Once More with Chutzpah Read online

  For Mom and Dad,

  But Mom more

  (because she said so)

  CONTENTS

  Opening Up

  On My Own

  Defying Gravity

  Start of Something New

  Where Do You Belong?

  So Far Away

  Tonight

  Go the Distance

  Getting to Know You

  La Vie Bohème

  One Song Glory

  Anybody Have a Map?

  Matchmaker

  Under the Sea

  Way Down Hadestown

  Family

  She Used to Be Mine

  Words Fail

  Put on a Happy Face

  Out Tonight

  Waving Through a Window

  It’s Quiet Uptown

  What’s Wrong with Me?

  Sunrise, Sunset

  So Much Better

  Tradition

  Why We Build the Wall

  What I Did for Love

  What Comes Next?

  Unruly Heart

  Seasons of Love

  You Matter to Me

  You Will Be Found

  Goodbye Until Tomorrow/I Could Never Rescue You

  Tomorrow

  A Note from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  OPENING UP

  If I were to pick the starting point for an epic adventure, it definitely wouldn’t be the Dine Express in Logan Airport, Terminal C. We’re sitting four to a table clearly meant for two, the black surface almost completely hidden under sandwich wrappers and cups and bags of chips. There isn’t much space at the pre-security airport café, but we’re making it work.

  Mom clears her throat. “Babies,” she starts, holding up her drink like she’s about to make a toast.

  “Technically adults now,” I interrupt. Max and I have been eighteen for a full month, so it counts.

  “My little infants,” she continues, “you are about to embark on a spiritual journey. One that will change you irrevocably. We send you off as children and expect you to return with aged souls, lightened by the wisdom you gather on your great adventure.”

  “Lizzie, they’ll be gone for less than two weeks,” Dad says. “I just hope they return without sunburns.”

  “I’m excited for them,” Mom says. “It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been to Israel for a conference.”

  One thing about having a mother who is a religious studies professor is that her business trips are to places like Jerusalem. Add that to the fact that Dad spent every summer growing up visiting family in Tel Aviv, and it all becomes pretty awful that Max and I haven’t been to Israel yet. We’re the only two in our family who still need to go.

  I take the last sip of my drink. “We should probably find our group,” I say. We were greeted at the El Al check-in by our trip coordinator, who handed us name tags and told us we were a half hour too early.

  Dad nods as though I’ve just said something very sage. “Time to fly the nest,” he says.

  “We are coming back,” I point out.

  “Then off to college next year,” Mom adds.

  Hopefully, I think. I look over at Max, who is silently picking at the excess bread from his sandwich, a tiny pile of crumbs accumulated on the plastic wrapper. If everything goes as planned, he’ll be a lot happier when we get back—maybe even happy enough to apply to Boston University like we planned.

  We clean up before Mom and Dad walk us to the El Al check-in. “This is where we leave you,” Dad says. “Love you, baby girl.”

  “Love you, Daddio,” I say.

  Mom wraps me in a big hug and whispers, “Keep an eye on your brother.”

  I nod, my chin hitting her shoulder.

  She pulls away and gives my arm a squeeze. “Have the best time.”

  I take out the name tag we got when we arrived at the airport, big and plastic with a blue-and-white lanyard, and put it around my neck.

  Let’s do this.

  After we say goodbye, Max and I walk toward the check-in counter. There’s a small line, partitioned off by a black divider. When we get to the front, two spots open. I walk one way; Max walks the other.

  I approach a man with an El Al Airlines pin on his collar and a thick black beard. He’s looking at a clipboard. “Name?” he asks without looking up.

  “Tally,” I say. “Talia. Talia Gelmont, I mean.”

  “Age?” he asks.

  “Eighteen.”

  “Passport?”

  “Yes, I have one,” I say.

  At this, he looks up, vaguely annoyed. “Here?”

  I rummage through my carry-on. I put my passport right in the front pocket with the packing instruction guide our group sent us, but we haven’t even reached security, so I didn’t think I would need it yet.

  “Here,” I say, handing over my passport. As he examines it, I worry that I don’t look enough like my passport picture. I shouldn’t have straightened my hair for the photo. Or worn it down in the first place. I should have known better; I should have—

  I catch myself starting to spiral and take a deep breath. A full-blown panic attack requires at least four symptoms. Heart racing, shortness of breath. That’s two. I’m not dissociating and I’m not dizzy and I don’t have any chest pain. I feel only the regular sense of both doom and gloom, so that barely counts.

  The check-in guy flips through the blank pages of my passport. “Never traveled?”

  “Not out of the country, no.” Is this a good thing? A bad thing? An embarrassing thing?

  “To confirm, you have never been to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt?”

  Just Arabic countries? Well, that’s high-key racist.

  “No, I have not been out of the country.”

  But Max has traveled outside the country before, which probably means that this trip is ruined. He should have never gone to that gifted program in Madrid two summers ago.

  My anxiety is watching my carefully curated plan crumble to the ground.

