Believe Read online

  I sighed with relief. She wasn’t mad. “Oh my God,” she said, “the meeting was amazing. A ton of people showed up. Not just kids either. I am so excited.”

  I said, “That’s so great. I should have been there.”

  She told me not to worry at all. She knew I was thinking about her. I could hear Samantha talking to her in the background. She yelled, “We missed you,” but I was sure she really only missed the people she thought I could bring.

  I told Miriam everything: how I fought with Dan, touched a guy in a wheelchair, and that I read the Book of Death.

  That got her attention. She had never understood why I wouldn’t read it. “What did it say?”

  “My parents were splitting up.”

  “Oh.” She said she was sorry, that that must have been a hard thing to read, but before I could tell her more, she changed the subject to Roxanne and Dave. “I can’t believe they were at your house. Did you tell them …”

  “No. Are you serious? I stood my ground and said no comment. Talk to your friend Abe, though. He and his mom left my house to meet her.” I hated that after all the years we’ve been friends, she still didn’t realize how hard this was for me.

  I must have been on speaker, because I could hear Samantha groan. “Listen,” she said, her voice getting louder, “we were thinking … if you call Roxanne and tell her to meet you tomorrow … or maybe even the next day … we’ll have plenty of time to set up everything.” She sounded confident, like this plan was a done deal.

  (Like we were friends.)

  I said nothing.

  She kept talking. “Miriam told me you don’t like attention, but this really isn’t about you.” She begged me to help—which just made me feel more stubborn. “If you did us this favor, we would be so grateful. We would owe you big time.”

  I wasn’t an expert, but for being hit by lightning, this tree still seemed pretty stable. The trunk looked sturdy. It was only missing one big branch. I said, “This tree can live without one branch. I think it’s going to be fine. You won’t need me.”

  Miriam came back to the phone. She said, “Please Janine. Just tell her about us. See if she’ll write one story. That’s all we need.”

  We went back and forth. Between “please” and dead air. Between “I can’t risk it,” and “Just this once. Use your fame for something good.”

  She was not going to let me say no. “Okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Really.”

  Miriam yelled, “She’ll do it!” She said “thank you” about twelve times. “This means so much to me.” She held the “so” just the way she did when we were young.

  I pictured her sitting on my bed. I could hear her voice.

  “He is sooooooooo cute.”

  “That game was sooooooo unfair.”

  For a moment, I was sort of happy. Excited. “What are you doing? Maybe should we all go out? Get a smoothie?”

  She wished we could, but “We have to get ready.” She squealed again. “This is so amazing.”

  That was three amazings. Two giggles. And one ugly truth: The only reason I was doing this was because I was jealous. I was jealous they were laughing. I was jealous they were becoming friends. I was so jealous I’d do what they wanted me to do, even if it was against everything I stood for.

  TWENTY-THREE

  When I woke up the next morning, Lo sat on the edge of my bed. She held the hamsa in her open palm. “I would really like you to put it back on.”

  I jumped out of bed and tripped over Current Medical Diagnosis. “Did I oversleep? Is there a crowd outside?” I stood at the window seat and made sure no one was outside waiting for me.

  My room was bright. Lo had removed the shade screen from the skylight. I smelled coffee. Next to my sewing machine sat my favorite mug.

  “No. Not yet.” She paused. “I just wanted to … I don’t know … I wanted to offer a truce. And talk.”

  When I told her that I didn’t want to talk about the Book or wear the hamsa or forgive my dead mother, she lightened her voice. “Well, we at least need to discuss our schedule for next week.” When I didn’t look excited, she said, “Your college tour. Am I missing something?”

  (Last night, she and Sharon probably took bets about whether I’d made appointments with schools. They probably determined that a week of tours and brochures and shopping would be the antidote to all this attention.)

