father, painfully polite, sulked silently. He had refused, at first, to attend the meeting, insisting that I ought to spend two years, at minimum, in a post–high school yeshiva before even considering pursuing a degree. This was what he’d done, he explained at length, and what the great majority of his family had done as well. My mother, however, won out.
“In biology,” Mrs. Ballinger added quickly, recognizing my mother’s distress. “That seems to be his most challenging class. His math has improved.”
“But he did so beautifully on his English paper,” my mother blurted.
Mrs. Ballinger smiled, amused. “So I’ve heard from Mrs. Hartman.”
I perked up. “You did?”
“She told me at lunch the other day. She was highly complimentary, Ari. Unusually complimentary.”
I felt a burst of gratitude for Mrs. Ballinger. My mother’s face lit up once again, diffusing some atmospheric tension. Even my father nodded cautiously.
“Now. To the nitty-gritty.” Mrs. Ballinger again surveyed my folder. “Have you begun considering particular colleges?”
We hesitated, nobody wanting to admit we hadn’t so much as discussed a single school.
“Not extensively,” I finally said.
“Not extensively,” Mrs. Ballinger repeated. “Hm. And that means—”
I provided a meaningless shrug. “We’ve looked at only a few places.”
She leaned forward at her desk. “And what have you in mind?”
“Somewhere with a strong liberal arts program,” I said, echoing Sophia’s words, impressing my mother. “I want to study literature.”
“What’s that?” my father piped up, unable to help himself. My mother countered with her finest death glare.
“Lovely,” Mrs. Ballinger said, glancing curiously toward my father. “A premature decision, of course, but there are a number of wonderful liberal arts schools—”
“Which ones do you like?” my mother asked. “Stanford welcomes writers, don’t they?”
“Stanford?” my father said. “That’s one of those Ivies, yes?” I did a facepalm. My mother assumed a look of abject humiliation.
Mrs. Ballinger threw back her head, emitting a high-pitched, carefully restrained laugh. “That’s really excellent, I’ll need to jot that down for the book on college guidance I’m writing. But, yes, well, to your point, Mrs. Eden, I told Ari we’ll need to stick to schools within the realm of possibility.”
“Ivies are out of the question?” my mother asked, unable to disguise her disappointment. “All of them?” My heart broke, mostly for myself.
Mrs. Ballinger attempted an empathetic smile, only to pivot to an authoritative throat clearing. “Nothing is certain in admissions. It’s all one big crapshoot. That said, I’ve been doing this twenty years. I’ve seen how things work.”
“I see,” my mother said, looking now to the carpeted floor.
“Legacy can help. Where did you two go?”
“Well,” my mother said uncomfortably, “I started at Barnard.”
“Excellent.”
“But I transferred.”
“To where?”
“Stern College.”
“Yes, less helpful for Ari’s cause.”
“But I did earn a degree from Teachers College—so there’s some legacy, isn’t there?”
“Well, probably not much, to be brutally honest.” Mrs. Ballinger shuffled papers. “And you, Mr. Eden?”
My father regarded her with unnecessary defiance, as if she were the person most responsible for tarnishing his son’s mind with toxic secular ambitions. “Yeshiva.”
“Yeshiva University? A great option I’m going to push for.”
“No. I mean I went to yeshiva first.”
“Oh. And afterward?”
“Queens.”
“Okay, got it.” She slid a paper across the desk. “I’ve prepared a list for you to research. I’ve organized schools by categories—reaches, possibilities, safeties.” Yeshiva University. The New School. Brooklyn College. Baruch.
My heart sank. “Thank you.”
“Let me also note I’m well aware of the difficulties in selecting a college as an Orthodox Jew. Finding the right campus with kosher food and prayer services and a social life and weekly Sabbath options—the whole nine yards. Rest assured, I’ve been there, done that many times over and am here to help.”
“Yes, well, thank you again,” I said politely, slightly bewildered. I imagined someone like Oliver laughing at receiving a speech about how to locate a minyan on campus. Then I imagined a world in which I told my parents I’d be attending school in a faraway land without any access to kashrut. I couldn’t envision their reaction. “I appreciate that.”
“Absolutely,” she said cheerfully. “Now, lastly. Your meetings with Adam Bearman? How have they been? Productive?”