  I look over at him. He’s standing with another employee, in the middle of his very own interrogation. He looks normal—hair too long and puffy, wearing an oversize sweatshirt he stole from our dad. I can’t see the scar from this angle, though I know that it’s still curved over his left eyebrow. He almost looks the way he did before the crash, before he became something fragile.

  Mr. Beard hands me back my passport.

  He continues to ask me questions, ranging from whether or not anyone asked me to bring any packages to Israel to details about my family in Tel Aviv. Logic brain knows this has only been a few minutes, but anxiety brain is telling me that we’ve been talking for five hours and I will never get on that plane and might end up in jail, probably, for no discernible reason.

  “Is there anything you think you should tell me?” he finally asks.

  Yes, frightening beard man. I would like to say you’re freaking me out with these questions, and they seem extremely unnecessary when I’m about to hand over my suitcase and go through a metal detector.

  Which I shouldn’t say out loud.

  “Nope. Nothing comes to mind.”

  The man waves to the check-in counter behind him. “Drop off your suitcase there. Enjoy Israel.”

  “You too!” I reply and then immediately realize what I have just said. “If you’re going as well? And, um. Thank you? For protecting, uh … You said over here?” I point directly behind me to the suitcase scale/counter with El Al above it. “Okay, thanks!”

  Mr. Beard is noticeably not listening to me, as he has now moved on to the next person in line.

  I drop off my suitcase, which is thankfully the right amount of heavy for an international flight, and get my boarding pass
. Max is already standing off to the side of the check-in counter, ticket in hand.

  “So are you a risk to Israeli society?” he asks.

  “I’m apparently a risk to society at large, but there’s really no helping me now.” I adjust the strap on my carry-on bag. “Did they ask you about traveling to Arabic countries?”

  “Yeah. Felt very wrong,” Max says.

  I nod, then wave toward security. “All right, come on, Moxie.”

  “After you, Tallytubby,” he says.

  So I take the lead.

  ON MY OWN

  Max and I walk toward the security line. It’s not too long; I’ve seen far worse for Thanksgiving travel to visit Safta and Sabba in Florida. I guess I thought it might be different with us going abroad. The check-in people have already basically grilled us; the security officers probably don’t need to do much more.

  I look back to where my parents were standing when we walked to the check-in desk, but they’re already gone. I don’t know what I thought they would do. Wait until we were officially past security and therefore inaccessible? Stay in the airport the whole time?

  There’s something jarring about their absence. Something that makes it official. Max and I are really going to Israel. Alone.

  I rub the bead on my fidget ring.

  “You okay?” Max asks.

  “Yeah, I just … I can’t remember whether I need to take this off,” I say, twisting the ring.

  Max shrugs. “I already took off my jewelry, just to avoid that very problem.”

  A joke. He said it deadpan, without the usual lightness he uses to tease me, but it’s a start.

  Security goes pretty quickly. Max spends most of his time looking at his phone, and I spend most of my time looking at everyone around us. I’m trying to figure out where people are going, coming up with imaginary background stories. The man with the yarmulke on top of his head is probably on his way to Israel just like we are; the mother and daughter talking rapidly in French are headed to Paris to visit family. I’ve just decided that one woman in front of us in line is an international spy when I see a girl with a lanyard just like ours.

  I hit Max’s arm.

  He looks up, annoyed. “Yes?”

  “There’s someone with a lanyard. We should introduce ourselves.”

  “How?” he asks, looking over to where I’m pointing. “They’re way ahead of us.”

  “Well, when the line loops over, we can just—”

  “Why don’t we get through security first. Then we’ll make introductions,” he says.

  I frown. Fine, we can start making friends at the gate.

  Except Max is a dirty liar, because when we get to the gate, he sits down in one of those uncomfortable airport seats, puts on his headphones—the big noise-canceling ones he got last year to edit music and play video games—and starts watching something on his phone. By now, there are tons of other people around with name tags on. So many people, in fact, I think there must be a few different tour groups all heading out on the same flight.

  I sit down in the seat next to him and lift a speaker off one ear. “Shouldn’t we try to find other people who are in our group now?” I ask.

  “I would,” he starts, “but I did already start this episode of The Nanny …”

  I let go of the headphone so it snaps against the side of his head.

  This is fine. This will definitely be fine. The trip hasn’t even really started; we’re still in Massachusetts. There are so many people here anyway; not everyone will even be on our trip. Sure, Max has been spending the last few … months, really, alone in his room, but once we’re there, he’ll have to be social. There’s no way to be a loner when you’re crammed on a bus with thirty teenagers, driving around a new country.

  When I found out that our local temple youth group was organizing a joint high school exchange trip to Israel with a few other nearby congregations, I knew I had found the perfect solution. The old Max thrived on social interactions. This has got to spark something in him. I think about his guitar, sitting untouched in our basement back home. Maybe all the social energy will even get him to compose a song. He used to love doing that.

  A song. I take out my notebook from my purse. I guess I could try writing now, since we’re apparently not making friends until the plane touches down.

