From that day on, Roni was saving herself for Mr. Kaplan. She asked her mother what he did, and her mother explained that he was in a business that turned other people’s money into more money. Roni imagined Jett’s father in a dark, candlelit room, turning nickels into diamonds with the wave of a hand. Eventually her crush became common knowledge among her friends. At sleepovers, when Roni slept with a pillow between her legs, her friends jokingly called the pillow Mr. Kaplan, asking if Mr. Kaplan enjoyed the view or if poor Mr. Kaplan could breathe under there. It was at one of these sleepovers that Roni’s friend Whitney came up with the dare.

“You go to his house,” Whitney said, “and you bring back a pair of his underwear.”

The other girls broke out in a fit of disbelief. “It’s just not even possible,” someone said. “How’s she supposed to get in his room?”

Whitney called for order and proposed a solution. “Obviously, she’ll use Jett. You’re friends with him, right?” She looked at Roni, whose hands were already trembling at the thought of Mr. Kaplan’s underthings.

“He helps me with English homework,” Roni said. “That’s all.”

“So you have an in,” Whitney said. “Easy as pie.”

“American pie,” someone said, and everyone laughed, even Roni, who did not understand the joke. By this point, her crush had become its own point of satisfaction. It did not have to be Mr. Kaplan, she realized, but it did have to be a man. Not a boy—never a boy. A boy was too easy, too ordinary. And what did boys know about sex? Her fixation needed someone mature, someone who had been married, who had slept in a bed and made love so many times it was not a matter of keeping track in a diary. Someone who would know how to handle a girl. Daddy issues, the Americans would call it, but the Americans had a diagnosis for everything.

It was true that Roni’s father was out of the picture, having remained in Tel Aviv, where he owned an insurance business and was dating a Russian immigrant named Galina. Upon moving in with Roni’s father, Galina said her clothes smelled like Russia and demanded an entirely new wardrobe. She’d also convinced Roni’s father to let her turn Roni’s old bedroom into a combination yoga studio–craft room. If Roni ever went back to visit, she would have to sleep on the pullout sofa. Roni was supposed to talk to her father every Sunday at ten a.m. American time, but sometimes when she called, Galina would answer and say that her father was busy. “He’s at the beach,” she would say, although Roni’s father had always hated the beach. He couldn’t stand the feeling of sand between his toes.

Roni dreamed that Galina would die and that her father, in his grief, would ask Roni and her mother to return to Israel and live with him. He would convert the yoga studio back into her bedroom, returning their life to normal one piece of furniture at a time. But Galina seemed indestructible. Only a month before, she’d walked away from the scene of a car bombing with nothing but a small shrapnel wound above her eye.