CHAPTER ONE
AS FAR AS FAMILY INHERITANCES go, I got a bad deal. Like, my friend Julie’s family has this beautiful ring that was originally her great-grandmother’s and got passed down through the generations to the oldest daughter in each one. When she turns eighteen, she’ll get to wear the ring, which, by the way, has an actual giant diamond in it.
Me? I got a nose.
Not, like, a nose cut off my great-grandmother’s face and passed down in a box. I’d throw that straight in the garbage, thank you very much. I mean the nose on my face. Everybody on my mom’s side of the family, as far back as pictures go, has the exact same nose. Long, with a bump in the middle and a little hook at the end. And really, really big.
I was staring straight at a mirror version of that nose right now over the chessboard. Just the nose, though, not the rest of the face. Not unless I’d aged eighty years and turned into a man in the last few minutes, which was unlikely. I think I would’ve felt that.
“Leah Roslyn?” Zaide asked. He’d just made his move, pushing his pawn forward a square, so it was my turn.
“I’m thinking,” I said, which was true, even if it wasn’t about the game.
Zaide shifted back in his seat. “Take all the time you need.” He was missing most of his teeth, and he refused to wear dentures, so all his words came out with a lisp. Combined with the Yiddish accent he’d brought with him from Poland a million years ago, he could be hard to understand. But I was used to it. I could understand whatever he said.
Zaide is the Yiddish word for grandfather, but my zaide is actually my great-grandfather—aka my mom’s grandfather. It’s pronounced like ZAY-dee, which you wouldn’t expect from its spelling. My family and I spent every Saturday afternoon at Zaide’s house and had for as long as I could remember. Now we spent other days here, too, since we’d moved here to live closer to him. Like, much closer to him. As in down the street.
About a million years ago, my zaide bought an old telephone company building because it was a lot cheaper than a real house, and then he redid the inside all by himself, so that it had rugs and wallpaper and actual separate rooms. The walls were brick three feet thick, he said, and there were only two windows, one in the front of the house and one in the back. Half of the house consisted of the giant garage, which was musty and dark and still full of old, rusty phone company equipment. I could see it out the window from where I sat on the couch.
“Leah Roslyn?” Zaide prompted again.
“Still thinking,” I said, though now I stared at the board. The pieces blurred before me. I was probably going to lose anyway. Zaide won at least 80 percent of our games. I would never let you win, he told me once. That would be an insult to you. Which made it way more exciting the first time I beat him, since I knew it was for real.
“Do you need a hint?” he asked. Just because he didn’t let me win didn’t mean he didn’t help me. He had over eighty years of life experience on me, after all. So it was only fair.
I’d never gotten made fun of for our nose before we moved here. The other day, I was at chorus rehearsal, and Emma Paglino, who is tiny and adorable with a pert nose like a pug’s, stood in front of me and looked hard at my face. She said, “Oh! So it’s true that Jewish people all have noses shaped like sixes.”
It’s probably important to note that, at my new school, I’m the only Jewish kid in all the sixth grade. This was not the case at my old school, which was a Jewish school, which meant we were all Jewish. And no, Emma Paglino, we did not all have noses shaped like sixes. I didn’t say that, though. My cheeks just got really hot, and I pretended not to hear her, and then the teacher called my row, so I got to run away to the stage.
“Zaide,” I said. “If you could change anything about yourself, what would it be?”
Zaide tilted his head, considering. That was another thing I liked about Zaide: He always took me seriously. Sometimes I asked my parents questions like this, and they just rolled their eyes, all like, We have far more important things to do than listen to our one and only child, like muttering at our phones and complaining that our coffees are cold. “I don’t think I would change anything,” he said. “Yes, I have had a hard life sometimes, but look at where it took me.”
By that, he meant me and my family and my cousins, all here at his house. That was heartfelt and all, but it didn’t answer my real question. “What about how you look?” I prompted.
He didn’t stop to think this time, only smiled. It wasn’t the prettiest smile, considering that there were barely any teeth and the ones that were left were all yellow, but it was pretty to me. “What would I change? This beautiful smile?”
I couldn’t help but giggle. Only a little, though.
“This glowing skin?” Zaide ran a hand over one of his many deep, deep wrinkles. “This strong back?” He stretched a little to show off his hunch. “This glorious head of hair?” The light shone off his bald head.
Okay, this time I giggled kind of a lot.