  My love for musicals started when I was little and my parents took me and Max to see a local production of Wicked. Honestly, that was it; I was hooked. I couldn’t get over the songs, the way the lyrics twisted together to tell the story. You could say that something had changed within me … something was not the same. I went through a phase where I watched nothing but movie musicals; I’m talking Hairspray, Grease, basically 75 percent of all Disney movies. If it had music in it, I would watch, sitting there in front of the screen singing terribly along.

  Then in middle school, my best friend, Cat, and I took a trip to visit her nai nai and ye ye in New York. On the second night, her grandparents took us to see the musical Waitress on Broadway, famous largely because the music and lyrics were written by the absolute genius songwriter Sara Bareilles. Basically, there’s a waitress who is in an unhappy, emotionally abusive marriage. She gets pregnant and then has an affair with her doctor, which is a pretty scandalous plot, considering who we were with. I had never gone through anything even remotely similar to the events in the musical, but I related so deeply to the feelings behind the words.

  I wanted to be Sara Bareilles. If I could ever write anything as moving as “You Matter to Me” or “She Used to Be Mine,” then maybe I could make a lasting difference. Maybe I could inspire another person, make them feel whole.

  That was when I started writing seriously. Cat would help me figure out the melodies, and on a couple of occasions, we even roped Max in to adding real music to my lyrics. It was just something fun we did, a bonus way to spend our time. Until I got absolutely smacked with writer’s block.

  I tap my pen against the blank page on the notebook. It looks … empty. Daunting even? Which is so supremely ridiculous. I’ve done this before. I logically know how to do this.

  You just need … words. Arranged in different ways. And there are letters in those words. I know my letters. I’ve known my letters for years.

  Ugh.

  I don’t even have a topic I want to write about. That would probably help. But it’s hard to focus on writing new songs when you’re desperately trying to get your brother back on track.

  Because the thing is … Max almost died six months ago.

  He went to a party, and it was getting late, so he hitched a ride. He didn’t know that the driver had been drinking. I didn’t know this at the time either. I mean, I knew there was a party and that he was going, but I had a very serious date with the movie musical The Last Five Years and a mud mask. But then I got the call.

  No one calls on the house phone unless they’re a telemarketer or a grandparent, and in both cases, my dad is usually the one to answer. I was the only one home that night since my parents go on these date nights every week because they apparently still love each other, which is both gross and adorable. So there I was, face damp from washing off the mask, rocking some unreasonably old plaid shorts and a tank top when the phone started to ring. I let it ring once, but by the second ring, I had convinced myself that it was probably just Safta trying to figure out how to use the microwave again, and I would be a bad granddaughter if I didn’t answer.

  It happened two streets away; he was almost home. I ran. I ran in those old shorts and the tank top and a pair of my dad’s too-big sneakers that were right by the door. I can’t drive and it was so close and I had to be there. He was lying in the back of an ambulance when I arrived. His left eye was puffy and covered in blood.

  “She’s gone, Tal,” he said. His voice sounded like everything had been sapped out of it. Quiet and blank, he continued. “I saw her. She’s gone. She’s really gone.”

  Just like that, Max became the boy who watched a clas
smate die.

  It seemed like our whole town went into mourning. Only seventeen, so young, so tragic, snippets of sadness passed between grocery store aisles and over cups of tea.

  I know I was supposed to feel the same way, but there was this anger settled in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t shake. How could someone be so reckless? How the hell could anyone get behind the wheel drunk in this freaking day and age? How dare she do that to Max.

  There were also whispers about my brother. That’s him, the boy who was there. Watched it all, the poor thing. That’s what he was now. A poor thing.

  When he got back from the hospital with two broken ribs and stitches over his eyebrow, he was supposed to be healing. But he started staying up all night, sleeping during the day. He left the house exactly three times the rest of the summer, and two of those times were to go to the doctor’s office. He went eleven days without changing out of the same pair of ratty pajamas. When senior year started, he didn’t go back for the first two weeks.

  Which was bad enough, but then he missed the BU early application deadline.

  We had always planned on applying early to BU. Always. It made the most sense. BU is an amazing school, and with Mom’s teaching position there, we’d only have to pay for things like room, board, and books. Not even room and board if we decided to commute, though we’d probably go for dorms, at least at first, to get the full college experience. A full college experience at an amazing discount. And applying early gives you a better chance of getting in.

  Max didn’t apply early.

  It’s not like he didn’t know it was happening. I was extremely vocal about the deadlines, mostly in the form of loud complaints and constant updates on my own application. When I was finally ready to hit Submit, I went to Max first.

  “Want to apply at the same time? We can get Dad to film it; he’ll be all emotional.”

  “I’m not applying,” he said.

  “And I’m not listening to the Hadestown soundtrack tonight. See, we can both be funny.”

  “Tally, I’m not applying,” he repeated.

  That’s when it became serious. Because while I understood that he was grieving, giving up on a basically guaranteed future was absolutely unacceptable.