AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She winces. “Did you really need to say that?”
I stand up. “Yeah. I did. And even though you were a shitty friend, I still really hope you like college. I hope you figure out what you want to do. I hope you find what it is that you love.” I say it genuinely, and she mumbles something back that sounds like you too, but I’m already walking away.
In the middle of July, Zack and I take another camping trip. Alone. I tell him what I want and what feels good and I’m not shy about it, so there’s one thing Lindsay wound up being right about.
This time we have all night to figure it out. And after some stumbling and laughing and rearranging of sleeping bags, we finally get it.
“You’re going to miss me,” I say afterward, and while I meant it as a question, it comes out as a statement.
He holds me closer against his bare chest, fingers moving through my hair. My cheek rests on his heartbeat. “So much. But we’ll talk all the time.”
He might be my high school boyfriend or he might be the one true love of my life. We might be back in this same place next year, commemorating the anniversary of our first time, or we might be smitten with other people. I might be a surgeon and he might be an artist, or we might be completely different things.
Right now, though, we’re just Tovah and Zack, reckless in love with each other, and I like that most of all.
Something on Aba’s laptop screen, open on the kitchen table, freezes me in place.
“Aba?” I was about to go on a run, but my feet have turned to lead. I set my protein shake down on the table. “What’s this?”
“Not now.” He shuts the laptop and the website listing long-term care homes. “But you know we’re going to have to talk about it sometime.”
“I know.” I bite the inside of my cheek, hard. It’ll happen for Ima, and then for Adi. And I’ll visit both of them all the time. Regardless of what my own future holds, I’ll spend much of my life in a hospital.
He slides into a chair. “Do you have time to help me practice my ivrit, or are you on your way out?”
“On my way out,” I say in Hebrew. “Could we do it later?”
He nods. “Betach,” he says.
“How does dinner and a Hebrew lesson sound?” It’s something we’ve gotten in the habit of, cooking dinner and speaking Hebrew. “I can stop by the grocery store. And the pharmacy, for Ima’s meds.”
“Todah,” he says before switching back to English. “You’ve always been my girl, right?” He squeezes my shoulder.
“You can be so sappy.” I roll my eyes so he can’t tell how much this touches me. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”
“Not now, maybe,” he says. “But you will.”
Fall, again
Forty
Adina
I MISS THE COLD. I long for rain. I dream of overcast skies. In Baltimore the summer bleeds into fall, and September is punishingly hot. What I want is an East Coast winter, snow and closed streets and that fresh chilly scent. A few more months. A few more months and I will have my cold.
I unpack in my dorm, a small bricked cube with a window the size of a piece of sheet music. I take a photo and send it to Tovah.
My clothes fill the closet and my viola finds a spot in the corner of the room. Then I sit on the creaky bed and . . . wait. This is the first time I’ve been truly alone. Tovah and I went to Jewish day camps when we were little, and one weeklong overnight camp in Eastern Washington. But that has been it, and it barely compares.
At first I relish my alone time before it can turn lonely. I go for long walks around campus, or I play viola in the rehearsal spaces before classes start. Then I meet my roommate, Corinne, a flute major from North Carolina who has an accent and says “y’all.”
Corinne tacks up photos of her friends on her side of the room. “My boyfriend’s at school in Asheville,” she says with a sigh, smoothing out a picture of the two of them. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No.”
Her eyes flash with mischief. “I saw some cuties on the fourth floor. Piano players, so you know they’re good with their fingers. . . .”
I laugh hard at this. I have never had a friend like Corinne, who talks too much and has no filter.