I glanced down at the board, avoiding his eyes. I wanted a hint now, but I didn’t really want to ask for one and make it obvious how much I didn’t know. So I moved my queen across the board, snagging one of his knights.
“Leah, what are you talking about?” My cousin Matty looked up from her phone. I’d thought she wasn’t paying attention to me, but apparently, she’d been listening this whole time from over where she sat on the cozy armchair. “Zaide doesn’t need to change anything about himself.”
I bristled at her know-it-all tone. She was only a year older than me, but she thought that one measly year made her, like, an entire adult. “I didn’t say he did. Anyway, I’m focusing on the game.”
I turned back to the board just in time for Zaide to nab my queen with his bishop. “Checkmate.”
Argh. I searched the board, but he was right. My king was trapped, nowhere he could go to escape or, at least, hide from all the other chess pieces making comments about his nose.
Maybe that was me projecting a little.
“Good game,” Zaide said, reaching over the board to shake my hand. I shook and said it back. He stood slowly, looking toward the kitchen. “I’m going to see what your parents are doing.” His eyes traveled over to Jed, Matty’s brother and my other cousin. “Jedidiah David.”
Jed sat up from where he was lying on the floor. Yes, he was just lying on the floor for no reason. He was the oldest of us, but he still did things like that. “What?”
“We’ll work on your math later,” Zaide said. “No more Cs.”
Jed’s sticky-out ears flushed red. “Okay.”
Zaide headed back to the kitchen, leaving me alone with Matty and Jed. As soon as Zaide disappeared into the other room, Matty set her phone down on the table and turned her eyes on me. “Leah, what were you getting at earlier? Do you want to change something about yourself?”
I bristled again, this time because I hated how right she was and because she was going to make me say it. “Seriously? You have to ask me that?”
Jed said, his ears still pink, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, either.”
With a grand flourish, I pointed right at my nose.
Jed blinked. Matty blinked.
“My nose,” I said.
Matty rolled her eyes. “Your nose is fine.”
My nose is not fine. It’s a villain’s nose, which makes it not-fine by definition. Every time you see a character with a nose like mine—big and bumpy, with a hook at the end—they’re evil. The Wicked Witch of the West. Professor Snape in Harry Potter. Jafar, Cinderella’s wicked stepmother, Mother Gothel, and basically every other Disney villain. All of the princesses and heroines have sweet little button noses or baby ski slopes.
But Matty and Jed wouldn’t understand. They don’t exactly have small noses, but they’re not big, either, and they certainly don’t have the hook at the end. Somehow they managed to avoid the terrible inheritance, though their dad has the nose. “When I turn eighteen, I’m going to get a nose job,” I told them. I’d told my mom the same thing, but she hadn’t taken me seriously. It used to be that nose jobs were a big thing among Jewish girls, but not anymore, she’d said. Appreciate your differences! Have pride in them!
But how was I supposed to appreciate and be proud when it was clearly a bad thing to have a nose like mine?
“You don’t need a nose job, Leah,” Matty said.
I would totally have answered her if Jed hadn’t butted in. “I’m going to get a nose job, too,” he said. “Except I’m going to have them make it bigger. And fatter.”
“That’s stupid,” I said.
“You know what else is stupid?” he asked.
We said together, “Your face.” It was a joke, but in this case it was actually true. My face was stupid, all because of my nose.
Then I got serious. “But really, it makes it so that I don’t fit in, Matty.”
She wrinkled her whole face at me. “Matilda.” She’d started going by her full name a couple of months ago. She said that Matty made her feel like a little kid. Like Matilda was so much more grown-up.
A crinkle came from the direction of the kitchen. Matty shot bolt upright. She had a superpower: She could tell what any food was based on how the wrapper sounded coming off. “Chocolate-covered caramels,” she said breathlessly, jumping to her feet. “Hurry, before my dad stuffs them all in his face!”
She and Jed dashed off, feet loud on the carpet-covered concrete. I followed more slowly, plodding along, because Jed would make sure to save me some candy no matter what. This was what Saturday afternoons at Zaide’s were made of: hanging out with Zaide and my cousins, playing some chess (usually losing), and eating lots of candy (to make me feel better after losing). I paused for a moment in the kitchen doorway, my nose forgotten, smiling at the sight of everybody shoveling caramels in their mouths. I never wanted it to end.
But if the universe listened to what we wanted, I’d have a small, cute, Disney-princess nose.
Text copyright © 2021 by Amanda Panitch
