The Opposite of Hallelujah (13 page)

He laughed. “It’s just if you had an older brother, I’m sure I would’ve heard about him by now. Baby sisters tend to be proud of their older brothers. They mention them more than they think they do, especially to guys.”

“Is that so?”

“Yup.”

I could feel myself beaming at Pawel. I was getting a kick out of his confidence in his weird talent, how proud he was of what he could figure out about me just by paying attention. It wasn’t something I was used to, having someone really take an interest in me. I loved my
friends—there was no doubt in my mind that I’d be lost without them and they tried their best—but they had their own lives and their own troubles and they were mostly focused on those. And Derek—forget it. Derek hardly noticed anything I ever did unless it was directly related to him.

“Maybe I have a reason for keeping my hypothetical older brother a secret.”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe he’s a CIA agent on assignment in Saudi Arabia and any information I might have about his mission or his whereabouts is top secret and likely to get us both killed,” I proposed.

“I like the way you think, Caro,” he said. “What’s your sister like?”

I hesitated. “Older than me,” I said. “Much older.”

“Oh, that explains some things,” he said, rubbing the base of his neck thoughtfully. “How much?”

“Eleven years,” I said, determined that it would be the last thing I said about her. “What about you?”

“You tell me.”

But I wasn’t nearly as good at this game as he was. I feared I hadn’t paid attention to the right things about him to make an educated assessment. So I guessed. “You’re the middle. And you’re the only boy.”

“Right and wrong,” Pawel said. “I’m the middle, but I have a younger brother and
two
older sisters.”

“Lucky you.”

“Honestly, it’s not that bad,” he admitted.

“We’re here,” I said, stopping in front of the door.

“Where?” he asked, still looking at me.

“French.” I opened the door to Madame’s classroom and slipped inside. Reb looked up at me, then to Pawel, who had followed me in, then back at me. When she caught my eye, she winked.

“What happened this morning with Pawel?” Reb asked. Erin, who had been picking at her tuna salad sandwich, perked up.

“Walk-and-talk,” I said. I was glad Pawel and I had different lunch periods. It ensured that I had fifty uninterrupted minutes to talk to my friends about him, which I’d been doing with increasing and alarming frequency since I’d met him.

“How was it?” Erin asked.

“Good.” I couldn’t believe how much I liked talking to Pawel. I’d loved
being
with Derek, but I couldn’t say that our conversations were the most thrilling I’d ever had. But it was my mission to play it cool. You couldn’t be too obvious about liking a guy. You didn’t want to be one of
those
girls, as Reb and I called them. Erin was one of
those
girls. We loved her, but she was.

“Do you think he likes you back?” Erin pressed.

“Who says I like him?” I don’t know whom I thought I was fooling, but my friends weren’t going along for the ride. They knew me too well.

“Uh, you did.” It was nice of her not to point out how glaringly obvious it was, how I glowed like a light-bulb every time I was near him.

“Lies! I did not.”

“You cyberstalked him,” Reb reminded me. “Unsuccessfully, of course, but you did try.”

“We cyberstalk everybody.”

“Yeah, but you got upset when you
couldn’t
cyberstalk him,” Reb pointed out.

“I wouldn’t say I was upset,” I said, correcting her. “I was curious. Interested. Intrigued, if you will.”

“I won’t. You’re smitten,” Erin insisted. I opened my mouth to protest, but she held up her hand to silence me. “No, I won’t hear it. You love him.”

“Will you two give it a rest?” I cried. “I don’t even
know
him.”

“Well, due to his lack of Internet presence, that would require talking to him,” Reb observed.

“I do talk to him.”

“I meant talking to him about
him
. Not you.”

I took Reb’s advice to heart and decided to find out more about Pawel.

“So,” I said to Pawel as we left precalc together late that afternoon. “Where did you go to school before this?”

“Fairview,” he said as if it was the least interesting fact in the world. Pawel didn’t seem to like talking about himself. I found it sort of strange. You couldn’t get most people to shut up about themselves usually.

“Did you like it there?” Fairview was another big high school, just a few towns over. The Sobczak family hadn’t moved very far.

He shrugged. “It was okay. Nothing special. Not like this place,” he said sarcastically. He gestured widely, looking a little like Maria whirling around on the mountains of Austria in
The Sound of Music
. I laughed.

“This is a great school,” I mock-scolded him. “Look at how shiny the lockers are.”

“Good point, counselor,” he said, shifting his backpack onto one shoulder. “Locker aesthetics are very important.”

“So you transferred because your family moved?”

“Mmm-hmm,” he murmured absently. I could’ve asked, “Is my head on fire?” and I probably would’ve received the same response. I didn’t get the feeling he was ignoring me, really. He just seemed bored by his own story.

“Tell me about your family.”

“Why?” he asked, looking genuinely baffled.

