“I shouldn’t have said those things,” Elena said quietly. “And I shouldn’t have waited until 2:00 a.m. to apologize.”
Elena wiped her eyes with the napkin. “There’s a ‘but’?”
“You’re being stubborn,” her older brother, Josh, said from the couch, where he was pretending to do homework but was actually watching her.
“No,” Sophie agreed. “You weren’t.” -No estas invitada a mi bat Mitzvah-
“You’re not invited either,” Sophie said, even though he was, obviously. He was family. He had to come. That was the rule. The night before the bat mitzvah, Sophie couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed, running through her Torah portion in her head, and her mind kept circling back to the same image: Elena’s face when she’d laughed at the lockers. Not mean, exactly. Just careless. Like Sophie was a joke she’d gotten tired of telling.
Their eyes met. Elena gave a small, trembling wave.
“But,” Sophie continued, “there’s going to be a second dessert at my house tomorrow. Just leftover cake and the cheap ice cream. And you can come to that. If you want.” “I shouldn’t have said those things,” Elena said
Elena’s face fell.
“I know I wasn’t invited.”
No, Sophie typed. Then deleted it. Then typed: I don’t know. “There’s a ‘but’
“She really thinks she’s going to sing at her own bat mitzvah?” Elena was saying, her voice doing that mean-girl lilt she’d been practicing lately. “Her voice cracks like a frog with a cold. I’m just saying, someone should tell her before she embarrasses herself.”
Silence. Sophie could hear her own heartbeat.
She spent the next two months telling everyone who asked that Elena was not invited. Not a chance. Not if she begged. Not if she showed up with a life-size plush unicorn and a signed apology from Taylor Swift.
Are you really going to fake sick tomorrow?