The pelt of Natalie Portman slithered off to each side.
‘Why suicide?’ Barbra whispered. ‘What does that name mean?’
Someone lobbed a handful of popcorn at us from behind.
Natalie Portman was going ballistic. I thought, that girl is thinking about the Holocaust.
Barbra took the lid off her drink and guzzled the dregs. Joel poured her another hit of rum. He scrolled through his phone. I took Barbra’s hand. It was burning up.
‘Are you okay?’ I whispered.
It felt like a force field of fire suddenly encased her. Joel showed us a picture on his phone all aglow: a green-haired girl on her bony white knees, wrists crossed, sleeves tattooed with skulls and barbed wire.
‘This one’s got a double barbell in her hood and a stud in her clit.’
I heard Joel’s saliva. I did not want to be here. Suddenly, Barbra pushed up from her seat. I watched her disappear into the darkness. Joel laughed at my face. Skull’s eyes and barbed wire.
‘Fuck you, bro,’ I said.
I went out to the lobby just a few seconds behind Barbra, but she wasn’t anywhere there. I paced in front of the women’s bathroom. I heard Natalie Portman whining from inside. I was licking my lips. I felt totally stressed. I felt like I had to possess her to keep her revelations all mine. A ticket guy in a suit started walking over toward me. I inched away from the women’s bathroom door. I kind of knew I was catastrophizing – that is what my mother would’ve said. Like, there was no actual reason for me to link up suicide and Barbra. Or suicide and porn, suicide and being punished. Would she ever tell me about the dogs of Israel? Or was I just like Joel? Pink, pimply, porn-peddling? My thinking felt skewed. Why did she let him put his paw on her? My mother studied catastrophes for women. My mother was always right.
Maybe God had had enough of Barbra. Maybe God would punish me now.
Barbra waltzed out of the washroom.
‘Are you okay?’ I said, racing. ‘I thought something was wrong.’
She walked right past me. ‘You thought wrong, Jew-boy.’
I lost my breath. My chest liquefied. All I could do was trot back into the theatre behind her.
§
Me and my mother waited up for Barbra and my father that night in the kitchen, drinking coffee. He hadn’t wanted either of us to come to the Rotary event.
He said, ‘Barbra needs to concentrate on meeting the other students. We have a few from Guatemala and we’ve got this sharp eighteen-year-old pre-med girl from Peru.’
But when they arrived back home that night after eleven o’clock, Barbra’s eyes were bright pink. Her face seemed so wild. I remembered her gulping consumption of Joel’s Jamrock rum. Barbra immediately shot down to the basement and I stood up to follow but my mother shushed quietly at me, ‘Let her be, let her be.’
Me and my mother had been mid-conversation. My mother told me she was worried about me. My mother asked me if I needed some mental support. ‘Sixteen,’ she said, ‘is a vulnerable time for a guy.’ My mother looked at me as if she was searching for clues. I was not sure what clues or what vulnerable meant. Then my mother told me that she’d gotten a teaching job out of town. She said she’d miss my birthday in September but that I could visit. What I wanted to tell her was what I thought was going on with Barbra when Barbra and my father came in.
‘There’s coffee,’ my mother said wearily, after Barbra ran downstairs. ‘What’s wrong now? What happened? What did you do?’
My father ignored my mother and went to pour himself a cup. Coffee did not keep any of us from sleeping.
‘She called herself an “exile,”’ my father said, bewildered. ‘I don’t think she knows the right word. That is not the right word.’
My heart pounded. Exile was a Sabbatai Zevi thing.
My father said Barbra seemed out of it at the meeting. ‘She got too skinny, Ruth. What’s her problem? We can’t send her back like that.’
‘Just tell us what happened,’ I said, without freaking out at my father that he said we were sending her back.
‘What’s with you now?’ My dad shot me a look.
I looked at the floor. I felt like he could read my fucking mind. Skulls and barbed wire. The end of exile.
My father slurped from his mug. ‘So, she started talking at the church, we had at least fifty guys there, and it was okay, she started just fine, but then she’s talking about Operation Solomon, which is fine, that’s all good, but then she’s telling this story about how she didn’t want to go, she loved her country, she meant Ethiopia, okay, and she says that some young soldier in a helmet just picks her up out of the crowd and, uh, is holding her tightly, and feeling under her little dress or whatever she’s wearing, and I’m telling you, okay, look, all this was pretty abrupt.’