I could see that home life wasn’t a sufficiently
interesting subject, but I was committed to it. “Because you mentioned them earlier and I want to know more.”

“Well, okay. I have two sisters and a brother.”

“I got that much.”

“So you were taking notes,” he said.

I tapped my right temple. “Like a sponge.”

“That explains the grades. My parents are from Poland, and they immigrated in the late eighties, when my sisters were really young,” Pawel told me. “Jake and I were born here.”

“So you still have a shot at the presidency,” I said.

“Only when Americans find room in their heart for a Catholic candidate that isn’t as devastatingly handsome as JFK,” Pawel joked.

“You’re Catholic?” I asked, surprised.

“Mass every Sunday,” he said, rolling his eyes. “My mom’s pretty devout.”

“Hmm.”

“Did I lose your vote?” he asked, more serious for that moment than I’d ever seen him—not that I had very much experience.

“No.” I laughed softly. “You were saying about your sisters …”

“I was?”

“No, but I’m asking.”

“So there’s Magda, who’s twenty-two, and Monika, who’s twenty. They’re both at Loyola, but they come
home every weekend to do their laundry, so it’s like they never left.” He sighed. “And then Jake—Jakub, actually, but he’s gone by Jake since he started school. He’s thirteen.”

“Nice big family.”

“Really? I don’t know. My parents are both one of ten.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. We’re good breeders.” He smiled. “And it’s just you and your sister.” I didn’t miss the shift back to me, although I had to give him credit for subtlety.

“Well … I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Hannah’s eleven years older than me, and she went away for a while when I was eight, so it’s not like we were raised together,” I told him. There was a sudden buzzing in my head, a sound like white noise, like the flutter of insect wings, and I could feel the fact of Hannah’s absence from my life slipping out of my hands as I scrambled to figure out how much I trusted Pawel, and how much I really wanted him to know.

“Where did she go?”

“Oh, college, and then … other places,” I said. Maybe if I was vague about it, he would back down.

“That’s a great story,” he teased, waiting for more.

I shrugged. “So anyway. I was basically raised like an only child.”

“But you saw her at holidays and stuff, right?” Pawel asked. “I mean, she wasn’t totally gone.”

“No, not totally …” I knew I was bullshitting him, but I still didn’t want to talk to anybody about Hannah. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed, necessarily, but that I didn’t know how to explain her in such a way that I didn’t come off as an asshole and she didn’t come off as a total freak. And it wasn’t the nun thing; there was nothing wrong with being a nun. It was her age when she went in, and the secretiveness with which she made such a life-altering decision, and now the mystery surrounding her return.

“Where does she live now?”

Here we go
, I thought. “At home, actually.”

“Really? She must be”—he did the calculations in his head—“twenty-seven now, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Kind of old to still live at home.” I stiffened, but he barreled right on forward, prying me open with an expectant look. I took a second to consider what he must be like with his family. They were close; they must be for him to assume that I would have no problem talking about my sister, that I wouldn’t be secretive or closed off about such a straightforward subject.

“Sure. No, of course you’re right, but Hannah just got back from—” I thought quickly. “The Peace Corps. She was with the Peace Corps in Africa and now her term of
service is over and she’s not quite sure what she wants to do next. So she came home for a little while.”

And there she was, Caroliar, back again with a vengeance out of some deep dark pit. My old nemesis, after all that time, come to sweep me away on a wave of misdirection and falsehood. Except I wasn’t twelve years old anymore, and I should’ve known better. I should’ve told the truth.

“The Peace Corps. That’s no joke,” Pawel said. “Where in Africa was she?”

Goddammit
. Why did I have to lie? I knew precisely zero about Africa. “Chad.”

“Cool,” he said. “Your sister has kind of a kick-ass life, you know that?”

I smiled uncertainly. “She sure does.”

“Hi,” Hannah called, hearing me come in through the garage. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” I said, taking immediate refuge in my room. She was the absolute last person I wanted to see at the moment, after the way I’d completely lied about her earlier to Pawel. I kept hoping the sick, guilty feeling I had in the pit of my stomach would go away, but it stayed put to remind me how once again I’d denied my sister. Worse still, I couldn’t even pretend that I was trying to protect her. It was none of Pawel’s business where
she’d been and why she was back, and really, who was he to pass judgment on how old she was and the fact that she was still living at home? But that wasn’t why I’d done it and I couldn’t trick myself into thinking that it was.

I shut the door, threw my bag onto the bed, and sat down in front of my computer. Almost instantaneously, an IM from Reb popped up.

Rebelieuse:
I saw you went active. How was precalc?

Reb knew precalc was the last class I had with Pawel. It was her subtle way of getting me to spill any juicy details. Unfortunately for her, there really weren’t any.

SweetCarolina:
Same old. Equations, parabolas, blah blah blah.

Rebelieuse:
That’s too bad. I thought maybe things might’ve progressed on the Pavel front.