“Did you call me?” Mom says. She’s suddenly in my door, dripping wet in a towel.
I jam her phone into my pocket. The e-mail indicator chimes.
“What’s that?” she says.
“Nothing,” I say. “Hey, Mom, forget the ride. I’m going to walk with Herschel this morning instead.”
“You never walk with him anymore.”
“That’s not true,” I say, even though it is.
“Hasn’t school already—”
“I just called him. He’s late, too,” I say. “Funny coincidence.”
“Alright then. I have to run. I’ve got a level I-II at 8:30 and I can’t be late.”
“Good luck.”
“Don’t forget our prenatal class this afternoon.”
“I’m there. I promise,” I say.
And unlike Mom, I keep my promises.
Mom smiles and pats at her thigh with the corner of the towel.
“By the way, have you seen my phone?”
“Haven’t seen it,” I say.
Mom shrugs and disappears down the hall. Five minutes later she’s out the door, and I’ve got a choice to make. Do I go to school and lie all day? Or do I lie once and stay home?
I decide to risk it at school.
“The universe is not what we think it is.”
That’s what Professor Schwartzburg says in the middle of English class that afternoon. Then he pauses as good teachers do, waiting to see if he’s hooked us.
He hasn’t. It’s English class. Why is he talking about the universe again?
We hate him for this.
Or maybe it’s just me.
I’m in a terrible mood from dodging questions about Mom all day. Herschel wasn’t kidding about the school community leaping into action. Everyone is worried. Everyone is asking about our family. Each question has put me in a progressively fouler mood and forced me to lie more. My usual patience with Schwartzburg’s philosophical musings is hanging by a thread.
“There is a great, mysterious force out there,” Professor Schwartzburg says. He adjusts his sports coat, yanking it down by the flaps.
“What we thought was the fabric of the universe is not the fabric at all,” he says. “There is something greater underneath—a force that has been there all along, but has been invisible to us until recently.”
He fails to mention there is a great, mysterious force in here, sitting four rows in front of me. It is in the form of a girl.
Not just any girl.
The Initials.
It’s hard to ignore her when I see her every day in Schwartzburg’s class. Four rows. That’s all that separates us. That means I’m treated to an exquisite view of the back of her head, her left earlobe, the flip of hair when she uses her finger to push it behind said earlobe, the left shoulder upon which the hair falls, and sometimes, if only for a second, the side of her face as she turns to whisper to Talya Stein. I watch her lips moving from four rows away and try to guess what she’s saying. I imagine I am Talya Stein’s ear and The Initials’ words are for me, each one carried on a puff of sweet breath.
“You will not find this force in our physics or astronomy textbooks,” Professor Schwartzburg says. “Scientists have only begun to understand it. They call it dark matter.”
The Initials twists a flap of hair, spinning her finger around and around.
She might as well be spinning me.
The Initials is my great burden to bear. I have to see her each day, all the while knowing we will never be closer than we were in second grade. Our glory days have been over for almost as long as my sister has been alive.
If that isn’t a powerful force, I don’t know what is.
“Excuse me, professor,” Herschel says. “What does any of this have to do with Gatsby?”
We’ve been reading The Great Gatsby, which I’ve taken to calling The Great Goyim when Herschel and I are alone.
“What does anything have to do with anything?” Professor Schwartzburg says.
Herschel shakes his head, and his payis, the little curls that religious Jews wear in front of their ears, jiggle back and forth. Herschel is the only one who lets his payis grow in our school. He’s the most Jewish kid in Jewish school, and I am the least. Although my family is technically Jewish, without Zadie’s money I would never be in religious school. We’re like a lot of families in Los Angeles. Not seriously Jewish. More like Jewish adjacent.
Herschel’s family used to be just like us. They pushed him into Jewish school solely for the academics, and he hated it as much as I did. He lives down the street, and we’d walk to school every day bad-mouthing the hell out of the place.
Then Herschel went on a school trip to Israel along with most of the freshman class. He tried to get me to come along, but I told him the Jews spent forty years wandering lost in the desert. Why should we volunteer to go back?
Something happened to Herschel on that trip. When he returned, he took a cab directly from LAX to my house. I opened the door to find a bearded kid in a black suit and a fedora.
“Herschel? Is that you?” I said.
“We’ve got it all wrong, Sanskrit.”
“What do we have wrong?” I said.
“God. Judaism. It’s not what we thought it was.”
“What is it?” I said.
“It’s… life or death,” he said. “We have to find God. It’s our true purpose in this world.”
That’s when I knew I’d lost him. He left L.A. as my best friend and returned as Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof. Sometimes kids get flipped liked Herschel, but a few weeks of L.A. traffic and In-N-Out Burger help them come to their senses. But it’s been nearly two years since that trip, and the old Herschel is nowhere to be seen.
Now that Herschel is a super Jew, I’m all alone at the bottom of the religious pack, slightly below Tyler, who’s only Jewish on his mother’s side. He’s part of the executive committee’s diversity initiative. Actually, he’s the entire diversity initiative. They tried to recruit a few non-observant Jews when the economy slumped, but none of them lasted except him. It turns out that not a lot of non-observant Jews want to observe. Big surprise.
“Professor, I want to read Gatsby,” Tyler says. I notice he’s been paying close attention since we started reading the book. Something about Gatsby’s search for identity is very moving to him.
“Gatsby is all of us,” Professor Schwartzburg says, seeming to get his lecture back on course. “Just as this mysterious dark matter winds its way through everything.”
So much for back on track.
“I agree with Tyler,” I say, trying to score some points. “I’d like to get back to the novel.”
I’m hoping The Initials will turn around and see who said it, but she doesn’t. Back of her head. That’s all I get. Eight months of rear view. While it’s not a terrible sight, it’s only half of what I want.
“We will return to the novel, of course,” Professor Schwartzburg says. “By the way, how is your mother, Aaron?”
Another teacher who won’t use my first name.
“I’m waiting for word,” I say.
“Keep your cell phone on,” Schwartzburg says, which is against school policy, but overnight I’ve become the guy who gets special treatment.
“Oh, it’s on,” I say.
“We’re here for you,” Barry Goldwasser says to me.
I hate Barry Goldwasser.
He’s the founder of the Mitzvah Minute Club, our school service organization. Their mission statement? Good deeds in under a minute.
They only do mitzvahs that can be done in under a minute. On one level it’s genius. You pick up a piece of trash, you help an old lady across the street, you offer a dollar to a homeless man. It doesn’t cost you much in terms of time, money, or effort. Goodness is spread across the barren and selfish landscape that is Los Angeles, one sixty-second burst at a time.