when I wasn’t struggling to get back to sleep after some screwed-up dream, was watch Toby’s movie collection on his portable DVD player. He liked action and martial arts movies from all eras, and most of them were awful, but they were great at helping me not to cry.
I was sure that once I started to cry, I would never stop. I mean, how could I ever stop?
“I’d like you to come in and eat some breakfast. I don’t think you’ve had a decent meal all week.”
It was true. Seder had been the last time I’d eaten a solid, balanced amount of food at a normal time. I always thought it was totally soap-opera for people to lose their appetite after something huge, but now I understood why. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t even imagine wanting to eat. It was that the emptiness combined with the little nag of hunger seemed like a duty.
“What about you?” I asked Nana. “Will you eat with me?”
“My stomach’s still a little upset, but I’ll have some matzoh and ginger ale.”
In the kitchen, I sat down at the table, and she served me up a plate of pancakes, turkey bacon, and eggs.
“What about Passover?” I asked, eyeing the pancakes.
“I think we get excused this year,” she said wryly.
I picked up one of the pancakes, slightly warm in my hands, and started to eat it like a big, limp cookie. It was something Toby and I loved to do, and it drove Nana crazy. But this time she just smiled and pushed the newspaper toward me. “Here,” she said. “I know how you like to keep up with the headlines.”
It was the New York Times, not our local paper, the Herald Gazette. Because every day the Herald Gazette was publishing a new article about the accident and how the police were looking for someone, anyone, who might have seen what happened. Nana had stopped the Gazette delivery service two days earlier.
Now she sat down across from me with her ginger ale and matzoh, but didn’t eat. “Laurel,” she said. “Suzie Sirico called this morning. She’s the grief counselor you met the other night, remember? She wanted to know how we were.”
I looked up from the paper. “How did she get our number?”
“I gave it to her.”
“You told her I was fine, right? That we were both fine?”
Nana broke off a piece of matzoh and nibbled. “She thinks the two of you should talk.”
“You met her. She’s creepy.”
“She’s a professional who can help you.”
“Do I look like I need help?”
Nana actually did look at me, up and down my face, across and back. She knew better than to answer.
“Next time she calls,” I said, “please just tell her not to.”
Nana stood up, put what was left of her matzoh back in the box, and quietly left the room.
I turned back to the paper and started reading an article about trouble in Latin America, and there it was in the first paragraph: demagogue. It was one of my SAT words. It meant “rabble-rousing leader,” and my study trick image popped into my head. On the steps of our school, a straggly bearded guy wearing a T-shirt that said DEM on it was speaking to a crowd of students, working them into a frenzy.
It had been more than a month since I was in the Ds, but there was demagogue, crystal clear. The tests were in five days. I walked to my room and found my SAT vocabulary book on the desk where I’d left it, bookmarked, untouched since the night of the seder. I picked it up carefully; I’d had only two more pages to go on the list of a thousand words my dad had challenged me to memorize. He wanted me to go to an Ivy League school, preferably Yale, like he did. I wanted it too, because I’d visited Yale during one of his reunions and thought it was cool, but I didn’t tell him that. I needed him to think he was convincing me.
“I’ll pay you a dollar for every point you score over seven hundred on Critical Reading,” he’d said. “It’s not a bribe; it’s motivation. Just a little something, because I know you can do it.”
I put the book back down and went to find the phone.
“Are you absolutely sure you want to do that?”
Mr. Churchwell, my school guidance counselor, sounded happy to hear from me.
“Yes, I’m sure. I’m ready. I don’t want you to take me off the list.”
“I