“Quinn. I’m sorry. Okay? I messed up. I’ll scratch off my name, tell them I made a mistake.”
“Okay. I would appreciate that.”
This is all he knows how to do. He’s never not made that clear to me. This can’t last much longer—or there won’t be any of our friendship left afterward either.
When I speak again, my voice is softer. “We can go home, if you want. I’ll text Julia some excuse.”
His brow furrows. “What? Why?”
A laugh slips out. “Because we’re fighting? You really want to keep hanging out with me after this?”
“Yes?” He phrases it as a question. “I’m not going to stop spending time with you because we had one argument.”
I wasn’t expecting that. “Well… okay then.”
I guess… we’re done fighting? There’s no way it’s that easy, but he forges ahead. “Did Julia text you where they are?”
As I dig for my phone, fighting conversation whiplash, Tarek makes a move to reach for my shoulder—maybe to wrap an arm around me, or maybe just to give me a friendly pat. On instinct, I dodge it.
It’s not worth it for the way his face falls, but I promise myself I’ll make it up to him in the dark later.
21
Pizza turns out to be supremely good at smoothing frayed nerves. Since Julia had to be up early for another Kirschbaum camping extravaganza, she and Noelle took off ten minutes ago, leaving Tarek and me alone to navigate our awkward post–silent auction feelings. Except—it hasn’t been that awkward.
I stare down at my last half slice of pulled pork, pineapple, and jalapeño. “Do you want this?” I ask him from across the booth. Tarek declared this the best pizza in Seattle, and he was right; I’d never had wood-fired pizza quite like this, with gorgeous blackened bubbles on the crust, and it’s a crime I can’t finish it.
Tarek shakes his head. “Pork.”
“Shit. Sorry. Now I feel bad for eating this in front of you.” Pork products are getting Berkowitzes into all kinds of situations lately.
“Don’t apologize. And please, don’t stop on my account.”
Tarek doesn’t often talk about his religion, but now I’m wondering if it’s because we’ve only just recently started talking about serious things. Mansour’s doesn’t have pork on their menu, and aside from that, they only use humanely raised animal products. The first time I realized this might be unusual for a catering company was when my parents dropped a client who said something insensitive when they suggested Mansour’s. My parents refunded all their money, despite the work they’d already done. Said they refused to work with people like that.
“I don’t keep kosher.” I motion to the pizza. “I mean. Obviously. My sister’s fiancé, he’s, like, very Jewish, and I remember he was shocked when they started dating and she ordered pork at a Chinese restaurant in front of him, completely unaware. And now she observes more of the customs he grew up with, and she’s keeping kosher too. Sometimes I feel like I’m letting down ‘my people’ or whatever. I don’t know. I’m not a very good Jew, I guess.”
It’s not something I’ve ever really vocalized, and he’s quiet for a moment, taking it all in. “I feel like there are probably a lot of different ways to be Jewish, just like there are a lot of ways to be Muslim. Is it something you think about a lot?”
I shake my head. “Only occasionally. But when I do, it’s suddenly all I can think about. What about you?”
“My parents aren’t nearly as religious as their parents were,” he says. “But some things have just sort of stuck? Like, we work with a halal butcher, but not everything we eat or serve is halal. My mom drinks, but my dad doesn’t, and, well, you saw me do it at the beach. And I’ve had sex before marriage.”
“Right,” I say, feeling my face heat up.
“There are some things I agree with and some I don’t, but I still consider myself a Muslim. Just like you probably still consider yourself Jewish.”
And I do.
We split what’s left of the bill. I love this city at night, especially in the summer. Maybe that’s why I was so bold after the movie in the park, because I feel it now too: this sense of heady anticipation, liquid gold in my veins. Opportunity Possibilities. We’re past the halfway mark, the days getting shorter, those opportunities dwindling. Tarek and I have been seeing each other a couple times a week, sometimes at a wedding and sometimes on nights like this.
Logically, I know I’ve got to start distancing myself before we get any deeper. But it’s so hard to remember that when we’re tangled in his back seat or even when we’re talking about pizza.
Before we head out, I check my bag, probably spending more time doing it than usual. Checking, checking, checking.
“There’s something I’ve been wondering,” he says when we get outside. “And feel free to tell me to shut up if it sounds insensitive.”
“This sounds ominous.”
“I swear, it’s not. Or if it is, you can be the judge. I’ve just been wondering—when you’re doing those things, those checks, what does it feel like? I’m not judging. I just want to try to understand it.”
I try not to be embarrassed that he noticed. “It’s sort of like… getting stuck in a loop. I’ll do something, but I won’t believe my memory that I actually did it, even though I know I would hear it if I dropped my keys or phone, or I would feel it if a door didn’t lock, or I would see it if I didn’t turn the stove off. Like I can’t trust any of my senses. So I check again, and I still don’t have actual proof that it happened, or I worry I’m checking so much that I may have undone the thing I want to make sure of, so
