The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg Page B

met anyone before who needed him like she did, even
     if she couldn’t admit it.
    “I really want to know,” he said. He leaned back and put his arm around her, she unfolded
     herself into him, and then she began to speak.
    “I hated Hebrew school,” she said.
    “Was there someone who liked Hebrew school?” he said.
    “All the other kids went to the same grammar school and junior high school and summer
     camp, and they saw each other every day, all day long, and were all best friends with
     each other. And I was this interloper. Plus, I was fat, did I ever tell you I was
     a fat kid?”
    Yes, she had told him she was fat.
    “Everyone made fun of me. The girls were the worst, those bitchy little princesses,”
     she said. “It was two hours of hell, three times a week, for years. How many years?
     Like five years.”
    Robin’s eyes narrowed and her cheeks grew pinched, and it made Daniel love her less
     in that moment. Those faces she made never did her any favors, but there was no way
     to actually tell her that. You had to take the good with the bad: that was how Daniel
     felt. Later on, when her arms were wrapped around his back and her fingers were in
     his hair, the way she stroked his face, the kisses she laid on his neck, he wouldn’t
     be thinking about that weird squint she had when she was pissed off.
    “I’m sympathetic to your pain, but that’s not enough of a reason to reject religion
     outright,” he said. “We all had a lot of pain growing up.”
    Daniel had been a boy genius, and then a teen genius. (Though now as an adult, after
     a dozen years of drinking and a long-standing romance with Adderall that had ended
     only in the last year, he was probably just pretty smart.) He wasn’t sure why being
     smart necessitated being tortured by his classmates. He remembered in particular a
     football player who sat behind him in Spanish class sophomore year, who at least once
     a day stabbed him in the back of the head with a pencil until one day his barber discovered
     a dripping green hole there and he was rushed to the emergency room, and there were
     shots, the whole nine, and when he returned to school the next week, he found that
     the seating chart had been reorganized and he had been moved to a corner by himself,
     which, as he looked back now, should have bothered him, but at the time it just gave
     him a giant sense of relief.
    Still, he never complained about it, because he now made a living off the thing that
     was once a source of his pain. He also knew that the football player, husky, yellowing,
     was now a waiter at the McCormick & Schmick’s at Old Orchard—Daniel had seen him last
     year while holiday shopping with his mother—and even though he had never thought that
     he needed any resolution in his life of those dark years, that did not make the moment
     any less sweet. In fact, it might have been the air-conditioning in the mall, but
     he was pretty sure he had tingled.
    Robin started to say something that seemed like it was going to be important: the
     deep inhale, the bunched-up fists, the grim set to her mouth. But instead she simply
     said, “I just felt like it got shoved down my throat.”
    His girlfriend was making excuses. Maybe he’d hear the real story later, and maybe
     he wouldn’t, though he suspected he would. There was so much dramatic tension built
     up all over her, in every tight cell of her body, and he loved watching it unfold.
     Whatever emotions she was experiencing—and they were not entirely bad; in fact, they
     were sometimes so delicate and passionate that it was as if he could see right through
     to her soul—she made it count. On a daily basis, she took great big gulps of feelings,
     and whatever was left over she would pass on to him. All that Adderall had taken its
     toll on Daniel: It was simply harder to feel things now, so he would grab sensations
     when he could get them. Being with Robin was like being stabbed with a million pinpricks
     at