Finding the Worm (20 page)

I mean, isn’t that what happened with Howie for three years? Everybody knew except him that he was in love with Beverly, and everybody knew except him that he had no chance … 
because he was the one going through it
.

Beverly, meanwhile, hasn’t spoken a word to me since the race, which I guess isn’t a shock. Every time I’ve tried to apologize, she’s turned her head (if we were in school) or walked off (if we were outside). Plus, that wind keeps coming back. It’s gotten to the point where I expect it. As soon as I get near her, I feel it whirling around in my guts. It’s always the same, but always slightly different. Sometimes it stays down in my guts and feels warm. But other times it dances around inside me, and I feel chills running back and forth between my shoulder blades.

But the worst thing about it is—and it’s a shameful thing to say—I kind of
like
it. Right now, writing about the thing with Beverly, I can feel that wind rising up, and I’ve got a warm, glowy feeling. It’s like sitting by a campfire as it’s dying down, except the yellow embers are inside me, and I’m poking at them with a stick, thinking about her, and they’re warming me from the inside out. I mean, I know she’s hurting on account of what I did, and I feel bad on account of what I did, but every time I think about her, about the hurt look on her face, I feel good in a way that’s hard to explain.

Reading back those last two paragraphs, I almost want to rip out the page and start over. But I’ve never done that, not even once, going back to when I was writing for Mr. Selkirk last year. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve crossed out stuff and erased like crazy because I came up with better
words. But I’ve never written something and afterward decided to get rid of it because it was too stupid or too embarrassing or too weird. What’s the point of writing stuff down if you’re not going to tell the truth?

But to get back to Beverly, the best chance I had to say what I had to say to her came yesterday, at Eric the Red’s bar mitzvah. (Now
there’s
a guy who had a tough week.) I thought maybe, with the two of us being in temple, and dressed up in nice clothes, she’d at least hear me out. So while I was hanging around with the guys before the start of the service, I kept an eye on the back door.

It was hard to do, because we kept getting rushed by neighborhood moms. They came at us in clusters. Most of them were from the Hampshire House or Dorado House, and they were wearing big flowery dresses, and they all wanted a piece of Quentin. You’d have thought it was
his
bar mitzvah with how big a deal they were making over him. They were real weepy too, telling him what a fighter he was, and how good he looked, and how brave he’d been. You know how moms get.

The worst part was they were hugging the life out of the guy. There’s this one lady who lives at the end of the block, across the street from Danley Dimmel—she must weigh three hundred pounds, and she squeezed poor Quentin so tight I thought he was going to come out the other side of her. I mean, he’d just gotten through a week
of BBDs, when he had to fight for every breath, and he was finally having a good-breathing day, but the last thing he needed was a date with the Purple People Eaters.

It was right after the three-hundred-pound lady got done with Quentin that I saw Beverly and Bernard show up, and I made a beeline for them. She didn’t see me until I was right next to her.

“Look,” I said, “I just want to explain—”

She put up her hand. “Go away.”

“But I just want to apologize.…”

“Julian, I don’t want to talk to you.”

That was when Bernard, who’s a fifth grader and a total dingus, stepped between us. He folded his arms across his chest, like he was her bodyguard. It was kind of comical, the way he did it, sticking out his chin as if to say,
Wanna make something of it
?

“C’mon, Beverly—”

Her brother took another step forward. He was right in front of me. “Get lost, Twerp.”

“Bernard,” I said, “what are you doing?”

He poked his finger into my chest. “I said
get lost
.”

I looked past him to Beverly, and for a split second our eyes met. Even though she didn’t want to do it, she cracked a smile. It was only for that split second, and then she turned her head, but it was enough.

“All right, Bernard,” I said. “You win.”

I turned and walked back to the guys.

That smile made the rest of the morning bearable. It also let me concentrate on Eric, and on his haftarah—though, looking back, I wish I’d been distracted, on account of it was the most painful bar mitzvah ever.

Rabbi Salzberg was right. Howie was right too. The guy wasn’t ready.

