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Brill’s always been a mama’s boy.
His earliest memories, first flurries of consciousness, all center around his mama.
It was his mama who he went to when he couldn’t sleep at night. When the darkness of his bedroom and the possibility of a creature underneath his bed became too much of a terrifying thought, he’d crawl between his mama and papa in their king-sized bed for safety and security.
It was his mama who he went to whenever he took a nasty tumble off his bicycle. When he’d show up at the front steps after a day of play with a fresh etching of scratches on both of his knees, she’d make everything better with a bandaid, a bowl of soup, and a kiss on the forehead.
It was his mama who he went to in tears when two boys from his first grade class cornered him after school and asked him why he had curls and a nose like a kyke.
He didn’t know what the word meant.
He couldn’t know, not at the innocent age of seven. But he knew it wasn’t anything good from the sneers of his classmates. And he definitely knew it wasn’t anything good when he noticed the subtle burning rage in his mama’s eyes as she wiped away the tears from his face.
He didn’t know why he cried, why the tears instantly began to spill at the nasty, vulgar word as if they were triggered by the push of a button. Had they been tears of confusion? Or perhaps triggered by the malicious laughing and shoves that followed?
Brill didn’t know.
“It’s going to be alright, ילד מתוק שלי,” his mama coos. “No need to cry.”
“אִמָא, what does it mean?” Brill sniffles. “Kyke?”
His mama hesitates. “Why don’t you wait upstairs in your room until your father comes home?” she places a sweet kiss on his cheek. “I’ll call you when it’s time for dinner.”
And Brill would’ve willingly obeyed if he wasn’t so frightened at his mama’s obvious rage she hid behind her comforting grin.
He made camp on the staircase that night to listen for the familiar creak of the front door that signified his papa had returned home. Hands on his knees, he peeked through the wooden balusters to try and get a better look into the kitchen where his papa entered from the front door.
“Jonathan, we need to talk.”
The jingle of keys landing in the bowl on the kitchen counter, the gentle slam of the front door. “Honey, I’ve barely gotten in the front door.”
“Jonathan.”
Brill can’t make out the rest of the conversation as his mama explains to his papa what happened after school in a hushed whisper. He cranes his head closer, but it doesn’t help.
"אנחנו צריכים לדבר עם ההורים שלהם,” she hisses after her husband doesn’t respond.
“Please. English, my dear.”
“You know I can’t help it when I’m angry.”
“I know. I know you can’t.”
Brill becomes conscious of the fact that he’s different that night when his papa tucks him into bed and tells him that some little girls and boys his age don’t take too kindly to people that are different. He listens with the covers pulled up to his nose as his papa tells him that Tulsa is a place where people can get mean towards things unknown to them.
“Is that why they called me that word?” Brill asks, his face poking from behind the covers just enough to uncover his mouth before he conceals it again.
His papa, perched on the edge of Brill’s bed, nods. “That word is a very mean word for people like us,” he explained, taking a moment to clear his throat before he continues. “Jewish people.”
“Jewish people?”
“There aren’t a lot of Jewish people in Tulsa, Clarke. Lots of them are Christian, go to churches and all that. And sometimes people…sometimes people don’t like when other people are different from them.”
Brill digests his papa’s words, laying there in his bed in silence for a long while until he speaks in a voice barely above a whisper. “Why?”
It’s a response that breaks his heart. His papa doesn’t respond instantly. He stares at his son, the seven-year-old boy enveloped in the covers of his bed, and falters.
Because how do you explain antisemitism to a child? How do you begin to tell your child the origins of that terrible word, how it prevails in circular proof on his mama’s immigration papers?
“That’s a conversation for when you’re older, Clarke,” he settles on.
He knows it’s not a satisfactory response at the way Brill’s face falls and he turns on his side away from his papa, but he knows it’s for the best. His wife and him agreed to explain it all to him when he was older anyways.
“Get some sleep, honey,” his papa rumbles gently. “We can talk more in the morning if you want.”
Ever since that night, the day two of his classmates shoved him hard into the brick wall of his school and called him what he later learned to be a slur, Brill has been painfully aware of the fact that he doesn’t fit in.
He’s just gotten good at pretending over the years, pretending that he doesn’t notice, pretending that it doesn’t bother him.
He doesn’t cry in the face of ridicule anymore, because to cry would be to admit that it was true. Instead, he meets the teasing with an air of nonchalance. Stoic coolness that shows it doesn’t faze him one bit.
His papa introduces him to the idea of “playing pretend” whenever the other kids at school ask about God. At school, he plays that part of the perfect little Christian boy. With his papa, he rehearses answers to possible questions his classmates may ask.
Why don’t I see you in church on Sundays?
He attends a church out of town.
Not entirely a lie. There were limited synagogues in Oklahoma, and the closest one was a few miles outside of Tulsa. He goes on Saturdays rather than Sundays, and if someone were to ask why, he’d tell them it was the church (synagogue) his mama went to when she was a kid.
