It's My Party and I Don't Want to Go by Amanda Panitch

Author:Amanda Panitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

My mind whirred with thoughts all through the ride to Carl Meier’s bar mitzvah. He was one of the kids in my Hebrew school class I didn’t know that well—he sat in the back of the class with Todd Germaine and Danny Cohen, whispering through the teacher’s lectures and making up rhyme-alikes for Adon Olam—but it was a policy for my Hebrew school that all the kids in the class got invited to everyone’s b’nai mitzvah, so here I was.

I sighed and tilted my head back so that it rested up against the seat. In the mirror overhead, I noticed my mom looking at me quizzically, like she wanted to ask me how I was doing. If I was doing okay.

I closed my eyes so that I didn’t have to see it.

I got dropped off at temple comfortably late. B’nai mitzvah officially began with the start of the morning service, but that was at, like, nine in the morning, and the bar or bat mitzvah kid didn’t actually do anything until later. I was used to arriving at ten or ten thirty, when things really got going. So were the rest of the kids in my Hebrew school class.

Not the non-Jewish kids, though. I slid into the back pew next to Zoe, who looked at me with a sour expression. It was similar to the expressions of all the other non-Jewish kids from our regular school class, who’d been sitting here for over an hour as the rabbi and cantor droned on in a language they didn’t understand. All their eyes were pretty much dead at this point. “You’re late.”

“No, you’re way early.” I shifted on the uncomfortable wooden pew. “Do you have the shrimp?”

I felt that queasy sensation in my stomach again, like I really had to go to the bathroom, except that I’d literally just gone right before walking in here. It was accompanied by a heaviness, like my stomach might actually fall out of my body. Which would be bad.

It felt a little bit like … guilt.

“You can’t smell them?” Zoe whispered back.

I took a deep inhale and smelled nothing but old books and musty cushions and a wisp of too-strong floral perfume from one of the old ladies around us. The normal smells of Shabbat service. “Nope.”

“Well, that’s good,” Zoe said. “I wrapped them in, like, a thousand plastic bags.” She frowned. “Hopefully that’ll be enough to keep me from turning the temple unkosher and going to hell.”

“Jews don’t believe in hell,” I reassured her, but my queasy stomach said otherwise. “And there are lots of things we aren’t supposed to be doing in temple. Like, I’m not supposed to be carrying bags in here on Shabbat, but I did anyway.”

There were a lot of rules about what Jews are and are not allowed to do on Shabbat, which was our day of rest. The ancient sages and/or actual God had taken the definition of rest super literally, so we weren’t allowed to do things like turn things on and off, press buttons like in elevators, or carry things like bags.

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