“I believe he’s out,” Mrs. Kohl said. “But I can take you to his office so that you can deliver it.”

“Fine,” Layee said. This was probably an even better idea. “Thanks.”

Following Mrs. Kohl down the hallway, Layee tried very hard to look eidel and unassuming. But her shoes… next to Mrs. Kohl’s Ara slip-ons, her designer flats were a mite too noisy. Oh, well.

Finally they reached the office. Layee handed the application to Mrs. Kohl, trying very hard to avoid looking at the tiny, heat-emitting, speck-like mark on the paper. It looked like a tiny bit of dirt or food had gotten stuck to the paper after it had hung around the kitchen for too long. And although it took a leap of faith (or idiocy, perhaps) to go ahead with their plan, they were pretty certain the members of the vaad didn’t know much about thermal technology. No one would notice it, right?

“What’s the matter?” asked a very observant Mrs. Kohl.

Layee looked up, startled. “Oh, nothing!”

Don’t look at the paper! DON’T LOOK AT THE PAPER!

Eyes watering with the effort it took to hold Mrs. Kohl’s gaze, Layee finally laughed and said, “School nerves, I guess.”

Mrs. Kohl smiled and patted her on the shoulder. Layee watched her place the application in a mesh paper organizer and noticed a few other piles of applications scattered about. One pile was sitting in another organizer on a shelf near the door, and another pile was on the corner of the desk.

Leaning over as far as she could without Mrs. Kohl noticing, Layee glanced at the top of the pile on the desk. Straining her eyes, she made out Rosenberg. Or was it Rosenblum? Or Rosenbaum? The street name was definitely “Oak” something.

And one thing was certain. The application was in, and Layee knew in which room it was. For now, that was all that mattered.

Back in the van, Asher looked up from the tiny thermographic camera he was holding and eyed his wife. Layee, eyes closed, was recovering while he tinkered.

“Do you know a Rosenberg on Oak something?” she asked suddenly, eyes still closed. “Or Rosenblum? Rosenbaum?”

Asher twisted a wire into the back of the small device. After a few minutes of silence, he finally spoke. “Doesn’t Tova’s sister-in-law Rosenblum live on Oak?”

Layee eyes flew open. “Yes! Yes, yes, yes! Thank you! And they do have a little girl of age.”

Asher looked at her oddly.

“Of pre-preschool age, I mean. Same thing.”

Layee whipped out her phone and texted her sister.

Hey. Does ur SIL Rosenblum have a school for her daughter yet?

A moment later the response came.

Yep. Bnos Golda. Why do you want to know?

Gotcha. Layee grinned.

Just wondering. IyH by Hudis!

Layee turned to Asher. “Rosenblum’s in. Now we know where the paper should land.”

But Asher was silent. He fiddled with the camera and the wire of a tiny transmitter for another moment and then let them fall to his lap.

“What?” asked Layee.

“Forget it,” Asher said. “I can’t. I just can’t! This is nuts!”

Layee sat up quickly. “Asher! I thought we had a plan!”

“We did, but we’re crazy! And the normal part of my brain is saying that if anyone finds out, then that’s when we’re in trouble shidduchim-wise! Think of Shmuli!”

“I am thinking of him! And of Hudis!” Layee said. “And that’s not the normal part of your brain talking; that’s your cold feet!”

Asher looked forlornly at his shoes and sighed. Finally, he gathered his tools and climbed out of the car, Layee watching his every move.

Retracing his wife’s footsteps, Asher entered the building, found the office, and tapped on the window. Soon he got the attention of Mrs. Kohl.

“Yes, may I help you?”

Asher slipped a business card into the office. “I’m with Sound Security, here to check out an eye that I was told is causing a problem.”

Mrs. Kohl looked at the card and then back at Asher. “I didn’t hear anything about this. Do you know which eye it was?”

Asher shifted his weight to his other foot. “I’m not exactly sure which one, but it’s an eye in one of the offices at the end of the hallway.” He pointed vaguely in that direction. “I’ll see the problem when I take a look at the cameras.”

Mrs. Kohl got up. “Okay, I guess. Follow me.”

