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“Do you know what you want to do with your art? Mixed-media murals, or gallery shows, or what?”
He shrugs. “I’m not sure yet. I can’t imagine not making art, so I have to see wherever it takes me.”
As we eat, I try to ignore to seed of guilt in my stomach. There it is again: my inability to enjoy myself without thinking about my sister. Since Canada, there’s been a strange, tentative peace between us. I don’t want to lose that, but I also want to push past peace into something resembling friendship. I’m just not yet sure how.
Zack reaches across the table and touches my evil-eye bracelet, his index finger spinning one of the beads. Jewelry’s always itched and scratched me, but this is a link to a family member I know so little about, so when Ima gave it to me for Chanukah, I vowed to wear it as much as possible.
“That’s new,” he says. A statement, not a question. This close, I can smell his ocean-salt cologne.
“So is your cologne.”
His cheeks flush. “You got me there.”
“This was my Israeli grandmother’s, on my mother’s side.”
“Can’t say the same about my cologne.” He continues to map a path around the beads on my wrist with a fingertip. “Have you ever been to Israel?”
I shake my head. “
I want to go, though. Someday. What about you?”
“Someday,” he echoes, moving his hand away from mine. “When do you hear back from John Hopkins?”
“Johns Hopkins,” I correct, because its founder’s first name was Johns, not John. “Middle of December. A couple more weeks.”
“Johns Hopkins,” Zack says, emphasizing “Johns” with a teasing smile. “And then you’re gonna be a doctor?”
“A surgeon.”
He grins. “I like that you’re ambitious. Couldn’t get enough of Operation when you were a kid?”
“Please, like that game’s realistic. I like knowing how and why the human body works, and how to fix it if something’s wrong. Like, okay, do you know why we . . .” I grope for a way to finish the sentence. “Why we . . . blush?” I wrap my fingers around the cold water glass, then subtly bring them to my cheek. I’ve been doing it our entire dinner; I might as well acknowledge it.
“Is it like yawning? Once you start talking or thinking about it, you can’t help it? Like you’re blushing right now.”
“It’s involuntary, actually. It comes from our fight-or-flight response. When we’re embarrassed, our bodies release adrenaline, which makes our hearts beat faster and our breathing quicken, and it also makes our blood vessels dilate. That makes more blood flow to them, causing our cheeks to turn red.”
“Your blood vessels are so dilated right now.”
I hide my face with my hand. “Sorry.” I peek through a few fingers. “That probably sounded boring.”
“No,” he says. “That was interesting.”
“Really?”
He reaches across the table to pull my hand from my face, and his mouth lifts into a smile as our eyes meet. I want to make him smile like that again and again. “Yes.” Then the smile flattens, as though something’s just occurred to him. “Has Troy seemed . . . weird to you lately?”
“Weird how?”
“I barely see him alone anymore. He and Lindsay are always together.”
“I know!” It’s strange to have someone vocalize an insecurity I’m still in denial about. “They’re in love, I get it, but do they have to make the rest of us feel invisible?”
Zack blinks at me, and I realize how out of character the admission was for me.
“I mean, I love Lindsay,” I backtrack. “But I feel . . . abandoned sometimes.” Even during her pregnancy scare, she was allowed to have a crisis, but I wasn’t.
“Same. Last weekend Troy bailed on me at the last minute.”
