Like No Other (17 page)

—there’s no point in running blindly. If it’s Jacob, fine. But if it’s Devorah’s father, or the police—

17, 16 . . .

—not that we’ve broken any laws, unless letting myself into Wonder Wings counts . . . the Korean man who runs the deli next door has always seemed suspicious of me, I bet he called it in—

“
Jax,
” Devorah whispers, more urgently this time.

“
HEY!
” the voice calls out again.

13, 12 . . .

I turn around.

“Oh, good,” says a middle-aged man in flip-flops and a wife-beater. “I thought you couldn’t hear me.” He holds out my wraparound sunglasses, which I had stuck in the outside pocket of my backpack when we left the store. “You dropped these.” Devorah lets go of my arm with an audible sigh of relief.

“Thanks, man,” I say.

9, 8, 7 . . .

“Run,” I tell Devorah.

We make it. Just barely, but we make it. And ten slightly less dramatic minutes later, we’re standing in front of our destination: my perfect, secret Shabbat date spot.

“What is this?” she asks, pulling off the hood and sunglasses and peering up at the crumbling brick facade.

“Welcome,” I say, with a stupid little bow, “to
my
house.”

• • •

The basement of our building is only partially finished, which is a nice way of saying butt-ugly. There’s a cement slab for a floor, cinder-block walls, exposed beams on the ceiling, and one entire corner is taken up by a huge gas boiler, which looks kind of like a super-sized file cabinet with pipes sticking out all over. The rest of the basement is lined with boxes and furniture the tenants aren’t using, and of course I have my little training corner, which has always seemed action-movie badass but feels sort of embarrassing now that Devorah’s seeing it, the duct-taped vinyl bag standing proud on my mom’s old yoga mat. At least the candlelight helps make it look classier.

Under the guise of kickboxing practice, I came down this morning and pimped out the space a little bit. First, I cleared the center of the room and laid out a blanket. I stole some throw pillows off the couch, too, plus a few big Yankee Candle jars left over from Christmas and a folding breakfast tray. Then I went out and got some kosher snacks (again, thank you, Internet): pretzels, grapes, almonds, and—you learn something new every day—Twizzlers. It looked a little bit too much like a make-out den, though, especially with nothing but candles, so I brought down an old game of checkers to up the wholesome quotient.

We stand on the bottom step, and I watch her eyes as she takes it all in: the puffy rolls of insulation leaning against the wall, the bin of half-clothed, lazy-eyed baby dolls in the dim light, the musty smell barely hidden by the unseasonal synthetic scent of fresh-baked gingerbread.

“It’s perfect,” Devorah says, throwing her arms around my neck.

“Hey, hey—I thought you said we couldn’t do that,” I say, leaning in for a kiss. It’s downright sexy in here, and the checkers aren’t doing much to kill the vibe.

“You’re right; we shouldn’t.” She hops down the last step to the floor and kicks off her shoes. Gathering her long dress in one hand, she climbs gingerly between the candles and settles onto the blanket cross-legged. “Come sit,” she says. “Let’s talk.”

“Well, to be fair, though,” I say, playing devil’s advocate, “we’re already breaking
yichud
, so we’re batting oh for one.”

She claps her hands together and laughs, throwing her head back. “Jaxon!” she cries. “You’re speaking Yiddish!”

“I try,” I say with a grin as I slide onto the blanket across from her.

“So, first of all, Shabbat Shalom,” she says, waving her hands around her face. She looks at me expectantly. “Now you say it.”

“Oh, um, Shabbat Shalom.”

She grins. I’ve never seen her this happy, and it’s contagious.

“Now we do the kiddush,” she says. “Do you have anything to drink?” I slap my palm to my forehead, and she laughs. “It’s okay; grapes are almost the same as grape juice, right?” Devorah picks two grapes off the bunch and tosses one to me. Then she says a long string of Hebrew words, and at the end we raise our grapes in a symbolic “cheers” motion and pop them into our mouths. She shows me how to mime washing my hands in preparation for the challah—which will be played this afternoon by its understudy, strawberry Twizzlers—and then blesses the neon red candy with her eyes reverently closed.

“You’re good at that,” I tell her once we’ve eaten our snack-food feast.

“I should be,” she says, lying back on a pillow contentedly, her ringlets spread out like satin ribbons. “I’ve sat through at least two Shabbat meals a week for my entire life, which means I’ve heard it . . .” Devorah whispers to herself as she does math in her head. “One thousand, six hundred, and sixty-four times.”

