The Importance of Wings Read online

  Our classmates are picked off until it’s me, Liat, Gheeta, and Suri. I wonder what Liat makes of this humiliating savagery. She must have taken gym at other schools. For the first time, I wonder how schools in other states handle gym. Is gym like this in Alaska? I picture people dogsledding to school in heavy fur coats and conducting the Undressing in an icy igloo.

  Liat is picked last.

  I glance at her to see how she feels about it, but her face is expressionless.

  Our team heads outside.

  “Do you know how to play softball?” I ask her in a low voice.

  “Sure,” she answers.

  Donna, who is walking ahead of us in her butt-peeking-out-for-boys shorts, spins around. “Oh, you do, do you?” she asks viciously. She has impossibly long eyelashes—evidence of total mastery in mascara application. “Let’s make you first baseman, then. See how you do.”

  I want to kill myself. Why did I ask Liat that question? Now look what I’ve done!

  Liat places a hand on my shoulder as we reach the field. I nearly yelp. I wasn’t expecting her to touch me.

  “It’s cool,” she says with a small smile.

  I don’t know what to say in response, so I just jog to my outpost at the far end of the field.

  The game begins. As usual, few balls come to the outfield, which is exactly the way I like it. Halfway through the game, a ball whizzes toward Liat. I want to shut my eyes, but I force myself to keep them open.

  Liat catches it in her mitt.

  On the fly.

  I rub my eyes in disbelief.

  Liat’s catch is the third out. Our team exchanges places with the other team. I position myself last in line. If it’s timed right, gym will end before I have to hit the ball.

  Donna suddenly appears. “You’re up,” she says to Liat.

  Liat walks to the plate. She picks up the bat. She looks comfortable. When the ball comes, she whacks it hard and sends it right over the pitcher’s head and past the outfielders.

  Am I dreaming?

  Liat navigates the bases. When she returns to home plate, Donna raises her palm. Liat high-fives it.

  chapter ten

  “it didn’t mean anything, roxanne.”

  “It did too, Liat.”

  “I’m the one who did it.”

  “But I saw it!”

  Liat and I have been sitting on her stoop arguing about her home-run-and-high-five for so long, I’ve missed Gilligan’s Island. If I don’t get my carcass in the house soon, I’ll miss Wonder Woman.

  “What you did meant something,” I say.

  “Not if I didn’t want it to mean anything,” Liat replies.

  I’m not saying what I’m really thinking. The truth is, Liat can be good at sports, even if it’s the most All-American sport of them all. And she can high-five anybody she wants. And be friends with anybody she wants. What I’m really thinking is

  why can’t it be me?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I mutter.

  I don’t know if Liat understands what I’m getting at. But she does, because she says, “I didn’t know gym was so important to you. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

  “It’s a huge deal,” I say bitterly.

  “Why?”

  That stops me. Because:

  a. being brilliant at sports makes you cool and popular

  b. and therefore makes you all-american

  c. i am not brilliant at sports

  d. i am not cool and popular

  e. i am not all-american

  f. i will never be all-american

  “Look,” I say, standing up. “I’m going to miss my shows.”

  Liat seems puzzled. “Shows?”

  I clear my throat. “Yeah, you know, TV shows.”

  Liat frowns at me. “Come on, Roxanne, let’s keep talking about this.”

  “But I can’t miss Wonder Woman.” This sounds lame and is lame, but it’s the truth, and besides, I’ve had enough.

  “Why do you have to watch Wonder Woman?” Liat asks.

  That stops me, too.

  Because:

  a. wonder woman is all-american

  b. liat pulled a wonder woman move today

  c. i will never be like wonder woman—or like liat

  But I can’t say this to Liat. And I can’t tell her my biggest fear—that any second now I’ll say something moronic … and she won’t like me anymore.

  I start to move toward the door. At that moment, Joe struts up the walk with his never-far-behind-him troop of little boys in tow.

  “Oh, what do you want now?” I ask, then gape at my own outburst.

