I love you, I told Esther. I said, I don’t want to make you cry.
She said, “I don’t feel like you love me. Why are you always correcting people? If you didn’t correct people so much, we would still be in Schecter together and you never would have written the poem and made me sad with it and then we could still be together.”
She wanted me to cry and I was failing. I didn’t want to fail. I wanted to cry for her, but I couldn’t.
I told her, I’ll cry soon.
Esther said, “No you won’t. I’ve seen you cry.” She said, “You only cry about crazy things like the Intifadas, and Jonathan getting passed over for David, and Moshe getting banned from Eretz Yisroel. You don’t cry about the things you are supposed to cry about.” She stopped crying then. It was my turn more than ever. I thought: Esther is being mean to you so that you will cry because it is your turn to cry and you’re late.
I said to her, I cry when I’m angry and my dad says something nice in Yiddish.
She said, “That’s a crazy thing to cry about, Gurion. It makes no sense.”
By then I knew she’d really broken up with me, or that at least she thought she had. Because it wasn’t like we stopped being love with each other, I thought, and Esther wasn’t even saying we stopped. And if we were still in love, that meant we’d get back together eventually, because that’s what you did when you were in love, was be together.
I said, I’m sorry, Esther Salt. I said, I hope we can get back together soon.
“There is nothing to be sorry about. You can’t help it,” she said. “You just make me sad and it means we are a bad match. I wish we never fell in love with each other.”
Rabbi Salt came out on the patio and told us it was time for honeycake. He waited at the sliding glass door for us, and Esther stared at me for an extra second to see if I would cry and I couldn’t cry and she went inside ahead of me. When I passed her dad, he put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed a couple times. It was a warm, rough hand. “My favorite student,” he said. “I hear you’ve been expelled from King. For a fight.”
I said, A seventh-grader attacked me and I beat him into submission, then his friends came, seven of them, and I picked up a brick, and right then is when the recess lady came, and everyone said I used the brick on the first kid.
Rabbi Salt said, “You didn’t use the brick?”
I said, I don’t need a brick for one kid.
“I know,” he said. “Relax.”
Let me back into Schecter, I said.
“I can’t,” he said. “It’s not up to me.”
I said, I want to study Torah with peers.
Rabbi Salt said, “Go to Hebrew School.”
I said, Hebrew School is not for scholars.
He said, “Gurion, you need to be realistic. You threw a stapler at Rabbi Unger and everyone knows it. And that email from Kalisch — it’s too late now for damage control… Maybe in high school, if you act like a mensch in the meantime, people will forget, but please don’t waste your energy on false hope. It will warp you. You’ll be lucky if I can get you into this Aptakisic.”
I said, What’s Aptakisic?
The Rabbi said, “I’m going to speak to your father about it after cake, but my friend Leonard Brodsky — the father of Ben, may Hashem bless his soul — is the principal there. I called him up and he’s considering you. The school’s in Deerbrook Park is the only problem — we’ll have to figure out a way to get you there, or at least to one of the bus stops. But we’d likely have to do this for any school, so—”
I said, I want to be a scholar.
He said, “Think about the future. You act well at this Aptakisic and who knows? Maybe Ida Crown Academy lets you in for high school.” He squeezed my neck again. Then he went into his dining room to eat cake and I stayed by the glass door and watched the rabbit while I cried. Its haunches kept twitching. I thought: This is not a crazy thing to cry about. And it turned out not to be. Aptakisic was twenty-five miles from our house, so I couldn’t have friends outside of school, and there was no other choice except Catholic school, with all its miniature false messiahs hanging from miniature torture instruments hanging from the walls, or boarding or military school, which my mom would never allow. And then I get there and Brodsky puts me in the Cage and calls me B.D.
It was hard to find the justice.
I thumb-drummed the teacher cluster’s fakewood surface, chewed cheekfuls of cheesepuffs, made a decision: I was never in love with Esther Salt to begin with. If we’d been in love, she wouldn’t have told me it was crazy to cry about the stuff I cried about. I decided that the only reason it ever seemed like I was in love with her was because I said it a few times. And when I said it, it was true, but when I stopped saying it, it stopped being true. When I stopped saying it, it made me a liar. It made it so I was lying those times when I said it. So maybe I was a liar, but I’d never been in love before June. So there was no danger of the smelly version affecting the good version: there never really was a smelly version — it was something else completely. The thought cheered me up a little, and I ate a couple bites of my sandwich, but then I thought: How do I know I’m in love with June? I thought: If all it ever was with Esther was that I kept saying I was in love, then later on, if I ever stop saying it to June, I’ll just be a liar again.
So I wrote it down, because when something is written it has a better chance of being permanent. I wrote it down with a Darker on the brown paper bag.
I wrote:
I AM IN LOVE
Jelly saw. She said, “With Jenny Mangey? I knew it. You should be in love with me!”
I finished writing what I was writing:
WITH ELIZA JUNE WATERMARK.
Jelly said, “That girl June? I know that girl! I had Art with her in fourth! She painted violent things!”
I looked at what I wrote and I saw there was a problem — No one who saw it would know who loved June. So I signed it and it looked like:
I AM IN LOVE WITH ELIZA JUNE WATERMARK.
TRULY,
GURION BEN-JUDAH MACCABEE
But then the “truly” part made it sound like I doubted it. If I saw it, I would think: The person who wrote this is unsure of himself. I would think: Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee must have written “truly” because sometimes what he says isn’t true, which means he is a liar. And if he is a liar, I’d be a shvontz to believe him just because he says he’s telling the truth.
So I scratched out “truly” so that it looked like:
I AM IN LOVE WITH ELIZA JUNE WATERMARK.
GURION BEN-JUDAH MACCABEE
Except now it looked like Gurion was even more unsure of himself.
I blacked out all of what I’d written entirely.
And Jelly said, “Thank God! I knew it wasn’t true.”
I flipped the bag-plate over. This is what I wrote:
GURION BEN-JUDAH MACCABEE IS IN LOVE
WITH ELIZA JUNE WATERMARK
That was the most concise sentence I’d ever written, so I left it.
Jelly said, “But you can’t be, Gurion! She paints so many violent things! She painted a comicstrip one time of a pink monkey telling a man about the ass of another man who was fat and then the first man goes and cuts the ass of the fat one off and brings it to the monkey and the monkey pays him money and takes the ass of the fat man and puts it on a plate. A silver one.”
I said, Did the monkey chew the ass?
“It was implied,” said Jelly.
How? I said.
She said, “The monkey had a bib on.”
That’s subtle and hilarious, I said.
“Hahalarious!” said Mookus.
Yes haha, I said.
“Yes haha!” Scott said. “The mastication of the ass is made possible by the people who brought you I-teeth. Let Us make man! And in the image! The crown and the wisdom and the understanding. The judgment and the love, the beauty and the splendor. Let us not forget the victory. Let us not forget the kingdom and the foundation. The kingdom is the mouth! In the mouth, there are teeth! The foundation is the penis of Us!”