“I think the couch, after all,” she said, sitting down quickly and moving to the far end of it, near the wall. She sat there, her short legs out before her in a childlike pose she found undignified, close to ridiculous. She pulled her skirt down as far as it would go, suddenly glad it was mid-calf.

All the while, she was conscious of him watching her every move, a small, unnerving smile on his thin lips.

“So tell me, Shaindel, why are you here?”

“You don’t know?”

“Avadeh. But I want you should tell me why you think you’re here.”

“Because I disappointed my parents. I didn’t tell them the truth.”

“You lied?”

“Not really, I just didn’t tell them what was going on with me.”

“And what was ‘going on with you,’ maideleh?”

She hesitated. This was really hard, and honestly, she didn’t feel comfortable talking about her sex life with a Hasid who had a couch in his office and pictures of women in bathing suits on his wall, not to mention a man who was ignoring the laws of yichud. But again, what choice did she have?

“I met a boy, and we started going out.”

“A shidduch?”

“No,” she answered, knowing perfectly well Halpern had told him all about it. If it had been a shidduch, she wouldn’t be here. “We met on our own.”

“And how did that happen? Explain it to me.”

She told him about the pizza parlor, about the boy behind the counter, the notes, the clandestine, thrilling meetings in the evenings. She even told him about Greenwich Village and the jazz club. To her surprise, he didn’t seemed shocked or even disapproving. She found herself relaxing.

“So you started to think about sex, no? What did you do with this boy you met in the pizza parlor?”

“Nothing.”

He looked skeptical. “I’m not here to judge you, Shaindel. But if you don’t tell me the truth, I have better things to do, and I’m sure you do, too. You’re a senior this year in Bais Yaakov?”

She nodded sullenly.

“That’s a lot of work, being a senior. You are working hard?”

She nodded, slightly relieved that the conversation had taken this turn.

“Do you like school?”

“Very much. My mameh—”

“The one who died?”

She nodded. He really did know everything. “My mameh was a teacher. I also want. I want to go to seminary when I graduate.”

“So, my dear Shaindele—you don’t mind, do you? If I call you that?”

She did, actually. Although perhaps kindly meant, it felt diminishing, swatting away any semblance of emerging adulthood, reducing her to a silly child who was to be pampered with diminutives of her anyway silly name. Shaindel—beautiful. Shaindele—pretty little thing. In the end, it was a galling liberty, a pretense of closeness to which he, a stranger, was not entitled.