Tell It to Naomi

by Daniel Ehrenhaft

  Dear FONY,

  A) Forget about Jersey. Come on, where would you move? Atlantic City? It would be like living on a giant Monopoly board. Also, Jersey is the official birthplace of the mullet haircut. My apologies if you have a mullet. (Then you really DO have problems. Just kidding.)

  B) As far as falafel goes, the guy on 20th and 5th is your man. You’ll know when you smell his cart. His hot sauce will take you to Enlightenment and back.

  C) Bike messengers want to mow down all pedestrians, not just you. Well, unless you wronged one of them in some way …

  Okay, seriously. Don’t laugh, but your fellow Roosevelt students, new and old alike, are just as shy as you are. They have an irrational fear of strangers. Well, maybe it’s not so much irrational as natural. Or maybe it’s both. People are always frightened of something new—the way you’re frightened of New York. And I say the best way to overcome any fear (natural OR irrational) is to confront it. It’s up to you to make the first move.

  Remember Dr. Seuss? Remember the story about pale green pants with nobody inside ‘em? Just think of somebody you want to meet as those pale green pants. Walk up, right up, and introduce yourself. I mean, what do you have to lose? They’re pale green pants. If they run away from you, it’s their problem. At least you’re a human being, right?

  Good luck and STAY AWAY FROM JERSEY,

  Naomi

  I didn’t even bother to read it over. I’d second guessed myself a bunch of times when I’d written that sample, and in the end, there was no point. The final version had ended up being pretty close to the original. Best just to trust my instincts. I clicked on the SEND icon—

  “Dave?”

  I nearly fell off the chair.

  Naomi stood right next to me, with a big grin on her face. She was also holding a sheet of paper.

  “Didn’t you just tell me not to sneak up on you?” I mumbled.

  “Man, you have deep concentration. You were in a zone. Can I read what you wrote?”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to change a word. That’s why I waited until you were finished. But I almost forgot—you have to sign this. Joel faxed it to me this morning.”

  I scowled. “I have to sign something? Why? Am I going to be testifying in court?”

  “It’s nothing,” Naomi said, flapping the form in front of me. “It’s called a nondisclosure agreement. Joel just wants to make sure you don’t tell anyone that I’m the same Naomi as the Naomi in the column.”

  “But you aren’t,” I said.

  “I know. But Joel doesn’t know that. He’s worried, since he thinks you and I tried to pull off a scam earlier. It’s not that he doesn’t trust you … it’s just, you know, since he thinks that you pretended to be me the other day, he thinks maybe now you might tell someone that you’re related to Naomi.”

  I shook my head, completely baffled. “Who would I tell?”

  “Just sign the stupid agreement,” she groaned. “What’s your problem?”

  “My problem? Gee, Tell-It-to-Naomi, I don’t know. Maybe my problem is that I’m at the end of my rope and I feel like screaming. Can you help me out?”

  She laughed. “Look, Dave, it’s just … see, I’m having dinner with Joel later tonight, and it would make things easier if you signed this now. That way you won’t have to give it to him tomorrow at school. That’s why he faxed it here. He doesn’t want to deal with it there. He doesn’t want there to be any possible connection between you and me and him, so—”

  “Wait, wait,” I interrupted.”You’re going on a date with Joel Newbury?”

  She blinked. Her hand fell to her side.”It’s not a date,” she said. “It’s dinner.”

  A foul realization was dawning on me. “My God. Is that why you were cranking Hendrix? Is that why you want to tell the world you’re so happy?”

  Naomi blushed. This was not a good sign. I hadn’t seen my sister’s face turn red in over six years—not since the afternoon we’d walked in on Aunt Ruth making out with the plumber.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said after a moment. “I just felt like listening to that new greatest hits collection. Speaking of which, I had to go get it from your room. You borrowed it without asking. You always borrow my crap without asking.”

  It was an old tactic of hers: shift the attention to me when things go wrong. But for once, her talent for lying had failed. Ugh. It was painfully clear. Not only was she going on a date with Joel Newbury, she still had the hots for him. And that … well, that defied logic. Couldn’t she see what a little wiener he was? This was the same guy who’d radically altered his appearance just because she’d jokingly compared him to Jerry Seinfeld. And that was the least of his offenses. That was actually positive. What about this ridiculous form I had to sign? Forget Wiener; he was a psycho.

