The Last Words We Said Read online

  “I’m not cutting my hair, you guys,” I insist, covering the puffy mass behind my ears.

  They all just look at each other. There’s an awkward silence while my mother pretends to blow her nose. (She can’t even do that convincingly.) Someone has obviously forgotten their lines. Or maybe I just jumped forward in their script.

  “I’ll go first, okay?” Deenie suggests mildly. “Maybe you’ll like my hair short and get a similar style?”

  It’s no secret that my family and friends have been lobbying hard to get me to fix my hair. And I’ll be the first to admit that it’s horrible in its current state. In the past, I’ve worn it long and I’ve worn it short, but I’ve never worn it puffy-pyramid style—which is how it’s been for the last nine months. In awful haircut limbo. A couple of days before New Year’s I’d decided to try a new salon; I wanted to surprise Danny with a sexy new do. The hairdresser styled and moussed and snipped for half an hour. The result was a multilayered disaster. My already thick red curls had somehow doubled in volume, and instead of the sleek cute bob that I’d envisioned, I looked like Little Orphan Annie after an electric storm.

  I’d intended to get it fixed as soon as possible, but I never got the chance. Danny’s disappearance after the New Year’s party ended all trivial plans; I had other things to worry about. Since then, any time someone has mentioned my hair, I’ve dug my heels in deeper and shut them down. This was how my hair was when Danny went missing, so I’ve only trimmed it to keep it from changing, and hidden the mess with a thick hair band and tight ponytail. Time stopped for me when Danny went away; I wanted him to see that when he came back. I needed to keep everything exactly the same.

  “Well, I’m going in,” Deenie declares when I shake my head. “You can at least keep me company.”

  “You’re here to keep Ellie company,” Rae protests. “We all are. This wasn’t supposed to be about—”

  She freezes midsentence, and her breath catches; her eyes have fixed on a group of young men who’ve just passed us. Rae’s lips fall open, her cheeks fade to white.

  “Rae, what’s going—”

  But I also don’t finish my thought. I’ve followed her gaze, and suddenly I can’t speak either. I see why she stopped breathing. We’ve all stopped breathing.

  Right there, in the middle of a throng of boys, is Danny. His back is to us, but it’s him, in the flesh. This is no vision, no flight of imagination, no tortured hallucination. It’s obvious that we all see him this time. That sandy mop of hair, the long neck, the bony, slouched shoulders. He’s even wearing his favorite black polo. It’s him. He’s actually here—just twenty feet from us.

  Next to me, my mother claps her hand to her mouth; Deenie grabs at Rae’s arm. But Rae shakes her off and lets out a piercing shout, her eyes blazing with wild joy.

  “Ellie,” she whispers. “Oh my God, Ellie—I see him too. I see him too!”

  “Rae, wait,” Deenie begs, “I don’t think—” But Rae is already tearing after him.

  I’m frozen to the ground, torn between the urge to follow her, yet too terrified to move. They could all see him now. Finally, they could all see him.

  But what did that mean for me? Why hadn’t he said anything as he passed? He must have seen me. Did he not want to see me? Is this what I’ve been waiting for all this time? Danny has finally come back, but now he won’t look at me.

  “Wait!” Rae cries, and launches herself at them. Two startled boys fall back to let her pass. She calls Danny’s name and grabs at his shirtsleeve, spins him around so roughly that he totters against her.

  An awful moan shudders through Rae, a cry that tears through all of us. The boy is wearing a different face; every part of him is wrong, distorted. To his buddies I know he looks completely ordinary, but to us he’s absolutely hideous, because he’s not the boy we’ve longed for. Like a small child reaching for her parent’s arm, Rae had accidentally grasped at a stranger. And in that moment, that boy’s innocent, confused expression burns us like a monster’s sneer.

  Rae wilts, her fingers still clutching his sleeve. Mom grabs my hand and quickly draws me close to her. I can barely feel her arms around me as she pulls me into a hug, but I catch a glimpse of her face before I’m buried in her blouse. She looks like she’s seen a ghost.

