“Oh,” Shayna had said. “I’m sorry.” But she wasn’t sure what she was sorry for. That Zoe’s bubbe had survived? “I mean — that’s awful.” It was awful that she’d survived? And then, finally: “It’s great that she survived.” Zoe nodded sadly.
Behind them, in the last row, Ari had gotten out his guitar and, as the bus rumbled into motion, could be heard picking out “Blackbird.”
Jonah was sitting at the front, next to Rabbi Amy, who’d introduced herself as “Rabbi Amy” and so didn’t seem to want to be called simply either “Rabbi” or “Amy.” She had sharp little features, lank orange hair parted sternly down the middle, and wore a crocheted lavender kippah.
“Welcome to Kraków!” Jonah bellowed into the bus PA as they drove out past the airport through big empty fields of grass. One kid up near the front broke out into claps and even a “Wooo-hooo,” and Ari had just gotten to the line about how you were always waiting for this moment to arrive, but the rest of them remained appropriately silent, riveted to their windows as if to so many movie screens.
Shayna had never been farther than the eastern seaboard, unless you counted one trip to Canada to have Passover with her second cousins (which she did not, as it had involved only one jaunt to a local mall and otherwise had been entirely contained to their house). Poland, despite her deep familiarity with Max’s journal, was a thing so far beyond her actual experience that she drilled herself to stay alert, stay aware, note the shape and hue of each blade of grass, each telephone pole whizzing past. To this end she had gotten out the journal, a pretty blue-silk-covered confection she’d painstakingly chosen from among dozens at the mall the week before. She clicked her pen a few times over the virginal white first page, relieved to be the younger sibling. There would be no one after her, no one to snoop around in her room when she went to college, no one for whom she’d be cast as unwitting guide. She wrote the date, and then: “Well, here we are in Kraków.”
The words were uneven, though; it was impossible to write smoothly while the bus lurched along. Ugly penmanship was extremely hateful to Shayna, for whom perfectly rendered, heart-dotted-i yearbook testimonials were a virtue, a character achievement worthy ultimately of Jessica and Jamie’s friendship, of grinning, shiny-haired, glossed-mouth snapshots tacked to a bulletin board in a future dorm room.
The words themselves, too, felt inadequate and wrong; the “well” distant and formal, the “here we are in Kraków” obvious. She had blighted her pretty blue journal with this inauspicious beginning. It deserved better. Something jaunty and adventurous, all-encompassing. Something factual but deeper than that. Like Max’s, but new and hers. She tore out the page carefully, along the binding, and spent the rest of the ride ripping it into ever-smaller confetti, which she let fall, finally, into the nether regions of her backpack like industrial snow.
In the lobby of the Hotel Continental, Rabbi Amy had handed stuff out. They each got blue windbreakers (One Size Fits All), blue plastic name tag holders with attached pins, and blue binders for handouts, everything emblazoned with the program’s insignia: a Star of David encircled by the words “We Are the Living!” It was everywhere, this statement, stamped defiantly onto everything inanimate. The T-shirts Jonah and Rabbi Amy wore, the luggage tags they’d gotten in the mail two weeks earlier; all things material insisted on it: They were alive, all of them, really, truly, here, breathing.
“In case there was any doubt,” spat Heather Golden at the cover of her binder that first night. Heather’s mom was friendly with Shayna’s from volunteer work at the Scranton JCC, and it was thus assumed that they would be pals, but Shayna didn’t want to commit; Heather was Goth, the whole nine yards, black hair, black lipstick, black nail polish, eyebrow ring fastened with a little stainless-steel ball.
Shayna, in truth, found the We Are the Living accoutrements pretty awesome. Max’s, when he’d returned from his trip swathed in such exclamations of Life, had cut a dashing figure for the implication that said life had begun in Poland, that he knew secret things, the knowledge of which imbued him with special powers, a special place in the world. She had been only ten at the time, and to see him get on a plane wearing innocuous jeans and a red-hooded sweatshirt and then get off another plane only a few short weeks later wearing the windbreaker and assorted accessories identifying him as The Living — well, she had been completely awestruck.
After they were outfitted in Living accessories, Jonah consulted a clipboard and handed out preassigned room keys.
Jon Abrams held his key to room 420 aloft, like a prize.
“Four-twenty, dude!” he’d bellowed at Aaron Weiner. They’d high-fived, laughing. Later they were escorted off and lectured by Jonah and Rabbi Amy, who had apparently freaked because April 20 was Hitler’s birthday, and they’d assumed Jon and Aaron were referring to that.
“What are you?” Jamie asked Jessica. They both wore, on that first day and thereafter, ultrachic, low-slung velour tracksuits; Jamie’s baby pink and Jessica’s burgundy. Jessica’s fit her perfectly and exposed a 360-degree band of taut midsection; Jamie could’ve stood to lose a few, and her band of midsection fairly bulged.
“Three-oh-two,” said Jessica, looking at her key. “What are you?”
“Four-twelve,” sighed Jamie.
“Fuck.”
“You’re with me!” Rose-Ling Horowitz squealed at Jessica, holding up her matching key. “Three-oh-two, baby!” They hugged. Jamie looked despondent. But still cute, Shayna couldn’t help thinking, eyeing the track suit, the way the legs flared just so.
“Hey,” she’d said, making her way over toward them. “Hey, Jamie. You’re with me. Four-twelve.” She offered her key as proof. Why Shayna had thought this might be good news was a mystery.
“Cool,” Jamie said carefully, in a baby voice, all the enunciation scrunched up behind her cheeks, way back alongside her molars. Jessica shot Jamie a sympathetic but victorious shrug, hooked arms with Rose-Ling, and set off to room 302. “Sarah, right?”
“Shayna.”
“Jamie,” Jamie said, pressing her palm magnanimously against her chest. She got points for that, truly: It was sweet for someone as popular as Jamie not to simply assume that Shayna already knew her name. Falsely modest, perhaps, since Shayna had just called her by name a few seconds earlier, but still.
“What’s up with the Rose-Ling person?” Heather stage-whispered as they stood in line at dinner, a meager buffet.
“Her mom’s Chinese, I think,” Shayna said. All the food was muted, colorless: bread, potatoes, garbanzo beans, white iceberg lettuce, boiled chicken breast, the ubiquitous honeydew, squares of flat white cake, white icing on the white cake.
“Lame,” Heather concluded. “Nebbishy dad with an Asian fetish. Rose-Ling Horowitz? Fucking lame.” The garbanzo beans were suspended in some sort of gelatinous goo, but Shayna scooped some onto her plate anyhow, realizing for the first time that she was incredibly hungry.
The reality of dinnertime was four big round tables with plastic tablecloths and free seating. Around one table were Ari and Jessica and Jamie, etc.; at another Zoe Fischler was sitting with Jonah and Rabbi Amy. A few randoms were at the third, and the fourth remained empty. There really wasn’t any way around it: Heather it was.