  “Look, are you gonna sign this or not?” Naomi demanded. She couldn’t stop smiling.

  “I’ll sign it,” I mumbled.

  And I have to admit: I couldn’t help smiling back at her. At least somebody around here really had a life. Regardless of the reason, that was a good thing. The rest of us were just faking.

  Tuesday gave me the first clue as to the madness that would follow. Not that I had any idea then. No, on that one, brief, happy day—the day the school paper ran its very first installment of “Tell It to Naomi!”—the whole insane scheme seemed pretty harmless. And fun. And sort of flattering. too, if you want to know the truth.

  There wasn’t much to the column, just the e-mail FONY had sent me, and then my response. Joel had taken care of all the downloading and formatting—the “technical side,” in Naomi’s words. In the end, it didn’t look all that different from the ad that had appeared the day before: same font, same general layout … same everything.

  I didn’t really expect anyone to pay any attention to it. I definitely didn’t expect anyone to talk about it. But after lunch I began to bear little snippets of conversation in the halls:

  “The hot sauce on Twentieth and Fifth once made me hallucinate…”

  … gonna go up to that honey in biology and be like, Yo, I got on my pale green pants. Wanna know what’s inside ‘em?”

  “Everybody is too shy around here, and I’m glad somebody finally said it…”

  I overheard my sister’s name a lot, too. “Naomi” seemed to be on everyone’s lips, wafting through the air like a juicy bit of gossip. I even caught Olga Romanoff—outside the classroom where the lit club meets, no less—asking her coffee-shop minions: “Hello? Is there anything more heinous than a mullet? Or Jersey in general? I mean, come on. You guys have read Philip Roth.”

  It was nuts. There was a real, palpable buzz.

  And I was responsible for it. Me. Mr. Invisibility. The guy who’d made it through freshman year without getting to know a single person beyond “Hey, what’s up?” I found myself chuckling out loud a few times. There’s just something so undeniably cool about knowing a secret that no one else could possibly ever guess. It was like being Clark Kent.

  But there was a downside to that. Clark Kent could never admit to being Superman. And let’s face it: he was a geek. He was cut off from people. He never quite fit in. Likewise, I wasn’t exactly the star of Roosevelt. Everybody was talking about the column except me. And it wasn’t because I’d signed that moronic nondisclosure agreement. It was for the simple reason that I had nobody to talk to.

  I wondered how FONY felt.

  I wondered who she was, more than anything. I kept eyeing insecure-looking freshman girls. (In retrospect, probably not the wisest idea.) I imagined that someday—two years from now, when I was a senior and FONY was a junior—both of us would be cool and popular and comfortable. We would be tight friends. (Oh, and I would also be going out with Celeste, who would have forsaken college just to stay with me.) But we wouldn’t know the truth, And then in a rare confessional moment, we would break down and spill. And we would hug each other.
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  The frightening thing was, this lunatic daydream made me feel better.

  I even exchanged a conspiratorial grin with Joel as we passed each other on the stairs before final period. He’d taken my sister to one of those skanky Indian restaurants on Sixth Street, where they blast off kilter disco and the odds of contracting a fatal gastrointestinal disease are about fifty-fifty. (According to Naomi, they’d had a “great time.”) If I could bring myself to smile at Joel Newbury after that—tossing in the high probability that he’d managed at least one cheap ass-grab I during the evening—well, I must have been in a good mood.

  It wouldn’t last long.

  * * *

  Celeste Fanucci was sick that Tuesday. Or something. She definitely wasn’t in school, because I didn’t see her once.

  I saw her the next day, though.

  Boy, did I see her.

  In order to fully illustrate the abomination of what happened, I have to set the stage a little:

  Last year in freshman English, we were assigned to read 1984, by George Orwell. I guess it’s one of those classics that everybody has to read sooner or later. In a nutshell, it’s about a repressive society where everybody has to think and act the same way, and they’re all suspicious of each other, and they’re constantly being spied on and encouraged to do evil by the vicious powers that be. (Sort of like one of those reality Spring Break! specials, minus the glamour and midriff shots.)