“He goes every other Sunday, you know,” my mother said approvingly.
“Yeah, mostly productive,” I lied. Bearman had been anything but helpful: during our most recent session, he had me accompany him to pick up bagels. (“New environments sometimes bolster productivity,” he reasoned. “Plus I’m hungry as shit.”)
“Marvelous. I want you taking that November SAT.”
I stood to leave. “Sure.”
“A fine boy you have, Mr. and Mrs. Eden,” Mrs. Ballinger said unconvincingly, dismissing us for the next family.
* * *
THE LIST BOTHERED ME. Never was I under the impression that I was on the road to major academic achievement. Until now, in fact, I’d never so much as thought twice about college. And yet, I couldn’t shake my lingering disappointment. I knew I couldn’t compete with my friends: Amir was hell-bent on emulating his grandfather and studying at MIT; Noah was beginning to flirt with recruiters at Northwestern, where his father ran track and field; Evan could write his own ticket. And I wasn’t exactly opposed to the schools Mrs. Ballinger had suggested; for the most part, I hadn’t even heard of them. What bothered me was the thought that this was it: a single year of exhilarating, brightly lit dreams, and then an immediate return to my old life—slinking back into my cupboard-sized Brooklyn room, falling back in with Shimon Levy, morphing slowly into my father. I could not bear coming face-to-face with a life I now knew I wanted, only to have to give it up.
I spent the remainder of the break this way: inexplicably crushed by college prospects, obsessing over my night with Sophia, stumbling halfheartedly through schoolwork. We had a couple of miserable basketball practices, and I met once with Bearman, who, after mocking me for observing Sukkot (“you mean to tell me you believe God descended on our forefathers and beseeched them to shake tree branches?”), gave me a full-length practice test on which I didn’t do very well. When I got home I told my mother my projected scores. For the first time in a long while she embraced me, hiding her look of sympathy. She insisted, with her arms around me, that I was the most intelligent person she knew.
* * *
WE WERE IN TANACH ON our first day back when we heard a gentle knock. Rabbi Feldman, mid-sentence, stopped lecturing on why we
read about Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones on Pesach. Rabbi Bloom hovered at the doorframe.
“Please pardon me, Rabbi.” He cleared his throat officiously. “I was hoping to briefly borrow three of your students. Mr. Davis, Mr. Samson, Mr. Stark, a word, if you will.”
Through the window I could see Sophia loitering in the hallway. Davis and Amir stumbled out, looking grim. Evan went last, wearing the ghost of a triumphant smile while making a concerted effort to avoid Sophia’s eyes. A strange unease settled over us, even after the candidates disappeared from view.
After a few short minutes the door reopened. Davis, hands probing the pockets of his tweed sport coat, looked dumbfounded. Amir refused to lift his head.
“Where’s Ev?” Oliver piped up.
“Quiet, Bellow!” Rabbi Feldman snapped, more from habit than from anger. He bore his own look of confusion.
Evan returned with the period nearly over, dark-blue eyes aflame. When the bell rang no one stood to leave. Rabbi Feldman dawdled, shuffling lesson notes. Eventually, biting back his own curiosity, he nodded and left us alone.
“Well?” Oliver said, breaking the silence. “Anyone have the decency to tell us what happened?”
Evan slung his backpack over his shoulder and headed for the door. “She won,” he said, leaving the room.
* * *
“YOU DON’T REALLY THINK HE fixed it, Ev?” Noah was saying, looking skeptical. We were on the balcony, beneath a ragged, violet sky. A drizzle had begun to fall.
“Pretty implausible,” Oliver said brightly. “Bloom loves you too damn much.”
“I don’t know why you guys are even remotely surprised.” Amir was doing something where he’d pretend to receive a text, spin his phone over his legs and then repeat the process anew. “Did you think Evan Stark was capable of conceding defeat?”
Calmer now, stretching his legs, Evan shrugged. “My position remains unchanged.”
“But, like, what’s your evidence?” Noah asked.
“I know how Bloom works,” Evan said. “I could read between the lines.”
“Come off it,” Amir said gruffly. “Davis, Sophia and I were standing right there. He didn’t say shit.”
“You were,” Evan said, “until he dismissed you all back to class.”