  Deenie is the only one who’s kept her sanity. “Sorry about that,” she calls out to the startled boy. “She thought you were someone else.”

  “No worries,” the boy replies, and gently disengages Rae’s hands from his shirt.

  I hate his stupid voice. No worries? How can he say that? We’re obviously worried. Even my mom’s calm confidence is blown; she’s shaking as hard as I am.

  I wriggle out of her arms and start toward Rae; I’m scared she’s about to fall to the ground. Deenie is closer, and she reaches her before I do, but she’s also too late. Rae’s sadness has already evaporated. Fresh outrage sweeps over her; it straightens her back and lights up her eyes. “Where did you get this?” she demands, grabbing the boy’s shirt again. “This isn’t yours!”

  He looks like he’s at a total loss. Deenie tries to pull her away, but Rae has caught most of the polo between her fingers; she seems to be trying to yank it off of him.

  “This isn’t yours!” she repeats desperately. “How did you get this?”

  “Look, Rae, there’s a monogram,” Deenie points out, prying the cloth from her fingers. “It’s the wrong shirt.”

  The wrong shirt, the wrong boy. Rae stares at the fancy orange stitching and throws it back at him with a cry of disgust. The boy makes a face at his buddies, and they all take off down the hall, their laughter lingering behind to mock us.

  Rae turns around to us, her jaw set, her eyes blazing. “Stop looking at me like that,” she growls. When none of us speak, she clenches her fists. “Stop looking at me!” she repeats, and then takes off.

  I head after her, leaving Deenie and my mom behind.

  “Go away!” Rae shouts as I catch up to her at the entrance to the restroom. She slams the stall door in my face. “I just need a second, okay?”

  “Rae, it wasn’t just you. We all saw him. I know how you feel—”

  “Yeah, but you see Danny all the time,” she snaps. The door lock clicks into place. “Isn’t that right? So there’s no way you know how I feel.”

  “Come on, that’s not fair—”

  “He’s always with you. I bet he’s standing next to you right now. Is he laughing? I bet he’s laughing at me. Go to hell, Danny!”

  I take a deep breath. “Fine. I’m going to go.”

  “Good. See ya.”

  I linger in case she changes her mind, but there’s no sound from behind the closed stall door, so I reluctantly step back into the hallway. On the way back I spot my mom and Deenie near the entrance of Nordstrom. They are facing away from me; my mom is speaking, and I stop to listen, my body hidden behind a purse display.

  “You have sharper eyes than I do,” Mom is saying to Deenie. “I really thought it was him for a moment.”

  Deenie looks down at her feet, as if ashamed of herself. “I tried to stop her. I knew it wasn’t him.”

  “How?”

  “If it really was him, I know I would have felt—” Deenie hesitates for a moment and shakes her head. “You know that Danny always knew when Ellie was nearby? Even before he saw her. He’d know she was going to call even before his phone rang. He’d never have walked past her like that.”

  It feels good to hear her say that, to see my mother wipe away a tear. I want to hug them both, to thank them for seeing a part of him I couldn’t see. I’m about to step out of my hiding place to join them when Deenie draws closer to my mom. “He isn’t coming back, you know,” she whispers. “He’s never coming back.”

  “I know,” my mother says. “I know, dear.”

  I step back into the shadow, a surge of anger blotting out my love.

  My mother gives her a sad look and gently touches the end of the black braid coi
led around her shoulder. “Your hair is so beautiful. Are you really planning to cut it all off?”

  Deenie doesn’t look up. “Yes, I am,” she says softly. There’s a ring of regret behind her cool conviction. “I just don’t want it anymore.”

  DANNY MEETS THE RAWR

  There was a boy in my basement! It made me giggle when I thought about it. It’s not that I’d never been exposed to the opposite sex before—my high school was coed. But religious girls and boys hung out in separate circles for the most part. No girl I knew could truly say that she was close to a boy.

  And yet, somehow, I’d managed to convince one to be my friend. Danny’s voice had changed sometime after our plane ride and had fallen to a good octave below mine. I didn’t know why this excited me as much as it did, but I loved listening to his gravelly rumble. He smelled like a strange cross between talc powder and Old Spice. And he was taller than me now, though not yet close to Deenie’s height.

