Since You Left Me (7 page)

“I will not hesitate,” I say, as seriously as I can.

“Don’t.”

“I won’t.”

“Thatta boy,” he says, and he goes down the hall.

Herschel shakes his head. “Rehabilitation? Where did you get that from?”

“I had to say something. If they think Mom is at Cedars Sinai, they’re going to want to see her.”

“You’re lying to the man’s face.”

“I’ll tell the truth eventually.”

“When?”

“I just need some time to work it out,” I say.

Just then the CORE crew passes by, the hardcore religious kids. The administration hand selected a group of particularly devout students last year and put them in an accelerated religious studies program. They even daven in a separate room every morning, personally coached by the rabbi.

“Boker tov,”
one of the guys shouts to Herschel.

Why can’t he just say
good morning
like everyone else? You don’t have to prove you speak Hebrew. Everyone in the damn school speaks Hebrew.

Herschel waves.

“I have to catch up to my boys,” he says. “Do the right thing, huh?”

“Of course,” I say.

“Yo, yo, yo!
Shalom chaverim!
” Herschel shouts to the guys, and they head down the hall together.

I turn around to see if The Initials is still there, and Tyler is at the cabinet next to mine. He’s clutching a religious studies textbook like a life preserver.

“I’m praying for your mom,” he says.

“Which prayer?” I say.

“What?”

“Which prayer specifically are you saying?”

Tyler looks flustered. I’m being a jerk, but I can’t help it.

He says, “It’s not—I don’t mean a specific prayer. I mean prayer in general.”

Tyler motions for me to come closer. He leans towards me, lowering his voice to a whisper.

“If you want to know the truth, I believe he’ll help you,” he says. He points to the ceiling.

“Who?”

“Jesus.”

“I thought you were Jewish,” I say.

“Half-Jewish. Half other things.”

“Isn’t that confusing?”

“Not really. It’s all God,” he says.

“You’re killing me. I’m dying.”

That’s what Sweet Caroline says on the phone. She never calls in the middle of the day—or any time of day for that matter. That’s why I pick up. I excuse myself from math class by holding up my phone, and then I take the call out in the hall.

Tragedy has its privileges.

“How am I killing you?” I whisper.

“Do you know what it’s like here—”

“Wait a minute, how are you calling me? You can’t have cell phones in school.”

“I’m in the bathroom,” she says, “and I smuggled my phone in.”

I sometimes forget that Sweet Caroline has it even worse than me. She’s at a superstrict all-girls Jewish school. At least my school is coed so there’s something to look at besides the Torah.

“They’re asking about Mom,” she says.

“How is that possible? You don’t even go to my school.”

“It’s Jewish geography, like Dad says. They all talk.”

“Who’s asking?” I say.

“The head of school. The teachers. Everyone.”

“Crap,” I say. “How bad is it?”

“They want to know what they can do, how they can help, how I’m holding up. You know the deal.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them to send a gift basket to the house.”

I laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Great minds think alike,” I say, even though I never considered Sweet Caroline to be in that particular club.

“It’s not funny, Sanskrit. I have to walk around looking sad all day, and it doesn’t come naturally. I’m a happy kid.”

A happy kid with a psychologist. But I don’t say that.

I say, “If it helps at all, I told them Mom is at a hospital in Orange County. So nobody can come to visit her.”

“You’re making my life miserable, and I don’t appreciate it.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would get out of school.”

“How sorry are you?”

“What does that mean?”

“Are you twenty dollars sorry?”

“Goddamn you—”

“Lord’s name—” she says.

I stop myself. Not because I don’t want to take the Lord’s name in vain, but because if I go off on Sweet Caroline right now, I could be in big trouble.

“Twenty dollars?” I say.

“A week.”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“It should be more,” she says. “But we’ll start with twenty. Remember, I’m keeping the secret, too.”

I think about ways to come up with twenty dollars a week. I’ll have to break into my book fund.

“Deal,” I say. Anything to keep Sweet Caroline on board.

