You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone

“Go back where you came from!” She climbs on top of her chair to fit more of herself out the window. “That barking! I can’t stand it, Adina. It’s dreadful.”

“Please,” I implore her, steadying the wobbly chair with my hands. “Be careful.”

Her head whips around. “Don’t just stand there. Help me! Azor li!” Continuing to mutter under her breath, she stumbles off the chair and tears out of the classroom.

“Ima!” I chase after her, punching open the metal doors to the playground. A few kids on swings stare at the strange teacher crouching on the woodchips, peering underneath the slide.

“I can’t find them,” Ima says, “but I can still hear them!”

This could be you someday, a voice at the back of my mind warns.

I swallow around a knot in my throat. It’ll be okay soon We’ll get through this and we’ll go home and have dinner and I’ll practice for my audition Aba will take her to the doctor and they’ll change her medication and everything will be fine.

“We’ll find them.” Cold air bites at my cheeks and nose. “I’ll help you, okay?”

Then, certain I’m doing this all wrong, I yell and wave my arms along with her. Together, we shoo the imaginary dogs.

Four

Tovah

THE HUMAN BODY IS MADE up of millions of microscopic puzzle pieces, and in med school I’ll have to memorize them all. Understanding what makes us work has always brought me comfort. I seek out the why, and I learn the answer.

It’s why AP Bio is my favorite class. Today I snip the hinges of a frog’s mouth and open it up, spelling out words to Lindsay so she can label our diagram. Esophagus, pharynx, vomerine and maxillary teeth. She half covers her face as she scribbles on the worksheet.

“I can’t watch,” she says.

With latex-gloved hands, I open the frog’s body cavity. “Look, you can see its stomach and pancreas! And that curled-up thing is its small intestine.”

I try to sound enthusiastic, but with the test results more than a week away, each day brings me closer to solving my own unknown, and this lab isn’t distracting me the way I’d hoped it would. Nothing can. At synagogue over the weekend, I sat on a hard bench in the sanctuary with the rest of my family while Rabbi Levine spoke. I love weekly services; I love the way Hebrew sounds when the entire congregation recites it together. But when I left the synagogue, I couldn’t remember what the Torah portion had been about. I never space out like that.

At the lab station next to ours, Henry Zukowski and Evan Nakayama are pretending to make the frogs talk.

“I feel funny,” Henry says in a high-pitched voice as he puppeteers a frog’s mouth.

“Do I have something on my face?” Evan says in the same tone, and both of them cackle. I roll my eyes.

“Please be mature and respectful, or I’m taking the sharp objects away!” Ms. Anaya calls. She stops by our station. “Tovah, careful with your incisions! You nicked that little guy’s left atrium! Why don’t you give Lindsay a turn?”

Heat flares on my cheeks, and I clench my teeth. Ms. Anaya’s my favorite teacher; she loves biology so much that all her sentences seem to be punctuated with exclamation points. She’s never criticized me before. I can’t even be good at what I’m supposed to be good at, and I have a feeling I won’t be back to my old self until we get our results.

Well. Depending on what those results are.

“Sorry,” I mumble. I try to pass the scalpel to Lindsay, but she shakes her head and clings to her pencil.

“You okay?”

“I need some air.” I peel off my gloves, toss them on the table, and snatch my backpack. In my rush, my backpack knocks something hanging off the edge of a lab table. Someone gasps, maybe me, as a metal tray flies off the table and a frog plummets to the floor.

The classroom goes silent for a split second before erupting into noise. “Oh my God!” and “Did Tovah Siegel seriously just do that?” and “I’m gonna throw up.”

Ms. Anaya tells us to have respect for everything we work with in the lab, especially anything that used to be alive. I’ve taken away whatever dignity that frog had left.

“Tovah,” Ms. Anaya says gently, “I’ll take care of this. Why don’t you go get cleaned up?”

Cleaned up? I have no idea what she’s talking about until I notice the frog’s not just on the floor—some of it is on my sweater, too.

“Lindsay, could you help her?”