The Opposite of Hallelujah (28 page)

“For who? Him or you?”

“I’m fine,” I insisted. “I’ve moved on. And so has Pawel. He’s got a new girlfriend.”

“He does?” Hannah looked as shocked as she could manage.

“Well, that’s the rumor. He didn’t
exactly
deny it when I … accidentally confronted him about it today,” I said. “Anyway, back to work.”

“Hey, hold on. Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?” Hannah fiddled with an old sock. “I don’t mind listening.”

“It’s nothing,” I said, trying to ignore the way my stomach was tugging. I began scrolling through yet another website. Fifteen minutes later, I found what I was looking for: a narrow-necked hundred-milliliter round-bottom distillation flask made out of soda lime glass. I ordered it immediately on my parents’ credit card and went back and forth about texting Pawel to let him know, until, finally, I just sent “Bought container for experiment. Let you know when it arrives” and left it at that. I got no response.

I was about to retreat into my room when Hannah stopped me. “Caro?”

“Yeah?” I asked, cradling my laptop in my arms.

“I— Mom is taking me to the doctor next week,”
she said. It was news to me. Nobody had mentioned a doctor’s visit—not that anyone in this family told me anything. Father Bob was right when he said trust took a lifetime to build and a second to destroy. “And I was wondering if you would come.”

“What kind of doctor? Like a lady doctor?”

Hannah stared at me for a second, then shook her head. “No, like a, um, a nutritionist, sort of. Will you come?”

“Yes,” I said. I was surprised but pleased. This was a big step for Hannah—and for my parents. They were finally admitting that Hannah had a problem, even if they weren’t admitting it out loud to me. And I had some trust-building to do with my family. I was absolutely going to be there if Hannah wanted me. “I will come.”

She smiled. “Thanks.”

A week later, Pawel and I sat across a table from each other in the physics lab with the flask between us. Mr. Tripp was in his adjoining office with the blinds half closed.

“Okay,” Pawel said, staring at the flask. “Now what?”

“I showed Mr. Tripp a list of the equipment we’re going to need,” I told him. “He promised he’d help us get our hands on it. He says he has a friend at the physics
department at Northwestern who might rent some of it out to us.”

“So we just wait?” Pawel asked.

“No,” I said. “I thought we could go over methodology. I made this for you.” I pulled a small stack of papers out of my bag and handed it to him.

He took a minute to look it over. “This seems really complicated. Are you sure we can pull this off?”

I nodded. “I’ve gone over everything about a thousand times. Although I fully acknowledge it might not go exactly as planned.”

“You mean we might fail?”

“What would you rather do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Pawel said. He paused for a moment, as if he had something more to say. Then he said it. “Actually, I was thinking maybe we could create a Rube Goldberg machine.”

“What’s a Rube Goldberg machine?”

“You know, like a contraption that does something simple in a really convoluted way,” Pawel said. “I’ve been sort of obsessed with them since I was a kid. I used to make them out of K’nex.”

“If you wanted to do a different project, you should’ve said something when we had to turn in a proposal,” I said.
Amazing
. I’d done all kinds of research on single-bubble sonoluminescence, purchased the flask, and requested the materials from Mr. Tripp, some of which were going to
be difficult and expensive to lay our hands on, and now he was telling me he wanted to submit a useless invention made out of a children’s toy. “Unbelievable.”

“Jesus, Caro,” Pawel said, kneading his forehead. “I know you’re not thrilled to be working with me, but you could at least pretend to listen to my ideas.”

“I’m listening. I’m just telling you that the deadline for turning in our proposal has passed and we can’t change our project now,” I said. “I don’t know what you want me to do about that.”

“You know what? You’re totally right. I should’ve said something earlier.” He leaned away from the table and folded his arms across his chest. “Why don’t you just tell me what you want my help with? I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”

“Well, how about, since I’m already familiar with the procedure, you be in charge of recording our observations?” I proposed. “Then we can do the write-up and presentation together.”

“Okay, that sounds good,” Pawel said, running his fingers through his hair. I loved it when he did that. It made him look sweet and pensive. I blinked a few times to clear my head and when I looked up, Pawel was staring at me.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I just had something in my eye,” I lied. “It’s gone now.”

“So … are we done for today?” He didn’t wait for me to answer; he just started packing up his books.

“Sure,” I said.

He gave me a tight smile as he slid off his stool and onto his feet. “See you later,” he said, walking to the door.

“Hey, Pawel?” I called out. He turned, and I bit my lip, unsure now about saying what I’d been planning to say.

“Yeah?” His eyes searched for mine, but I kept them trained on a large crack in the linoleum.

“I don’t not want to work with you,” I said. “I just thought it was going to be weird and I didn’t want you to think—”

“I don’t,” he said. I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the smile in his voice. “We’re friends, right?”

“Right,” I said, letting my breath out slowly and trying desperately to fight the floaty feeling. The last thing I needed was to blurt out the truth about the friend thing—that it wasn’t what I wanted, that I wanted much more.

“Then it’s kosher,” he said. “Have a good night.”

“You too,” I managed to say, hoping he didn’t hear the crack in my voice as he left the room.

When he was gone, I knocked on Mr. Tripp’s window and waved. He waved back and gave me a thumbs-up, which, dorky as it was for a teacher to give his student a thumbs-up, made me feel a little better.

I decided to walk home. It wasn’t dark yet, and though it was November, we hadn’t had our first snow, so the air was brisk and sharp and clean-smelling. It felt good in my lungs. I bundled up in my puffy coat and wrapped my scarf around my neck to keep the chill out. I turned on my iPod, blasted my favorite sad, sweet song from a folk pop artist I liked, and trudged home, feeling sorry for myself, but not as much as before. Things were not great, but they definitely could’ve been worse.