  “I don’t want to go until I have a portfolio in hand.” When Lo looked confused, I told her the bad news. “Ms. Browning wants me to go back to the drawing board.” I got back into bed and faced the wall. “She says my work looks inauthentic.”

  Lo tried to hug me. “Did she really say inauthentic? I think your work is great. Maybe she’s not as smart as you think she is.” She got up from the bed and picked up the half-finished dress. “This is gorgeous. I say let’s throw caution to the wind and see if we can’t crash their open houses.”

  Ms. Browning was opinionated for a reason. She was not the enemy. Dave was. My mother was. Lo didn’t know that FIT and Parsons don’t make last-minute appointments.

  Looking at the dress, I got it. Nothing I made was original. Even this dress—I was pretty sure I could find a Vogue pattern for something just like it in five minutes. It didn’t look anything like me. Anyone could have made it. “She thinks I should plan to wait until this summer. Or fall.” I looked away. “And I agree.” This dress was supposed to be a tribute, but now that was the last thing I wanted to make. “It doesn’t matter anyway, because I’m not going to finish it.”

  Lo picked some lint off her skirt—a too-long, overpleated number that I’d begged her to donate to Goodwill at least a hundred times. She walked across the room, folded two shirts, and lined up the three bottles of perfume. Then she shook out the dress-in-progress and laid it across the bottom of my bed. “Just tell me you’re not giving up because you’re feeling sorry for yourself. Or trying to hurt me. Because that won’t get you anywhere. You’ll only hurt yourself.”

  “It’s just a dress.”

  Lo looked irritated. “I want to talk about your mother.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  She didn’t defend herself. She didn’t beg for my forgiveness. She didn’t even bother pretending that all this talking about process was anything more than an icebreaker. “Janine, look at me.”

  I looked at my basket of remnants, my bookcase, and the pile of dirty clothes at the foot of my bed.

  “Janine?”

  I looked at some dried flowers, still hanging upside down, next to the skylight.

  She stood over me and waited for me to look at her. Then she actually compared what I was going through to a really hard yoga pose that it took her two years to accomplish. “You have to dig in your heels and …”

  “This is not about effort.” I tried very hard not to freak out or laugh. “Yesterday, I wanted to read the Book because this dress was going to be a tribute to my mom. I wanted to feel close to her.” It was so ironic. “I thought her last words would inspire me.”

  “I wish you had told me.” Lo put the hamsa on my bedside table, sat back down, and took each of my hands, one at a time, into hers. She pressed into the scars, and when they felt a little warmer, she pulled on each of my fingers, one at a time. She loosened each joint without cracking them, so that if I held them very still, there was no pain whatsoever.

  I didn’t move. I imagined normal, ordinary, scar-free hands. No reporters. No Book of Death. Living, breathing parents.

  This wasn’t Lo’s fault. I knew it. Still, I had to blame someone, and she was the only one here. I said, “I can’t help thinking you wanted to hurt me. That maybe you even resented that you got stuck raising me.” I said what I’d never been willing to say out loud before. “That this wasn’t your choice either.”

  Lo brought my hands to her lips. “You know that that is not true or fair. I have always been honest with you. I wanted this life. At the time, I almost felt guilty�
�I wanted it so bad.”

  “So you could get away from your parents?”

  She sighed, like this was a conversation she never wanted to have. “So I could get away from everything. Including my parents.” Lo stroked my hair. “Maybe I was wrong to keep the Book, but I thought it was important that you have the chance to read your mother’s last written words. I knew it would hurt, but I trusted you wouldn’t ask for it until you were ready.”

  That made no sense. “Trusted what?”

  She scratched her head. “Fate? Destiny? I’m sorry your mother wasn’t a perfect person. I’m sorry she wrote those hurtful things. But she was also a hero. A champion. She had a mission, and you can’t resent her for that.” She took the Book from me and put on her “I’m here for you” smile. “Over break, let’s go somewhere fun, eat some good food. Shop till we drop. In not too long, you’ll be gone—off to school. We should seize the moment. Have a little adventure.”

