“You’re staying with us tonight, you can’t be home alone,” Aunt Chana says, like it’s obvious. “There’s plenty of space, you can share Raizy’s room”

Sitting with Raizy on hard plastic chairs in the ER’s waiting room is super, super awkward.

Yeah, it was nice of her to come with me. Really nice. But we’re not friends. We never were and we probably never will be. We’re cousins, we’re the same age, so we’re supposed to be all close, but… nope.

Raizy keeps craning her neck down the hallway to see if anyone from the family has arrived. Every so often, she looks back at me, struggling to remember perakim of Tehillim by heart. When I meet her eyes, she quickly looks away.

Bubby’s not with us. She was whisked into a room upon arrival, and no one’s come to update us yet. I mean, we’re just two teenage girls, so I don’t blame them for not taking us very seriously, but still… if only someone would just tell us what was going on.

My head is fuzzy, the words of Tehillim getting jumbled in my mind. I need a distraction from the nerves.

“Thanks for coming,” I say to Raizy. Yes, I’m that desperate to break the silence.

“It’s fine,” she mumbles. “You… it was cool how you checked Bubby’s pulse and stuff. I was totally freaked out. I would never have been able to do that.”

“You called Hatzalah, that was a smart move,” I reminded her.

“I mean, yeah, I’ve done it before, when things happened. Tzivi got a burn once, or when Shmuel fell and needed stitches,” Raizy says. “You don’t have anything like Hatzalah in India, do you?”

“No. We’re the only frum people for miles.”

“So weird,” she says, but not in an insulting way. I expect her to keep the conversation going, ask me more about life in India, but she lapses into silence again. Oh, well, distraction was great while it lasted.