Jim - Fourteen

Jim

 

Well I sure as hell didn’t see what I did wrong there. Jesus, Hersch got mad if I ignored her, and he threw a f*****g fit when I tried and be nice to her. How the hell does that work? What an a*s. Something’s wrong with that guy’s head, let me tell you.

I had told the truth, before he flipped his lid at me. It had been a great night. I mean, obviously there was the part where I wanted to kill myself out of fear that she would spill our secret every time she opened her mouth, but once I got past that, it turned out Becky was a pretty decent girl. Actually, she was better than decent; she was crazy. She could drink and smoke with us guys all night, but still looked damn good in her little skirt. She could push Erich around but still be sweet enough to Moretti. She could make her brother believe she was his innocent little sister, but flash her eyes at me like she was still thinking about how stupid I had looked with my pants around my ankles.

It was like nothing I had ever seen. The girls back home came in two varieties: farmers’ daughters, and more farmers’ daughters. That meant lots and lots of subtle flirtation, followed, if you were lucky, by a quick f**k behind a barn or a clumsy journey through her bedroom window at three in the morning. If you weren’t lucky �" and let me tell you I’m a pretty unlucky guy �" let’s just say I had gotten slapped away with my hand an inch under the hemline plenty of times, and had been chased off of more than one guy’s land with a shotgun pointed at my back. So, if nothing else, Becky was exciting.

Of course, there was no one I could tell this to. Hersch was my best bud at the school, but if I brought it up to him I would get worse than shot. If I had to guess, Moretti or Amery would probably find me impaled on the weather vane next Tuesday if I so much as mentioned thinking that way about Becky to him. It’s not like either of them would be a lot of help either. I somehow doubted Gabe would be much help when it came to girls, and frankly I was surprised Erich hadn’t killed her.

So I couldn’t talk to anyone, and I ended up lying in my bed for about an hour with all these thoughts just bumping around in my head. In the end, I decided that I was sleep wasn’t an option. I listened to make sure the guys were asleep, slipped out of bed, grabbed my pants, and crept out the door.

I hit the wall more than once as I struggled into my pants in the pitch dark hallway. It was so dark I figured there wasn’t much I could do inside, and I needed some fresh air anyway, so I clumsily felt along the wall until I made it outside.

It was warm out in the courtyard, well, at least warm enough to have a smoke in my undershirt without immediately succumbing to pneumonia. It was a clear night, and the moon was maybe a week away from being full, so it was bright out too, bright enough to make it to the oak tree.

I leaned against the trunk and lit a smoke. One of the many pathetic things I could never admit to the guys was the fact that I really didn’t like smoking that much (actually I had smoked more in the past month than I had in my whole life, just so they guys wouldn’t get wise), but a good cig could always calm me down when my mind running working a mile a minute. This happened sometimes back home, the insomnia. The way I saw it, my brain was dead set trying to kill me by working overtime after midnight.

“Can I bum a smoke?”

The voice came from directly above me, and I was so alarmed I shrieked and tossed the pack into the darkness. A second later, a figure dropped from the branches above me. Who else?

“Becky!” I breathed, still panicked. “What are you doing?”

            “Rebecca,” she corrected me. “Don’t ever call me that in front of Hersch. No one back home calls me that.” Through the shadows, I could see her smirk. “And I’m here for the same reason as you, I would guess,” she said, dropping the ground next to me. “Can’t sleep.”

            I looked at her disbelievingly. “Yeah, scaling oak trees is how I get ready for bed, too.” I said sarcastically. “What the hell were you doing up there?”

            She nodded her head towards the sky. “The stars,” she said softly. “You can’t see them in London.” She looked down sadly. “Can’t see them in Poland, either.” She sighed, then looked at me so directly I squirmed a little. “Why is it you can never just button your pants?”

            My eyes shot down to my fly, which I had missed altogether in the process of getting dressed in the dark hallway. While I scrambled to remedy that, I realized something. “Your English is better,” I said suspiciously. “It’s better than it was an hour ago.”

            Becky scoffed and shook her head. “That’s because the worse Herschel thinks my English is, the easier it is for him to believe I’m not getting in trouble.” She flashed a knowing smile at me and I shivered. “How much damage could I do in London if I don’t even speak the language?”

            “Yeah,” I rolled my eyes, “you’re a regular saint.”

            She glared at me. “I got fired, you know. That’s why I had to come here. I told Paul I wouldn’t take private customers anymore. I barely had any in the first place. Believe it or not, not many of those uptight British guys want to pay for a dirty Jewish w***e.” Her voice was bitter.

            Her tone made me feel a little sick. The better I got to know her, the more I realized a place like that was not where Becky belonged. “How did you end up there in the first place?”

            Becky sighed. “It was stupid. I just needed a place to stay, and when I met Paul he said he would give me a job and an apartment.” She looked back towards the school. “I could have asked Hersch to stay in London with me, but I wanted him to go to school. I didn’t want Papa’s plans to go to waste.”

            “Boy am I glad,” I said happily. Her glower immediately mad me realize it was the wrong thing to say. My face got hot and I had to glue my tongue into place to keep myself from stammering. “I… I just mean he’s my best pal here. I know what you mean, about being alone here. I’m from Wisconsin, and I haven’t got anyone but Hersch in this whole country.”

            Rebecca sighed. “Sounds like we’re in the same boat. I’ll bet Hersch is glad to have you, too. He’s as alone as anyone. He’s told you about Kristen, then?”

            I racked my brain, but he actually rarely talked about her. “Not really, not much, anyway.

