Like No Other (18 page)

“Hey,” I say, a spark of hope igniting in my chest. “Are you allowed to have sleepovers?”

Devorah laughs. “With you? Doubtful.”

“No, with other girls. You know, popcorn, pillow fights, frozen bras.”

“You’ve never actually been to a sleepover, have you?”

“Just answer the question,” I say, laughing.

“Sure,” she says. “Sometimes.”

“Could you have one next weekend?”

“Why?” She pauses. “You can look now.” I pop up onto my knees to find her sitting on the bottom step, buttoning up her cardigan.

“Ryan’s parents have a house out in the Hamptons,” I say, the idea taking shape as I talk. “They only use it in the summer; by now it’s empty most of the time. I could get the keys—”

“Jax—” she says, but I won’t let her finish.

“Just think,” I say hurriedly. “We could go up on a Saturday, come back Sunday, have a whole twenty-four hours to ourselves. Take walks in public, go out to dinner, lie on the beach. Go to sleep together, wake up next to each other . . .”

“There’s a pretty loaded time lapse buried in there,” Devorah says, blushing.

“That’s not what I meant,” I sputter. “I won’t try anything, I swear. All I want is time with you.”

Devorah nestles her chin into her palm and looks at me for a long minute. “We’d have to be back early on Sunday, since I have school,” she says.

“Is that a yes?” I can barely contain my glee.

“It’s an ‘I’ll think about it,’” she says.

I take her up to the street and say goodbye, but it’s not bittersweet this time. I know I can reach her whenever I want. I know she’s just as crazy about me as I am about her. And most importantly, I know that if I can just get Devorah away from all of this for a weekend, we can figure it out, find a way to make it work, for real. Not just as some secret star-crossed fling, but forever. Out in the open. The way it should be.

D
evorah

S
EPTEMBER
14, 7:30
AM

T
his morning I stayed in the shower much longer than is probably considered polite in a ten-and-a-half-person household. But I just couldn’t tear myself away from the warm rivulets of water coursing down my back. It felt too good. I could chalk it up to it being my first post-Shabbos shower, but it’s only been a day since my last one. And it’s not just the shower.
Everything
has felt too good for the past eighteen hours. Eating. Walking. Running my fingertips along the wood banister as I head downstairs for breakfast. And I think I know why. It’s because I know for sure now: I’ve met my
bashert
.

I know my father says that only G-d can know when two souls are meant to be together, but my feelings for Jaxon have developed into something so deep and profound that I don’t know what else it could be but fate. And it’s made me question the future my parents expect for me even more. How can anyone commit themselves to a life with a person they don’t already feel this way about? How can you blindly trust that love will follow marriage? How can you put so much of your happiness into the hands of a stranger who doesn’t even need to take a class or earn a certificate to become a matchmaker claiming to do the work of G-d? These questions don’t seem irrational or disgraceful to me, and I can’t believe that no one else is asking them.

But I try not to get too bogged down in crises of faith on this sunny Sunday morning. Breakfast has morphed into a casual affair ever since Liya moved in, and the circle of my siblings on the living room rug, surrounding the baby, who’s working on her “tummy time,” is too warm and inviting to resist. Plus, thinking about Jaxon and our date puts me instantly back in a good mood. I pour myself some cold cereal and sit down next to my mother, who is tickling Liya’s feet and singing.

“You know,” she says to Rose, “you can just move in here. I won’t mind a bit.”

“We’ll only be four blocks away, Mama,” Rose says, stirring her cup of odd-smelling fennel and anise tea, meant to help with milk production. (If the wet spots on her blouse are any indication, it’s working.)

“The nursery is almost ready,” Jacob calls from the dining table, where he is reading the paper with my father—and also, apparently, eavesdropping. “We’ll be out by Tuesday.”

My mother makes a pouty face, but this piece of information just buoys me even higher. Of course I’ll miss having Rose and the baby here all the time, but it will be worth it if it means I have to endure Jacob’s miserable, accusatory glances only two or three times a week from now on.

Liya burps loudly as if to punctuate this announcement of good fortune, and we all laugh. But then, once it’s quiet again, another sound rings out, farther away and decidedly less funny.

It’s my cell phone. And it’s
ringing
.

My mother has a cell phone. So do my father, and Rose, and Jacob, and Amos. It’s not an all that out-of-the-ordinary thing. Or it wouldn’t be, except that my phone is playing “our” song. The one we listened to in the elevator. It’s playing music—
secular
music, sung by a woman, which is the worst kind!—and it’s playing it
loudly
. So much for the volume controls. I can’t believe I didn’t just turn it off after Jax and I were done texting last night. After we were so careful all afternoon, one tiny oversight is about to bring everything crashing down.

