I first met Rebecca in New York City, far from the Potomac Ocean separating our home states. My family was on the way back from visiting my Grandparents in Boston, and we stopped in New York for lunch and so my brother could meet Rachel, a camp friend from Virginia he didn’t see enough. Rebecca, a friend of Rachel from school, happened to be in New York at the same time. The two of them had plans of some kind later, so Rachel brought Rebecca to her lunch meeting with my brother.
I have a sixth sense for detecting conversations about Star Trek across crowded and loud rooms, and while I lack the gift for gracefully butting into them, I do it anyway and the conversers are usually too excited to find another Trekkie to notice the awkwardness. I had been just sitting there and quietly thinking, not listening to the conversation around me, but when Rebecca referenced some episode of Next Generation, my Trek-dar went off and through sheer force of will I crashed my way into the conversation.
We talked about Star Trek and then other Sci-fi shows and then school and then other stuff I don’t remember. We were both already obsessed with Firefly and Doctor Who, I recommended Battlestar Galactica and she recommended Stargate. She was entering Junior Year, I was entering Freshman year. I told her about the IB magnet program I was going into, she told me about the hard classes she was going to be taking. Like me, she was a borderline Socialist. We were both introverts, and used to be bullied but had since escaped into new schools (for me, a series of magnet schools; for her, a Jewish private school). We parted about an hour later, saying we’d both probably go to the next AJYG event, hopefully we’d see each other then.
AJYG stands for American Jewish Youth Group, and it’s exactly what it says on the tin. Maryland and Virginia (and DC) are grouped together in the Chesapeake Region, so 6 times a year whoever can make it from the area (anywhere between 100 and 500 high schoolers) meet at a Synagogue or Camp for a weekend. The limited time and infrequent meetings necessitate tight schedules of activities and learning, but it also means social relationships move very fast. There is little fear of embarrassment or awkwardness inhibiting people from meeting and getting to know each other when you won’t see these people again for at least a month.
My bus pulled into the camp in the Appalachians that was the site of the first AJYG meeting of the year. Rebecca’s bus was traveling farther, from Southern Virginia, so she arrived about an hour later than I did, in the middle of dinner. She sat down right next to me in the dining hall and we resumed our conversation from New York as if the month in between was a day.
During that event we spent a lot of time together and learned more about each other. She was very bright and intellectually curious, and she understood and shared my introversion and dislike of loud crowds. We talked about a lot of things, but in various conversations I kept making fun of Virginia and the South, calling where she lived the Confederacy (it made sense and was vaguely humorous in context). I thought I was being funny, but she didn’t laugh; I noticed that but I couldn’t stop myself.
During a bit of free time between activities, my group of friends sat around on sofas and chairs and talked. Tired because her bunk had stayed up ridiculously late the previous night, she rested her head on my shoulder. I could have put my arm around her, I think she might have wanted me to, but I didn’t. That evening, we sought refuge together from the loud dance in a quiet room along with a few other people who similarly disliked the bad music and worse dancing. All of us were exhausted. A few of us were talking sedately about comic books or something when Rebecca laid her head on my lap and fell asleep. I had no idea what to do so I just kept talking with the people.
At the end of the event we exchanged phone numbers and parted by saying “Live Long and Prosper”, but we didn’t text until about a month and a half later, as my bus was approaching the next event. This event happened to be at her Synagogue, Temple Bet Shalom in Norfolk.
During the service, I pricked my thumb on the “safety” pin on my nametag, and I’m afraid of blood so this visibly distressed me. She took my thumb and put her finger over it to stop the bleeding, and calmly asked around if anyone had a band-aid. Later, the people from the host Synagogue were called up for an aliyah, but she didn’t want to go. She said she hoped they didn’t notice she wasn’t up there, so I said “I’ll make sure they know” and made some pathetic motions vaguely pointing to her. She looked terrified and embarrassed, so I hurriedly explained that I was joking, but I don’t know for sure if she heard me because I had to murmur it because they were starting to chant the aliyah. Extrovert Culture tells me stuff like that is teasing and endearing and funny, but I know I would have been at least as terrified and embarrassed if someone even joked about doing that to me. I didn’t think about that until afterwards. I realized quickly what a horrible thing it was to even joke about, and I hoped she knew I would never actually do that to her.
The dance at that event was supposed to be a “Decades” theme. Each of the grades got an email telling them what decade to dress up as, but by some glitch in the system, everyone got assigned the 1920s. So of course there were lots of girls in what they claimed were Flapper dresses (I wouldn’t know the difference) and guys in pink suits and the like. Thinking myself very clever, I dressed up as a post-revolutionary Russian soldier, noting that they never specified what country the costume should be from. Rebecca complimented my costume when she saw me, and I talked about how I made it and was so wrapped up in my own cleverness I forgot to tell her how beautiful she looked in her black Flapper dress.
The event was in Virginia, and this was about a week before the election, so the people who planned it thought it would be funny to do Swing Dancing. They hired a few people to divide us up into groups and teach us how to Swing Dance, or at least as much as can be taught in half an hour. I was pretty terrible, but I put in effort to learning because I wanted to be good enough to dance with Rebecca and not crush her toes or accidentally trip a fire alarm or something. It turned out she had a sprained ankle, so we didn’t end up dancing. I was vaguely disappointed, but I probably dodged a bullet. We ended us sitting on a sofa in the hallway and talking and eating ice cream the whole time.
It was my birthday that day. I thought Rebecca liked me, so for the whole day I was half-expecting her to kiss me (I don’t know where I got the idea that she would be more likely to do that on my birthday). During the dance, I was thinking about kissing her, but I had ice-cream breath and besides, there were other people in the hallway. I could have taken her outside or something and found somewhere more private, but that would require initiative. And besides, what would I say?
I sat next to her in the Friendship Circle the next morning. Before we leave on the buses, every event we gather in a massive amoeba-shaped “circle” and sing songs, “Lean On Me” and the like. It’s all very sad because we aren’t going to see our friends for a month or two. People buy each other candy grams the night before and they’re distributed at the Circle. Rebecca and I each got each other candygrams, the one I wrote her said the rough equivalent of “It was nice seeing you again, and I hope to see you at the next event. Live Long and Prosper, Jacob.” She said it was basically guaranteed, barring some sort of emergency, that she’d be at the next event.
The last song was “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” I hugged her and got on the bus, and as it pulled away I kept hearing the chorus, feeling the after-vibrations from singing as part of a 300-person crowd-entity, “So kiss me and smile for me/ Tell me that you’ll wait for me/ Hold me like you’ll never let me go...”
I texted her a few times leading up to the next event, asking if she was going to go. She didn’t reply to any of them. I sent her an email and got no word. I arrived at the next event and she wasn’t there. I missed her, but I still had a blast. In fact, for reasons having nothing to do with her lack of presence, it was the most fun event I’ve been to so far. But as we sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane” at the Friendship Circle, I remembered the last Circle and how I felt on that bus leaving.
I bought a candy gram and wrote a note to her. I forget the exact words, but I told her I missed her this event, and hoped to see her at the next one. I ended the body of the note with “Live Long and Prosper” instead of signing it with that as I had done previously, and instead I signed, “Love, Jacob.” I gave it to Rachel to deliver to her.
I never saw Rebecca again. I don’t know why she stopped coming to events. And to this day, I have no idea if she ever got the note.