“I can lie for a while,” she says, “but Mom better have a spontaneous recovery before Passover. We’re supposed to show up for the seder, right?”

Passover. Next week.

“I’ll take care of it,” I say.

I hear the toilet flush over the phone.

“Were you peeing while you were talking to me?” I say.

“I’m multitasking,” she says, and hangs up.

“I’ve got a little situation, professor.”

That’s all I have to say when I go back into math class. I don’t even walk all the way in, just stick my head in the door and hold up the phone.

“Of course,” the professor says, waving me off. “I’ll let your other professors know.”

I feel a little guilty ending school at one o’clock, but I’ve got business to attend to. Sweet Caroline’s report has me worried, and I want to get back to the house.

I walk through school in the middle of the day, all alone in the main hallway. I feel free, like the rules don’t apply to me anymore. I could walk into any room right now. I could interrupt Herschel’s science class and say I need him, pull him out. I could ask for a meeting with the dean. I could do anything.

I feel good, I feel powerful.

But as soon as I get outside, I start to feel bad again. I rush through Brentwood with my head down, afraid
someone from Mom’s yoga studio will see me. Would Mom even care if she knew I was walking around in the middle of the day? I could make some lame excuse and she’d believe me. You can tell Mom just about anything, and she’ll buy it. That’s because you have to pay attention to notice a lie, and then you have to be willing to do something about it if you do. Mom doesn’t qualify in either category.

But even she would freak out if she knew I was telling people she was in an accident. And if I got thrown out of school, I don’t know what we would do. How would we pay for college if not with Zadie’s money? Forget Brandeis. I’d be taking the bus to Santa Monica Community College every day.

When I get home, I go into my room and take Mom’s phone from under my mattress. When I turn it on, she’s up to thirty-eight messages. I need to make the phone disappear.

I could just put it in a closet, but Mom might be smart enough to use the Find My Phone app, or find someone smart enough to do it for her. That means I have to do away with the phone for good.

I pop out the SIM card and snap it in half.

Then I think about Sweet Caroline. I can’t trust her to do the right thing, even for twenty dollars. I need some leverage.

I head down the hall to her room. If she finds out I went into her room without permission, there will be
hell to pay. Not that I want to spend much time in her room. It looks like the Disney Store threw up in there.

I check around her doorframe for traps. Sure enough, there’s a piece of string near the bottom of the door-jamb. If you open it, the string falls out. Then she knows someone was in her room. She learned that trick from a book about the Mossad that Dad bought us one Hanukkah.

I open the door and catch the string so I can put it back after.

To my surprise, she’s redecorated since the last time I was in here. The Disney stuff is gone, replaced by gymnastic posters.

Sweet Caroline loves gymnastics. I keep hoping she’ll break her neck on the parallel bars, but so far I’ve been unlucky on that front. Why can fate wipe out an entire village in Southeast Asia that’s minding its own business, but my sister can do death-defying leaps on gymnastics equipment and stay healthy? It’s not fair.

I stare at a giant photo of the Israeli rhythmic gymnastics team in some kind of sexy human pyramid. Just what I need. More girls in tights. Between Sweet Caroline’s meets and Mom’s yoga classes, I’m having a tough adolescence.

It’s kind of gross to get turned on in your sister’s room, so I get down to business, looking through drawers, sliding open the closet, checking the shelves. There’s nothing interesting, or at least nothing I can
use against her. I think about where I would hide something that I didn’t want anyone to find.

I check under her mattress. I search under the bed.

I look between her books.

I’m ready to give up my search when I see an Old Testament on the shelf. A birthday gift from Herschel last year. Just what every little girl wants. A Jewish Bible.

I open it, and a paper falls out. It’s covered in sparkly stickers. I recognize Sweet Caroline’s handwriting. I start to read. Bingo.

It’s a love letter written to someone named Levi.

Every time she writes his name, she dots the
i
with a heart. Sickening.

Sweet Caroline + Levi. Levi + Sweet Caroline
. Over and over again.