“What
is
that?” my father asks, furrowing his brow and looking up at the ceiling. Hanna looks at me with wide, dramatic eyes, and I see Jacob look over at her, and then at me. I wish she would stop being so obvious about everything.

“Sounds like the radio,” Miri says.

“Probably outside,” Hanna jumps in. “A car with the windows down.”

“No,” Jacob says, standing up and looking right at me. “It’s definitely coming from inside the house.”

As the tension mounts in the living room, the Shirelles blithely continue their distant, moody crooning.

“No!” I spring to my feet, milk sloshing out of my bowl onto the carpet. “It’s—” My mind races to come up with some excuse, but I can’t think straight with everyone staring at me. “I’ll go see what it is,” I sputter, and run up the stairs two at a time.

The phone has stopped ringing by the time I get to my room, but I slam the door behind me and pick it up off the floor next to my bed. With shaking hands, I struggle to turn it off and then, in a blind panic, stuff it into the band of my tights, far enough down my thigh so that it doesn’t make a bulge under my skirt. So much for a lifeline. (But at least for once, I’m grateful to be wearing stockings.) I stand helplessly, trying to concoct a reasonable explanation, when the door swings open and in walks Jacob, followed by my mother, looking smug and flustered, respectively.

“Hand it over,” Jacob says, holding out his hand, the thin, bony fingers flexing in anticipation.

My only choice is to play dumb. “Hand what over?”

“Jacob seems to think you have a cell phone,” my mom says, in a tone that lets me know she’s not willing to believe it until she sees it with her own eyes.

“What? No!” I feel the chunk of warm plastic inch down toward my knee.

“There’s no use lying, Devorah, we all heard it,” Jacob says testily.

“I couldn’t find anything,” I say, my eyes flashing with real anger. “Go ahead and look around if you’d like.” I may be guilty of keeping secrets from my family, but I don’t deserve to be treated like a criminal.

Jacob pushes past me and strips my bed, shaking the pillow out of its case, lifting the mattress to examine the wooden slats underneath.

“I just cleaned,” my mother says sharply. “You’ll be making that bed when you’re done.” She crosses her arms and sighs.

“It’s in here somewhere, I know it,” Jacob mutters, moving to my dresser. He opens my top drawer and starts rifling through my underwear.

“Jacob!” my mother shouts, horrified. “Stop it right now!”

Jacob calmly closes the drawer and looks at us defiantly. “Ayelet,” he says, “she’s pulling the wool over your eyes.” I can tell he wants to say more, but I also know that Jacob is too concerned with his place in my father’s estimation to reveal what he knows without any supporting evidence. He wipes his hands on his trousers and stalks out of the room.

“Mama,” I say, not sure how to undo this damage. “I—” But she doesn’t let me finish.

“Please,” she says, holding up her hands. “I don’t know what you’ve done to set Jacob off, but make it right before dinnertime. I’ve had my fill of drama for the morning.” She turns to leave but then pauses in the doorway, looking around my room as if seeing it for the first time.

“Devorah,” she says slowly, “if you were hiding something, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?” I nod mutely.

As soon as she’s gone, tears (of shame? relief?) flood my eyes, and I shut the door softly, leaning against it just in case anyone tries to ambush me again. I take my phone out of its hiding place and press the power button.

Can u get away & talk? About to spend whole day @ library with the sisters . . . missing u :)

A knock on the door behind me gives me my second near–heart attack of the morning.

“Don’t worry, it’s only me,” Hanna whispers from the hallway. “But we have to leave for school. So, whatever you’re doing . . . you should probably finish up.”

I shut off the phone again and wipe my eyes. I know Jax was trying to help, but now I feel like I have a grenade that could explode at any second. I have to get it back to him, and I have to do it without getting caught, expelled from school, or disowned by my family.

You know, just your normal weekend plans.

• • •

The Brooklyn Public Library looks like some grand Egyptian temple rising up out of the intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway. I could stare at it for hours, studying the brilliant gold figurines inscribed on its massive front columns, but seeing as I’m limited to my thirty-five-minute lunch period (ten minutes of which I’ve already squandered taking a car service to get here), I don’t have time on my side. In fact, right now it doesn’t feel like I have much of anything, or anyone, on my side. Except, of course, for Jax. Knowing I’m standing within yards of him instantly calms my nerves, although my bones still ache under the weight of the message I know I have to deliver.

Since it’s a gorgeous weekend day for the secular masses, I counted on the library being empty, but instead it’s teeming with people—kids in grass-stained shorts slapping their way across the marble floors in candy-colored Crocs; skinny-jeaned hipster twenty-somethings clutching sweaty cups of iced coffee; elderly ladies in modest church wear tottering on pastel high heels. I scan the crowds for Jaxon, but it’s impossible to know where to start looking. The only clue I have is that he’s here with his sisters, so I head left into the children’s section, dodging unsteady toddlers and moms pushing strollers the size of tractors.