  Joe seems shocked. But he recovers quickly.

  “You’ve got food on your face,” he says to Liat, which is true. Liat has a tiny speck of pink bubble gum stuck to her upper lip.

  Liat automatically brings a hand to her mouth but says nothing in response. I can’t tell if she’s embarrassed about it.

  “Oh, leave her alone,” I say, surprising myself again. But I take a deep breath and go on. “If you came here to annoy us, you’re wasting your time.”

  I head into the house, leaving Joe and Company in my dust, stunned at my own boldness.

  chapter eleven

  saturday morning.

  Super Friends.

  Wondering if I will ever hit a home run in my entire life. Wishing I could turn into Wonder Woman, marry Superman, and live in the Hall of Justice happily ever after.

  Gayle and I are on our second bowls of Captain Crunch when the doorbell rings. It’s Liat. “Whatcha doing today?” she asks brightly. Gayle and I look at each other. “Nothing,” I reply.

  I had assumed Liat was a regular kind of person, the kind who holds grudges, like Kathleen. But she’s forgotten our little argument from the other day as if it never happened. And don’t look at me, because I’m not about to bring it up again.

  “Want to do something?” Liat asks.

  Pause. “Well,” I try to explain, “my dad usually takes us to the mall.”

  “Want to come with us?” Gayle asks.

  “Sure.”

  I want to kill Gayle. I don’t want Liat there. It will be too weird.

  An hour later, the four of us are wandering around Sears.

  “This is the boring part,” Gayle explains.

  Aba is in his glory—surrounded by hammers and saws and screwdrivers and tubes of caulk. I wonder why the world needs robin’s-egg-blue caulk. Aba carefully examines fifty boxes of nails before choosing one. He pays for it, and we’re off to the food court.

  It takes a few minutes, but we finally find a free table. The family that used it before us made an ugly mess. There’s a puddle of soda on the floor and soaked napkins disintegrating in a disgusting mountain on top of the table.

  “Chazeerim,” says Liat, which is exactly what I think—pigs.

  Liat and Gayle go to the Greek stand to get the food while I sit silently with Aba. At the table next to us, a toddler is holding a mustard-drenched hot dog in each hand without buns. He’s waving them in jagged circles and mustard is splattering everywhere. His mother ignores him. I turn to Aba. Something’s been bugging me, but I hesitate.

  “How come you never talk about anything, Aba?” I ask before I lose my nerve. Is it an Israeli gene—this not bringing up things? Liat and Aba both clearly possess it. “How come you never answer my question about when Ema’s coming back?”

  Aba turns to me. He seems bewildered. “I don’t know,” he says. He’s silent again.

  I frown. This isn’t going the way I want it to go.

  “You want to talk?” he asks.

  “No,” I snap.

  “Okay,” he says.

  I sit there fuming. It’s absurd! My father asking me if I want to talk, as if he’s Mike Brady or Pa Ingalls, pretending to care. I turn to him again. “How come you never, like, pursue anything?”

  “Pursue?” he asks.

  “Yeah, ask me more than once about something.”
Aba shrugs. “Asking once is enough,” he says. “It’s not enough,” I say. “How much is enough?”

  I can’t believe this. “Three times,” I sputter, as if I’ve had this answer prepared the whole day. “Three times is enough.”

  “Okay,” he says, then asks me three times in a row, “Are you going to talk to me? Are you going to talk to me? Are you going to talk to me?”

  “No, no, no,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says with another shrug.

  I don’t know if this lack of communication is an Israeli thing or an Aba thing, but either way, I don’t like it.

  Gayle and Liat return with the food. We eat in silence. I can hardly taste my moussaka. See, the thing is, Carol Brady would never fly off to another country and leave her family for three months. Maybe that’s something Israelis do, but Americans don’t do that to their kids.

  After we’re done eating, Aba says he needs to look at car batteries in the Auto Center. He says he’ll meet us at the arcade.