He looked nervous from the start, even when he was sitting off to the side and Rabbi Salzberg was at the podium, plowing through the morning service. I was sitting with the rest of the guys in the fourth row, with Lonnie to my right and Quentin to my left. We were at the end of the row, as out of the way as we could get, but still with a good angle to keep an eye on Eric. He was real pale, which you’d kind of expect, but you could also see droplets of sweat trickling down his forehead and into the corners of his eyes, which kept making him blink and rub them. He even used his tallit shawl to wipe his forehead. But it was no use. The trickles came back, and you could see sweat spots staining the cotton.

The main problem, I think, was his red tie. His mom had made the knot too tight. His throat was as red as his tie. Since his face was as white as a marshmallow, he looked like he was strangling. I mean, he
wasn’t
strangling, but that was what it looked like.

It was a half hour into the service when Rabbi Salzberg
waved him up to the podium. Every step he took had a wobble in it. He stumbled at the edge of the podium, but he made it. The rabbi whispered into Eric’s ear, and Eric glanced over his right shoulder at the Torah, which sat on a ledge at the back of the stage and was wrapped up in decorative blue cloth. He gave the thing a good long look.

After that, he faced forward again and stared down at the huge open Hebrew Bible in a real serious way. Then, at last, he reached into his suit pocket and took out five pages of notes—where he’d written out the sounds of the Hebrew words in English letters. It was no big deal. Lots of guys did it if their bar mitzvah came around and they still couldn’t figure out the Hebrew letters. Even Rabbi Salzberg didn’t seem to mind. The sight of the crib sheet seemed to calm down Eric. He started to smile but caught himself and glanced from side to side as Rabbi Salzberg lowered the microphone. Then the rabbi stepped back from the podium. Eric the Red was on his own. He took a deep breath.

Nothing happened.

Not a sound came out of his mouth. The trickles of sweat became rivers, and he was blinking like crazy, and nodding up and down, but he couldn’t get out that first line. The thing is, he
knew
the first line. I knew he knew it. I’d heard him practice it a hundred times. Heck, even
I
knew the first line of Eric’s haftarah. But he was stuck.
He was dead stuck. I leaned forward, mouthing that first line, trying to push the words into his head. But I couldn’t make eye contact.

He was standing there, alone, with nothing coming out of his mouth, for at least a half minute before Rabbi Salzberg slid across the stage and whispered a couple of words into his ear. Then, as if he’d gotten a jolt of electricity, Eric sang out, “
Vayosef od-daveed ut-kol-bachuul beh-yisrahel …
”

Which means: “Something-something-something of Israel …”

Rabbi Salzberg slid back across the stage.

Except as soon as the rabbi stepped away, Eric stopped again.

There was another half minute of nothing, of torture. You could hear people in the rows behind us murmuring and coughing. When it was about to get unbearable, Rabbi Salzberg came forward again and whispered again into Eric’s ear. Again, it was like when Frankenstein gets shocked into life. Eric’s eyes jumped open, and he sang a few more Hebrew words: “
shlosheem alef vayacohm vayellech daveed …
”

But as soon as Rabbi Salzberg stepped away, again Eric stopped.

More torture.

Rabbi Salzberg didn’t wait as long this time, maybe ten seconds. He came forward and was about to whisper
into Eric’s ear for the third time. But before he could, Eric blurted out, “
Vehchol ha-ahm asher eetoh …
”

Just like that, he was off. Rabbi Salzberg stepped away, but Eric the Red kept going. You could feel relief spread through the entire temple. The congregation settled in, and Eric’s face started to go back to its normal color, and even the knot in his tie didn’t seem as tight.

It was about five minutes later when Lonnie nudged me with his elbow. He didn’t turn his head but said under his breath, “Kill me now.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You forget how boring it is.”

“Maybe we can liven things up.”

“No!”

“Oops, too late!”

By the time I looked over at him, he’d already reached forward and grabbed a copy of the Gates of Prayer monthly newsletter from the book sleeve on the back of the seat in front of him. Slowly, quietly, he began to tear off the back page.

“No, Lonnie!”

But he was smiling the way he does when he’s about to do something really bad—or really good, depending on how you look at it. I knew the fact that I’d told him to stop would only make him more determined to keep going.