“Wow,” I say. “I don’t think I’ve done anything that many times.”

“Well, my life is all about routine,” she says, and sighs. “There’s nothing new—
ever
.” She props herself up on her elbows and smiles. “Except you, obviously.”

“Does that get boring?” I ask. “Having so many rules?”

“Not for most people,” she says with a frown. “Everyone around me seems to thrive off of it. That’s why I feel so trapped sometimes. There’s literally no one who understands what it feels like to want anything else. I feel like a total—”

“
Freak
,” we say simultaneously.

“Jinx,” I say with a laugh.

“You, too?”

“It’s not the first label I’d choose for myself,” I say. “But it’s what I get called.”

“Who would
say
that?” she asks in sincere disbelief.

“Just this caveman on the basketball team who thinks he’s the love child of Kobe Bryant and Kanye West.” Devorah looks even more confused by this biologically unlikely analogy. “He’s just a bully,” I explain. “And it doesn’t help that I accidentally picked a locker in a place that people at school call the freak hallway.”

Devorah gasps. “That’s so mean!”

“I know.”

“Why do they call it that?”

“Maybe because it’s full of kids who . . . do things differently. Dress funny, or whatever. Girls with shaved heads, boys who wear makeup, that kind of thing.”

Devorah sits back up and hugs her knees. Orange dots—reflections of the candle flames—dance in her pupils. “What do you do that’s so different?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “I mean, I don’t run with the popular cliques, but I’m not on the lowest rung of the social totem pole, either. I guess I just don’t fit in anywhere.”

“That’s not how I see you at all,” she says, her chin jutting out defensively, as if in disbelief that anyone could ever not think I’m awesome. I picture her, all five feet and change, marching up to J-Riv and his crew like David confronting Goliath.

And that’s why you’re wonderful,
I think.

“Thanks,” I say instead. “But I can’t help but feel aimless. I feel like I’m just reaching for . . .
nothing
right now. I don’t know what I want to do. My only real life goal so far is to go to college, and that’s only because I don’t have a choice.” As soon as the words are out, I want to shove them back in, rewind like one of the scratchy VHS tapes my mom still hoards under the TV. I know Devorah would probably do anything to have my kind of problem. She’s trapped by too few choices, while I feel trapped by too many. It’s too bad we can’t share some choices and even it out.

But instead of looking angry, Devorah just smiles. “You don’t know what you want to be when you grow up?” she asks, teasing a little. “Maybe a Ghostbuster?”

“Ha ha, very funny.” I toss a grape at her. “But no, of course I don’t know what I want to be yet. Why, do you?”

Devorah rests her chin on her crossed arms. “I didn’t even consider it until recently,” she says. “But if I got to pick, I think I would go to nursing school and become a midwife. Deliver babies.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Why?”

“Seeing my niece get born was a turning point for me,” Devorah says, her eyes lighting up so bright that for a second I could swear someone flipped on the naked bulb dangling over our heads. “It happened the same night I met you,” she continues, smiling into her knees. “That night changed everything. In the span of an hour my whole world cracked open, and I saw
life
. Literally, I saw life being born, and then I met you, and I saw a life that was so different from the one I’d been living. I saw a future that could be so different. And that’s what I want to do. I want to bring more life into the world, you know? I want to be there when other people experience that moment.”

I am in love with you.
The words are on the tip of my tongue, and the only thing I can do to beat them back is kiss her, so I do. I crawl over on my knees and take her face in my hands and I kiss her, long and gentle, wanting her so bad it almost scares me. When I finally pull back, she smirks at me and runs her fingers through my hair.

“I didn’t know you felt so strongly about childbirth,” she says.

I roll my eyes and kiss her forehead, settling back against the pillow with her head nestled in the crook of my arm. “I don’t,” I say. “But what you said, how
you
feel about it, is amazing. I don’t feel that way about anything.”

“Nothing?” She turns on her side and rests her hand on my chest. I could get used to this. I never thought I’d pray to be stuck in my elderly landlady’s mildewy basement for all eternity, but here I am.

“I don’t know,” I murmur. “I mean . . . I like music, but I don’t know if I want to be a producer. I like kickboxing, but I don’t want to train rich white ladies at a gym.” Devorah laughs, and I get bolder. “I love being with you,” I say slowly, “but that’s not a career . . . unless you need a houseboy when you’re a big famous midwife.”

