Ryan wasn't in homeroom on Tuesday. I found out later that he and Adam Greenspan had already gotten in trouble and weren't allowed to come back without their parents.
After school, Rebecca and I grabbed a snack at her place and ate it on the way over to Hebrew school. We wanted to get there early to find out which class we were in. I guess everyone else had the same idea, because the hallway outside Rabbi's office, where the class rosters were posted, was packed. Rebecca and I were both in Rabbi Aron's class, which was a relief. I'd heard a rumor that only the smart kids got Rabbi Aron for their bar or bat mitzvah year. Judging from the fact that Ryan Berger and Adam Greenspan were in Ms. Jacobson's class, it was probably true. But it also meant prissy Sheila Rosenberg was in Rabbi Aron's with us.
In the middle of all the normal jostling, Ryan came barreling down the hall, pretending to shoot Adam, and Adam pretended to die, clutching his chest and sinking to the floor in a slow, staggering swoon. As he fell, he stepped on my foot and almost knocked Rebecca over.
"Hey, watch it!" I said, catching Adam before he knocked us all over like a bunch of dominoes. "Didn't you two already get suspended?" I couldn't help being a little bit impressed: getting kicked out of middle school for setting off a fart bomb-on the very first day? That was a new record. Too bad their punishment didn't extend to Hebrew school, too.
"My mother is so proud." Ryan sniffed, wiping away a fake tear. Only Adam cracked up. Rebecca rolled her eyes.
The hall was buzzing with first-day excitement, even though it was, um, Hebrew school, and everyone was comparing bar and bat mitzvah dates.
Ryan made the mistake of asking Sheila Rosenberg when her "bar mitzvah" was.
"It's bat mitzvah," Sheila said, correcting him. "Only boys have bar mitzvahs. Don't you know anything after five years of Hebrew?"
"Here we go," I muttered to Rebecca, who just shook her head and looked at Sheila with something like pity.
But Ryan, surprisingly, didn't take the bait, probably because he couldn't think of anything funny to say. Instead he turned to me and Rebecca. I wondered again if he had a crush on her, considering the dumb questions he'd asked me in homeroom on Monday. In a way, I felt sorry for him, because-Rebecca? That was never going to happen. Not in a million years. "When are yours?" he asked, looking mainly at me, even though I was pretty sure he meant her.
"Hers is February," I said, pointing to Rebecca. "Mine's in December. Right before Hanukkah"-automatically adding, in my head: if I go through with it.
"And when's yours, Ryan?" Rebecca asked, just to be polite. It wasn't like we were going to be invited, or vice versa. She sounded as bored as possible.
"November," Ryan said. "Adam's is in March." Not that anyone asked.
"Mine's the first one," said Sheila. "In October."
"Who cares?" said Ryan.
Sheila shrugged. "You asked."
"That's soon," Rebecca said, turning to her. "Are you going to be ready?"
"I already started taking lessons with Rabbi Aron over the summer," Sheila replied, seeming really impressed with herself.
"You went to Hebrew school in the summer?" Ryan asked, incredulous. Adam's mouth hung open.
I didn't think that was so weird, actually. I mean, if my bat mitzvah were coming up that soon, and if I were definitely going through with it, I probably would have done the same thing. To tell you the truth, I kind of liked Hebrew school, especially the history stuff, like how the Maccabees drove the invaders out of Jerusalem and reclaimed the holy temple. It was cool to read about stuff like that because it definitely really happened. I had a harder time with the Bible stories, though. I mean, Jonah gets swallowed by a whale-and lives to tell about it? Really?
Not that Hebrew school was easy. For one thing, Hebrew is a really difficult language, because it's a whole other alphabet and you read it the wrong way around, from right to left instead of left to right. Mostly I learned to sound out the words, but I didn't always know their meaning, which kind of bothered me. How could you pray in a language you didn't even understand? Ben-o told me it was like that in his old church, only with Latin, not Hebrew. Then his mom decided that was too old-fashioned, so they started attending a church where they pray in English, which made a lot more sense to me. I wondered why the Jews hadn't thought of the same thing.
Sheila ignored Ryan's question. "I'm surprised you're having one, Tara," she said to me, her eyes lingering on the gold om pendant-the one Nanaji gave me for my tenth birthday-that I wore on a fuchsia satin cord around my neck. She wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something unpleasant.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you're not even Jewish," she said. "Technically."
Not Jewish? That was a new low, even for Sheila Rosenberg. I fixed her with my blankest stare until she got nervous. "You know," she said, twisting a strand of hair around her finger. "Your mother's not Jewish, so you're not Jewish."
"Says who?" I whirled on her.
"Says everyone. You know the saying: 'You are what your mother is.'"
Those sounded like fighting words to me. "What is my mother, exactly?"
Sheila shrugged. "Not a Jew."
That was when I shoved her. You know how parents and teachers are always telling little kids to use their words instead of, like, their fists? Well, I go blank when I'm angry, and I don't have any words. If I did, I would have told Sheila Rosenberg that my mother, who was born in India, converted to Judaism way before I was even born. Not that it was any of her stupid business. So I shoved. And she shoved back, and then we were girl-fighting for real. She got this wild look in her eye, hissing and biting like a trapped cat.
