Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

After they were outfitted in Living accessories, Jonah consulted a clipboard and handed out preassigned room keys.

Jon Abrams held his key to room 420 aloft, like a prize.

“Four-twenty, dude!” he’d bellowed at Aaron Weiner. They’d high-fived, laughing. Later they were escorted off and lectured by Jonah and Rabbi Amy, who had apparently freaked because April 20 was Hitler’s birthday, and they’d assumed Jon and Aaron were referring to that.

“What are you?” Jamie asked Jessica. They both wore, on that first day and thereafter, ultrachic, low-slung velour tracksuits; Jamie’s baby pink and Jessica’s burgundy. Jessica’s fit her perfectly and exposed a 360-degree band of taut midsection; Jamie could’ve stood to lose a few, and her band of midsection fairly bulged.

“Three-oh-two,” said Jessica, looking at her key. “What are you?”

“Four-twelve,” sighed Jamie.

“Fuck.”

“You’re with me!” Rose-Ling Horowitz squealed at Jessica, holding up her matching key. “Three-oh-two, baby!” They hugged. Jamie looked despondent. But still cute, Shayna couldn’t help thinking, eyeing the track suit, the way the legs flared just so.

“Hey,” she’d said, making her way over toward them. “Hey, Jamie. You’re with me. Four-twelve.” She offered her key as proof. Why Shayna had thought this might be good news was a mystery.

“Cool,” Jamie said carefully, in a baby voice, all the enunciation scrunched up behind her cheeks, way back alongside her molars. Jessica shot Jamie a sympathetic but victorious shrug, hooked arms with Rose-Ling, and set off to room 302. “Sarah, right?”

“Shayna.”

“Jamie,” Jamie said, pressing her palm magnanimously against her chest. She got points for that, truly: It was sweet for someone as popular as Jamie not to simply assume that Shayna already knew her name. Falsely modest, perhaps, since Shayna had just called her by name a few seconds earlier, but still.

“What’s up with the Rose-Ling person?” Heather stage-whispered as they stood in line at dinner, a meager buffet.

“Her mom’s Chinese, I think,” Shayna said. All the food was muted, colorless: bread, potatoes, garbanzo beans, white iceberg lettuce, boiled chicken breast, the ubiquitous honeydew, squares of flat white cake, white icing on the white cake.

“Lame,” Heather concluded. “Nebbishy dad with an Asian fetish. Rose-Ling Horowitz ? Fucking lame.” The garbanzo beans were suspended in some sort of gelatinous goo, but Shayna scooped some onto her plate anyhow, realizing for the first time that she was incredibly hungry.

The reality of dinnertime was four big round tables with plastic tablecloths and free seating. Around one table were Ari and Jessica and Jamie, etc.; at another Zoe Fischler was sitting with Jonah and Rabbi Amy. A few randoms were at the third, and the fourth remained empty. There really wasn’t any way around it: Heather it was.

The food was cold, all of it, even the cake and garbanzo beans. Heather got busy seasoning hers to within an inch of its life. “Two hours down, two hundred and twenty to go,” she said, vehemently emptying a paper salt packet. “Mother- fucker. ”

At the head table, Ari emptied a salt packet down the shirt of a squealing, delighted Jessica. “Motherfucker!” she echoed, giggling.

Later they had what Rabbi Amy called Where You’re At. They went around in a circle.

“Feel what you’re feeling!” Rabbi Amy said. “Just the fact that you’re all here means you’re amazing people. Not everyone could do this. I don’t know that I could’ve done it when I was your age.” Next to Shayna, Heather gave herself a slow pat on the back. Aaron Weiner went first.

“I’m psyched,” he said. “Really, really psyched.”

“Everything’s pretty cool so far,” said Jonathan Abrams, who wore a hemp necklace and nodded continually.

“My bubbe ’s a survivor,” said Zoe. “So.”

Jessica spoke for both herself and Ari, in whose lap she was sitting. “We’re a little freaked,” she said. “But excited! And also? Can I just say? The food so far is really gross, and I don’t eat carbs, so I’m kind of worried about what there’ll be for me to eat.”

“I’m at a place where I don’t have to talk about where I’m at,” said Heather when it was her turn. She had her We Are the Living! binder in her lap and was busy filling in the word “Dead” after it with a black Sharpie, the exclamation point serving as the spine of the capital D. We Are the Living Dead.

Shayna looked shyly at the floor and said, “I can’t believe I’m really here.” She looked up to see Jonah smiling warmly at her, making her feel calm, as if she belonged and could just be. It was the right thing to have said.

Back in room 412 before lights-out, Jamie flipped her hair over, fluffed it a few times, and whipped her head back up, dazzling. And then, with a little wave, she said, “See you later, sweets,” and was gone.

Shayna looked around at the dusty fake velvet drapes, the filthy throw rug, the bunk beds pushed up against the wall, and the faintly humming fluorescent overhead. She folded herself into a cross-legged position on the bottom bunk, ducking slightly to avoid bumping her head (“Do you mind?” Jamie had asked, her hand already laying claim to the top bunk. “I’m allergic to dust and stuff.”), and tried for a second time with the journal.

Here I am in room 412, she considered. Or: Jamie’s my roommate in Kraków, where we arrived this afternoon. No. No! Too plain, too uneventful. Too standoffish. She needed a hook, a way in, a real beginning, befitting the scope of the trip, of being not only alive but the Living.

“The weight of what I am about to experience is intense,” she wrote. “I hope I can do it justice for my own sake and for the sake of my people.” But when she finished the sentence she spent almost a minute violently scribbling it out: It was Max’s inaugural entry, from memory, verbatim. When the words were satisfactorily blackened she removed the page expertly, like the first, along the binding, and promised herself it was the last time she’d fuck the journal up. This was her big trip, her turn to Live, her journal, and she would not wreck it with imitative idiocy, she would not save for posterity her own ineptitude.

She opened up her We Are the Living! binder to the table of contents: Introduction, Schedule, History, Feelings. She skipped the introduction. Tomorrow they toured Kraków, and the next day was Auschwitz, where they’d spend the afternoon walking to Birkenau, doing the famous death march. Then Lublin, Majdanek, Bialystock, Tikochyn, Treblinka, and Warsaw. Then Israel, the antidote.

She skipped History.

Under Feelings was an essay by Rabbi Amy (“You’re preparing for some of the most intense feelings your [ sic ] ever going to feel. Don’t be afraid to talk about these intense feelings! We’re all here feeling these feelings together!”) and an Elie Wiesel excerpt (“I remember it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed”).

Shayna reopened her journal and put pen to page, fired up by something. But just as suddenly it was gone again, whatever it had been, and her pen hovered, its blue-gray shadow hypnotic and trembling slightly on the stark, empty page. Her neck had begun to cramp, so she unfolded herself and stood up, eye level with the top bunk. Jamie had brought a miniduffel and a suede-bottomed backpack.