Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

“You should have given that jerk a piece of your mind,” Ofir said, and Gabi felt his face redden, the anger rising again.

“He’ll get what’s coming to him, don’t you worry” was his only response.

“For sure,” Ofir said, “he was asking for it.”

“Fourteen and fifteen in one step,” Yotam said.

“You should have smeared the cottage cheese all over his face,” said Ofir.

Gabi thought, Why didn’t you smear the cottage cheese in his face? But he didn’t say a word. The large diving board, three meters of concrete, came into view, and there in the distance, someone was doing a back somersault off its edge.

“Who was that?” Gabi asked.

“I think it’s that volunteer, what’s-his-name,” Ofir replied.

“Orit’s boyfriend,” said Yotam.

“He’s not her boyfriend,” Ofir responded.

“How do you know?”

“Wanna bet?”

“Fifteen,” Yotam announced as they approached the pool.

“You’ve already said fifteen,” Ofir noted.

“Really? So sixteen, then.”

* * *

That boy, Eyal, was standing in front of the giant bowl of cottage cheese. What’s up with him? Gabi wondered. Why isn’t he moving along? Was he trying to decide how much to put on his plate or simply daydreaming? Whatever — he shouldn’t be holding everyone up. What grade is he in?

Gabi was waiting for Eyal to move on from the cottage cheese, and then Ofir poked Gabi on his shoulder, a painful poke.

“What do you want from me?” Gabi barked, turning to Ofir.

“What’s going on? Why aren’t we moving? What’s with the cottage cheese?”

Their faux wooden plastic trays were lined up one behind the other on the steel rails that ran alongside the food stations. The identical trays bore light blue plates containing scrambled eggs, which by then had cooled and hardened and acquired a bluish tint around the edges, one tomato and one cucumber, and a set of cutlery. All that remained to complete the perfect breakfast was the cottage cheese. “Get moving,” Ofir urged. Gabi nudged his shoulder into the kid, Eyal, the second-grader.

“Hey, what’s your problem, Jaws?” Eyal said, looking Gabi squarely in the eyes. When all was said and done, Ofir acted the big hero, and wondered why Gabi hadn’t smeared the cottage cheese in the kid’s face, but truthfully, when it happened, Ofir and Yotam had chuckled at first, and waited to see how Gabi would react. As if they weren’t his friends, as if the cheeky little kid hadn’t shot his mouth off at all three of them, three years his senior. They chuckled, and Gabi said, “What did you say?” The kid replied, “Jaws,” without shifting his gaze, fearless. Gabi shoved him with his shoulder again, but not hard enough, because the kid managed to stand firm and say, “Hey, okay, just a moment, Jaws, I’m just taking some cottage cheese, show a little patience.” And Ofir and Yotam laughed again, and Gabi, more taken aback than anything else, waited, his face reddening. Eyal, his confidence boosted by the laughter, added, “Anyway, the cottage cheese will just get stuck in your braces. You don’t need that, do you?” And then he added another “Jaws,” for good measure, and one or two of his friends nearby tried to stifle their laughter.

Eyal loaded his plate with cottage cheese, and Gabi followed suit, alongside the scrambled eggs, and went to sit down. Ofir and Yotam did the same and sat down next to him.

“Did you see that cheeky little shit?” Ofir said as he sat down, like he didn’t know the answer, like he didn’t know that everyone had seen, and heard, too, that cheeky little shit, like he and Yotam hadn’t played a part in Gabi’s humiliation.

“What grade is he in?” Gabi asked.

“He’s going into second grade, he’s with my sister.”

“These kids, they don’t have an ounce of respect,” Yotam said, and Ofir responded, “You shouldn’t have let it slide,” and Yotam said, “Jaws,” and giggled, and Ofir joined in, and Gabi, too, in the end, as if he had a choice. When the giggle died down, Yotam peeled off the wrapping from a wedge of cheese, took a bite, threw the silver foil into the wastebasket, and added, “I haven’t heard that before.” He upped a gear from a giggle to full-on laughter, and Ofir went along with him, and Gabi shifted down to a smile, which turned bitter at the edges. It wasn’t, of course, the first time he had heard it. He had heard every name imaginable: Brace Face, Metal Mouth, Train Tracks, Magnet Mouth, Cheese Grater, Zipper Mouth, Tinsel Teeth, Tin Grin, and, yes, Jaws was certainly one of the popular ones. That said, he wasn’t accustomed to hearing such impertinence from a second-grader. What had the world come to?

“Jeez, that jerk, how did he not get a good beating?” Ofir repeated.

Gabi’s ears still burned red.

* * *

We reached the pool, entered through the black gate, and walked onto the lawn, passing by the lifeguard’s shaded bench where Orit sat with her volunteer and Zahavi, the lifeguard, and with another volunteer who wore an earring in his right ear, which, Roni told me, meant he was a homo, but then they said he was the boyfriend of Dana the eleventh-grader, so I didn’t get it. And we walked on, behind the diving boards — the small, springy one-meter board that the small children were jumping from, and the big three-meter concrete one that no one was on at the time — and rounded another corner of the pool until we came to our usual place, under one of the awnings on the lawn, and threw down our towels, and shed our flip-flops, and headed straight for the large diving board. From up there, you could see the back of the sports hall and hear the bouncing of the basketballs, boom-boom-boom, and the screeches of sports shoes changing direction on the PVC flooring, eek-eek-eek, perhaps it’s Roni, no, Roni is with the cattle, someone else is doing the bouncing, the boom-boom is thumping in my head and I’m hot, the sun is beating down, I’m thirsty but haven’t drunk, and there he is, there he is with all his friends — Eyal, who’ll be going into second grade next week. I’m on the big diving board behind Yotam and Ofir (Yotam closed his tally at seventeen dead black beetles), I’m standing on the edge and looking at Eyal, his friends are looking at me and smiling, but I am looking directly at him, and he is no longer smiling. I don’t look down at the green water but straight ahead, whoosh, an arc, an easy and simple dive into the water, and emerge from the water with my hair dripping, Yotam and Ofir are lying down on their stomachs on the speckled tiles in the sunshine, but I want another go and head straight back to the steps of the diving board, reach the top, and walk slowly to the edge. He and his friends are now jumping off the small board nearby, I pretend not to look, but check out the scene out of the corner of my eye, and see him say something and look at me and laugh, and his friends laugh, too, he probably said “Jaws” or something else ingenious, I wait, watching from the corner of my eye, waiting for him to jump into the water, if you jump from the big board to the left, you can land in the area of the small one, there’s the boom-boom-boom of the basketballs and the eek-eek-eek of the screeches, and I take a few steps back to gain some momentum, and, again out of the corner of my eye, I see Eyal take his jump, and while he is still in the air, I make my dash and jump down on top of him, right on him, take that, brave man. I hear nothing while I’m in the air, no boom and no eek. I hear only the air in my ears and feel only the sun on my back, and the water that is still dripping from my previous dive. I’m in the air, my body folded over, my legs stretched forward, and I land on his head. I’ll show you what Jaws is all about, ha-ha, big hero, very funny. Jaws? Take that, take a bite from Jaws, here I come, you worthless prick, enjoy second grade.