“Reindeer games,” said Andrew. He looked at the bear. “Maybe he should be Rudolph.” Then he looked at me. “I don’t really have friends, either,” he said. He straightened his shoulders, wincing as his arm shifted. “My dad was black and my mom’s white, so the black kids think I’m stuck-up and the white kids only play with other white kids.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, either. There were only two black kids in my entire school, and neither one was in my class. I thought about telling him that he didn’t look like he was black, but then I thought that maybe that would be rude. “My mom says to make a friend, you need to be a friend.” When my mother had told me that line it had sounded very wise, but when I said the same words they just sounded silly. Certainly it hadn’t helped me much. I’d tried to be a friend, but so far it hadn’t worked.
“My mom says we keep ourselves to ourselves,” said Andrew. “She says it’s us against the world.”
He pulled my nana’s blanket up higher, struggling to do it with just one hand.
“What movie did you get to see?”
He named the film, which had Blood in its title and was, I knew, rated R. His leg started to jiggle again, bouncing faster and faster. “The best was when my mom took me to the beach,” he said. “I’d never gone swimming in the ocean before.”
The beach was just a block away from my house. I’d been to the ocean more times than I could count, but I’d never been swimming. All I could ever do was walk on the sand and dip my feet in the foam, with my mother trailing behind me in a wide-brimmed hat, watching everything I did. Her gaze would bounce back and forth, from my feet to the water, as if a wave might surge up and snatch me away. She’d told me about the undertow, the invisible current that would suck swimmers to their doom . . . but even before I’d learned about the undertow, I was afraid of the ocean, the endlessness of it, how it stretched farther than you could see and was deeper than you could imagine. I preferred swimming pools, and all the houses in our neighborhood had them in the backyard, rectangles or ovals of clear, chlorinated blue. No seaweed, no waves, no chance of getting towed out to Cuba, no strange things lurking down in the depths.
“Did you like it?”
Andy nodded. He had beautifully shaped lips, full and pink, as if an artist had taken a lot of time to draw them and color them in. I thought he was cuter than Bryan Adams, the singer who Alice said was the cutest boy in the world. “It was so great. The water was really cold at first, and there was seaweed. I didn’t like that.” I nodded in sympathy. “But I figured out how to bodysurf, and then I went out past the waves, and I flipped on my back, and I just floated.” He was almost smiling, and I could picture him, his lean body in the water, his hair billowing out around him, face turned up toward the sun. “It was like being on a roller coaster. I wish I could have stayed forever, but my mom got a sunburn and we had to go back.” He gave a great, shuddering sigh and curled more deeply into the blanket.
“She’ll be here soon,” I promised. Then, to distract him, I asked, “Do you want to hear a story?”
He shrugged, then said, “You can tell me one, if you want to.”
“A baby one or a scary one?” I asked. I looked down at my pajamas, which were pink and had Winnie-the-Pooh on them, and wished that I’d put my bathrobe on.
“Scary,” he said.
I thought for a minute, flipping through my mental inventory before I made my voice as deep and spooky as I could. “Once upon a time there was a woodcutter and his wife and their two children. They lived in a simple cottage in the deepest, darkest part of the forest, where the sun shone for only one hour every day. And even though the woodcutter worked from morning until night, he could not earn enough money to buy food for his family, and they slowly began to starve.”
“ ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ” Andy said . . . but he didn’t tell me to stop. As I described the woodcutter’s wife growing so thin that her wedding ring slipped right off her finger, he leaned closer to me, and when I got to the part about how the family had only one potato and one carrot to last them for the entire day, he said, “Wait.”
“What?”
“Why couldn’t they go hunting and shoot a bird or a rabbit?” he asked.
I thought about it. “The birds and the rabbits were all starving, too, so they left to go to where there was more food,” I said in my normal voice. Then I deepened it again. “There was a great famine in the land. A plague of locusts,” I added, remembering part of the Passover story we’d learned in Hebrew school.