CHAPTER ONE
IF YOU’VE NEVER DROPPED AN entire pot of your grandmother’s famous matzah balls down the stairs, let me tell you: You are much luckier than I am. I stood frozen near the top of the basement staircase, my eyes wide with horror as I watched the matzah balls tumble from step to step as if trying to march back toward the basement fridge and pantry shelves.
Did you know that matzah balls bounce?
The sound each ball made on the dusty wood was a sick squelch, much like the sound an eyeball would make if you dropped it from a great height. Matzah balls are a little like eyeballs, actually. They squish in your hand in a similar way, and they are about the same size, though eyeballs are much less delicious. Or so I assume. I have never actually eaten an eyeball.
Mr. Zammit warned us against it. The whole reason I know the exact squishiness of an eyeball is because we’d just finished dissecting cow eyeballs in our sixth-grade science class. “These have been soaked in formaldehyde for preservation,” he warned us as he passed them out. “If you eat one, it will poison you. You have been warned.”
Joey Ramirez sat back in his chair, looking disappointed, because Mr. Zammit had been talking mostly to him. Kenneth Lappin had dared him to eat part of the worm we dissected earlier this year. It was gross, and he’d gotten detention, but he’d also won five dollars, so he said it was worth it.
I glanced over at my lab partner, Aubrey Liu. She was new, and I didn’t know her that well yet, so I wanted to see what she was thinking before I said anything. It was pretty easy to tell what she was thinking considering her face was all scrunched up like she’d bitten into an apple and found a spider nest inside. “Gross” she said as Mr. Zammit placed a cow eyeball on our lab table. It gleamed white and—surprisingly—blue against the table’s dull black surface. “This is so disgusting,” she moaned, then gagged.
I perked up. Here comes Ruby for the win. “Don’t worry. I got this.”
“You sound way too excited,” she said, grimacing. I froze, worried I’d said something wrong, but then she smiled. “And I’m really glad for it.”
I just smiled back. To be honest, I was really excited. Blood and stuff had never bothered me, and I was interested in how bodies and the world worked. Mr. Zammit said I’d be a great doctor when I grew up. “Or a serial killer,” I told him.
I think he was actually a little scared before I told him I was kidding.
Anyway, I’d much rather have seen a pot full of eyeballs bouncing down the stairs. My family would probably still love me if I turned out to be a serial killer who collected people’s eyeballs for fun and was careless enough to drop them, but dropping my grandma’s famous matzah balls like this? The afternoon before she was supposed to serve them at the weekly Sisterhood meeting at the temple, the one she’d told me was extra important? They were going to kill me.
I winced as I heard footsteps coming toward the basement door. Maybe I could salvage this. If I could distract my grandma before she saw the mess, I could fix things. The matzah balls had actually held together pretty well. Only a few had smashed apart. I could gather the other ones and give them a good rinse to get the basement dust off them, and nobody would ever have to know what happened.
“Don’t come down here!” I called up to the half-closed door. The footsteps stopped, but my heart was still racing. “I’m … naked!”
“You’re naked?” The voice sounded dubious. And it wasn’t my grandma’s. “Why … are you naked?”
I said a few words under my breath that would’ve gotten me grounded if I said them in front of my parents. It wasn’t Grandma Yvette, but it was the only person whose voice I’d rather hear less than my grandma’s. “Because I’m changing!”
“You are not changing in the basement.” The footsteps started again. “What did you do, Ruby?” Not even giving me enough time to think up a better lie—rude!—the basement door swung open, revealing my cousin Sarah looking down at me from the top of the stairs.
It seemed like my cousin Sarah was always looking down at me. Both literally—like now—and figuratively because Grandma Yvette loved her more, and she knew it. Everybody knew it.
Which was why a simple thing like carrying this pot of matzah balls upstairs without spilling them was such a big deal.
Sarah sighed down at me. It even seemed like her sighs were gustier than other people’s. Maybe it was an advantage of her being four months older than me. It didn’t sound like that much—we were in the same grade and everything—but she’d had four whole extra months of breathing practice. “I can’t believe you dropped them all,” she said, then glanced over her shoulder. “What happened?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” I said. And it wasn’t, really. Grandma Yvette had demanded I go get the matzah balls really quickly, so of course I took the stairs two at a time. But I knew Sarah wouldn’t care, so my shoulders just sagged.
