Honey and Me: Chapters 10–17

“What do you think of this?” I say, holding up a navy tulle dress that could be good for one of my friends’ parties.

“This?” I say, holding up a dress with gold embroidery.

Finally, our arms laden with more items, we head to the fitting room area.

He takes what’s in our arms and adeptly adds them to the rails.

The first day back at school, I feel blah—gray skies, mottled slush frozen over the street curbs, and the zipper of my ski jacket gets caught on my uniform sweater.

This doesn’t sound like their usual bantering. My mother sounds upset.

I look at Honey, who’s lapsed into silence on the massage table.

“Kids, mea culpa. That’s Latin for ‘my bad.’ I made a mistake. I made a bad choice. I felt at a crossroads in my life, and I let my own ego get in the way of one of my missions in life—teaching young minds and preparing them to be critical thinkers. And some other stuff they tell me to teach. Can you forgive me?”

“Sophie and Tali are best friends, and they did the exact same party. Why didn’t they just share it?” I muse as Mrs. Wine is putting on her winter boots.

At each of their bat mitzvahs, Sophie and Tali wore frilly dresses, had arts and crafts activities for us to do for charity, spoke about doing charity in their speeches, did the best friend’s speech for the other, and had the same music and dances.

And, while I do know that for Reform and Conservative Jewish girls it is totally common for them to have bat mitzvahs and do all this leining and blessings, in our Orthodox world it is pretty much unheard of and logistically impossible.

“In a partnership minyan?” As far as I can tell, people like Honey’s family would just as soon go to a Reform temple than be caught dead in a partnership-style service, which still have separate men and women’s sections but give women more opportunity to lead the prayers.

I know I’m lucky to have so many dresses. Why is she making me sound petty and spoiled?

“I’ve been watching videos,” she says as she deftly opens its drawers to find me the right blush.

Anyway, Natalie Aronovich’s bat mitzvah is definitely an extravagant affair, but nothing too wild happens. I flutter around all night with my friends, dancing and laughing at all the different entertainment booths.

I smile to myself at the incongruity of the wording—the Wines using the more traditional Ashkenazi pronunciation of “bas” rather than "bat” about Honey doing something so edgy and modern as leining megillah at a women’s service.

In the story, evil Haman devised an amazing reward for King Achashveyrosh to honor a most-loyal adviser—thinking that adviser would be himself—but instead it went to Mordechai the Jew, Queen Esther’s uncle.

But there are still a bunch of them sitting at the back, with thick orangey cover-up and rouged cheeks, the brims of their extravagantly decorated felt hats overlapping as they bend their heads to one another to whisper.

Finally, Honey approaches the bima quietly, Dan-Dan’s pink plastic tiara perched at a deliberately jaunty angle on her golden hair, a purple cape over her shoulders.

I turn around to see Aginéni looking at me keenly.

“I see you like my brooch.” She points to her butterfly pin, and I nod shyly.

Someone’s mother stood up and shouted, “Moishy, you’re not enunciating, start again!”

Another girl spoke with what my mother calls “poise” in a way that seemed otherworldly to me.

But—not to be glib—it’s the isms that always win.

She pauses as she glances at Aunty Steph and Shmuel Yosef looking deep into each other’s eyes and flashes a not-so- subtle face at my father.

The Starbucks is stifling hot with steam on the windows, and I’m starting to sweat inside my ski jacket.

All of Starbucks turns to look at us, and I feel mortified.

By the way, Milla, I marked your essay on heroes in myths and legends last night—very incisive—you showed really sophisticated critical and creative thinking.

“My Starbucks name,” he says to us with a wink before he ambles toward the counter.

And Honey is doing intramural volleyball during lunch and has joined an ongoing seventh-grade kickball game during recess.

“It’s good to have friends,” Aginéni says to me, adjusting her pink turban and then clasping firmly to the caretaker’s proffered arm.

Usually, the small beam makes our thoughts feel more solemn, but this afternoon I think our thoughts are too solemn already, and the darkness is too heavy.

Josh comes over and gently bumps shoulders with her in protective solidarity.

She smiles wanly at me.

I had wanted him to see the light inside me. And to bring it out through my shell, like the osmosis of an egg white in the science project I was doing with Natalie.

Her hair is pulled back tautly under a thin hair band, her ankles crossed perfectly, her back straight, and a big smile on her face.

The auditorium is a cacophony of kids from the middle school and fifth grade turning backward in their chairs, screaming in excitement to friends and siblings.

I walk with leaden legs.

I float like a balloon to Rabbi Adler, receive a plaque, smile for cameras flashing, and drift back to my seat.

“Yeah, but I really flubbed that part at the end—when we had to talk about why we thought our speeches deserved to win.”