She led Asher down the hallway and pointed to three doors. “I’m assuming those are the offices you mean. They each have an eye.”

Asher nodded his thanks and stepped into the first office. He pretended to inspect the camera, and after pronouncing it fit, followed the secretary to the next office.

As he entered the administrator’s office, beads of sweat trickled down Asher’s neck. He grabbed the sturdiest chair in the room and climbed up to examine the eye near the ceiling. First he inspected it very closely, and then, working fast, stuck the small thermographic camera onto the rim of the eye’s lens. After making sure it was pointing in the right direction, Asher fiddled with the main eye to appear legitimate and hopped down from the chair.

“There,” he said. “It just needed a reset. Now I’ll check the view, and I’ll be done.”

He pulled a tablet from his bag, quickly pulled up the thermal imaging system and confirmed that the position of the thermographic camera was correct.

Five minutes later he was in the car, the transmitter tucked in a dusty corner of the building no one visited. Other than the security maintenance guy, of course.

As it turned out, planting the eye was the easiest part of the operation. After that came the wait. The long, agonizing wait.

Every day, Asher would report with the same update: The paper hadn’t moved. And so the days passed and the weeks, and Asher’s reports became increasingly predictable. Soon winter gave way to the first hint of spring, and then it was almost Purim, and still the paper hadn’t moved.

Layee was sitting in a sea of raffia ribbon and bagged candies when the call came.

“Asher?” she said. “What’s up?”

“The paper moved!” he yelled.

Layee clutched the phone. “It moved?”

“It moved!”

“Okay…” Deeeep breath. “Where did it move to?”

“To the pile near the door.”

Silence.

“Bad news?” Asher asked.

“Bad news.” Layee closed her eyes. “I can’t believe it.”

“Wow,” Asher said. “Gam zu l’tovah. I guess I’ll have to call one of my guys.”

Layee thought fast. “Better ask Chaim, I think.” Asher’s brother was quick on his feet, and they worked well together.

“Hmmm,” Asher said. “Not a bad idea.”

“And if someone finds you,” Layee said, “just tell them this is a new service you offer. Midnight security drills or something.”

“Right,” Asher said. “And then let’s hope the school won’t back out after we’re accepted.” He snorted. “Accepted, ha. As if.”

“They won’t,” Layee said with certainty. “Once they think they’ve accepted us, they won’t pull back anymore. It’s not yashrus to do that, really not.”

“Hey!” Asher whispered into the darkness. “Chaim!” It was two days later and time for the security drill.

“What?”

“What’s the rope for?”

Chaim glanced at the rope hanging from his arm. “Oh, I dunno. Don’t people who break into places always need rope?”

Asher considered this for a moment. “But we’re not really breaking in, are we? Nah, leave the rope.”

Chaim looked disappointed but dropped the rope to the ground. “Okay. Do we have everything else?”

Glancing around his company van, Asher took inventory fast. “Yeah, looks good.”

Watching them from her dining room window, Layee tried not to smirk. There was no use pretending; these boys were enjoying themselves. Rubber shoes, dark clothing… give them ski masks and gloves, and they’d look like a pair of robbers.

Outside, Asher turned his phone to silent, instructed Chaim to do the same, and got into the van.

Chortling like a pair of maniacs, their nerves made worse by the jitters, they backed out of the driveway. Keeping to the speed limit despite the empty roads — this was not the right moment for a ticket — they made their way to Bnos Golda, rehearsing their plan as they drove.

They pulled into the school’s parking lot and parked under some trees. The building looked like an imposing beast in the dark, security eyes gleaming. The playground, empty and ghostlike, seemed all wrong in the dead of the night.

Keeping to the shadows, Asher and Chaim made their way to a side entrance that Asher assumed got less camera review. Asher worked quickly while Chaim kept an eye out, and within three minutes, the alarm system was disabled.

The door swung open silently. Asher and Chaim froze. Would the alarm go off? But no, all was quiet. Moving quickly, Asher led Chaim straight to the administrator’s office. They were prepared with a contingency plan for almost every possible crisis, but surprisingly, the door was unlocked.