  Frankly, I was tired of excitement. “I just want to forget everything about her. I never want to think about her again.”

  Lo’s lips turned flat. Her skin drained of color. She got up and walked to my stairs. In a flat tone she said, “Go get ready for school. I’m happy to talk, but don’t ever say that to me again. Your mother was my sister. She loved you, and I loved her. Now she’s dead, and we won’t get anywhere trashing her memory.”

  When I went downstairs, she was gone.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I walked to school alone. I was a girl with no boyfriend, and my friends weren’t answering their phones. So I walked past the church and the tree alone, and the whole time, my phone buzzed. Unknown name and number, every time. I turned it off. At the light across the street from the school, a policeman directed traffic. “I have a nephew who’s been dealing with Lyme disease.” I grimaced and tried to avoid eye contact. One of these days, I really should try to get a license. “You want me to escort you to the door?” he asked.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I can handle them.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I reminded myself he meant well. “I’m sure.” He held up his hands so it was clear to cross the street.

  So far, the scene didn’t look too bad. There were the usual groups of students hanging around. In between, I noticed five or six unfamiliar adults. That wasn’t a lot. I’d dealt with worse.

  When they saw me, they simultaneously began to walk toward me.

  “What was it like?”

  “How did it feel?”

  “Now do you think your hands are holy?”

  Their questions were pretty standard.

  “No comment,” I said. I kept walking toward the door, my hand shielding my face. They followed at a safe distance—they wouldn’t do anything stupid on school grounds. All around me, other students turned and watched. They posed. A lot of them looked like they had dressed up, hoping to get the attention of a camera.

  Any one of them would love to answer questions about Abe. They all knew him—or at least knew something about him.

  I was ten steps from the front door when a short guy with scruffy facial hair and a plaid, wrinkled shirt and scuffed shoes bumped into me, knocking my backpack off my shoulder. “Sorry,” he said, reaching down to help me, as if the collision was an accident and he was some klutzy substitute teacher and not a reporter.

  I said, “It’s okay. They’re just books.”

  He stood between me and the door. “What do you think about the power of faith? Have you spoken to Dave Armstrong?” When I just shook my head—these questions were possibly the most obvious ones I’d ever been asked—a crowd formed around us.

  I looked around. Where was the principal? How about a teacher? The closest familiar face was a girl from my English class. I couldn’t remember her name. She asked, “Do you deny that Abe Demetrius recovered? How can you turn your back on other people who might need your help?”

  A week ago, she had ranted about double standards—that women weren’t recognized professionally as often as men. I thought she seemed okay, even though she was a bit uptight. Now she was shouting. “If you can heal people, don’t you want to share your gift with the world? Don’t you have to? With all these witnesses, isn’t there anything you want to say?”

  We stared at each other as the cameras flashed. “I honestly don’t know,” I said, not because I didn’t, but because right now, I was a bit embarrassed, a bit ashamed. I understood responsibility—I was human—but I also had to contend with reality.

  This is what no one understood.

  Unlike her, if I gave up my seat on a bus, someone might take my picture. If I worked in a soup kitchen for the holiday, someone always found out and wrote a story about my desire to feed the hungry. If I cheated on a test or wore a fur coat or supported the wrong cause, even better. Someone got himself a headline.

  Think that wasn’t so bad?

  Just the price of being famous?

  Ask a movie star or even a mayor or any semifamous person—especially after their pictures are splashed across some seedy headline—how they feel about their “fifteen minutes,” and they’ll tell you: being famous (even for a little while) was not fun. When you were famous, you always had to consider how your actions would play to the press. You had to be careful and think about the downside of every word you said. Even if what you wanted was the right thing to do, there was always a negative. I hated it. I thought it was annoying. I never wanted to read about myself. “Of course I understand responsibility.”

