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shrugs.
    “I’d like to fly like that, over snow and down hills.”
    “I’ve never taken you or Neshama away because of Shabbos .”
    I nod.
    The sun slides behind the island and mosquitoes start buzzing around my head.
    “What day is it?” I ask.
    Bubbie closes one eye. “Saturday, I think.”
    “We missed Shabbos !” I sit upright, grip the arms of the chair.
    Bubbie stretches her arms over her head, yawns. “I guess we did. I feel well rested, don’t you?”
    “Bubbie, we didn’t light candles!”
    “We could do them now.”
    “It’s a day late.”
    “Oh, c’mon, just pretend.”
    I shake my head. “It’s not the same.”
    I wander up to the cottage. If I were at home we’d be doing Havdalah, the prayers for the end of Shabbos. Ima and Abba are probably celebrating in Jerusalem. I scuff my sandal on the wood floor and sink into one of the orange recliners and rotate back and forth until I’m sleepy.
    THE NEXT MORNING after prayers, breakfast and swimming, I settle in the hammock. A light breeze blows across the bay. I prop my ocean encyclopedia on my chest and let my eyes close. When Lindsay leaned toward me licking the glass, I saw the deep cleft between her breasts. I imagine my hand reaching out to her shoulder, stroking her collarbone,moving over her skin. A delicious tingle runs through me. My eyes fly open. What the hell am I thinking?
    I flip to a picture of a narwhal.
    Boys, Ellie, you’re supposed to like boys. Right. Like... I don’t know any boys. They go to a different school, sit in a different part of the synagogue, look away when we walk by. There’s that guy at the supermarket Neshama thinks is cute. He has nice eyes, and his hair is the same strawberry blond as Lindsay’s, except hers is long and rippled and soft, and oh, the ripples fall over her breasts.
    Omigod. I lie stunned, my heart thumping. I flap my hands and pull at my hair. I’m thinking about a girl, and she’s not even Jewish.
    I can’t be. I’m class monitor. I go to science fair. I’m the kind of girl who doesn’t even think about boys.
    Who never thinks about boys.
    I won’t be in love with her, I just won’t. I’ll just stop right now. There, done.
    I get out of the hammock and march up the gravel road into the trees. I just want to be like her. That’s right—the breasts, the hair and the way she talks, confident like Neshama, snappy like Bubbie, able to leap from canoes and gyrate in bikinis. I lean against an ash tree, dizzy. Omigod, has va’halila , please, not this. I just want to be normal.
    Please, please, please .
    Everyone I know is a pair—male and female. Adam and Eve, Avram and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah and Rachel. Okay, they’re a threesome, but Isaac is key. Romeo and Juliet, Bo and Hope.
    This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about a girl this way. Last year I was obsessed with Hadassah Sternberger, our school council president. I admired the confident way she organized the mitzvah committee, the way she could stand up and talk in front of the whole school. At night I dreamed about touching her pale white skin and her pretty black hair, or what she looked like underneath her school uniform. I’d wake with a jolt from these dreams, sweaty and disoriented, and then spend the next couple of days blushing like crazy whenever I passed her in the hall. I was relieved when she graduated last spring.
    There’s supposed to be some nice David or Isaac in my future, medium height, maybe even muscled and tall as well as hairy. Yes, I’ll be Ellie Cohen, or Ellie Rabinowitz, wife of some Jacob or Daniel. I close my eyes and try to imagine myself next to him. Holding hands, okay; kissing, not bad. But not like Lindsay. I sit on the ground and lean against the tree.
    I can just see it. I’ll be walking down the aisle in Ima’s wedding dress with the lace sleeves. Abba and Ima look so proud. Neshama is my beautiful bridesmaid, and there’ll be Lindsay smiling at me under the