  In the story there’s a place called Room 101. It’s where you get sent for the ultimate torture. The scary part is that you don’t know what the torture will be—not exactly. You only know it’ll be “the worst thing in the world.” It’s different for everybody. It depends upon what you’re afraid of most. They tailor-make the torture to fit you personally.

  So after reading about Room 101, I wondered what “the worst thing in the world” would be for me. For the main character in the book it was rats, which I didn’t quite get. Sure, rats are gross, but in New York City they’re about as common as tourists—and in certain cases, preferable. But for me … what? Lima beans? “Smooth jazz”? Being forced to wear Grandpa Meyer’s toupee?

  I never imagined I’d actually find out.

  But that’s exactly what happened on Wednesday. The school cafeteria became my Room 101—and true to 1984, “the worst thing in the world” turned out to be something so horrifying and inconceivable that I would never have even dreamed of it.

  It was the sight of Celeste Fanucci sitting alone at a table with Zeke Beck.

  Only they weren’t just sitting together.

  She was holding his hand.

  Compared to seeing that, wearing Grandpa Meyer’s toupee would have been a freaking joy.

  Zeke Beck was Jed Beck’s older brother. He was pretty much just a bigger and swarthier version of Jed—the main difference being a dopey hippie vibe he’d honed with fuzzy sweaters and a fuzzy beard. (To his credit, the beard was thick. Old-time rabbi thick.) He was also a self-proclaimed singer/songwriter: always key for a hippie. And like Jed, he was supposed to be a notorious ladies’ man. Not that I knew this for sure. I did once overhear a girl screaming at him in the hall, calling him an ass-face because he’d made out with her sister. Or maybe it was her cousin. Whatever. As a senior, he was so far removed from my own realm of existence that I’d never given him much thought. Jed was in my grade, and we’d taken chemistry together, so I’d dealt firsthand with his particular brand of schmuck-ness … like, say for instance, the time he told me I didn’t “talk like other guys.” But Zeke and I had never taken a class together. And we never would. He might as well have gone to a different school.

  I wished he’d gone to a different school, the jerk.

  I stood there in the middle of the cafeteria, clutching my lunch tray. Hope circled the proverbial drain like dirty bathwater. Celeste was holding Zeke’s hand with both of hers. She was gazing at it. She was stroking it.

  Then they both laughed.

  At that moment I seriously considered dropping out of Roosevelt. Why not? If school was a “job,” as Cheese and I had decreed in our pact, I had the right to quit. People quit their jobs all the time. It was cool to quit a job you didn’t like. It gave you a kind of maverick nobility, the chance to become a real, honest-to-goodness rebel.

  Celeste turned to me. Her eyes met mine.

  She dropped Zeke’s hand and beckoned me toward her table.

  At first I thought she was waving at someone else.

  I glanced over my shoulder. “Me?” I mouthed.

  She nodded, laughing.

  I swallowed and did my best to ignore Zeke Beck’s puzzled frown. By the time I made it to the rear of the cafeteria, my knees were wobbling.

  “Hey, Dave,” Celeste said brightly.

  “Hi,” I said. At least she got my name right this time.

  She glanced at Zeke. “Hey, do you guys know each other? Dave, this is Ezekiel.”

  Ezekiel? I forced a pained smile. “Hey,” I said.

  “What’s up, bro?” Zeke bellowed. He returned the smile, clearly only for Celeste’s sake.

  “So, listen, Dave, I have to ask you something,” Celeste said. She spoke in a stage whisper. “The Naomi who wrote the column yesterday … that’s your sister, right?”

  I avoided her eyes. “Uh—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Celeste laughed. “Come on. You can tell me. I swear it won’t leave this table.”

  “The—uh, column?” I asked

  “Yeah, bro, the column,” Zeke said. “You’ve seen it, right?”

  “Uh—I don’t think so. No.”

  “You haven’t?” they both asked at the same time.

  “Jinx!” Zeke shouted.

