“Yeah, sure.” Jacob kneaded his hands. “Look, if you want to ask me stuff, it’s okay. I don’t know much about Golding. I knew him from the parties. I haven’t seen him or any of them in six months. I hope you know that.”

“Yonkie, I’m not looking over your shoulder.”

The teen considered the words, but gave no indication that he agreed with them.

“You miss Sammy?” Decker asked.

“Yeah.” He licked his lips. “Yeah, I do. We E-mail each other almost every day, so in a way I talk to him as much as ever. But then things come up…things you don’t want to write about. It’s not the same.” He caught Decker’s eye. “Golding had a really nice girlfriend…Lisa Halloway. They were real tight, and then he broke up with her. She was upset about it. Totally baffled. At least, that’s what she told me. I felt bad for her. I almost asked her out. Not because I felt bad for her, but because I liked her. She was smart enough and really good-looking.”

“So why didn’t you ask her out?”

“What’s the point?”

“I’m sure she would have gone out with you, Jacob,” Decker said. “Besides the brains, you got your mother’s baby blues.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I know she would have gone out with me. But it wouldn’t have lasted, so why make Eema upset? Eventually, I would have been too Jewish for her, and she would have been too goyish for me.”

He shrugged with resignation.

“You know, it’s not the rabbis and all the mantras they feed us at school that keeps me Orthodox. It’s idiots like Ernesto Golding. It makes me realize how alienated I am from the vast majority of this country. I can’t be a typical American teenager, starting with the fact that I’ve never eaten a cheeseburger. So maybe the rabbis did their job on some level.”

“Do you like being Jewish?”

Jacob turned hostile. “What kind of question is that? Do you like being Jewish?”

“Most of the time, yes. Can you stop biting my head off?”

“Sorry.” Jacob tapped his toe. “I’m okay with being Jewish. Better with it than I was six months ago. Now that the pressure’s off, and I can choose a secular college without feeling guilty, I feel a lot better about it.”

“That’s good.” Decker leaned down and kissed Jacob’s head. Not that he had to lean down much. The kid was inching his way to six feet. “I’ve got a mound of paperwork that’s weighing down my desk.”

“Go jam,” Jacob said. “Don’t worry about anything. Hannah will be fine.”

“And you?”