Page 27

“Thank god for that, or you wouldn’t have such a great boyfriend,” Dan said, grinning again. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. Probably he wasn’t. A real friend wouldn’t be an asshole about that. “I don’t know, something about the guy’s attitude was infectious. I never wanted to be told to ‘look on the bright side’ of losing out on the dorm we wanted or getting turned down by the guy in my history of immigration class, but I have to say, he was usually right. If we’d gotten that dorm, which was a lot nicer but less central, we wouldn’t have become the kings of the party scene. If that guy had gone out with me, I wouldn’t have met Mike S., who became one of our best friends.” He nodded at the guy across from him, who I assumed was Mike S. He nodded back.

“Yeah, totally, I get it.” I plastered a big smile on my face, the type of smile the girlfriend of a “look on the bright side” guy should have. “It’s like when my grandma died, and I was like, well, on the bright side, at least I still have my other grandma.”

Dan pinched his eyebrows. “Uh. Okay.”

I took a big gulp of my drink.

And another.

And another.

“Hey, guys, you’d better not be telling Abby any embarrassing stories about me.” Seth’s attention was suddenly back on me, his smile so blinding I had to squint a little. He draped an arm over my shoulder. Don’t people say that weighted blankets help with anxiety for some reason? I didn’t know why I was thinking that now, but I set my drink back down on the table.

Not soon enough to keep the effects from hitting me hard, though. The drink wasn’t even that good—the cranberry juice was too sugary, and the vodka was cheap, and they hadn’t even given me a maraschino cherry—but it got the job done. By the time we were flowing out of the Irish bar and on to our next stop, I felt like I was floating pleasantly above the sidewalk, tethered to the earth by Seth’s hand. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I said dreamily.

When we stopped in front of the next bar, my jaw dropped open. Dan slapped Seth on the back so loud it echoed. “This one’s for you, Seth-man!”

Seth looked stunned. “Is this…”

It was. A. Hanukkah bar.

Blue and white lights dazzled me as we stepped through the door and were met by the scents of apple and vanilla and fried potato, which—I couldn’t explain it—smelled just like Hanukkah. “Apple isn’t even a Hanukkah food,” I murmured.

“What?” asked Kylie, who was next to me.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

Electric menorahs blazed all around the room from every surface, all lit up for the third night. Right. We’d passed sunset without lighting the candles. Had Seth’s parents lit them without us?

We nabbed a circular table so that everybody could hear one another when they talked, me settling in between Seth and Dan again. It would have been easier here even if we hadn’t; the music, currently a version of Adam Sandler’s classic Hanukkah song, was set pretty low. One of the electric menorahs sat in the middle of the table, along with a few extra-large dreidels. I picked one up to find a sheet of instructions beneath for a dreidel drinking game. Nun, nobody drank. Hay, you drank. Gimel, everybody drank. Shin, you got to choose someone else to drink. Simple. Elegant. Brilliant.

I didn’t realize I’d said that out loud until Seth started to laugh. “How much did you have to drink already?”

“Only two drinks!” I poked him hard in the chest for emphasis. A ragged nail got stuck in the weave of his sweater, and it took a second to extricate myself. “To be fair, they were strong.” It was probably a good thing that I’d stuck to one drink when I met up with Seth the first time.

“Clearly,” Seth said, a smile twitching at his lips.

“What, do you find this funny?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’re usually so buttoned-up. It’s funny to see you loosen up a little.”

There was nothing like somebody pointing out you’d loosened up to make you tighten right back in on yourself. I turned away from him, feeling like I’d accidentally flashed him or something. “Hey,” I said loudly, because I’d rather talk to anyone and everyone else right now. “It’s after sundown and we haven’t lit the candles yet, and we’ve got this great menorah right here.”

The table sprang into action as I ordered them around: Dan loosened the lit bulbs so that they went dark, and Seth pulled up English transliterations of the blessings on his phone for the non-Jews’ (about half of them—it seemed a couple of the Mikes were Jewish, but the rest of the group wasn’t) reference.

They were all too shy to start off the singing. Thanks to the vodka, I was not. “Baruch atah Adonai…”

Everybody else joined in, the people who didn’t know Hebrew butchering all the pronunciations enthusiastically. Understandable—if you didn’t know that the “ch” transliterated into a sound that could be described in English as clearing your throat, you’d naturally pronounce it like the beginning of “choo choo train.” But they were trying, and that was what mattered.

It mattered a lot, actually. It’s the vodka, I told myself, but my sinuses were stinging with how much I felt it. I was so used to blending in the opposite way—buying friends Christmas presents; going to Christmas parties and singing along to Christmas music; creating Christmas specials for my menu board—that welcoming people into my own traditions felt odd. Odd, but really nice.

Nice enough that, after we’d all ordered a round of Hanukkah-themed drinks (unable to resist my curiosity, I’d selected a latke-themed cocktail that was either going to be fantastic or terrible), I insisted we play the dreidel drinking game. “It’s part of the holiday,” I told them all. Their faces blurred just slightly as I spun around, enough where they could’ve been anybody—my childhood friends, my family, the tourism board. “When you’re a kid you play with gelt.”

As if the waitress had read my mind, she turned up not just with our drinks, but with a little mesh bag of the gold foil–wrapped chocolate coins for each of us, too, so I didn’t have to explain what gelt was. Before trying my cocktail, I ripped open the bag and tore apart one of those bad boys, popping the coin into my mouth. It took a few seconds for the cheap, plasticky chocolate to melt. Just like I remembered.

“I played strip dreidel once in college,” Dan offered, and the table laughed. He nudged Seth. “If I recall, you lost pretty bad. Didn’t your underwear end up pinned to the wall of the girls’ bathroom?” I snorted at Seth’s chagrined expression and took a sip of my latke and applesauce cocktail. It tasted mostly like apples and cinnamon, which was probably a good thing, though I did appreciate the salty potato chip garnish on the rim.