“And don’t you have to go to the bathroom after all that Gatorade?”

“No.”

That was when she knew she was in love.

ONCE SHE KNEW of Jason’s interest in “old people,” Leora often thought of telling him about Bill Landsmann—who, whatever else he was, was certainly an old person, though she doubted the old people Jason visited in his nursing home had recently gone trekking in Birobidzhan. But telling Jason about Bill Landsmann would require telling Jason about Naomi, which was something else Leora often thought of doing. It occurred to Leora that Jason might even have heard of her, from one of the articles in the local paper, maybe, or perhaps through a friend who had attended the memorial service, where, Leora remembered, people who had barely known Naomi had blathered on and on about the terrible tragedy, the life cut short, such potential, such promise—just as they had done the last time some kid in the school died. Ultimately, though, she decided against mentioning it to Jason. Talking about Naomi would mean dragging him along with her to some strange new country, and Leora couldn’t be sure he would survive the trip. That wasn’t the only reason she couldn’t talk about Naomi. Naomi, now sixteen for all eternity, had often flirted with boys, and had teased boys, and there had been boys who had worshiped her from afar, and she had known it. But she had never liked any of them enough to offer them her heart, or even her little finger. As a result, each of Leora’s firsts with Jason—their first kiss, their first long kiss, their first caresses over clothes, their first caresses under clothes, each incremental step on their road together—left Naomi further behind in Leora’s memory, made her seem more and more like a little child in the distance, reaching for a dropped glove in the road. It was only when Jason began persuading her, pressing her, pushing her, pinning her, that Leora found herself wishing she hadn’t left Naomi behind. When the long, frightening night came when Leora lay trapped beneath Jason’s spent, slumped weight, thinking that she might cry, she might have, if Naomi had been alive. But because Naomi wasn’t, Leora set it all aside and tried to fall asleep next to Jason, turning away from him while fighting off nightmares, staring at a square of moonlight on the ceiling above the window which reminded her of a blank panel from one of Bill Landsmann’s slide carousels. It was the week before Passover. The following week, home for spring vacation, she went with Jason to the East Mountain Zoo.

The East Mountain Zoo was not much of a zoo, as zoos go. No elephants, for example, and Leora was glad for that—at least Jason’s father had realized that there was no room in New Jersey for elephants. No giraffes either, or hippos or whales. But it did have a respectable aviary, a fair-sized marine exhibit with several kinds of otters and seals, and a large petting pen with enough sheep and goats for a biblical sacrifice routine. (Every family in Leora’s town had a picture on the piano at home of one of their children at about the age of five, petting a goat in the East Mountain Zoo.) There were even two little mountain lions there—“ocelots,” according to the label on the exhibit—yawning their way through boring days as they stretched in the shade in their glassed-in fiberglass forest. When Leora walked through the East Mountain Zoo holding hands with Jason, she felt as if the two of them were part of the exhibit, baby animals whose mature form was not yet clear, tiny cubs not yet grown into lions, little birds in their eggs still waiting to hatch. What sort of animals would they turn out to be?