  Celeste giggled.

  I shrugged. “No,” I repeated weakly. “I haven’t seen it.” Real convincing, there, Dave, I thought. I probably sounded a lot like Cain did when he was asked if he’d seen Abel around anywhere. Note to self: work on lying.

  “Well, you must be the only one left,” Zeke said. “You should cheek it out.” He shifted his gaze to Celeste. “It made me realize that I was a jackass for being so shy. It made me walk right up to these pale green pants and introduce myself.”

  Celeste giggled again.

  I wanted to barf.

  Horrifyingly enough, she was wearing pale green pants. Corduroys. I had a vivid fantasy of smashing my tray full of meat loaf and mashed potatoes over Zeke’s, aka Ezekiel’s, head.

  “Aw, come on, Dave,” Celeste said.”I swear we won’t tell, okay?” Her voice was oddly intimate—almost too much so—but in a familial way. You’d think she was my older sister. It was a nightmare. “I know this must be weird for you. I mean, I already talked to Mr. Newbury, so I know the whole deal. He doesn’t want anybody to know who Naomi really is. He won’t even admit that Naomi is her real name!” She laughed and brushed her curls out of her eyes.”But I spoke to your sister on the phone, remember? So I know that she and Mr. Newbury are friends. So … ?”

  Before I could think of another lame excuse, Zeke took Celeste’s hand. He stretched it out in his own, slowly and deliberately—as if he were conducting a palm reading. Then he leaned across the table. He brought his fuzzy face within about six inches of Celeste’s nose. He made a big point of ignoring me.

  I almost laughed. Nice work, Ezekiel! Very smooth! Subtle, too! If he wanted me to take a hike, he could just tell me. Not that I needed any encouragement. Nope. I was on my way. Maybe there was some mathematical correlation between facial hair and brainpower: the more you had of one, the less you had of the other.

  “It doesn’t really matter who Naomi is,” Zeke said to Celeste in a breathy voice. (If he was trying to be sexy, it wasn’t working. He sounded like a serial killer in one of those American Justice reenactments.) “All’s I know is she’s a genius. I haven’t thought of Dr. Seuss in so long. The thing about him … he’s a true artist. He’s a surrealist. He’s up there with Dalí. He taps into reality in a totally
skewed way, and that makes his art more real. Reading him and looking at those pictures is like … I don’t know—interpreting a dream or something.”

  Dalí? Interpreting a dream?

  And his little brother said I didn’t talk like other guys?

  Ten to one Zeke had looked up surrealism on the Internet right before lunch and was now regurgitating some tripe he’d gotten off an SAT study site. Listening to him made me want to regurgitate. No, actually—what made me want to regurgitate was the way Celeste gazed dreamily back at him, as if he somehow made sense.

  “Hey, Ezekiel, why don’t you read Dave’s palm?” Celeste suddenly asked.

  My eyes narrowed.

  Zeke blinked at her.

  “Ezekiel just taught me how to read palms,” Celeste stated with complete sincerity. She pulled her hand from his and turned to me. “You want to talk surreal? I couldn’t believe how accurate it was. You should try it. You’ll freak out.”

  I already am freaking out, I thought.

  Wow. This was no longer just a nightmare. This was hell: one of those rare times in life where you make an absurd joke and forget it and the very next instant you discover that it’s true. This was surreal.

  Zeke Beck really was giving Celeste a palm reading.

  And vice versa.

  That’s what they were actually doing.

  The guy was smooth. No doubt about it. The palm-reading angle? I never would have thought of that. No, instead, I’d come up with a bugged-out ruse involving various lies, my sister, an ass-grabber, and a phony advice column. That was my brilliant strategy to woo Celeste Fanucci. Man, I could learn a thing or two from Zeke Beck. He wasn’t as dumb as I thought. Not by a long shot. No wonder he’d decided to start calling himself by his full name. He could tell people’s fortunes now. He’d become a full-on prophet.

  “I’d love for Ezekiel to read my palm,” I said. “But I’m seeing my astrologer this afternoon, and he always gets pissed off when I ask for a second opinion.”

  Celeste glanced at Zeke.