  Over that winter break, he only came by during the mornings when my parents were at work. My basement had always been my friends’ preferred hangout place; in a clever attempt to supervise my socializing, my parents had equipped the large windowless room like a teenager’s dream palace: it housed a collection of massive multicolored beanbags in front of a large-screen TV, a corner Ping-Pong table, and a stocked mini-fridge for late-night snacking.

  Danny ate all of Rae’s frozen cookie dough and then worked through the kitchen pantry so diligently and enthusiastically that my mother began to wonder if I was finally going through a growth spurt. (I wasn’t. He was.)

  But the best thing about Danny was the stories he told. Sometimes they were anecdotes from his former life in LA, sometimes tall tales based on real events—and sometimes they were total fantasy.

  Deenie objected to the tall tales, especially the ones that overlapped with reality. We couldn’t help noticing there were a disproportionate amount of girls in his stories who resembled the two of us; it was hard to believe that most of his past acquaintances were tall, rosy-cheeked brunettes or petite, freckled redheads. “You’re basically lying,” Deenie pointed out after one of the fictional brunettes did something she didn’t like. “How will we know when to believe you?”

  He shrugged. “I never lie about anything that’s important.”

  “I bet I can guess which ones are made up,” I said.

  That’s how our favorite game was born.

  We were in the middle of playing one morning during winter break, and I was building a pretty strong case for “fiction” (He couldn’t possibly have organized a team of ninjas to scale the school fence and steal ungraded math tests, could he?) when the front door slammed and there was a heavy thud on the landing.

  “Anyone here?” Rae’s voice echoed down the stairs. “I’m home, girls!”

  Deenie and I exchanged concerned looks. Neither of us had mentioned our new friend to Rae. She was supposed to be in New York at a Jewish boarding school for “at-risk” religious girls. We didn’t expect her back until Passover break, so we figured we had plenty of time to introduce Danny to her.

  “Down here!” Deenie called out.

  She bounded down the stairs and burst into the basement. “Hey, bitches! What are we smoking?”

  Something was definitely wrong. She only called people bitches when she was nervous or scared. Rae looked the same as usual, except maybe her blond curls had lost a little of their bounce. They hung limply around her thin cheeks, and she kept brushing them aside impatiently.

  “Who’s up for some experimentation?” she demanded, whipping a crushed box out of her jacket. “I’ve got hair dye and scissors.”

  “Rae, what are you doing home?” I asked her.

  “I wasn’t expelled, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she declared, ripping open the box and dumping the contents on the floor. “I left. Turns out, you have to pretty much kill someone to get expelled from that school. And believe me, I tried. To get kicked out, not to kill someone. But they were too busy trying to love me to get that I just wasn’t interested in what they were selling. So, I got on a bus.”

  “You just—left?” Deenie’s expression was somewhere between shock and admiration. “Did you call your parents to let them know?”

  Rae tensed and turned her back to her. “Come on, Ellie, help me with this dye stuff. I’ve never done this before. And I’m not going home looking like me.” She seemed about to say more when suddenly she paused and sniffed the air.

  “Why does it smell like Old Spice in here?” she asked, turning around in a circle until finally spotting Danny, buried deep in a beanbag. He waved and made a show of smelling his armpit.

  “That would be me. Too much? Thanks for the tip.”

  Rae froze, her mouth slightly open.

  “Rae, meet Danny,” I said awkwardly.

  “Hi there.” He struggled out of the beanbag and pointed to the bottle in her hand. “By the way, if you really want a change, then that isn’t the right dye. It’s temporary. Not going to make the statement you want.”

  It was like waving a flag in front of a bull. My awkward introduction had obviously pissed her off, but she’d been holding back—until Danny’s innocent little suggestion sent her straight over the edge.

