“Merry Christmas!” he called. Andy ignored him, tucking his chin down into his chest and hurrying past before Mr. Sills could give him the present or start asking him questions. There was a Dumpster behind the Spanish restaurant on Kensington Avenue. He heaved the lid open, threw the bag deep inside, and let the lid fall down, with an echoing clang that he could feel in his teeth.

Next to the Dumpster was restaurant trash—newspaper, plastic bags, coffee grinds and eggshells, a rotted half of a head of lettuce, and a chunk of a broken brick about the size of a baseball. Andy picked up the brick. The roughness felt good against his skin. He stepped onto the street and then, before he could think about it, before he even knew what he was going to do, he lifted his arm and threw the piece of brick, as hard as he could, through the windshield of a car that was parked at the meter in front of the restaurant.

The glass rained down in jagged shards. A lady on the sidewalk screamed, and the man beside her pointed, yelling, “Hey, kid!” Andy ran, and at first the man who’d yelled was chasing him, except he was old and slow and Andy left him behind, his long legs eating up the pavement, weaving down one-way streets and cobbled alleys too small for a car, not feeling the cold, not thinking about the jacket or his grandparents or his mom, thinking of nothing, feeling nothing, hearing nothing, not even the shriek of sirens, until a policeman’s hand grabbed the hood of his sweatshirt, yanking Andy backward. The cop was soft and jiggly underneath his blue uniform shirt, and his belt, with a walkie-talkie on one side and a gun on the other, dragged down his pants. “Merry Christmas, asshole,” he said.

Andy twisted violently. “Fuck you, fatso,” he said. Then the cop grabbed his hood again and slammed Andy into the brick wall of the row house beside him. The air went rushing out of Andy’s lungs as the cop pulled his arms back and up behind him, twisting them hard, and the pain pushed everything out of his mind, and he barely felt the snow in his hair, on his cheeks, melting and mixing with his tears.

Rachel

1990

I ran into the bridal room feeling sick with shame, my eyes burning and my heart galloping in my chest. My party clothes, a gray miniskirt with flounced tiers and a pink-and-gray top, with pink tights and pink Mary Janes, were arranged neatly on the hanger on the back of a chair, and I shoved it over so that the clothes spilled to the ground and lay there in a sad little heap. I had never been so ashamed, never imagined that such shame was even possible, in my entire life.

My bat mitzvah had started off perfectly. I’d studied for weeks, practicing until I could chant every line of Hebrew along with the tape that Cantor Krugman had made for me to play on my Walkman. Nana had taken me shopping and we’d picked out the navy-blue dress that I’d worn for the service (“Sophisticated,” Nana had said approvingly) and the outfit I’d wear to the party. My mother had finally let me get my ears pierced—not at the Piercing Pagoda at the mall, where all my friends had gone, even though I’d begged her, but at my pediatrician’s office, “just to be on the safe side,” she’d said. Even though I’d been doing well for the last year and a half, I still had to be careful about infections. The morning of the service, she’d brought me to her beauty parlor, where Annette, who did her hair, had done mine, using a round brush to blow it out perfectly straight. I’d gotten a manicure, my first, and my mom had even let Annette curl my lashes and put on a little mascara and some pink lip gloss. The whole time, she’d sat in the waiting area, watching me in the mirrors, sometimes with her hands pressed together over her heart, sometimes sniffling a little bit, which should have been a warning, if I’d only paid attention.

The service had started at ten o’clock. The sanctuary wasn’t packed the way it was on High Holidays, when every seat, even the ones in the balcony, would be taken, but the first ten rows were full, with aunts and uncles and cousins, my nana’s sister, my great-aunt Florence, and her husband, Si, my father’s two brothers and their wives and all of their kids. My friends sat together, Kara and Marissa and Kelsey and Britt and Josh S. and Josh M. and Derek and Ross, plus every kid in my Hebrew-school class. My parents were in the front row. My mom wore a rose-colored suit, a pleated silk skirt that fell to her knees, and a jacket that buttoned up tightly enough to show her shape, and high heels that matched, and my father and Jonah both wore dark suits and ties. Up on the bimah, holding the heavy ­sterling-silver pointer, moving the finger over each Hebrew word, I’d been so nervous that my knees had almost been knocking together, but once I’d made it through the first blessings I started to calm down, and I sang the prayers and chanted my portion and read my speech almost perfectly. The subject of my Torah portion was sex offenses—which, as Rabbi Silver said, did not lend itself naturally to a bat mitzvah speech. Together, we’d decided that I could talk about rules in general—which ones we should follow, which ones we should question, which biblical injunctions made sense in the 1990s and which could stand what Rabbi Silver called “some interrogation.”




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