Chapter Fourteen
Outside the restaurant, snow was falling. David dug his hands into his pockets. Despite the freezing temperatures, and the late hour, he decided to walk back to Vikram’s apartment. He needed to decompress. And let out his pants. It being the holiday season, the city breathed with holiday cheer.
A bike messenger zipped past him wearing a Santa hat.
Shop windows, decorated with strings of Christmas lights and tiny menorahs, attempted to entice shoppers walking by with artisan crafts and jewelry.
He came to a stop at a light, beside a dozen strangers waiting to cross the street.
Just beyond the cars speeding by, beneath a lone exterior light of a bar called Finnigan’s, a young couple were kissing.
Kissing was probably an understatement, though.
The woman’s body was pressed up against the brick wall.
The man’s hand—at least the hand David could see—was inching beneath her shirt, touching skin.
Neither of them were wearing jackets. A bittersweet sadness fell over him.
He remembered those days with Evelyn, when everything about their life together—especially the sex—was all white-hot intensity.
Oh, the places they had been. Dr. Seuss had no idea.
There was The Pale, a Jewish delicatessen, open all night, known for its Yiddish delicacies like kasha varnishkes and hand-sliced nova lox.
This evening, it was unusually crowded. Not surprising, considering it was Hanukkah.
Through the front window, he watched platters full of freshly made latkes being handed out.
When Evelyn had been working late nights, David would often head to The Pale to bring her dinner.
She would always get kasha varnishkes, a dish her grandmother made, but which she never had the time to make herself.
David, on the other hand, would get the lox platter.
He smiled, remembering the way he would tease her after eating by asking for a kiss .
. . and he found himself missing Evelyn.
He hated that he still missed her.
It had taken David a long time to grow into his own confidence.
Most of his life, he had struggled to fit in.
It didn’t help that David had gone to a small Jewish day school.
His class, which he attended from first until the eighth grade, had only seven kids.
His school, in total, had no more than one hundred students attending at any given time.
It was a wonderful foundation, Jewishly and academically.
But unfortunately, it didn’t have a high school.
The only option for continued Jewish learning was both expensive and forty-five minutes away.
His parents didn’t have the time or money.
And so—like his big sister, Danielle—David entered public school his freshman year.
It didn’t go well.
For one, David was smaller than other boys at the time, both physically and emotionally. He was also extremely sensitive. He cried easily, including on his first day of public school, when he was overwhelmed at both the sheer size of the building and the number of students racing through the halls.
It only got worse from there. When he finally found his homeroom, and the teacher asked them each to give a brief recounting of their summer for each other . . . he missed the memo where he was supposed to talk about sports, beaches and movies.
Instead, he went on a diatribe about all the books he had read and his time at Jewish summer camp, where he and his bunkmates learned all the words to Les Misérables and caught the rabbi’s daughter kissing Jacob Greenberg.
And when people began laughing—egged on by some bigger dude named Nate sitting toward the back of the class—it took David two full minutes to realize that his classmates were laughing at him.
It was one of those my life is over moments.
The teacher tried to calm them down, move on to the next kid sitting beside him, but it was too late.
David had, officially, become the weird kid.
And it may have remained that way his entire life—or, at least, his entire high school life, which when you’re fourteen years old is basically your entire life—except a voice from the back of the classroom interceded.
“Oh, shut up, Nate!” someone said, bringing the entire room to quiet. “You’re just pissed because you spent your summer in juvie.”
It did the trick. The peanut gallery moved from laughing at David to laughing at Nate, and then, without their fearless leader to guide them, the room quickly quieted. David twisted in his seat to see who had stood up for him . . . and found Evelyn.
He hadn’t seen her in years. Not since her parents divorced and they moved away, but he recognized her immediately.
She gave a tiny wave. He waved back. And that was it.
They were friends. His first friend, really, in that big and scary high school.
After homeroom, she showed him how to read the school map, told him where to go for classes and then took him under her wing.
For the next four years . . . well, he was still viciously bullied. But never when Evelyn was around.
She was just too tough. And frankly, smart. Bullies quickly came to realize that they were no match for her fearless and witty comebacks. While she never had the same penchant for animals as David, Evelyn hated injustice. Or what she saw as injustice. And David had loved her for it, completely.
He sighed and glanced down at his watch.
Knowing Evelyn, she would still be working.
Likely, she had also missed dinner. The studio was just a few blocks away.
She wasn’t his responsibility any longer, but considering the way they had left things—considering the fact he had walked out on her—he felt the need to bring her a peace offering.
And maybe, if he was being completely honest with himself, he just wanted to see her.
He missed her, after all.
Not the woman she had become, but the woman she’d been.