For a second there, I imagined showing up to high school with shoes and a bag that Mommy helped me buy. Mommy is amazing, but she is, as my sisters pointed out… color blind.

We pull up to a walled compound, and the bus stops. “Here we are,” Temmy says brightly.

I look around. “Huh. Where’s the dome and the palm tree like from the pictures?”

Tili cracks up. “Ohmygosh, have you never been here before? It’s not like that anymore, Daaaaahlia!”

Everyone’s laughing, but I can’t help feeling cheated. Why do things have to change? Why does everything have to change? I stomp off the bus, through the gate, and inside. Then I stop stomping, because we’re actually here. Kever Rochel. It’s real.

We split up, and I manage to dodge Tili’s hand gesture by pointing toward the restroom. I grab a tissue and then find my own corner bench. I sit there, staring up at the arched kever.

And then I daven.

Mammeh Rochel. Please. Help me. I’m starting high school. I’m so nervous. What if I’m as invisible as I was in elementary school? What if I have no friends and I can’t keep up with the classes? Mammeh Rochel, please, help me. Please. Please ask Hashem to send me a friend, a real one, who will like me for me.

Please.

I daven for Mashiach and yeshuos and geulos, I daven for Tatty’s knee and Avrumi’s asthma and anything else I can think of. And when I stand up to leave, the tissue is shredded and my face is wet.

So this is what it’s like to connect to something so much that you cry, I think. Is it strange that I’ve never felt anything this strongly before? Am I just growing up?

And then I wonder, in a very fleeting, faint way, if maybe I’d been asleep the past 14 years of my life.

Tili comes over that night.

“I just wanted to say goodbye,” she says, smiling. “It was so, so fun to have a summer friend.”

Nodding, I pull out the gift Temmy and Hadassah helped me pick for her. A pearl pink Tehillim with her name on it.

She hugs it to herself. “Thank you! Let’s stay in touch, okay Dahlia? We’ll be like pen pals? My family has an email address, here, write to me, okay? And call me!” And then she turns and hurries out into the night. I watch the first friend I’ve ever had disappear into the night until she’s swallowed up by shadows.

The next morning passes in a blur of hugging and crying and presents.

“Thank you for everything,” I tell my sisters. Temmy shakes her head, lips pressed together, eyes bright.

“We ordered you school shoes. And a backpack,” Hadassah says, enveloping me in a hug.

“They’re waiting for you at home,” Temmy adds.

“You. are. The bestest,” I whisper.

They shake their heads. “You are.”

Hadassah pulls me to the side. “Dahlia… we picked and pulled you apart a bit, and I think it was our duty as big sisters, but I hope you know that you, Dahlia, you’re amazing, and we would never want you to change. Tili may have been drawn to you because of the clothes and the hair, but she kept coming back because you’re you. Fun and sweet and happy and a really good friend.”

I swallow. “Thanks for saying that,” I whisper.

The Nesher pulls up and Avrumi and I climb on, waving and blowing kisses.

And as my sisters and their families shrink into tiny dots in the blinding Jerusalem sun, all I can think is how I don’t believe Hadassah at all.

I can’t believe my summer in Eretz Yisrael is over. It was everything I had hoped it would be and so much more. More than memories and a suntan, I was coming home with a whole new identity. Did I like my new identity? Why not. It definitely brings major perks. Like Tili. But now it’s over, just in time for the next stage in my life to begin.

I look at Avrumi as the plane touches down with a bump and a few half-awake passengers bring their hands together in sleepy applause.

He gives me a half smile and a shrug.

Well then. We’re back.

Welcome to New York.

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Cozey, Issue 1007)