  We take the escalator down to the first floor. The arcade is packed. Bleeping, whirring, and shooting noises drift out. There are four guys blocking the entrance. They look like thugs. They have ornate green tattoos all over their arms and spiked blue hair.

  I hesitate. So does Gayle. Liat does, too. Finally, she walks over.

  “Um, excuse me,” she says to the tallest thug.

  “Oh, sorry,” he says, jumping out of her way.

  My jaw falls open. Gayle and I follow Liat inside.

  We head to the Ms. Pac-Man machine and plug in two quarters.

  “Weren’t you afraid of those guys?” I ask Liat.

  “What could they do to me?” she says. Liat is pretty good at Ms. Pac-Man. She gets all the way to the third level on her first life. I guess they have arcades in West Virginia and Texas and Alaska.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Punch you in the stomach.”

  “All I said was ‘excuse me.’ They were blocking the entrance.”

  “I know, but …”

  “But what?” Liat turns to me. Pinky just ate her Ms. Pac-Man, so it’s my turn. “They’re scary.”

  “Yeah, but they were blocking the entrance.” She cocks her head to the side. “What happened? You told off Joe.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “But what?” Liat asks.

  “Joe’s a little shrimp,” I reply.

  “And …”

  And I can’t think of anything else to say.

  chapter twelve

  when we get back from the mall, I see a red, white, and blue U.S. Mail truck at the end of our block. I race to our mailbox and feel my heart explode when I see a pale-blue aeromail envelope peeking out from under all the other mail.

  “A letter from Ema!” Gayle screeches from behind me, grabbing the letter out of the mailbox before I can. She closes her fist around it and starts dancing on the lawn.

  “Give me that!” I shriek, trying to snatch it out of her hands.

  Gayle giggles and takes off. I run after her. We run around our whole house three times before we’re both completely beat. When I catch up to Gayle, I’m almost too tired to even take the letter from her, but I do anyway. She doesn’t put up a fight, and the envelope slides easily out of her grasp.

  I rip it open, but I know even before I look inside that it will be a complete waste of time. As I expect, there are no vowels. It looks like a chicken dipped its feet into black ink and skated haphazardly across the blue sheet of paper.

  I realize Liat has been watching us quietly all this time. I guess I kind of forgot about her in the excitement of finding Ema’s letter.

  Liat looks upset. In fact, she looks like she’s about to cry.

  “Are you okay?” I ask her.

  She nods once, but in a way that says she doesn’t want talk about it. She turns her face away from me and takes several deep swallows of air.

  It hits me.

  Her mom. Our mom being alive—and hers being dead. I feel terrible about this, but I don’t know what to do.

  Aba watches us quietly too. Because I don’t know what else to do, I walk up to him, give him the letter, and ask him to read it. So, he does, right there, right then, while all of us are standing on the lawn.

  It says all the usual things: Ema misses us, she’ll come home soon, she thinks about us every minute of every day. And yet, it sounds rushed, and I wonder if it is rushed.

  I wonder if maybe that’s why Ema doesn’t take the time to put in vowels anymore. I wonder if she’s dashing off these letters as fast as possible.

  Why?

  To get them over with? To get this troublesome chore over with as soon as possible?

  It makes my stomach sink into my knees.

  Is Ema … forgetting us? Is her sister more important to her than we are?

  Aba says he has to get ready for work. I know he’s already delayed past the time he’d normally go, but I wish, just for once, he’d stay home with us. Do some normal American thing with us like make popcorn and hot cocoa and play checkers.

  My wish isn’t granted. Aba leaves for work.

  Liat, Gayle, and I sit aimlessly on our stoop. Ema‘s letter is clutched in Gayle’s hands. She passes it to Liat.

  “Can you read this to us?” she asks. “I need to hear it again.”

  I guess Gayle assumes, like I do, that Liat is good at reading Hebrew.

  But Liat says, “I don’t read well without vowels. My dad could read it for you, but he’s working, too, like your dad.” She seems really bummed out. Her voice is soft and her eyes are shiny—like she’s holding back tears.