  The girl said, “Then make a statement. Tell us everything that happened.” She waved her fist in the air in a very forceful, confident way. (Of course, she could also be exploiting her own fifteen minutes.)

  I was considering the personal damage I’d have to absorb if I punched her in the nose when I heard someone shouting my name. Across the street, Samantha and Miriam stood and waved. The second the policeman stopped the traffic, they sprinted toward me. Samantha stepped into the small crowd. “Of course Janine is delighted to know that Abe has recovered. She is also very concerned about other very important issues in the local community.”

  She’d clearly practiced her opening line.

  Too bad Miriam was a terrible actress. This was supposed to look spontaneous, but when she raised her hand like a schoolgirl, the first reporter smirked. “Important issues? Can you explain? Are you speaking about the community farm that the town is planning to sell to the college?”

  One reporter walked away.

  The rest looked at me. I was the target. They would stay until I left.

  So I stayed. As Samantha talked about how the farm was close to my heart, how even though it made good economic sense to move it, it also had an emotional value, I listened. I watched the reporters stop writing and zone out. I watched them look at their phones. I watched them look at me, waiting for me to do something.

  I didn’t.

  I stood there and nodded until the bell for school rang and Mrs. Hollingsworth, the secretary to the principal, an old lady with a very tight bun, walked out into the front lawn to escort me inside. “Go home,” she told the posse. She had no patience for grandstanding. It worked. They walked away. No one wanted to be scolded by a woman who looked like a grandma.

  I had never been so happy to see Mrs. Hollingsworth. “Thank you,” I said. If she had been a little shorter and more cuddly, I would have hugged her.

  She wasn’t the touchy type. She looked straight ahead and said, “Follow me.” When we were alone in her office, she apologized for what she called the ruckus. “I don’t understand your world one bit.” She explained that “in her day,” this never would have happened. People respected each other’s privacy. She thought it was a pity—a crying shame—that she wasn’t permitted to control everything that happened outside the school.

  Because inside, it was another story. For today, the principal had posted extra security at every door, but if anyone snuck through, I should let her know immediately. She said, “Although I am
confident your classmates will be nothing less than respectful, I also sent the entire faculty a memo.” She reminded me, “You should feel safe here. No one is allowed to talk about things like religion. This is a school. There’s no mixing church and state.”

  It was a minor miracle I didn’t scream. My peers did not understand. I felt threatened now. Religion was everywhere. No one could escape it.

  It was the reason there was war.

  It was why my parents were dead.

  The separation of church and state was a joke.

  Just last year, after some kid told his friend he was going to hell because he didn’t believe in Jesus, the school held a symposium to officially talk about all the different religions. They invited a whole panel of believers. At the end of the row was a rabbi.

  He said, “The land of Israel is sacred.” He said, “We are more than a faith—we are a community, a chosen people.” He called the Torah “a mine, waiting to be excavated.” He said Jews believed that you had to work to understand new ideas—that you had to release your old opinions to gain new ones. He called us “witnesses” because we see and hear. Then he challenged us to think.

  Miriam thought it was cool—for religion.

  When I asked Lo about it, she was just relieved no one dissed gay marriage. Yes, she still “felt” Jewish, but that didn’t mean she wanted to go to services. Faith was a good thing, but religion … it didn’t matter which one … she didn’t like the politics.

  I asked, “Is that because my grandparents were religious?” I was sure this was why.

  She said, “No. Not particularly.” Then she talked in big generalizations. “After everything that happened, I became cynical. And more private. I’m glad the rabbi was nice, but I have no interest or need to start praying in public.”

  Behind her desk, Mrs. Hollingsworth folded her hands. Her nails were painted pale pink. On her desk she had a picture of a whole herd of grandchildren smiling in matching white button-downs. Across the top it said, “We love you, Grammy!” Next to that was a tiny green nest holding chocolate Easter eggs. And a half-green, half-red apple. She said, “Time to go. You don’t want to be late.”