19

I almost forgot about Hannah’s doctor’s appointment. My science fair project, which had started out as just one more annoying class assignment, was occupying most of my thoughts and nearly all my time. Mr. Tripp and Pawel were right to doubt our ability to successfully complete it. Single-bubble sonoluminescence was
way
above our skill level. But when Mr. Tripp offered us the opportunity to back out, to choose something easier, and once again Pawel suggested the Rube Goldberg machine, I got this sudden feeling that if I didn’t go through with it, then that would say something about me. I wanted nothing
to do with some high school–level project. I needed to do something bold and risky and inventive. I wanted to prove that I was capable. And I didn’t care if I failed.

Mom reminded me of the appointment as I ran out the door to catch the Reb bus to school. “The nutritionist, Caro,” she said, waving a piece of toast at me haphazardly. Hannah was upstairs, still asleep probably. She had agreed to this “health assessment,” as they called it, but she hadn’t given up her strange habits, and she wasn’t eating any better.

Clearly, she was unhappy about the appointment. She and Mom picked me up after school and Hannah was silent the whole way to the doctor’s office. The nutritionist’s office was three towns away, and traffic was making us late. The air in the car was clotted with tension; Mom drummed anxiously on the steering wheel and Hannah bit her fingernails, lost in thought. It was as though we were all being ferried by some intangible force of the universe toward an unknowable doom, and even though I knew this was for Hannah’s own good, a part of me wished desperately that we could turn back, go home, and bury our heads in the sand the way we had been doing, because it was safer there, where the shadows of oblivion hid the darker truths well.

The atmosphere in the waiting room was no better. Most of the other patients were normal-looking, all women, and I wondered how many had once been
where Hannah was now, and how many had come from the opposite direction, who were there to get skinnier.

There was one girl, though, younger than Hannah but older than me, who stood out. She sat in a corner with one leg pulled up, her chin resting on her knee. She surveyed the rest of us coolly and dispassionately, as if we were specimens in some human zoo and she was an alien observer. Her hair was pulled up in a messy ponytail high on her head, and her clothes, a simple ensemble of rumpled T-shirt and jeans, hung off her body in a grotesque way, improbably thin arms and legs jutting out from nowhere, like she was made of matchsticks.

I couldn’t help comparing her to Hannah, who sat as far away from the matchstick girl as possible; next to her my sister looked less fragile and wasted, but there was some strange assonance between them, as if they were vibrating at the same frequency, connected by a thread of understanding. The matchstick girl’s eyes landed on Hannah and remained there. She didn’t appear to be ashamed by her bold-faced staring, and Hannah squirmed beneath the weight of her gaze, the heaviest part of her, and refused to look in her direction. Even after the matchstick girl was called in, she left an invisible thumbprint on the room. I couldn’t quite shake off how she had made me feel.

She hadn’t come back by the time Hannah was summoned. I looked up sharply when I heard her name called,
following it to its source, a sweet-faced young nurse who was obviously tired from a long day. Hannah hesitated before standing up, and she and Mom followed the nurse while I, according to a preordained plan, stayed behind with my homework. Twenty minutes later the matchstick girl returned. She placed a clipboard on the receptionist’s desk with a loud clatter and wordlessly grabbed her coat from the rack near the door. She took one last long glance at all of us before turning and leaving, her eyes passing over me as if I wasn’t there. I wondered what she was looking for, but I was glad she was gone; she brought up in me a sort of primal protectiveness of my sister, and even though the thought was absurd, it seemed as though if I could shield Hannah from the matchstick girl, then I could shield her from the disease itself.

When I saw Hannah and Mom emerge from the labyrinth of exam rooms, I jumped up, eager to get out of there. Hannah had some papers to fill out, so Mom offered to go pull up the car while I waited with my sister.

“How was it?” I asked as Hannah bent over the forms, pen in hand, marking boxes with careful checks. She just shrugged.

Hannah had just finished sliding the pen back into the cup on the receptionist’s desk when the door opened and a woman bustled in, an infant carrier in one hand and a boy of maybe three clutching the other. The little boy was babbling and the baby was screaming its head
off as the woman worked to divest herself of her various accoutrements and navigate her team out of the small hallway and into the waiting room.

I glanced at Hannah. “Ready to go?”

But Hannah’s face had blanched, and she turned it away from me, searching for something in her purse.

“Are you okay?” I asked. She mumbled something in reply but I didn’t catch it. “What?”

The woman had removed her scarf and coat and hung them precisely on one of the hooks in the hallway, and with the little boy on her hip and the carrier in her hand, she passed us, only at the last moment looking over.

“Hannah?” she said. I was completely surprised, and it occurred to me then that I often thought of Hannah as if she was a ghost only I could see. Hannah’s head swiveled slowly toward the woman, and her face was as expressionless as I had ever seen it, but in that way my sister had that I now knew hid a churning ocean of feeling underneath.

“Amanda Brenner,” Hannah said, the name coming out in a sudden
whoosh
.

The woman laughed. “Amanda Taylor now.” She wiggled her left hand and a diamond the size of a boulder sparkled in the overhead fluorescent lights. “I can’t believe you’re here! I had no idea you were still in town—it’s been so long and nobody’s heard a thing about you. Are you on Facebook?”

Hannah squinted at her. I had explained Facebook to her already, but she had probably given it no other consideration, had definitely not thought about it as something she should
be on
. “No,” she said flatly.

“Well, that explains it, then,” Amanda said. “You should really be on, we’ve got a nice big group of old St. Robert’s people on there, and our fifteen-year reunion is coming up. You don’t want to miss that, do you?”

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said, nearly shaking. “We need to go. Our—someone’s waiting for us outside.”