By the light of his phone’s flashlight, Asher quickly leafed through the pile of papers near the door, with the discomfiting knowledge that they were under surveillance. He soon found their application, the tiny speck of thermographic technology intact. Crossing the room, he slipped the paper between some other sheets in the pile on the desk — the pile of Rosenblum distinction.

Task complete, Asher climbed onto the chair he’d climbed some months before and turned off the eye. He glanced around to make sure all looked right and followed Chaim out of the room. Whoever discovered the camera wasn’t working would simply assume something was wrong again.

They slipped out of the building as silently as they’d slipped in. Asher reconnected the alarm system, checked that all was well, and led the way to the car.

Security drill complete.

Back home, the front door opened with a creak. Layee shot up from the couch.

“Asher?”

“Yeah.” Still dressed all in black and looking alarmingly suspicious, Asher entered the living room and fell into the seat Layee had just vacated, dumping wires and a random collection of security equipment onto the next seat. “All done.”

“And?” Layee hovered over him anxiously. “How did it go?”

Asher shrugged. “Well enough, I guess. Got in, moved the paper, got out.”

“And? Tell me something!”

“Nothing more to say, really. Would you rather have wanted the drama of a janitor finding us or something?”

“No! Did you delete the camera’s memory?”

“Yeah, remotely, from the car,” Asher said. “What we don’t do for a shidduch…”

“And for Hudis!”

“Right, and for her.”

Sighing, Layee returned to the couch. “And now we wait, again.”

The wait this time was no less agonizing than the previous one. Layee tried to distract herself during that long week before Purim with last-minute goodies to buy, accessories to find, and foods to package. It was the school administration’s busiest time of the year, Layee told herself. What did she expect?

Finally Purim arrived with a burst of hearty singing and perfectly knotted bows. The younger boys were outfitted as racing car drivers, and Hudis was dressed up as a ballerina, prettied in a shock of pink. The exclamations of oohs and aahs over the little girl consistently followed one version or another of the same script:

“Your little girl, finally! Her costume is adorable!” Then, “How old is she now?” And then, “Hey, do you have a school for her?”

And Layee’s answers, too, followed the script. “She’ll be three right before Pesach. And we’re still working on a school for her.”

This would be followed by an intensely uncomfortable conversation about the virtues of applying to all the schools in town, including the ones they wouldn’t want their daughters attending even if the school paid them tuition. And Layee would nod, because, yeah, sure, she was following protocol just like everyone else, wasn’t she?

All through the whirlwind of dancing lions, tipsy singing, and squished mishloach manos packages, Layee wondered. Had they taken things a bit too far? After all, there were scores of people desperate to get into mosdos, and not every other parent was breaking into school buildings, right?

Yet it wasn’t so simple. Would she stop cooking rakott krumpli just because no one else in the entire country (other than her shvigger) knew how to make it? Of course not! Even if her sisters claimed it contained alien ears and hippogriff teeth. Some things were just individual that way.

But still…

Finally, her mind was made up. They had to backpedal. This just wasn’t the right thing to do. On Motzaei Purim Layee sat Asher down at the kitchen table, although it was hard to talk seriously to someone with a green-streaked beard. She sat opposite him and handed him two hamantaschen.

“We need to talk,” she said.

Asher popped a hamantasch into his mouth. “Okay. Shoot.”

“Now don’t go telling me I told you so,” Layee said, “but, yeah, you were right.”

Asher chewed happily. “I love being right. What was I right about?”

“You were right that we were crazy. Totally nuts.”

“Oh? And when exactly were we cra—? Oh.”

“Yeah.” Layee examined her shoes. “Can you, I mean, you know… would you, maybe—”

“Can I what?”

“Movethepaperagain.”

“What?”

Layee sighed. “Are you really gonna make me say that again? Move. The. Paper.”

“No, I heard you alright! I just thought — Oh, whatever. This is getting ridiculous, Layee. First we break in —”

“You’re right,” Layee said in a small voice. “You really are. You have your head on straight, and I don’t, and I’m really, really sorry about that.”

