But watch tomorrow, when she’s parading around shiva like this little rabbi in the making, you watch, anytime there’s a prayer or praying or prayer-like anything, she’ll get this look on her face, like, I’m above all of you, like, I’m on this spiritual enlightenment plane way above everyone else, like Poppy’s death hits me more or hurts me more or means more to me because I’m reading some shit in Hebrew which I would put money on the fact that she doesn’t even know what half that shit means but as soon as I come around or Jonah comes around, her little talmudic personality grows in 2 seconds like those sponges you put in water, and she becomes this little uber-Jew who like lords her newfound and— dare I say it? Yes, I dare— temporary and potentially passing religious fanaticism over everyone, like after her trip to Israel last summer, all we heard about at Thanksgiving was this fucking Army boyfriend she had now from some town where you have to say “cccccchh” to pronounce it, so she pronounced it like sixteen hundred times, this guy who is so Jewish and so great and he wants to marry her and she’s going to make aliyah and live in Jerusalem shoving shofars in her hideous unused vagina until the whatever arrives and it’s like, I bet this guy fucked her once, when he was drunk, by accident, and woke up the next morning and was like, uhhhh MISTAKE, but she woke up and thought, BOYFRIEND! and because he’s Israeli, and Jewish, that somehow makes him superior even though the dude probably doesn’t even know her name and I’d bet money he never did and it’s so fucking pathetic it makes my skin crawl, not even crawl, like, it makes my skin slide completely off me, detach itself from my body and pool up in a slimy slithering puddle at my feet and I just want to grab her by the back of her hideous fucking Jew hair and smash her face into a puddle of my molten dead skin and let her breathe that in for an hour or two. The fucking bitch.

Beat.

DAPHNA returns from the bathroom. The room is quiet. Everyone is cautious. Watching her. Waiting.

DAPHNA

Excuse me.

She inches past MELODY to put her hairbrush in her cosmetics bag. LIAM tries to engage MELODY in a silent conversation. She ignores him. DAPHNA turns around and sees everyone watching her.

DAPHNA

How’s school?

LIAM

What?

DAPHNA

My Mom said you’re almost done.

LIAM

Uhm, with the Masters. There’s still the Ph.D.

DAPHNA

God, that’s so much school!

LIAM

I don’t, uhm, mind it.

DAPHNA

I would hope not!

LIAM

Yeah.

DAPHNA

Yeah. And you’re studying, I’m sorry, I know it has to do with Japanese—

LIAM

Culture. Contemporary Japanese youth culture.

DAPHNA

Right.

(To MELODY.)

Liam’s funny that way. He’s obsessed with Japan. I’m sure you already know. Even though there’s absolutely nothing Japanese about any aspect of our family. Except his Mom makes you take off your shoes before you come inside their house. But when Liam was ten I think, for some reason my family was in town during his birthday, Liam insisted on going to this crazy Japanese restaurant, what’s it called?