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She laughs as though I have made a hilarious joke. I haven’t. “How’s high school treating you?”
“All right. Only eight more months of it.”
“Your mom says you’re keeping busy with the violin, and of course we’re all so proud to hear about your sister. I heard she was a National Merit Scholar!”
“She was,” I say through gritted teeth. I don’t bother correcting her about the violin.
Everyone always talks about how noble Tovah’s pursuits are, how brilliant her mind is. We need more women in STEM, after all, and apparently Tovah is going to singlehandedly solve the imbalance. She is going to save lives—but I am going to enrich them.
“Well. I’ll leave you two. Simcha, we’re still on for the faculty breakfast next week?”
“I never pass up pancakes,” Ima says with a big smile, which doesn’t leave her face until Mrs. Augustine’s heels click-clack out of earshot. Then she turns back to me. “I brag about both of you,” she says, as though she can tell from my stiff posture that Mrs. Augustine’s words have hit a nerve. “You know how much I treasure your music.”
Logically, I know my parents don’t play favorites. But I have always believed my mother understands me better than she will ever understand my sister.
“I’m no National Merit Scholar, but thank you.”
“You are at least a hundred other good things. Don’t let what she said bother you, okay?”
I shrug. Ima returns to grading her assignments, and I start cleaning the classroom. As I push the vacuum across the carpet, I force my thoughts somewhere happier. I can still feel the warmth of Arjun’s hand beneath mine. Wouldn’t he have moved away faster if he didn’t like me? The thought builds me back up, restores my confidence.
As far as I know, Arjun doesn’t have a girlfriend, though last year he hinted at it. Occasionally, he used the pronoun “we,” which sent shivers of envy through me. We are going to the farmers’ market Saturday. We are going to the symphony next week. I was only a me.
Once when I used the bathroom, I found a tube of wild rose–scented moisturizer in the medicine cabinet. Did she simply leave it there one day, or did she regularly spend the night? Was she moving in? I squeezed a dime-size amount onto my palm. I wondered if Arjun liked when she wore it. If it made her skin soft when he touched her with his long, beautiful fingers. Then I panicked. Arjun might notice it when I got back to the studio, so I turned on the water and scraped my hands until they no longer smelled sweet like Arjun’s girlfriend.
When I checked a few weeks later, the lotion was gone, and when Arjun talked about his weekend plans, his “we” turned back into an “I.”
“Adina?” Ima’s yell penetrates my eardrums over the vacuum’s roar. I switch it off. “I’ve been calling you!”
“Sorry,” I say. “The vacuum—”
She interrupts, waving me over. “Come here for a second.” Before Huntington’s, she was even-tempered, but now her moods shift quickly. It’s jarring when she raises her voice.
Above her desk is a window with a view of the playground. “Do you hear that?” she says.
Whatever it is, I probably couldn’t hear it over the wail of the vacuum. “Hear what?”
“The barking.” She sounds exasperated. “I’ve been listening to it all day. I think there are some dogs on the playground.”
There probably are. Too many people in Seattle let their dogs go off-leash. Last week at the bus stop, a collarless mutt yapped at me for a full fifteen minutes before the 44 bus arrived.
I’ve always had excellent hearing, able to pick up nuances in songs, detect when a single string is slightly out of tune. But right now I only hear the wheels of the janitor’s cart squeaking down the hallway.
“They have to be somewhere out there. Under the slide maybe? It could be dangerous with so many kids around, especially if the dogs are strays.”
“Ima, I don’t hear them.”
“Oh! There they go again.” She pushes open the window, letting in a cool breeze. “Get out of here!”
Then I realize it: The barking isn’t real. The dogs aren’t real.
I’ve never been alone with her when she’s—hallucinating. The word itself is terrifying.
It has too many syllables; there is no simple word to explain how complicated and scary it is. Aba’s always been around, and Aba, who takes notes during Ima’s doctor’s appointments, always knows what to do. Whenever this happens at home, I flee the room as fast as I can.
She’s sticking her head out the window, flapping her arms wildly. I rack my brain, trying to remember how Ima’s specialist told us to handle her hallucinations. We’re supposed to tell her that we believe she’s really hearing this, but I can’t go along with it. I have to snap her out of this somehow.
“They’re not real. They’re not real, okay? You’re imagining it.” I want her to believe me, not whatever’s going on inside her head.