Asher looked at her closely. “Layee… Are you just being super nice to make me say yes?”

Layee eyes widened. “Of course not!” She paused. “So… will you do it?”

Asher popped the second hamantasch into his mouth. His jaws moved silently as he pondered the question. Finally he swallowed.

“I may, actually, but only if you accompany me.”

“Me?” Layee squeaked. “Whatever for?”

“So that I can be sure that you won’t have me do this every time we apply to a yeshivah, high school, or seminary. Somehow, actually getting into the building takes the geshmak out of the whole idea — you’ll see.”

Layee looked at her husband for a long moment. “I hear you. Okay, I guess. I’m not exactly in any position to refuse, am I?”

“No,” Asher agreed. “You’re not. We’ll do it tomorrow night.”

Asher was right, Layee thought, as they crept through the bushes in the dark. He was making it a habit, this being right, but he was right, because this was no fun at all. Even with rubber shoes.

After slipping to the side entrance, Asher disconnected the school’s alarm system with practiced fingers as Layee watched.

“What do you think?” Asher whispered. He seemed to be almost enjoying himself.

“That I’d much rather be Pesach cleaning!” Layee hissed back. “Let’s get this over with!”

With a final click, Asher got the door open, and they entered the silent building. “This is creepy,” said Layee. “Get me outta here.”

Asher, a few paces ahead of her, turned around. “This was your idea,” he said. “Come on.”

A half-minute later they were in the administrator’s office. Asher found the paper and moved it in one swift motion.

“There. Done. And this camera isn’t working yet, so nothing captured.”

It took them exactly two more minutes to exit the building, and Asher quickly got to work on the alarm system. Layee resisted the urge to dash to the van until Asher had finished piecing the wires together.

Finally all looked good, and they crept to the van. Inside, Layee glanced at Asher.

“Asher?”

“Yes?”

“Never. Again.”

Asher cocked his head. “Thank you.”

The very next morning, Layee was standing at a kitchen counter and poring over Pesach cleaning lists when the phone rang. Her nerves still on edge, she jumped at the sound, and her pen skidded across the counter.

“Hello?”

“Yes, hello,” said a semi-familiar voice. “It’s Mrs. Kohl speaking. From Bnos Golda?”

Layee sat down on the nearest chair. “Yes?”

“So I’m calling about Hudis, right?”

“Yes. Hudis.”

“Right,” Mrs. Kohl said. “I have your application here, and I’m so sorry about the wait! It seems there was a little misunderstanding on our end.”

And a little understanding on ours, Layee thought, panicked. Now what?

“Because your application was already between the other accepted applications, ready for a phone call…”

Layee sat up straight and pushed the phone to her ear. “But?”

“But then it seemed to have disappeared! Which was why I didn’t call immediately. I couldn’t make the call without the application.”

Layee blinked, still processing. “So, again, sorry. We’re… we’re accepted?”

“Yes, you were accepted! It’s just that it took a few days before the application turned up in my pile again. It must have been somewhere in this pile all this time. Or someone moved it to the already-called pile by mistake? I guess it was bashert you had a few more days of uncertainty.”

“Yes,” Layee said, thinking of rubber shoes and disabled cameras. “I guess so.” And then, the pieces fit together in her head: Rosenblum’s paper had been on top of a third pile —the already-confirmed acceptances!

“In any case,” Mrs. Kohl said, “welcome to Bnos Golda! I’m sure your daughter will be very happy here.”

“Yes, I’m sure she will!” Layee said, standing up again. “Thank you.”

They were in! After all that, they were truly in!

“Pleasure. I’ll call you in a few weeks to set up a meeting, but that’s just a formality. We’ve heard very nice things about you and your husband — oh, that reminds me! Your husband is from Sound Security, right?”

Layee’s heart crept back to her throat. “Yeah…”

“Great. Our alarm systems have recently been interrupted. Probably a technical glitch. If it’s not too difficult, can you please ask him to stop by when he gets a chance?”

“Oh! Yeah, sure!” Layee said. She gave a nervous laugh. “I’ll tell him to stop by. These glitches happen. Sort of like papers disappearing by mistake.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 625)