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One, two, three, four deep breaths, the way Coach makes us do during track warm-ups sometimes.
Then I’m out the door, blinking back tears and sprinting down the hall and into the parking lot. I’ve never skipped before. Even though I pass a few teachers, no one stops me. It’s like I’ve accumulated all this good-kid cred by being Tovah Siegel these past four years, and no one cares that a second-semester senior is about to skip the last twenty minutes of seventh period.
Fleetingly, I wonder what else I’d be able to get away with.
Where are you?
I have your backpack.
ARE YOU OK???
On my way up to my room, I type back something about my period, and Lindsay replies with a frowny-face emoji.
“Tov?” It’s Ima, calling from downstairs. Faintly, her knitting needles clack-clack-clack. She knits slower than she used to. She has to give her fingers so many breaks. “Can you help me with something?”
I sigh and tromp down the stairs. “What is it?”
She places the needles next to her on the couch. “Are you all right, Tovah’le? You look a little . . . frizzled? Is that the right word?”
Ima’s frown is deep, the wrinkles like parentheses on each side of her mouth. Depression is hitting her harder now that she’s home all day, though Aba’s been trying to work from home one or two days a week so he can keep her company and be there if she needs anything. This week, though, she’s been all alone.
“You mean frazzled.” My correction’s much harsher than I intend it to be. “No, I’m fine. Just a long day. What do you need?” I hope she can’t hear the impatience in my voice.
“The yarn.” She picks up a skein of purple wool and crushes it in her hand. “There’s a knot, and I can’t”—tug—“seem”—tug—“to untie it.” She curses in Hebrew. Hurls the ball of yarn across the room. Rage clenches her teeth and fists, reddens her cheeks.
As calmly as I can, I retrieve the yarn. It takes me a couple minutes, but I finally undo the knot.
“Todah,” she says, the anger fading. Sometimes the mood swings last an instant, making her capable of going from zero to fury at any time. “Do you want to sit for a while? You can knit something for yourself, if you want. Remember, you tried it once when you were little? You made a few scarves.”
No. That was Adina. She taught Adina how to knit, but not me.
One day, will she be unable to tell us apart?
“I have to do something upstairs,” I tell her.
When I reach my room, I rummage through all my desk drawers, tossing trinkets and dull pencils and loose papers on the carpet. Finally I find it: Gray’s Anatomy, the classic anatomy textbook. Cliché, but anyone interested in medicine has to have a copy. Aba gave it to me when I returned home from the Johns Hopkins summer program. I stare at the glossy cover, the well-worn pages with intricate drawings of the human body.
Then I yank the cover by the corner and rip it off. Fuck you, Gray’s Anatomy.
I flip to a diagram of the four chambers of the heart, two atria, two ventricles. I tear it into halves. Into quarters. Into eighths. Broken heart, so sad.
The next page I land on is a grayscale rendering of the brain. I break apart the hemispheres. I shred the cerebellum, killing this person’s balance and coordination, occipital lobe, rendering this person blind, and temporal lobe, making them forget it ever happened.
Losing Johns Hopkins must be my punishment for testing negative. It’s how I can repay this cosmic debt I owe. It’s the universe telling me luck doesn’t exist, after all. I’m lucky and unlucky all at once.
It’s the only way I can rationalize it.
I sever heads. I amputate limbs. I castrate men. I turn it all in
to confetti, and then into dust. When I finish, there are more books. Old lab reports I saved because I got As. Endless certificates of achievement and participation. All of them, dust.
The Nirvana ticket is the only thing I can’t bear to destroy. Kurt Cobain didn’t betray me. Nirvana made me no promises they couldn’t keep. I put on “Lithium” and blast it, growling along off-key.
I am acting like Adina: ruled by my emotions. We haven’t ever been that different, after all.
Adina. I’ve tried so hard with her, even when it felt impossible to do so. Maybe it’s because of Adina, though, that I didn’t get in.
My life has been eighteen years of alphabet soup, AP and SAT and GPA meant to lead me to JHU. The best biology education, then the best medical school, best residency . . .
