AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We have to go,” I urge, shouldering my saucy little minx of a backpack. “Shabbat.”
Before he opens the door, he glances back once, as though the image of me in his room is too strange for words. Honestly, everything that happened here is too strange for words.
Stranger, though, is the new kind of determination pulsing through me.
I was wrong earlier. Howl is bigger than Neil and me, but it’s bigger than Westview, too. Destroying Neil to accomplish some freshman-year dream sounds so trivial when this money could change his life. God, he could even change his name. While I can’t erase what’s happened to him, it’s clear now that I can’t take a cut of the prize money. I can’t keep playing Howl just for myself. When we win Howl—if we win Howl—we’re winning it for him.
Excavated #8: A Haunted Hanukkah
by Jared Roth and Ilana García Roth
Riley tightened one of the little buns coiled on top of her head, and then the other. She wasn’t about to let her hair get in the way of this mission. Not again.
She wasn’t scared. She hadn’t been scared since she was ten, maybe eleven. Roxy was the one who got scared, who begged Riley to check inside her closet and beneath her bed for monsters. Riley had always taken her role as monster vanquisher very seriously, and after poking her head into every shadowy space, she declared in her most official voice that her sister’s room was officially beast-free.
No, she wasn’t scared, not as she crept up the familiar steps to her favorite place in the world at half past midnight. Being in the museum after hours was a privilege; Riley knew that. As she swiped her badge and waved hello to Alfred, the overnight security guard, she reminded herself she had to see the stone up close. She needed silence to allow her mind to fully process it.
The museum’s senior curator, Mrs. Graves, said it had been found on a dig in Jordan, and the image carved into it was unmistakably a menorah. It was, in fact, perhaps the oldest depiction of a menorah that had ever been found.
And yet there was something about the stone carving that hadn’t felt quite right to her, something that pulled her back to the museum when her parents thought she was asleep.
Riley drew closer, her lucky sneakers tip-tapping the tiled floor. It should be up ahead, near the other religious relics housed as part of the museum’s permanent collection.
But just as she turned the corner, she heard someone scream.
And suddenly, Riley was very, very scared.…
6:22 p.m.
NEIL MCNAIR IS ogling my parents like he can’t quite believe they’re real.
“Do you want to lead the kiddush?” my mom asks him after lighting the candles with a hand over her eyes. Maybe she sensed he wanted to by the way he was staring at them.
“I’d love to,” he says after a pause.
In the car, he lamented not having changed into something nicer, but I insisted my parents wouldn’t care that he’s wearing a shirt with an obscure Latin phrase on it. Downside: the whole Neil’s arms situation is
back.
It’s not quite sundown—read: not the best Jews—so there’s still light coming in from outside. When we got here, he took off his shoes in the hallway and shook my parents’ hands, but he could barely speak. They know the basics about him: longtime rival, infuriating, mediocre taste in literature. And Jewish, which I included in my message letting them know Westview’s valedictorian would be making an appearance at Shabbat dinner. My parents love opening our home to other Jews, and it happens much too infrequently.
My mom passes him the kiddush cup.
“Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam borei p’ri hagafen,” he says in this low, honeyed voice. The blessing over wine.
His pronunciation, his inflection—flawless. Of course they are, with his affinity for words and languages. There is so much I love about Judaism, the history and the food and the sound of the prayers, but it isolates me too. Yet here’s someone I labeled as an enemy who was maybe feeling isolated in the same way.
After what happened at his house, I’m not quite sure how to act around him. It’s clear things have changed between us; we’ve shared more about ourselves than we do with most other people. But I don’t know how to tell him that if we win, I want him to take the Howl money without it sounding like it’s coming from a place of pity.
We pass around the kiddush cup that belonged to my dad’s grandparents, silver and ornately designed. Neil takes a small sip, then hands it to me. My sip is tiny too. I wonder if he thinks I purposefully sipped from a place he didn’t. Then I pass it to my dad and try to act a little less neurotic.
After that, we recite the blessing over the challah, and then it’s time to eat. True to their word, my parents picked up mushroom ravioli and threw together a salad with my dad’s secret vinaigrette recipe.
“Do you observe Shabbat with your family, Neil?” my mom asks.
“Not very often, no. But I have a good memory, and we used to do it when my sister and I were younger.” It’s slight, but I notice his jaw tense for a split second. “You do this every week?”
“We try to have Shabbat dinner together every Friday,” my dad says. “I suppose it’ll be different when Rowan’s in college.”
