Chapter 7: YARON

That night, when I came back home, I told my parents about Vee’s father.

“There’s nothing you can do, Yaron. People like Luke Hart don’t change, no matter how many chances you give them. The man can’t keep a job. He is what he is. There’s not much more to it,” my father sentenced.

“His wife died, and he’s depressed, Dad.”

“He shouldn’t be drinking then.”

I didn’t believe what my father had said. I believed people could change. I wanted to help people like Luke Hart or Barnaby become better versions of themselves. With the right help, people could turn their lives around if they put their minds to it.

Dad was right about Vee’s father, but I didn’t want to hear anything about that, because if her father died, Social Services were going to take Vee away from me, and they would probably do their best to extinguish her light. To turn her into a “normal girl,” and Vee would become a shadow of the person she was.

“I’ll pray for him,” my mother said. I doubted that praying would help Vee or her father at all.

“Mom, I’m going to see Vee,” I announced after dinner.

I walked into the kitchen. Mom was doing the dishes. Taking advantage of her back to me, I put a couple of lunch boxes from the fridge in my backpack so that Luke and Vee could have a decent dinner that night. I knew Mom had made them on purpose. We both knew that she had been cooking too much lately, and the reason was obvious.

My mother never liked Vee. She didn’t say it openly, but it was easy to guess that she wasn’t the company she wanted for her only son. But she was a good Jewish woman, and it’s obligatory on every Jewish person to help the poor and the needy.

She sighed and nodded. “When was the last time you went out with Daniel and the rest?”

More than a week. I had seen Natalie alone, but she brushed me off.

So, I had preferred to spend the rest of my free time with Vee, instead of the others. I thought of my friends— Natalie, Dave, Gillian, and all the others with whom I had shared classes since childhood and to whom I remained very close. I appreciated them, I liked being with them, however ... something in me always pulled a little more towards Vee.

“I chat with Daniel almost every night,” I said. “We’re constantly messaging or playing games.”

“That doesn’t count, Yaron. What’s wrong with good old face-to-face communication? The other day that girl was wearing a wedding dress, Yaron,” my mother quickly said, bringing up the topic of my friendship with Vee again.

My mother’s words caught my attention despite my effort to ignore her.

“What do you mean, Mom?”

She shook her head and continued washing the dishes. “She was at the supermarket. She was wearing a white dress that was so loose on her that she had tied it with a string around her hips.”

I imagined Vee in her mother’s wedding dress and shuddered. I knew her well enough to know that she would have worn it proudly, as a tribute to the mother she never knew, but Vee often forgot that not everyone understood her way of understanding things. And what is not understood is scary, always.

“I want you to find a good Jewish girl, get married and give me a lot of grandchildren, Yaron.”

I blushed at the warning implicit in her words. My relationship with Vee had no future. But, which relationship did at that age? It was crazy. I was attracted to Natalie. I wanted to kiss her, not Vee.

“Vee is just a friend, Mom. She’s lonely, and she needs a friend to take care of her, you know that.”

My mother nodded. Even when I couldn’t see her face, I knew she was smiling.

Vee was a girl. I’d always known that. But until that moment, I hadn’t realized what it entailed. One day, Vee would meet a boy, and he would want to do to her all the things I dreamed of doing to Natalie.

He would kiss her. He would touch her. He—

“Fuck,” I whispered.

My mother heard it, but didn’t say anything.

I left home, confused and nervous, and wishing I could freeze that moment and never grow up. To be the Yaron and Vee that we were at that moment forever.

Just dreaming of a future that would never come and that could no longer disappoint us.

But there was a problem with that, and it was that Vee wanted to reach that future more than anything else, so I had no choice, but to accept that life was getting complicated for us.

Before I closed the door, I heard my mother’s murmur like a background song that would repeat itself in my head years later, every time a new wound opened.

“Take care of yourself, Yaron, for Hashem’s sake. Don’t tie yourself down to someone who isn’t made for ropes.”

Maybe that was her way of warning me of everything that was about to come.