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I feel my face flush. I was having a good time. I’ve spent so much time trying to convince myself I’m not young, that I’m old enough for all those guys, but the truth is . . . I am young. And I’ve spent so much time isolating myself that I’ve missed out on countless things. There’s still so much to experience. I want love like Tovah has, like my parents have, but I want more than that. There’s more than that out there. More than viola, even. I feel greedier than I have ever felt, for friends I can confide in, and dancing with strangers, and sitting in a room playing a stupid, fun game. The miniature orchestra swells in my chest again, but this time it is playing something new, something I have never heard before.
“He’s nice, but I’m taking a break from boys, I think.” I pluck a stray thread from the carpet. I’m not wearing tights tonight. “I can tell. With Lindsay. That it’s not . . . that things aren’t how they used to be with you.” At dinner, the two of them didn’t speak to each other, only to the rest of the group.
Tovah sighs. “It’s been like that all year. She cares more about Troy, and that’s her choice. We might never talk after high school. Apparently you meet the best friends of your life in college, though, so maybe I’m not losing all that much.”
But she still looks sad.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. Maybe this whole year, she was as alone as I was.
A silence falls over us. We exist in silences these days, but I suppose it is better than yelling, than slamming doors, than destroying prized possessions.
I unzip my bag and pull out an envelope. “Tovah. I know I can’t begin to apologize for what I did, and I know it’s not as special because it’s not Aba’s, but . . . I wanted to give you this.”
She turns the new Nirvana ticket over. “How did you get this?”
“I found it online, and it arrived in the mail earlier today. I swear I’ll get it framed for you, but I wanted you to have it tonight. That was such a shitty thing for me to do. I’ll continue making it up to you however I can—”
Tovah holds up her hand. “No. I don’t want there to be any more debts between us. I don’t want one of us to owe the other.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you.” She regards the ticket with a sad smile, and then her head jerks up as though she’s just remembered something. “What time is it? I left my phone in the room.”
“Quarter to ten. Why?”
“Get up. We’re going somewhere.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Where? And what about Zack and everyone?”
She holds her hand out to me, pulling me to my feet, and grins. “It’s a secret. And they’ll be fine. This is just for us.”
Thirty-eight
Tovah
THE CROWN OF THE SPACE Needle vanishes and then reappears as I steer us up a steep hill and into a neighborhood I’ve been to only once before. I’ve lived in Seattle all my life and it’s still full of mystery. Cities are a little like people that way. I didn’t know Adi no longer kept kosher, but that’s her choice, and I can’t force her devotion to our religion. Maybe one day she’ll find her own way back to it.
“Are you going to tell me where we are?” Adi asks as I wiggle into a parallel parking spot. She pulls down the mirror to check her makeup. Dabs at an imaginary lipstick stain on the side of her mouth.
“You’ll see.” I unbuckle my seat belt. “And your makeup looks fine.”
“Only fine?”
“You look beyond stunning, as always. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
She smirks. “When you say it sarcastically like that, it doesn’t sound genuine.”
Our heels clack along the sidewalk, the fabric of our dresses rustling. I lead us down a stairway and across an old bricked street and into an alleyway, and when I knock on a door at the end of it, a honeyed voice asks me for a password.
“Blotto,” I say.
“Are you serious?” Adi says, laughing. “What is this, a speakeasy?”
That’s exactly what it is. Bernadette’s is sepia-toned, tea lights strung across the ceiling, old movie posters on the walls. A cluster of round tables faces a stage, where a pianist plays a tune I vaguely recognize. Maybe it was in one of the films Ima loves so mu
ch.
Zack got the password from someone in his art class. We did some reconnaissance here last week and learned they’re very lenient about the under-twenty-one policy as long as you don’t order alcohol and you tip generously.