I walk along the rows of stacks feeling my heart beat wildly in my chest. Any second could bring us face-to-face, in full view of his unsuspecting family, and the buildup is almost unbearable. Is this how Jaxon felt crouched in my backyard? This hunger tinged with terror? I slip between two rows of chapter books to catch my breath. On one side the books have slid over into a haphazard avalanche, opening up a crooked window in the middle of the shelf that looks out onto the bright children’s play space in the center of the room. And that’s when I see him.

He’s sitting in a child-sized chair next to a big, low wooden table, his lanky frame folded awkwardly, adorably into the tiny piece of furniture. Next to him, a coltish young girl in braids and a floral sundress—that must be Tricia, the eight-year-old—sits with rapt attention as Jax reads to her from
The Princess Bride
, his hands waving animatedly, making her giggle. Two taller preteen girls—these must be the twins—sidle up wearing matching cutoff shorts, each holding an armful of paperbacks.

“Can’t you read it yourself?” I hear one of them ask Tricia, and the little girl shoots back a saucy look.

“I like the way he does the voices,” she says, and my heart melts a little.

“All right, Trish, we’re almost done with this chapter anyway. Let’s check it out and finish at home,” Jax says, easing out of the chair. I know I have to get to him soon, before they leave. And as I’m agonizing over how to make him see me without drawing the attention of his sisters, it suddenly occurs to me that they don’t know who I am, and they certainly don’t know what I look like. So with a deep breath, I simply step out of my hiding place and into sight.

Jax looks up, and I let our eyes meet for a fraction of a second, just long enough for the air to stop between us, sending that invisible electric current I’m almost used to now—almost. I turn as a familiar tingle travels down my spine, and pretend to leaf through a dog-eared copy of something called
Twilight
.

“I forgot,” Jax says loudly. “I have to find a book for school up in the history section. Can you guys hang here for a few minutes?”

“Whatever,” one of the twins replies in a bored tone, and then I feel him brush by me. I count out ten long seconds before I follow him, out into the din of the cavernous lobby, up a creaky escalator, and into a long room lined with rows and rows of towering bookcases, each identified by a series of letters and decimals. There are a few people in between Jax and me, and so I’m not quite sure which row he’s ducked into until I feel his hand close around my upper arm and pull me in to the historical biographies, letters G through I.

“What are you doing here?” His warm, deep voice is hushed and excited, his broad shoulders filling the aisle, blocking out the light like some kind of human eclipse. Without even thinking, I stand up on tiptoe and press my lips against his. Someone passing by us snickers, and I pull back abruptly. I can’t let myself get swept up. I have to remember the reason I came here.

“Jax—” I start, but he interrupts me.

“Don’t you have school?” he asks, his arms still wrapped around my waist.

“
Yes
,” I say, signaling for him to let go. “But I had to see you.”

“I haven’t stopped thinking about you.”

“That’s what I need to tell you—” I say.

“That you’re obsessed with me?” Jax winks, and I laugh in spite of myself.

“
No
. About the phone.” I press it into his hand. “You have to take it back. Jacob knows.” Just saying his name makes me cringe and look behind me, half expecting to see him standing there in his dark suit, his forehead dotted with sweat, his eyes narrowed, his lips twisted in a self-satisfied smirk.

“Shit,” Jax says, his smile fading rapidly. “Did he find it?”

“No,” I say. “But it went off this morning, and everybody heard it, and I know he knows I have it—and I think my parents are starting to suspect, too.”

“Shit,” he murmurs again. He slips the phone into his back pocket with a crestfallen look.

“It’s just getting too risky,” I say. “He’s getting too close, and I’m afraid that he’s really going to go digging now for something he can use to catch us.”

“Like what?” Jax’s face is tense, his normally warm eyes dark with worry.

“He’s seen you,” I say, fear flooding my chest. “He knows what you look like, and I’m pretty sure he knows where you work.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Jax says firmly. “I can handle that guy.”

“But I can’t not worry!” I say, my voice rising in panic. “There’s too much at stake. That’s why . . .” I swallow, hard. “I think we should take some time. Apart.” I’ve been rehearsing saying it for hours, but it doesn’t hurt any less this time.

“No,” he says, looking crushed. My heart breaks into a million tiny shards.

“Just for a few weeks,” I say. “Until it’s safe again.”

Jax frowns. “It’s never been safe. It’s never going to be safe, Devorah. Not if we stay here, anyway.” I know he’s right. There aren’t enough stacks in this library to hide us for another hour, let alone forever.

“I just . . . I’m getting really scared,” I sputter, and he pulls me in close.