I knew better than to say anything about cow eyeballs and remind her about Mr. Zammit’s class. Sarah and I had always had our classes together and had been lab partners last year when we dissected an owl pellet, but we’d been placed into different tracks this year. We didn’t have any classes together for the first time ever. Whenever anyone brought that fact up, Sarah got all sad and slumpy, which was actually kind of funny compared to her usually perfect posture.
Me? I was usually slumpy. But it wasn’t because Sarah and I were in different classes.
Sarah glanced over her shoulder again. Her shiny dark hair bounced as she did it, too, like it was trying to rub how shiny it was in my face. She always had it tied back in a ponytail, neat and never frizzy. Her blouses were always white, and they never had funny slogans or food stains on them. “Maybe we can—”
“What’s going on?” Grandma Yvette’s voice was a rumble that traveled all through the house, so hearing it didn’t mean she was close. Maybe I could fix this before—
She appeared behind Sarah at the top of the stairs, wide enough to fill the entire doorway. Sarah was taller than me, but she seemed to shrink.
I had only a few seconds to speak. “I didn’t mean to,” I said hastily. “I’ll pick them all up, I’ll—”
Grandma Yvette’s pale blue eyes bore down on me. I stopped talking immediately as she began, her voice quiet. A smile stretched out over her face, a big fake one that didn’t warm her eyes even a little. “Ruby Diana Taylor, what in the world happened down there?”
That was one of her things. She liked to hear you admit to whatever wrongdoing you’d done. I had a lot of experience with this. “I dropped all the matzah balls,” I said, and then, quickly, “It was an accident. I’ll pick them all up, and I’ll—”
Her smile stretched wider. It was almost wider than I’d ever seen it. You’d think a wide smile would be good, but not always when it came to Grandma Yvette. “Unfortunately, I can’t serve matzah balls that have been dropped on the floor to the Sisterhood.”
I shrank under the force of that smile, under Grandma Yvette’s smoke-yellowed teeth. It always kind of reminded me of the freeze face corpses sometimes got after death, pulling their lips back toward their ears, baring their teeth. “I can check the freezer to see if there’s more,” I said meekly. I knew there weren’t any more. All the refrigerated matzah balls were rolling around on the floor, and there weren’t any frozen ones, because I’d already checked. I just wanted to get out from under those pale blue eyes, icy enough to make me shiver.
Grandma Yvette shook her head. Her steel-gray bob didn’t move. “What a shame, Ruby. What a shame,” she said. She turned to Sarah. “My dear, it seems we’ll have to make chicken noodle soup instead. Will you go down and fetch me some egg noodles from the pantry?”
I perked up. Maybe I could redeem myself. “I can get it!”
“No, Ruby.” Grandma Yvette’s voice was heavy. “You’ve done quite enough today.” She paused to let the weight of those words sink in. I slumped under them. “Clean the matzah balls up, and then you should get started on your homework before that mother of yours comes to get you.”
The way she said mother made it sound like she was saying something like hiveful of wasps instead. Sometimes I thought Grandma Yvette would prefer having a hiveful of wasps as a daughter-in-law rather than my mom. Though then I would be half wasp, which would be both weird and cool. As long as I got the stinger or wings half and not the antennae half.
“Okay,” I said, only it came out more like a squeak. It was enough, though, to make Grandma Yvette leave. She turned away and went back toward the kitchen, where the bubbling pot of chicken broth had probably overflowed by now, just so that she could blame something else on me.
Sarah, though, came down the stairs. Toward me. I scowled at her for wanting to rub how much better at everything she was in my face, and then I remembered that Grandma Yvette had asked her to grab the noodles from the pantry. I moved to the side of the staircase so that she could get by without having to step on me.
But instead of going down to the pantry, Sarah knelt next to me and started scooping dusty matzah balls into her arms.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. Why couldn’t she just leave me to stew in my misery by myself?
