“Cheaters never really win,” he says, smiling and leaning back on his palms.
“Butthead.” I set my bike and, ignoring him, walk over to the sliding board.
“And that was another come-from-behind victory, by the way,” he says. “Since you like to cheat.”
“I didn’t cheat. A head start isn’t cheating.”
“Well, I didn’t know you were gonna have a head start.” He climbs up onto the monkey bars and hangs by his skinny arms. “You know what my daddy calls it when one person has a head start that the other person doesn’t even know about?”
“What?”
“America.” He laughs, and I grin even though I don’t understand half of what Mr. Stern says most of the time.
“Did he hear anything about that job in Chicago?” I ask, facing him and hanging from the bars, too. I hold my breath while I wait for him to answer.
“He didn’t get it.”
Suspended from the bars, our bodies twisting, we face each other and give ear-to-ear grins. I’ve been worried Mr. Stern would get one of the many jobs he’s always applying for up north.
“Why’s your mom want to leave Atlanta so bad?” I ask, dropping to the ground, a dusty cloud puffing around my feet.
Ezra drops, too, and shrugs. “She says here, people still make a big deal out of me being mixed. She says in New York, folks won’t stare or make dumb comments.”
“What kind of dumb comments?” I ask, but I’ve heard some of them. I kinda know.
“Asking if I’m adopted,” Ezra mumbles, his chin sinking into the collar of his T-shirt. “Asking what I am, or calling me Oreo or zebra, or whatever. Dad’s applying in lots of places, but Mom’s hoping for New York. She misses our family up there.”
“You see them all the time, though.” My insides are heavy like there’s a roll of pennies at the bottom of my belly.
“Mama says holidays and a few weeks for summer’s not enough. She wants to be closer to my bubbe.”
Thinking about Ezra moving makes my stomach go all swimmy and my eyes burn and my throat tight. He’s my best friend. We even have the same birthday. He can’t leave.
“M-m-maybe your g-grandmother could m-m-move here.” When I get nervous or upset, my tongue “skips,” and I want to bite it clean in half. My speech therapist tells me to just take a deep breath and slow down before I talk. I forget sometimes, but Ezra never makes fun of me like some of the other kids do.
“Bubbe is never leaving New York,” Ezra says. “She wants me to Bar Mitzvah.”
I’ve learned a lot about Jewish traditions from the Sterns—enough to know that’s a big deal.
“Are you gonna?” I ask, glad my tongue is cooperating again.
“I guess.” Ezra shrugs. “I’d have to start going to Hebrew school every day after school.”
“Crap.” I relish the word my mother won’t let me say. “What about chess? You just started competitions.”
“I’ll still play chess. It’s a lot of time, but Mom says the busier I am, the less trouble I’ll get into.”
And the less time he’ll have to play, to spend with me. I look around the park, empty now that the sun has set. The streetlight blinks to life, reminding us it’s time to go home. Soon Mama will walk to the front porch and yell my name, telling the whole neighborhood I’ll come home if I know what’s good for me.
I take off running across the playground, willing to risk it to have a few more minutes with Ezra.
“L-l-let’s swing!”
Chapter Three
Ezra
12 Years Old
Be strong, be very strong, and we will strengthen each other.
Hazak, Hazak, Venithazek.
The Hebrew words turn over in my head, sloshing with Outkast’s lyrics pouring through the headphones fitted over my yarmulke as I walk home. This is my life—all the influences and interests colliding, conflicting, making sense and chaos. Bubbe wants me to become Bar Mitzvah, so I’m playing crazy catch-up, attending Hebrew school three days a week after school. I practice chess the other two.
Somehow, my grandmother, at only four feet eleven inches, casts a long shadow over me even from New York. I can’t deny that little lady anything, and she knows it. A few months ago she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, so when she begged me to have a Bar Mitzvah celebration, even though it basically requires me to be at synagogue all the time, cramming what the other kids have spent the last few years preparing for into less than two, I’ll do it.
Grandma guilt.
Most of the kids at synagogue are cool, and I've made some new friends, but a few of them love finding ways to make me feel like I don’t belong. Some laugh at me when they think I don’t hear them, or maybe they don’t care. When they have parties or go out together, I’m usually not invited. Mom says I imagine it because she doesn’t want to believe anyone at the synagogue would treat me that way. My father says I’m definitely not imagining it, but to ignore it and keep my head down. Dad thinks it’s all stupid anyway and asks at least once a week why I’m doing it. I tell him, and I guess I tell myself, it’s for Bubbe. But there is a part of me that simply wants to understand as much as I possibly can about this part of myself—my Jewish heritage. Neither of my parents really know what it’s like to live here as me. To look around and see no one who looks like you. To live with the stares and questions about “what I am.” To feel like a puzzle, pieces hidden and scattered, and always trying to find and fit all my parts together. To see myself not as half this or bi-that, but whole.
The synagogue is only a couple of blocks from my house, and I’m almost home. Kimba and I don’t go to the playground as much as we used to now that we’re in middle school. She joined the band. Clarinet. She’s good, but between my Hebrew classes and chess and her band practice, we don’t see each other as much outside of school, which sucks. If I’m home before dark, we can get in a bike ride before dinner.
My house is just ahead when someone jerks my arm.
“What the…” When I look up, three boys from Hebrew school stand there, arms crossed, one smirking, one glaring and one frowning.
“We called you like six times,” one of them, the glare-er, says. Robert. His name is Robert and he always sits slumped in the corner and struggles with the basics of the Torah though he’s been studying for years.
“The music,” I say, pointing to my headphones, which I slide down to rest at the back of my neck. “Sorry. I couldn’t hear you.”
I look between the three of them pointedly, lifting my eyebrows to ask what they want.
“We came to have a little talk,” Paul, the smirker, says.
I fold my arms to match theirs. “So talk.”
“Stay away from Hannah,” Michael, the frowner, says.
“Who?” I turn the volume down on the portable CD player clipped to my belt.
“My sister Hannah,” Robert says, still glaring.
Who even is she?
“I don’t know who…”
Pale skin. A mass of freckles. Dark brown, tightly coiled ringlets. Looks away quickly every time I catch her looking at me.