“Sorry.” I cringed. Was that the fourth “sorry”? I’d lost count. “I’m being a nuddy. I just meant—”

“You’re being a what?” Keya giggled.

My face went hot. Had I really just called myself a nuddy out in the real world? “Forget I said that. Please.”

“I can’t. I love it.” Her smile was back at full wattage.

“You love what?”

“That word. New-Dee? Nuh-Dee?”

“You love ‘nuddy’?”

“Yes!”

“You can’t. You don’t even know what it means.”

“So what? I love the way it sounds. Nuddy. Nuddy. Nuddy. It makes my mouth want to smile.”

She was always smiling anyway. How could she tell the difference? “Fine. I give up. You love ‘nuddy.’”

“Does it mean something bad?” Her eyes got all big.

“No, it means ‘idiot.’ It’s short for nudnik. It’s Yiddish.”

“Oh.” Keya nodded like now it all made sense.

The panel’s speaker made a clicking noise. Then the man came back on. “The repair guys are here, and they’re working on it. Shouldn’t take too long now.”

“Okay. Thanks for the update,” I called.

There was another click, then the tone. I crawled across the floor and pressed the button to make it stop.

“Can I ask you question?” Keya tucked a dangling bun behind her ear.

“Sure.”

“What country speaks Yiddish?”

I burst out laughing.

“Oh, ha ha.” She scowled at me. “There are twenty-two major languages in India. I bet you can’t even name two!”

“No, no, you don’t understand. I’m laughing because Yiddish, it’s…it’s not spoken anywhere, really. Not anymore. It’s kind of a mishmash of German and Hebrew. I think it’s only spoken now by like, really religious Jews.”

“And your family’s really religious?”

“No, my dad’s not even Jewish. But through my mom we’re…not really religious, but…connected. It’s kind of hard to explain.” I’d never even tried to before now. “We cook the foods, celebrate holidays—some at least—tell stories, and use some Yiddish words. If we worship anything, it’s food.”

“Oh, you’re rememberers.”

“Rememberers?”

“That’s what you call people who use languages that aren’t really spoken anymore. That’s my mom’s thing. Languages, ones that are disappearing. We came here so she could teach at Yale University. Right now, she’s working on a book. It’s all about the last people on the planet to speak a particular language. They’re called ‘terminal speakers.’”

I couldn’t help thinking about Petersville. Was there a word for the last people to live in a particular place?

Keya opened her bag, took out her phone, and began tapping away.

Click-click-click…

Was I boring her?

“Wir zenen stak,” she read off the phone.

“What?”

“It’s ‘We’re stuck,’ in Yiddish. It’s definitely not dead yet. It’s on Google Translate.” She held out the phone to me.

“Are you serious?” I looked at the screen. In the search box were the words: we’re stuck. Then in the box marked Yiddish were Hebrew letters. “Wow. I didn’t even know it was written in Hebrew.”

“Look under the box. It tells you how to pronounce it.”