“Lonnie, c’mon.…”

There’s this thing that Lonnie does with a sheet of paper that you have to see to believe. He tears off a narrow strip at the end and rolls it around his thumb, then pulls on the tip until it forms a perfect missile. I mean, it’s like a work of art, the way he does it. He gets the paper to come to a point, and then he licks his fingertips and squeezes the point so that it stays that way. I’ve seen other guys do it, but their missiles always unravel or come out too fat or too dull. Lonnie’s are like doctor’s needles.

Then comes step two: he takes the leftover paper and rolls it into a peashooter—except it’s a missile shooter, because Lonnie wouldn’t bother with a pea. Again, I’ve seen other guys do it, or try to do it, and blow the missile out of the shooter, and the thing just falls out the other side or goes a couple of inches. But Lonnie always gets the shooter the exact right size so that the missile slides in with no room to spare and comes out like, well, a missile. Plus, the thing’s dead accurate. I’ve seen him spear a Twinkie some guy was about to put in his mouth … and the guy was three cafeteria tables away.

Once he had the missile and shooter made, he nudged me again. “All right, you pick the target.”

“I’m begging you, Lonnie. Don’t.”

“You know you want me to do it.”

“Look, just wait for the reception,” I said. “Not the service. It’s the wrong time.”

“That’s what makes it the right time.”

Quentin overheard us at that point and nudged my left arm. “What are you guys doing?”

“Hunting for wabbit,” Lonnie said.

That cracked up Quentin, but then Howie, who was sitting to Quentin’s left, shushed him, and then Shlomo, who was sitting to Howie’s left, shushed both of them. Then a gray-haired old lady sitting in the first row—three rows in front of us—turned around and shushed all of us. She was wearing a tall black hat with spidery-looking loops on it.

“Target acquired,” Lonnie whispered to me.

“Are you
nuts
?” I said.

Lonnie slipped the missile into the shooter.

“I think that’s his grandmother!”

“Do you see the top curlicue?”

“Lonnie!”

But by then he had the shooter in his mouth, and he was taking aim.

“Don’t do it!”

The only answer I got was the sound of his breath:
“Pwah.”

The missile zoomed right through the loop of the top curlicue on Eric’s grandmother’s hat and landed next to the emergency exit on the side of the stage. I watched it, then braced myself for the reaction. But there was no
reaction. Nothing happened. No one in the congregation, except for the five of us, noticed. Not even Eric’s grandmother, though she brushed the top of her hat with her right hand, so she must have felt something zip past her. It was a miracle. Lonnie got away with it. The thing must have shot forty feet, but people were either staring down at their prayer books or looking at Eric, and they missed it.

But
Eric
saw it.

He must have noticed it out of the corner of his eye, because an instant later, he stopped singing. He looked up from his crib sheet and down at us, and for half a second, he cracked a smile. But when he looked back down at his crib sheet, he was lost. His momentum was gone. Even from the fourth row, you could see the panic come back into his eyes. His face went pale again. Then, in about three seconds, the skin of his throat changed four shades—from pink, to dark pink, to red, to dark red.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad if Rabbi Salzberg had been paying attention, if he’d slid back across the stage and whispered into Eric’s ear again. But I think even he got caught off guard. He was standing off to the side, like before, except his eyes were shut, and he was rocking back and forth on his heels, saying the words to himself. You could see his lips moving. I don’t think he even heard Eric grind to a stop.

Eric glanced up from the crib sheet again and then down at the five of us, and he got a weird, surrender kind of look on his face. It was like he was saying,
All right, I’m done
. Except he wasn’t done, not by a long shot. Even without knowing the Hebrew, you could tell he was still in the middle of his haftarah. He began to sway behind the podium. You know that thing that happens when a boxer gets knocked down to the canvas and then stands up too fast? That was what it looked like.

He grabbed the front of the podium to settle himself, which caused the microphone to rattle. That, at last, got Rabbi Salzberg’s attention. He rushed across the stage and put his hands on Eric’s shoulders to steady him, but he was too late. Eric pulled out of his grasp and ran off the stage, and a couple of seconds later you could hear him throwing up in the hall.