“Really?” She sighed and looked sadly down. “He shouldn’t keep it inside like that. It’s going to kill him.”

Suddenly, I was angry. I was f*****g sick of everyone keeping their secrets, like I was some kind of idiot who wouldn’t understand. “Rebecca, what happened?” I asked. “I mean, really? How much could Hersch be keeping from me? I’m the only person he ever even talks to!”

“Oh really?” She asked condescendingly. There was that idiot feeling again. “Has he told you he’s almost twenty?”

That threw me for a loop. “Nineteen? No… he… why… he couldn’t be!” Stammering. Idiot. “H-how? He couldn’t have gotten into Wellington’s.”

“Well, not without connections.”

“What? You came from Poland! How could he have…?” The light bulb in my head came on so bright I was surprised Becky couldn’t see it herself. “Knight?” Hersch’s uncanny knowledge of the school, his ability to get us out of even the worst situations with Knight. How stupid were we to not have figured that out.

She nodded. “Papa’s best friend. They met here at Wellington’s.”

“At Wellington’s? Wait, is this… is this where your dad went to school in England?”

She snorted. “Herschel isn’t sharing much, is he?” One look at my bewildered face and she softened her tone. “Herschel and I came from a place in Poland, I think the word in English is a ‘gettie.’”

“Ghetto?” I asked tentatively, still afraid of looking stupid.

“That’s it,” I couldn’t help but be glad I had come off looking good there. “The Germans took all the Jews in the area and walled them off in one corner of our city.” Her breath caught a little bit, and she took a drag on her cig before putting in out in the dirt. “Our parents disappeared a few months after we were moved. We got word of their deaths a little more than a year ago. Papa had made… plans for us. But we were only supposed to act on them if something went really wrong.”

“What plans?” I was sitting like a kid listening to a good story with my legs crossed and my elbows on my knees.

Becky rolled her eyes, and I could almost feel the bitterness radiating off her. “Well, they were plans for Herschel. Herschel was the king of the ghetto, the way Papa saw it. He was the one just destined to fix our lot.”

I smiled to myself. “Back home, we would call that the Prodigal Son.”

Becky smiled a little too. “The Prodigal Son, then. Anyway, in case of any real trouble, Papa had written Knight, who had agreed to accept Herschel into the school at any time. I like to believe that they took him away before he could make plans for me. But I always knew I meant less to him than Herschel did.”

I snuck a glance at her face, and what I saw almost made me topple backward. There was more there than just the icy cynical w***e who had thrown me out of her room with my pants around my ankles. Rebecca was hurting and alone and scared. Hersch was, too, I realized. And I had failed to see it in either of them.

Suddenly, all I wanted to do in the world was comfort her. I reached for her hand. First test passed: she didn’t jerk away. “Rebecca,” she turned her head, and I touched her face, the way I had tried to back in London. She didn’t hit me this time, a very good sign. “You’re perfect.”

Becky shook her head. “Oh, James.”

“I mean it,” I insisted softly. I wonder if this was coming off fruity, but really, I did mean it. “I mean it.”

She didn’t turn away this time, and I saw my chance. I tilted her chin up and kissed her. And she didn’t hurt me at all. She kissed me back. My heart was practically exploding against my chest. What was I doing? This was Hersch’s sister. This was the girl who had tried to strangle me in the basement of a cathouse.

But she was different from other girls. She made me feel different. With her, I didn’t feel like an outsider, like I usually did with the guys. Becky had opened up to me, more than Hersch or anyone else ever had. And when I was with her, I felt like I was in the right place.

A distinct throat clearing made me shove off her in two seconds. I opened my eyes hoping for an angry lion, but - surprise surprise - Hersch was standing in front of us. I heard Rebecca gasp and we looked away from each other like somehow a lack of eye contact could turn back time. It was too dark to see Hersch’s face, but as far as I was concerned, there must have been smoke coming out of his ears.

“Get back to your room, Rebecca,” he seethed.

She stood. “Herschel, we…”

“Don’t start,” Hersch said through gritted teeth. Rebecca threw a desperate glace back towards me before slinking back towards the building.

I was left standing in the shadows of the oak tree with Hersch baring his fangs at me. I tucked my chin, both out of shame and in order to protect my throat from attack. Jesus Christ, I was a bad guy. I had one friend in the entire country and I had given him just about every right to kill me. He didn’t say anything for so long, I finally had to open my mouth.

“Sorry,” I squeaked.

Hersch squinted through the dark at me. “That’s. My. Sister.” His tone was so deadly it sent a jolt of adrenaline through me. I nodded a little too vigorously. “You don’t touch her.”

I nodded some more. “Loud and clear, Abrahamson. Loud and clear.”

He gave me another long glare and shook his head. “Idiot.”

I stood there stupidly for a minute after he headed back for the dorm, until, eventually, I had not choice to follow him. I couldn’t help but feel like I had come away from this night but a belly full of shame and a new shade of lipstick on my face.

Author's Note

Posted raw... so...

Reviews

[trish420]

wHOO HOO! Great explanations given without seeming too wordy, good job!

[Arianna]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAP. insight into hersech's life!
and how he knows knight
and how rebecca became a stripper
MY LANTA SO MUCH INFORMATION!
:D
*happppppy danceeeeeee*
this was an awesome chapter
you told what was going on without makeing it too awkerd
cause that was what i was worried about
but this was REALLY GOOD
im excited...
and sad i didnt read slower to make it last.
:)
LOVE IT!