  I’m bummed out, too. I don’t even feel like watching TV.

  The day stretches out before us in all its depressing splendor.

  I don’t know how we’re going to get through it.

  chapter thirteen

  liat says, “hey, i know. Let’s do a night of wings. That’ll cheer us up.” Her voice is still soft, but I can tell she’s trying to sound happy.

  This is a perfect idea, and I’m all for it. Besides, Liat did promise she’d teach me how to make wings.

  We set up shop in my room. Liat brings hot rollers, a curling iron, and beauty magazines from her house. I think they all belong to Rivka. Gayle lies on the floor, flipping through the magazines. I sit on a chair in front of my mirror and Liat stands behind me, like in a beauty salon.

  I know what hot rollers and curling irons are, but I’ve never actually used them. Whenever I attempted to make wings, I used our blow dryer and my round brush. No wonder it didn’t work out.

  “You’ve got to have the right tools,” Liat says when I tell her about my failed attempts. “That’s the secret.”

  “My father always says that,” I say.

  “About curling irons and hot rollers?”

  “No,” I reply with a smile. “About doing stuff around the house. You know, hammers and saws and things like that.”

  “Well, he’s right,” Liat says.

  “Yeah,” I murmur. “I guess he is.”

  Almost Mike-Brady-and-Pa-Ingalls-right.

  Liat begins rolling my hair. She gives instructions as she goes. Soon we’ve stopped feeling so bummed out.

  “You’re lucky you have Rivka,” I say. “To show you how to do your hair and stuff.”

  Liat clips a curler into place. “I’d rather have my mother,” she says quietly.

  I don’t know what to say. “I’m sorry about your mother,” I mumble. Then I add, “My mother’s been gone for three months.”

  “At least you have a mother,” Liat says.

  “Yeah, but she’s in Israel.”

  “At least she’s not dead,” Liat responds.

  This statement gives me chills. And it makes me suddenly worry about bombings in Israel. I’m eager to change the subject, so I ask, “Do people, like, live in igloos in Alaska?”

  She laughs. “No, we lived in, like, a regular city. Anchorage.” She adds slyly, “It even has a mall.”
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  “So, are people the same in all the places you’ve lived?”

  Liat carefully tucks another curler in place. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, are there people who are … mean and nasty in Alaska?”

  “Sure,” Liat says with a shrug. “There are mean and nasty people everywhere.”

  “Even in Alaska?”

  “Yup, even in Alaska.”

  “So, every place is the same?”

  Liat ponders this. “Well, yes and no. Alaska’s different from Florida. And Ohio’s different from Texas. But people are mostly the same.”

  I ask, “How come you’re not scared to start a new school?”

  Liat shrugs. “I guess I’ve done it a zillion times.”

  “But what about starting all over, making new friends, not getting picked on …”

  Liat shrugs. “Yeah, it’s hard.”

  “Were you ever picked on?”

  “Yeah, definitely,” she says.

  “Really?” I ask, turning in my seat. I find this impossible.

  Liat places her hands on my head to steady my curls. “Yeah, lots of times.” “What did you do?” “Tried to make them stop.” “How?”

  “All different ways,” she says mysteriously. “Like what?” I ask desperately. Of all the questions I’ve asked, this one is the most important.

  Liat stops what she’s doing. “It’s more of an attitude,” she says. “It’s hard to explain. It’s like—the way you think about yourself.”

  I try to understand this as she begins unclipping the curlers. “We’re almost there,” she says, brushing out my hair and taking care of any loose spots with the curling iron.

  “Ta-da!” she announces at last. “I give you: Wings.” I actually gasp. I have wings! Two perfect, glorious wings!

  “Wow,” I whisper, fingering them delicately. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Yeah, but look how long it took to make them, Roxanne,” Liat replies, checking her watch.

  “It’s totally worth it,” I declare.

  Liat looks into my eyes in the mirror’s reflection. “I don’t know…. Some things are more important than wings.”