Now that I’m thinking about it, I hope Neil doesn’t bring that one. As much as this kind of thing doesn’t usually faze me, I would really like to not discuss my period or Riley’s in Neil McNair’s bedroom.
“There’s this word in Japanese: tsundoku,” Neil says suddenly. “It’s my favorite word in any language.”
“What does it mean?”
He grins. “It means acquiring more books than you could ever realistically read. There’s no direct translation.”
“I love that,” I say. “Wait. What’s that in the back?”
“Nothing,” Neil says quickly, but I’m reaching for the familiar cover, the woman in a wedding dress. Vision in White by Nora Roberts. The romance novel I wrote about freshman year.
“Huh. Isn’t this interesting.” My grin cannot be contained.
He fists a hand in his hair. “I—uh—got it used. Later in freshman year. I thought maybe I’d been… a bit of a dick about it? I figured, maybe you were onto something, maybe I should read it if I was going to pass such harsh judgment on it. It’s the way so many people talk about romance novels, right? I was young, and I guess I thought it was cool to make fun of things I didn’t really understand? I wanted to give it a chance.”
“And what did you think?”
“I… liked it,” he admits. “It was well written, and it was funny. It was easy to get invested in the characters. I could see why you loved it.”
He is surprising me in so many ways.
“I’ll take it off my list of potential book reports. There are three more books in the series, though,” I say. “Wow. My head is just reeling. From everything.” I open it up, freezing when I land on the copyright page. “Wait. This is a first edition? Are you serious?”
He peers over at it. “Wow, guess it is. I never looked.”
I’m gaping. Neil has a first-edition Nora Roberts.
“Take it,” he says.
“What? No. I couldn’t,” I say, though I’m hugging it to my chest.
“It means more to you. You should have it.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much.” I unzip my backpack, and in my rush to reshuffle and make room for the book, a small foil packet plummets to the floor between us.
I have never before experienced the silence that comes over us. “Red” doesn’t even begin to describe the color of his face.
“Did… you have plans later?”
I am deceased.
“Oh my God. No. No,” I say, snatching the condom and stuffing it into my backpack. “It was a joke. Kirby was cleaning out her locker—she’d gotten it in health class—and I’ll just go die now. Leave me here with your books.”
If this had happened to any of Delilah Park’s heroines, they’d breezily laugh it off and crack jokes about it later. I can do that with Kirby and Mara, but not with Neil McNair. In the back of my mind—okay, maybe somewhere closer to the middle of my mind—I wonder if he’s had sex. Earlier today, I would have said absolutely not because of how he and his girlfriend were so cold at school. But after all that happened here in his house… anything is possible. I’m only just now realizing how little I knew about him.
“Please don’t die. I have to tease you about this later.”
“We have to go,” I urge, shouldering my saucy little minx of a backpack. “Shabbat.”
Before he opens the door, he glances back once, as though the image of me in his room is too strange for words. Honestly, everything that happened here is too strange for words.
Stranger, though, is the new kind of determination pulsing through me.
I was wrong earlier. Howl is bigger than Neil and me, but it’s bigger than Westview, too. Destroying Neil to accomplish some freshman-year dream sounds so trivial when this money could change his life. God, he could even change his name. While I can’t erase what’s happened to him, it’s clear now that I can’t take a cut of the prize money. I can’t keep playing Howl just for myself. When we win Howl—if we win Howl—we’re winning it for him.
Excavated #8: A Haunted Hanukkah
by Jared Roth and Ilana García Roth
Riley tightened one of the little buns coiled on top of her head, and then the other. She wasn’t about to let her hair get in the way of this mission. Not again.
She wasn’t scared. She hadn’t been scared since she was ten, maybe eleven. Roxy was the one who got scared, who begged Riley to check inside her closet and beneath her bed for monsters. Riley had always taken her role as monster vanquisher very seriously, and after poking her head into every shadowy space, she declared in her most official voice that her sister’s room was officially beast-free.
No, she wasn’t scared, not as she crept up the familiar steps to her favorite place in the world at half past midnight. Being in the museum after hours was a privilege; Riley knew that. As she swiped her badge and waved hello to Alfred, the overnight security guard, she reminded herself she had to see the stone up close. She needed silence to allow her mind to fully process it.
The museum’s senior curator, Mrs. Graves, said it had been found on a dig in Jordan, and the image carved into it was unmistakably a menorah. It was, in fact, perhaps the oldest depiction of a menorah that had ever been found.
And yet there was something about the stone carving that hadn’t felt quite right to her, something that pulled her back to the museum when her parents thought she was asleep.
Riley drew closer, her lucky sneakers tip-tapping the tiled floor. It should be up ahead, near the other religious relics housed as part of the museum’s permanent collection.
But just as she turned the corner, she heard someone scream.
And suddenly, Riley was very, very scared.…
6:22 p.m.
NEIL MCNAIR IS ogling my parents like he can’t quite believe they’re real.
“Do you want to lead the kiddush?” my mom asks him after lighting the candles with a hand over her eyes. Maybe she sensed he wanted to by the way he was staring at them.
“I’d love to,” he says after a pause.
In the car, he lamented not having changed into something nicer, but I insisted my parents wouldn’t care that he’s wearing a shirt with an obscure Latin phrase on it. Downside: the whole Neil’s arms situation is back.
It’s not quite sundown—read: not the best Jews—so there’s still light coming in from outside. When we got here, he took off his shoes in the hallway and shook my parents’ hands, but he could barely speak. They know the basics about him: longtime rival, infuriating, mediocre taste in literature. And Jewish, which I included in my message letting them know Westview’s valedictorian would be making an appearance at Shabbat dinner. My parents love opening our home to other Jews, and it happens much too infrequently.
My mom passes him the kiddush cup.
“Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam borei p’ri hagafen,” he says in this low, honeyed voice. The blessing over wine.
His pronunciation, his inflection—flawless. Of course they are, with his affinity for words and languages. There is so much I love about Judaism, the history and the food and the sound of the prayers, but it isolates me too. Yet here’s someone I labeled as an enemy who was maybe feeling isolated in the same way.