The Jake Show: Chapters 1–4

He had a trimmed beard, a broad smile, and a knitted blue yarmulke on his head.

“Halacha?” Caleb said again, enunciating the syllables this time: Ha-la-cha.

My eyes flitted back to his yarmulke.

I had a whole drawer of them at my mom’s apartment, like some secret agent’s stash of currency and passports. Knitted yarmulkes. Velvet. Satin. Suede.

But I’d spent sixth grade at the Miami Beach Yeshiva and knew Hebrew just fine.

Caleb nodded. I exhaled. Crisis averted.

New kid on his first day of school? What a tired old trope. Seen this episode a million times already.

In those early days, we celebrated Passover. Lit the menorah.

Her apartment went completely kosher. And around the time she got two sinks—one for meat, one for dairy—my dad got a second freezer.

She had messy auburn hair, light brown eyes, and a navy uniform polo shirt faded into oblivion.

She had messy auburn hair, light brown eyes, and a navy uniform polo shirt faded into oblivion.

It wasn’t like I’d never met nice kids before. I had. Sophie Schapper at the Binsky Day School for Progressive Judaism.

Falling asleep. Being asleep. The glow of the screen in the dark, mixed with the two dancing flames of the Shabbat candles. The feel of the couch cushions as I sprawled out between them, end to end.

But I still loved Shabbat. Every version of it. I loved it in third grade, when we started attending Temple Emeth every week. I loved it a year later, when we switched to the big Conservative synagogue ten minutes up the road by car.

I loved chocolate chip challah. And cinnamon challah. And blueberry challah. (Don’t get me started on chocolate chip cinnamon blueberry challah.)
“I made it fresh,” my mom said, setting the loaf on the cutting board, slicing it open.

“Bad,” I lied. Big frown. Wrinkled forehead. Chin jutted out. “I hated it.”

Yaakov was quiet and serious. He wore suits all the time (like, all the time) and a velvet yarmulke underneath a wide-brimmed black hat. A fedora, I think it’s called.

The Bendishes—nosy-neighbor types without any kooky catchphrases—lived in the apartment next door and made regular cameos at my mom’s during the winter.

Instead, I brainstormed ways to escape, mining my mind’s archive of TV getaways for inspiration.

I’d been questioned more times than James Bond and knew to expect the debrief whenever I returned to one home from the other.

“Yes, it’s a coed Modern Orthodox school,” he said. “But it’s a good place, and not completely secular. There’s plenty of Torah learning at JDS, right, Yaakov?”

She plucked her napkin from her lap, dipped it in a cup of seltzer, and began scrubbing, feverish to remove the stains.

“Boys and girls learning Torah together?!” She seethed, not looking up.

“I assumed that school was only coed for secular subjects.”

I’d never been to court before, but I could see her in my mind clear as day, sitting high behind the mahogany bench: Perfectly coifed hair above dark robes.

I’d never been to court before, but I could see her in my mind clear as day, sitting high behind the mahogany bench: Perfectly coifed hair above dark robes.

It was the judge who had sent me to the Hebrew charter school, after my mom won some big court argument in the divorce.

And it was the judge who had made me leave for the nondenominational Binsky school a year later, like my dad wanted.

“I’d almost rather you be back in public school. At least it knows what it is. It’s not picking and choosing based on what it feels like doing on any given day. It’s not masquerading as something it’s not.”

Tehilla whipped her body around, eyes glaring fire at Noam.

For a moment, Tehilla puffed up to match Noam’s stance, then she deflated like a pierced balloon.

He left as quickly as he’d appeared, apparently stopping by only to insult us on his way to the hot-lunch line.

“You kidding? You don’t recognize Scrooge McDuck? What kind of deprived nineties child were you?”

“That would be a sequel. Like Fuller House or the seventh season of Clone Wars or the fifth season of Samurai Jack or The Magic School Bus Rides Again or the newer episodes of Saved by the Bell where Zack Morris is the governor of California. Sometimes they call those revivals or whatever. They’re continuations. Same world. New stories. A reboot is...something else. A different world. With characters who don’t remember who they were in the old version.”

Sure, in my dad’s world, you didn’t need a pocket Hebrew-English dictionary. But words still didn’t perfectly translate. You still needed subtitles to get around.

He’ll be with his mother plenty on Hanukah. Including Friday night and Saturday and the extra holiday weekday she’s entitled to under the joint custody order.

Kayla’s eyes bored into his. She tilted her head an inch in my direction. Some wordless signal transmitted across the room and Dad ran his fingers through his hair.

“Who you are isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition,” Kayla added.

It seemed like he’d forgotten all about how he’d grown up. Forgotten that things were different when he and my mom were together. Nothing that came before was canon. This wasn’t Marc Lightman: The Sequel. This was a total reboot.

Pulled an old photo out of my backpack, one I always kept close in case of continuity emergencies. Me, Dad, and Mom. Together on our old couch. It was the only proof that I wasn’t living in some alternate-reality remake where my parents had been parallel-universe mirror images of each other since the dawn of time.