“No thanks,” Molly says, as neutral as possible, hoping her mother will just go away.
And when her mom goes, Molly decides it’s time for a new look.
Her beautiful blond hair. It’s always been her calling card. It’s natural, and it’s gorgeous, and she doesn’t deserve to have it anymore.
She goes into her mom’s bathroom and rifles through the drawers until she finds the electric clippers, and she removes the guard. She wants blade on scalp for sure.
Her first stroke is right down the middle, and she watches the hair disappear like she’s watching the guy mow the lawn out in East Hampton. And as she does more strokes, and as the massive pile of blond accumulates at her feet, she thinks, Me. My fault. I did this to Tillie.
Amir has never had detention before. But he’d do it again in a second.
Of course he punched Jason Mathes in the face. Who wouldn’t have punched him and broken his nose?
“You fucked that girl to death, dude.”
Who thinks to say such a thing?
Of course he punched him. How could he not?
Thank God the other kids who witnessed this had more sense and talked Jason and his dad out of pressing charges.
So Amir sits there in Mr. Boswell’s classroom, alone except for Mr. Boswell. He cannot focus on homework. He’s tried to, but every time he pulls out his calc book, the words swim across the page like uninterested fish in an aquarium.
He pulls out a piece of paper and tries to write something. Anything to approximate the guilt he feels.
He reads it and he crumples it up into a ball. Garbage. Words can never come close to expressing anything he’s feeling. And anyway, he can never say it now. He’s caused enough trouble.
If he comes out now, he’s the boy who killed a girl because he was too chickenshit to be who he was.
Aaron and his dad go to Barney Greengrass at Eighty-Sixth and Amsterdam for lunch. A treat, his father says. Since he left the bank and went into social work, they eat out almost never. As they open the door, Aaron is assaulted by the intermingling smells of pastrami, garlic, and cabbage, and the shouting of patrons trying to be heard at the insanely busy deli counter. He follows his dad to the hostess station at the entranceway to the dining area, his senses reeling from the smells and noise and the old Jewish people noshing on bagels and lox and it’s a lot, a lot.
The old guy with the gray-white beard and crusty voice tells them five minutes and they stand there, cocooned between the noisy deli and the busy dining area, and Aaron feels trapped and like he can’t breathe and he tries to go somewhere else, anywhere else.
“My dad used to take me here,” his dad says. “It’s a hoot.”
Aaron nods and smiles as much as he can but the walls are closing in on him and he closes his eyes.
“Did he hate you?” Aaron asks.
His dad gives him a look. “Is this too much? Am I an idiot? I really just thought—”
“It’s fine,” Aaron says. “It’s a lot but it’s fine.”
His father looks pained and glances at the door, but just at that moment, the bearded host calls their name.
“Is this what you want?” his dad asks.
Aaron shrugs. “Let’s make some Jewish delicatessen memories.”
They follow the host through the dining area, tables stuffed together like it’s a clown car and they’re all a bunch of clowns. The host takes them to the far diagonal corner, and they come to a standstill at a table of miraculously old people who block their way. The old guy sitting across from his wife looks up and laughs.
“I guess I’m the gatekeeper,” he says, slowly standing, and Aaron’s stomach twists. As he follows his dad and the host around the old man, all Aaron can feel is his own pulsing heartbeat, which is so strange to him because, yes, depressed, but he’s been in crowds before. He doesn’t have an issue with crowds. He made his dad go with him to Columbus Avenue to watch the balloons get blown up the night before Thanksgiving every year until last because there was something nice about the smell of chestnuts and hot chocolate, and the swarm of people made him feel alive. But suddenly it’s the opposite and he’s broken and he wonders what his claustrophobia score would be now: one sixty-six? Forty-nine? The scales are undefined and everything’s unfixably wrong.
He sits against the wall, looking out on the messy mass of diners, and he stares at his menu, hoping to quiet his pulsing chest.
A Dr. Brown’s cherry soda helps some, as do pickles, as Aaron sits there and tries to make sure his newfound claustrophobia doesn’t show up.
“I would never eat the latkes,” Dad says.
“No?”
“Definite no. ‘Pancakes are not potatoes,’ I used to explain. Your grandmother thought I was nuts. She basically foisted them upon me. For years, I could not eat at a table where someone else was eating any latke-like substance.”
Aaron laughs, but he’s checked out.
“Where is Aaron?”
Aaron looks around dramatically, but it’s not really computing, the Aaron-Dad banter thing. He’s just. Not. There. But he does it anyway because it’s what they do.
“He’s in one of the circles of hell, where they seat you in the back at a table where every time the waiter wants to get to you, a man who can barely stand is made to stand, and at some point he and his father die of hunger.”
His dad screws up his face at him. “That’s dark.”
“Dark times are these,” Aaron intones, channeling Yoda.
His father bends his head down and shakes it, which is not the reaction Aaron is expecting. He crosses his arms over his chest.
“I just …” Dad says.
“You just?”
“I just can’t understand. Why you didn’t tell me. I asked you. Like right after you went to the bridge. Like just yesterday morning. I asked you a thousand times. Why wouldn’t you tell me? Did you think you couldn’t tell me? I just. Help me understand, Aaron. Help me.”
Aaron feels the jitters in his throat and his instinct is to yell but it wouldn’t be words, it would be more like a roar of exasperation because it’s too much, much too much. Here in this fetid pastrami palace, this cacophonous cabbage chaos. He’s a fuckup. He gets it. Everything he does is wrong. He really, really gets it.
“What’s going on? Aaron. You okay? Do we need to get you out of here?”
His dad is looking at him funny, looming over him, and it reminds Aaron of this Natasha balloon that one time on Thanksgiving was being blown up and it seemed to be staring down at him like … Hello? Hello? It was hard to explain but it cracked him up, and suddenly his dad is Natasha, and Aaron’s laughing, and the laughter is guttural, or lower, it’s a full-body laugh, and he convulses with it and his dad keeps looking at him, super concerned, and that’s even more funny and he slides to the floor like this is the funniest thing that’s ever happened and his body shakes and oh my God! Two out of two! Two days in a row, crazy body things! What’s happening to him, to his body, these days, and this would be such a funny thing to tell Sarah on the bus and she’d laugh but no, no, no. It’s actually not that funny and he’s crying on the sticky, mustard-stained floor of a restaurant, hugging the wooden table leg, and he wants to disappear from the world. Forever.