What is it with our family? We don’t fall in love; we go insane.

I slip the letter into my pocket. I have leverage against her if I need it.

Sweet Caroline is in love. That seems impossible. She’s only twelve years old. How would she know what love felt like, anyway?

“Excruciating.”

That was the word Ms. Shine gave at the end of the spelling bee. It was down to Judi and me by that time, and since we kept spelling everything correctly, the words kept getting more difficult. Finally, we got to
excruciating
, which is a crazy word for second graders, but it shows you how smart we were. Or how smart we thought we were, because when Judi got the word, she smiled like she had it nailed, then proceeded to spell it wrong. She put in an
shi
instead of a
ci
.

Sucker.

Now it was my turn.

I had a lot of experience with
excruciating
. I’d studied it the night before.

All I had to do was get the word right, and I’d win.

I looked towards Judi. Her fists were clenched and there was sweat on her forehead. Her face was covered in freckles. There was even a freckle on her lip I hadn’t seen before. Freakish.

It was obvious that she was nervous, but what did I care? I was going to crush her.

I started to spell the word, but I made the mistake of glancing at her again.

Something was different.

She had the same freckled face, but now she didn’t seem so ugly to me. The idea of winning didn’t feel fun anymore. It felt almost cruel.

I realized I wanted Judi to do well in the spelling bee. I still wanted to win, but not if it meant she had to lose.

So I blew the word. On purpose.

When it went back to Judi, she spelled it correctly. And she won.

“Hah!
Got you!” she said, and she smiled at me.

I didn’t care because for the first time in my life, losing made me happier than winning.

After that, Judi liked me. We became friends. We studied together. We competed with each other. We pushed each other to do better.

Sometimes I was number one and she was number two. Sometimes the order was reversed. But it didn’t matter because we were the two smartest kids in class.

When Valentine’s Day rolled around, Ms. Shine made us write cards to everyone in the class. We walked around and put them in baskets on the front of the desks.

When Judi passed by, she didn’t put anything
in my basket. She whispered, “Check your cubby.”

That’s where I found her card later. The one where she asked me to be her boyfriend.

Judi and I did everything together after that. I dreamed about her. I smelled her when she wasn’t there. I heard her voice in my head.

We were boyfriend and girlfriend for a week. The greatest week of my life.

They say God created the earth in seven days.

Six days. He rested on the seventh.

He created me in the same amount of time. And destroyed me.

Because after a week, something happened, and it was over. Judi wanted nothing to do with me anymore. She stopped talking to me. She walked by my desk without so much as looking at me.

And I never knew why.

One time I tried to ask her, and she burst into tears and ran away.

It was over. A week of bliss followed by years of longing.

Second grade. It was the Golden Age of Sanskrit. I had a best friend, Herschel, who lived down the street.

I had a girlfriend, Judi Jacobs.

I had parents. Plural.

I had a kid sister, who was briefly adorable, innocent, and legitimately sweet.

Zadie Zuckerman was still alive, and I wasn’t trapped in Jewish school.

I had it all. And then I lost it all.

I hadn’t studied history yet, so I didn’t know that all great eras end. Civilizations rise and fall. Cities prosper and decline.

Families come together and split apart.

Such is the cycle of life.

Second grade is when I learned not to trust good times. They seem like they’re here forever, but they can come crashing down around you.

Sweet Caroline doesn’t know this. She thinks she’s in love. She thinks she’s safe.

I know better.

“Mucous. Lots of it.”

One of the ladies in Mom’s prenatal yoga class is complaining about it. From the head nods around the room, it’s obvious the other mommies-to-be know all about the mucous. I don’t see any boxes of tissues around, so I get the feeling that whatever is stuffed up, it’s not their noses.

“Mucous is very natural,” Mom says. “It’s the body’s way of celebrating life.”

“And phlegm is the throat’s way of saying good morning,” I say.

A few of the women chuckle. I like making women in tights laugh.

“My son is very funny,” Mom says, “but these are serious matters.”