  “You want a statement, shrimpy boy?!” she shouted. “I’ll give you a statement. I’m DONE.” She walked over to him and grabbed the little kippah off his head. “I’m done pretending to believe this crap. So you can just stick this thing up your skinny butt and run home to your mama. I’m not going to any more ‘lost girl’ schools and I’m not listening to another rabbi tell me to just follow the rules and be patient. I’m rejecting all of it,” she shrieked, brandishing the kippah in his face, then turned back to me and Deenie. “And if you want to replace me with this nice Jewish boy, then go right ahead.”

  She choked on the last words and made a noise between a sob and a moan. Deenie took a couple of steps toward her and then stopped, one arm outstretched in an aborted hug. I wavered between Rae and Danny, torn between protecting my new friend and comforting my old one.

  But Danny didn’t need protecting. “It’s okay, you can keep that,” he said quietly, nodding at the crumpled kippah in her hand. “I wear it mostly to make my father happy. And I would love to run home to my mama, except I can’t because she died. That’s why I moved to Atlanta.”

  Rae’s eyes widened, and she took a step back. There was an awful, heavy silence; nobody breathed while Rae struggled to find her voice.

  “You don’t have to apologize to me,” he said before she could find the words. “I’ve eaten about ten batches of your chocolate chip cookie dough, and if you promise to make more, that’s better than any apology. But your friends didn’t deserve that.” Rae’s shoulders sagged; she glanced around the room as if looking for an escape. “Hey, I’m with you on the religion thing,” he continued, lowering his voice. “But you know it’s precious to Deenie and Ellie, and calling it crap would be like me calling your brownies crap. It would hurt you, and anyway, it wouldn’t be true. Your brownies are awesome—except that I think they’re missing something.”

  She blinked and cleared her throat. “What are they missing?” she said hoarsely.

  He smiled and pulled a white Hershey’s Kiss out of his pocket. “So glad you asked.”

  A little color returned to her cheeks. “That stuff is, like, fifty percent filler. I only use the best ingredients.”

  He grinned. “Great. I’m looking forward to it.”

  She took a deep breath, and her lip quivered. Rae never cried. She yelled, she swore, she threw things, but I’d never seen her cry. She came pretty close that morning, though. There was a glassy shine in her blue eyes. “I think I’d better go home now,” she whispered. “I need to talk to my parents.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Deenie inquired.

  She shook her head and turned away.

  “You’re coming back, right?” Danny asked. “I’m still pretty
hungry, and these two can barely crack an egg.”

  “Hey!” I protested.

  “That omelet tasted like toenails, Ellie.”

  I chucked a pillow at his face.

  Rae’s shoulders were shaking with silent laughter. “I’ve never really talked to my parents about how I feel,” she said after a moment. “So it might take a while. But I’ll be back. Save your appetites, guys.”

  Rae was gone for hours. When she returned, her eyes were bloodshot and puffy, but there was something new in her smile, something stronger than faith and kinder than rebellion. I think it was hope. She never told us what she said to her parents, but I believe that was the day that the RAWR was born.

  Chapter 6

  “But how will you know if he’s any good?” Rae asks Deenie as she settles with a sigh into her beanbag and leans back against the cement wall. We’ve made an unspoken agreement to leave last week’s Danny sighting alone. Rae hasn’t referred to it at all, and neither Deenie nor I want to bring back the pain of that evening. So we just add it to the list of things that we don’t talk about.

  Not on that list, apparently, is Deenie’s shomer conviction.

  Rae has become obsessed with the idea that Deenie is going to wake up one day to the horror of a sexless marriage, shackled to a man who’s not attracted to her. “Or he could be gay. What if he’s gay, and he doesn’t realize it until he sees you naked? And then BAM.” She makes a deflating motion with her index finger. “Oh, no, there it goes. I’m melting, I’m meeellllting….”

  Deenie bats her hand away and laughs. “I guess I’ll just take my chances. And, anyway, you can feel chemistry, even without touching.”

  “She’s right,” I say. I’d certainly felt it with Danny, way before we touched each other. “If you’re in love, the sex will be wonderful.”

  Rae snorts. “How would you know? Weren’t you the shomer poster child?”