“You can be my househusband,” she says. “You can stay home and raise the kids.”

After that, we’re both silent for a long time. It’s crazy scary to think that far into the future (although maybe it doesn’t feel that far for her, if her friends are all getting married at eighteen), but it’s also unspeakably exciting to imagine that something like that could be in the cards for us someday. I want to say exactly the right thing, to reassure her without overwhelming her, but I’m too afraid of saying the wrong thing. Finally, after five or ten minutes have gone by with nothing but the clank of the boiler and the faint strains of a TV upstairs, I find the ability to form words again.

“Can I ask you something?” I say.

Devorah nods into my neck.

“Hypothetically, can we really do this?” I ask. “Can we choose each other?”

“I don’t know,” she says softly. “I didn’t think so at first. But then . . .”

“What?”

Devorah sits up and turns to look at me. “There’s this girl I went to school with, Ruchy,” she says. “She disappeared from the neighborhood abruptly, and I hadn’t seen her in a long time. And then last week, I found out that she left.”

“What do you mean, left?”

“I mean she left the community,” Devorah says with a far-off look in her eyes. “She moved in with her boyfriend. She just . . . left.”

“That’s allowed?” Now I sit up, too.

“No!” Devorah’s small hands ball reflexively into fists, but then she relaxes. “Or at least, I never thought it was. I grew up being taught that the world outside was immoral.” She casts her eyes down. “Honestly, I didn’t know better. I looked down on it, on all of you.”

“So do we,” I say guiltily. “About you.”

“It’s convenient, at least,” she says, sighing. “Mutually exclusive.”

I tuck a curl behind her ear, letting my fingers trail down her cheek. “But it doesn’t have to be,” I say. “Your friend Ruchy—she broke through, right? That means we can, too.”

Devorah smiles, but her eyes are sad. “Maybe,” she says. “But it’s easier for you. You can pass back and forth. I’m afraid that if I leave, I won’t ever be welcome home again. And I don’t hate it, you know?” Her chin trembles as tears fill her rain-cloud eyes. “My family is everything to me, and there’s so much I love . . . I want to be able to have both. You
and
them.”

“Listen,” I say. “No matter what, you’ve got me, okay? You’ll always have me.”

Devorah stares at me for a long minute, the light flickering across her face, almost like we’re back in the elevator. Except this time, no one’s waiting outside for us. And this time, we can’t control ourselves anymore.

I’m not sure who moves first, but within seconds we’re all over each other, Devorah’s hot tears staining my cheeks as I pull her against me and taste her lips, breathe her oxygen. She grabs the back of my neck, and my hand leaves her waist, operating as a free agent from my lust-paralyzed brain, tugging at the zipper of her hoodie, reaching in, cupping her breast. She moans, and I gently ease her back onto the blanket. The tension that’s built up in me over these weeks of waiting is overpowering. I feel like I’m going to explode.

But then Devorah turns her face away, puts a hand against my chest, and pushes. It’s the universal sign for
stop
, so I roll off, panting. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“No,” she says, her face plump and flushed, her eyes wild and dazed. “You didn’t do anything I didn’t want. We just . . . can’t.”

“I know,” I gasp, trying to turn off the electric current buzzing through every inch of my body.

We lie there for a few minutes listening to each other breathe, until her hand migrates over to mine, and we just hold on, splayed out on the basement floor like stargazers.

“I should probably go,” she whispers.

“When can I see you again?” I ask.

“I don’t know. But soon. I can’t stand this.” She gets up and finds my backpack, pulling out her clothes. “Could you . . .” she says awkwardly, and I turn over and I close my eyes as she stands in the corner to change.

“This is just how it’s gonna be, huh?” I mumble into the blanket. “Underground meetings, sneaking around, no time to do anything but talk about how we can’t do anything?”

“For now,” she says. “We just have to wait until Jacob stops hovering. And he will. He has a new baby, and his rabbinical studies. I’m actually amazed he has so much time to stalk me as it is.” It’s a joke, but I can’t laugh. I’m suddenly in a kind of terrible mood, all my endorphins dive-bombing, reality seeping back in. As long as we stay in Brooklyn, we’ll always be hiding. The only way to get the time we need to give our relationship a running start is to get away somewhere. And not permanently or anything—I know we can’t go the white-picket-fence route at sixteen without so much as GEDs—but just for a few days. Even just for one night.