Today Tonight Tomorrow

“She’s left-handed, and the rest of our family is right-handed, and she’s the only one who has an outie belly button, so I convinced her that meant she was an alien. She was so freaked out about it, and she was determined to try to get home to her home planet, which I told her was called Blorgon Seven. Every so often, I’ll ask her how things are going on Blorgon Seven.”

I can tell there’s genuine affection there. That he’s a good brother, though as an only child, I’ve never been able to completely understand the depths of sibling relationships. It tugs at my heart in more ways than one.

“Your poor sister.”

“And you, with your parents—you’re close,” he says, more a statement than a question.

I nod. “That was nice, what you said to them. Thank you.”

“I figured I was wrong. They are too,” he says. “But really, your parents are pretty cool. You’re lucky.”

His words feel weighty. I know I’m lucky. I really do. And I love my parents, but I don’t know how to make them understand what I want when they don’t understand what I love.

“Thank you” is all I can manage. “Again.” Politeness with Neil McNair. That’s new.

We find a parking spot a ten-minute walk from the troll. I lock my car while Neil mimes stretching, like he’s getting ready for a big race. He raises his arms skyward, his T-shirt riding up and exposing a sliver of his stomach. He’s wearing a simple brown belt, and the navy band of his boxers peeks out above his jeans.

My face grows warm. The command to look away gets lost between the part of my brain that makes good choices and the part that doesn’t. It’s as though Neil McNair’s stomach somehow does not compute in my mind. Obviously he has a stomach, and naturally it’s covered with freckles.…

Objectively, it’s an attractive stomach. That’s all this is—an appreciation of the male form. His shoulders, his arms, his stomach.

And the ring of freckles around his navel.

And the reddish hair directly beneath it that disappears into his boxers.

His arms flop back down, as does the hem of his shirt, safely concealing his stomach from view. He meets my eyes before I can avert my gaze, and one corner of his mouth quirks up.

Oh no, no, no. Does he think I was staring?

“I haven’t had a Shabbat dinner in a while,” he says, and I’m relieved because Judaism is something I can talk about. Reasons I was staring at Neil’s freckled stomach, not so much. “Thank you for that. Really. What you said, about that teacher you had…” He shakes his head. “I’ve had too many experiences like that to count. People tell you to lighten up, that you’re overreacting. Or they seem that way at first, and then it’s one ‘joke’ after another and you start wondering if you really are lesser because of it. That’s why I stopped telling people, and with my last name… no one assumed.” We fall in step, passing a frame shop and a gluten-free bakery. “But the holidays are hard. Every year, I think they won’t be, and then they are.”

“Don’t you love when people call it the holidays, or a holiday party, but everything’s red and green and there’s a fucking Santa?” I say. “It’s like they think calling it ‘holiday’ makes them automatically inclusive, but they don’t want to put in the actual work of inclusion.”

“Yes!” He nearly shouts this, so loudly that a family leaving a Thai restaurant stares at us. Neil’s laughing a little, but not because it’s funny. “I had a teacher straight-up tell me I couldn’t participate in an Easter-egg hunt, even though I wanted to.”

“When people learn I’m Jewish, I swear sometimes they nod, like, ‘Yep, makes sense.’ I’ve… been told I look very Jewish.”

“I had a friend in elementary school who stopped coming over to my house,” he says, his voice low. “This kid Jake. When I asked him about it, he told me his parents wouldn’t let him. I came home crying to my mom about it because I didn’t understand, and she called his dad. When she got off the phone… I’d never seen her look like that. And some part of me just knew, before she even said it, why he wasn’t allowed over anymore.”

He just keeps breaking my heart.

“That is fucking terrible.” I scan our surroundings before uttering the next part. “Earlier, when I overheard Savannah at the safe zone. She said I obviously didn’t need the Howl money. And then—and then she tapped her nose.” At this, I do the same with mine, realizing I’m drawing attention to it and wondering if Neil thinks it’s too bumpy or too big for my face, the way I used to. He stops abruptly, his eyebrows slashed.

“Are you serious?” A loud exhale. “The fuck, Rowan. That’s messed up. That’s so messed up. I’m sorry.”

His reaction helps me relax a little. Like I could be justified in how I felt about it because I wasn’t alone in thinking it was shitty, but… my reaction was enough, wasn’t it? If I felt like crap about it, that was enough.

Neil steps forward and grazes my forearm with a couple fingertips, a small gesture to match his expression of empathy. The way he touches me, it’s soft and tentative. It’s the way I touched him back in his room, on his bed. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, his eyes not leaving mine, and there’s something so foreign about those words combined with his fingertips on my skin that I have to look away, which makes him drop his hand.

“People think it’s harmless. They think it’s funny. That’s why they do it,” I say, trying to ignore the strange shiver where he touched my arm. Must be static electricity. “And sure. I guess it’s harmless until something bad happens. It’s harmless, and then there are security guards at your synagogue because someone called in a bomb threat. It’s harmless, and you’re terrified to get out of bed Saturday morning and go to services.”

“Did that—” he asks in a quiet voice.

“Right before my bat mitzvah.”

The police found the guy who did it. It had been a prank, apparently. I’m not sure what happened to him, if he went to jail or if a cop simply patted his shoulder and asked him not to do it again, the way they do when white men do something atrocious. But I was so scared, I wailed and begged my parents not to make me go to synagogue for weeks afterward. And eventually we stopped going altogether, except on holidays.

That fear took something I loved away from me.