She shrugged. “I don’t mind.” She cracked a smile. “I’ve missed you lately anyway. Now that we don’t see each other in school.”
Maybe I don’t miss you, I wanted to say back, but I held my tongue. I didn’t really want to spend more time than I had to in the cold, dark basement, so I just focused on getting as many matzah balls into the pot as I could. Even the ones that had rolled under the old furniture stored down here. If I forgot those, they’d grow mold and rot and attract mice, which I learned after the meatball debacle of fourth grade. Really, it was a miracle Grandma Yvette kept sending me to fetch stuff out of the basement fridge.
I got down on my knees and kneel-walked across the concrete floor. Grabbed a matzah ball from under the old high chair Grandma Yvette used to pull out when Henry was a baby (and probably when Sarah and I were babies, too). Snatched another one before it rolled under the leaning tower of boxes in the corner. I looked around as I tossed the balls into the pot. I didn’t see any others—oh, there was one, trying to hide behind that treasure chest.
A treasure chest?
I crawled over eagerly, tucking the matzah ball into my pocket before focusing fully on the chest. It looked like one of those old-timey treasure chests you’d see in a pirate movie: shiny brown wood, flat on the bottom and curved on top. I ran my fingers over the surface, feeling the small carvings of grapes and palm trees. Funny how everything else was dusty down here, but this wasn’t.
A bunch of years ago, when we were little kids—okay, maybe it was only a year and a half ago, when we were slightly littler kids than we are now—Sarah and I had a longstanding joke about Captain Brickhead, which had started after this one time we saw a fast-food mascot standing guard over a giant pile of bricks. All one of us had to do was say “Brickhead,” and the other one would burst into laughter. For Sarah’s eleventh birthday, I’d made her a treasure map that led her on a scavenger hunt for Captain Brickhead’s hidden treasure (conveniently enough, his hidden treasure happened to be a stash of Sarah’s favorite snacks and a few of mine, since Sarah’s favorite snacks were mostly far too healthy for my taste).
But that was before the Incident. Before the lines were drawn.
I shook my head, bringing me back to reality. There was one big difference between this chest and a real pirate’s treasure chest: It wasn’t locked. Which meant I could open it and check out what was inside. My fingers eagerly found their way down to the latch and—
“Stop!”
I fell back at the sound of Sarah’s shout, right onto my butt. I winced but made sure to wipe it clear off my face and put on an annoyed look before she could see it. She stood by the staircase, her hands on her hips, looking down at me.
Of course.
I frowned at her. “What?”
“The chest.” She took a few steps toward me, but stopped far enough where I couldn’t reach her if I’d tried.
I bet I could nail her with the matzah ball in my pocket, though. Not that I’d actually do it. But I could if I wanted to, assuming it hadn’t gotten too squashed when I fell on my butt.
She went on. “I found that in the back of Grandma’s closet two nights ago. I asked Grandma Yvette about it and she told me never to open it. And then she took it and put it down here.”
“But why would she—” I stopped short and squinted at her. “Wait, what were you doing here two nights ago?” My parents and Sarah’s parents, my aunt and uncle, had us come here on the bus after school a few days a week to spend time with each other—something we used to ask for—and help Grandma Yvette. It was better than being in daycare. But I hadn’t slept over here since my parents went on vacation without me two years ago.
Sarah pursed her lips and looked down at her feet. “I was sleeping over.”
“Is that the first time?”
She shrugged, looking back up. She bit her bottom lip, then sighed. “No.”
Meaning she’d slept over here before. Maybe a lot. And she and Grandma Yvette had never said anything, because they didn’t want me to know.
My cheeks got hot, but I ducked my head. I didn’t want her to see. “Whatever.”
“Well, here are the matzah balls.” She stepped over and dropped a matzah ball back into the pot with a plop, drying her hands off on her shirt. “You should be more careful.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I hope she didn’t miss the sarcasm. If she did, she didn’t let on. She just gave me a tiny smile, then moved around me to go get the noodles. She took them upstairs to Grandma Yvette, leaving me alone in the cold and the dark.
Copyright © 2022 by Amanda Panitch