"Girl fight! Girl fight!" Ryan and Adam yelled, pointing at us.
I got Sheila into a modified headlock, mostly to stop her biting.
"Not again, Tara." Rebecca groaned.
That kind of snapped me back to the moment. When Rebecca pulled us apart, I had a hank of Sheila's curly black hair in my fist. I didn't even know how that happened, or when.
Rebecca stood between us, ready to spring into action if either of us made another move, but the moment had passed. Sheila started to cry, her lower lip blubbing in and out like a moist rubber fish. Still, she had been asking for it with that crack about my mother, and she was the one doing the biting. And besides, I mean-big deal. She certainly had enough hair. I straightened the hem of my shirt.
"Why'd you stop them? That was awesome," crowed Adam.
Rebecca turned and grabbed him by the collar, lifting him up so he had to stand on his toes to keep his feet on the ground. Rebecca is pretty tough. She's the captain of the basketball team and used to dealing with unruly players.
"You wouldn't want me to tell Rabbi Aron you were involved in a fight, would you?" Rebecca asked him in her most quietly threatening voice, the one she learned from her dad, who's both a union negotiator and a judo master. He never raises his voice, or his hand, but everyone listens to him. "I mean, considering how much trouble you're already in." Adam blinked helplessly. She let him go with a scowl and he slumped against the wall.
Rebecca turned back to me and Sheila. "I don't suppose you're going to apologize to each other?"
Apologize? I opened my mouth to protest, not a hundred percent sure if I could form words yet, but Rebecca shot me a warning look. Sheila looked down and shook her head. Trying not to cry again, I thought.
Rebecca looked at her watch: four thirty. "Time for class. Sheila-you may wanna clean up this situation first," she said, indicating the area around her eyes.
Was that mascara? Sheila sniffled and nodded. She went into the girls' bathroom. Rebecca dragged me toward our classroom, at the far end of the hall.
I grunted, trying to say something, but she shushed me.
"Don't talk," she said.
"I-She-"
"Silence," she said, holding up her hand. "Get all your words back before you start spewing." Rebecca knows me that well.
When I had stopped harrumphing, Rebecca used her quiet, scary voice on me. "You can't keep hitting people," she said. "You're almost thirteen."
And I thought to myself, That's a rule? Teenagers don't hit? How come I didn't know that? Seemed like everyone else knew how to act their age, except me and maybe Ryan Berger. This almost-teenage stuff was bewildering.
"Do you really want to be known as that girl?" she asked.
"No, no," I said, still panting. Whatever "that" meant-it sure didn't sound good.
I could see that Rabbi Aron was already inside the classroom, writing something on the board. Which was a lucky break-he hadn't seen us fighting. I mean, I'd never heard of anyone getting expelled from Hebrew school, but I liked Rabbi Aron and I wanted him to like me, and suddenly I felt kind of ashamed-not because of Sheila, but because I had lost control, like a little kid.
A few minutes later, Sheila slipped into a seat in the front row, looking fresh and composed, as if nothing had happened. I don't know how some girls do that. I mean-once I'm on, I'm on.
With my adrenaline still pumping, I couldn't concentrate much in class, even though Rabbi Aron is one of my all-time favorite teachers, after Mr. H. Now that I had my words back, I thought of like a hundred different ways I could have replied to Sheila, none of them polite. But I couldn't stop thinking about what she had said. And even though I knew she was a total ignoramus, it made me wonder: Why was I doing this? No one in my family is particularly religious, except maybe for Gran. She's active in her synagogue, but whether it's from feeling or habit, it's hard to tell. Mum surprised everyone, including Daddy, when she decided to convert to Judaism before their wedding. But even she only admires the religion from a respectful distance. Daddy hasn't been inside a synagogue since his own bar mitzvah, twelve hundred years ago. Well-except for their wedding, I guess.
Mum's the one who thought I needed to get in touch with my Jewish self, which is a laugh. Believe me, I am way in touch with my Jewish side, thanks to Gran. I wouldn't mind getting more in touch with my Indian side, which, if you ask me, is more interesting, and I prefer the cuisine. Mum says I don't have "sides," that ethnicity is not the same as religion, and that anyway, you can't be half-Jewish. Just regular Jewish. And since she is, that's what I am, too.
So maybe having a bat mitzvah wasn't my idea originally, and maybe I hadn't completely made up my own mind about it, but who was that know-it-all Sheila Rosenberg, with her big hair and rubbery lips and runny mascara, to wrinkle her nose at my om necklace and say whether I'm Jewish enough to have one or not? I stared at the back of her smug, composed, curly-haired head and made up my mind: I am having a bat mitzvah, Sheila, I thought at her, and you're not invited.
I opened my new datebook and flipped to the page in December corresponding to the Saturday before Hanukkah. My bat mitzvah date. I circled it.
I couldn't wait to tell Mum I was going through with it.