The Opposite of Hallelujah by Anna Jarzab Page B

whatever, you’ll find out tomorrow. What’s he like?”
    “Very cute,” I said, brightening. “Funny. Nice. Smart, but not too smart. Not one of those guys who thinks he’s smarter than you and lets you know it.”
    “ Is he smarter than you?”
    “Probably not.”
    “Boy, do you have a type,” Reb said.
    There was a knock at my door. I practically jumped out of my seat; I wasn’t used to having someone else home on weekday afternoons and had forgotten that Hannah was probably around somewhere. “Who is it?” I called, just to be sure.
    “Hannah.”
    “Reb, I gotta go,” I said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
    “Pick you up in the morning?” she asked.
    “You bet. Seven-forty-five sharp.”
    “Or I leave without you.”
    I hung up. “Come in.”
    Hannah walked into the room and stood at the foot of my bed. She looked gaunt and tired, and her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. It struck me again how skinny she was. There were circles, dark as bruises, under her eyes, and her clothes, baggy and wrinkled, hung on her body like curtains. Whatever perkiness she’d had that morning had vanished, like she was too tired to fake it anymore that day. The spell had certainly worn off.
    “Did you just wake up?” I asked, and she nodded. “What do you need?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. She pulled her hands, with their long, thin pianist’s fingers and pale skin stretched over knobby knuckles, up into the sleeves of her T-shirt, rubbing her fists together through the fabric.
    “I have homework,” I told her.
    “Yeah. Okay.” She paused in the doorway on her way out. “Do you want to watch a movie or something later?”
    “A lot of homework,” I non-answered.
    “Okay.” Hannah ventured a smile. “How was school?”
    “Fine.” I was already bent over my physics book, running my eyes over the same sentence again and again. I wasn’t really planning to start my homework for at least another hour, but I hoped that my looking busy would discourage her from sticking around.
    “Anything interesting happen?” she asked.
    “Nope.”
    “I was walking to the laundry room and I overheard you say something about a boy?” she pressed. “Something about being in love?”
    “You were eavesdropping?” I snapped. All I needed was for her to go tell my parents I was in love, especially since it wasn’t even true.
    She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I just thought … we had a nice talk yesterday.”
    “I really have to get started on this science homework,” I said. I knew it was mean, but she made me feel uncomfortable, standing there expectantly but not really communicating what she wanted. One friendly conversation didn’t make a relationship, and I still didn’t know how to navigate ours, whatever it was.
    “All right. I guess I’ll see you later.”
    “Later,” I said, turning back to the text and my empty notebook. “Can you close the door behind you?”
    As soon as I heard it shut, I rolled away from my desk, propped my feet up on the bed, and opened my laptop.
    Let’s face it: everybody cyberstalks. It’s a fact of teenage life in this century, and I’m okay with that. It was like a tacit agreement among us: everybody liked to know other people’s business, so we put up profiles and we took the opportunity to spy on each other from the comfort of our own bedrooms.
    Pawel Sobczak didn’t appear to have gotten that memo.After diligent searching on several social networking sites, not to mention Google, all I was able to pull up was a water polo record from his old high school, which turned out not to be very far away. No profiles, no website, not even an old email address. Was he from the Dark Ages? I called Reb.
    “No profile, huh?” she said, crunching on something. “Interesting.”
    “Creepy,” I said.
    “Oh, I don’t know about that. Maybe he’s just a private person.”
    “Nobody is private these days,” I pointed out.
    Reb laughed.