Do you go to Sunday school?
Of course he does.
Every God-fearing, Bible-wielding, Jesus-loving kid does. Why wouldn’t he? He goes right before church, the same church his mama went to when she was a kid.
What are your plans for the holidays?
Leave cookies out for Santa, wake up the next morning to a sea of presents under the Christmas tree, deck the halls with boughs of holly, and make the yuletide gay, of course.
He definitely wouldn’t be lighting a Menorah. No, that would be downright blasphemous.
His mama didn’t like it, this pretending, but everyone in the Brillstein household knew it was necessary for their safety. Especially her.
She had seen how cruel the world was firsthand when she and her family fled from the strenuous legal repression and physical violence in Berlin. Even then, in 1938, she had only been three years older than her son was when he faced his first encounter with antisemitism.
It was only a matter of time before he’d face it, too, wasn’t it?
With age, Brill had gotten skilled at concealing the outermost indications of his Judaism.
He’s got unruly hair that never lays straight, that instead curls every which direction in tufts of deep brown. His mama had finally shown him how to take care of the curls at the start of junior high after years of begging and pleading from him and years of retaliation on her front.
“You should be proud of your curls, ילד מתוק שלי,” his mama huffs. “They’re a sign of your heritage, of who you are.”
But Brill had managed to keep it a secret this long, and he wasn’t about to be given away by some curly hair.
He had gotten good with a comb and hairspray, learned how to make the hair sit stoically on his head, but he couldn’t calm the single curl that seemed to always fall against his forehead. The bane of his existence, that pesky curl, that damned curl that got him enough grief from his buddies to last a lifetime. His mama would tell him that it made him look cute, the curl, but Brill knew that looking cute was never a good thing for a prepubescent boy.
That was until he fell in love.
Beverly Jitney-Bush is a little blessing in disguise when she shows up to Brill’s sixth grade science class one random day in snowy January. The words of his teacher are mindless background noise as his eyes settle on the girl at the front of the classroom and her pretty little baby blue winter coat.
She’s fresh off of a plane from Beverly Hills, California, Beverly explains, as she introduces herself in a polite voice that commands the attention of the room with an air of confidence laced in every word. She talks melodically as she describes the place she grew up in, and Bril can’t help but smile amusedly.
Beverly Jitney-Bush from Beverly Hills. That won’t be hard to remember, now would it?
It’s obvious how elegant Beverly is even at the age of eleven, her blonde hair pinned away from her face, a well-mannered grin curled up at the corners of her lips, and a graceful movement as if she were gliding upon a sheet of ice as she finds the empty seat next to him when she’s done.
Brill tenses, as any twelve-year-old boy would, when the girl takes the seat next to him. His peripherals analyze the way she drapes her coat against the back of her seat. And shed from her outdoor wear, as if she couldn’t stand out more, she does, wearing a simple school dress with short sleeves among a sea of students in thick, woolen sweaters and layers upon layers.
Of course. She’s from California. They don’t get winters like they do here in Tulsa, do they? That would explain the purity of the fur trim on the collar and cuffs of her jacket, so pristine and pretty. It had to be a recent purchase, something her father must’ve bought for her after the plane landed.
As her delicate fingers spread across her desk, Brill notices the lack of gloves and the way the wind from outside had painted her knuckles in little splotches of pink. He turns his face to subtly examine her further and spots small blotches on her cheeks that match her flushed knuckles. And perhaps Brill should’ve been more careful when staring at this new girl like a fool, for when she casts him a glance, he freezes.
Her eyes flick up and down, and to Brill’s chagrin, doesn’t look away. She continues to stare at him with those eyes of sea glass green that make his entire body feel hot.
“You…you must be cold,” Brill manages after the silence turns excruciating. Beverly meets his statement with a look of perplexity, her eyebrows taut as she looks at him.
“Your hands, I mean.”
Beverly shifts her gaze from him down to her hands on the desk. From there, she, too, notices the pinkness of her knuckles. “Oh,” she responds, and it’s a short response, but it doesn’t fail to make Brill’s heart swell in his chest.
“It doesn’t snow in California like it does in Oklahoma?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
Way to go, Brill. Stating the obvious. How dense could you be?
“I’m Clarke Brillstein, but everyone just calls me Brill.”
“Brill,” she repeats as if storing the name away into her memory. “I’m Beverly.”
“Yeah, Jitney-Bush. You told us at the front of the class.”
“Oh, right.”
“Beverly from Beverly Hills,” Brill chuckles.
The awkward silence that follows his remark makes Brill want to curl up and die, messing with the cuffs of his sweater as he continues. “I’d recommend gloves if you’re gonna be living in Tulsa from now on.”
To Brill’s surprise, she laughs softly. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that advice,” she replies through a smile before she turns her attention back to the front of the classroom.
The next day, Beverly finds her seat next to Brill. She shrugs her jacket off of her arms, drapes it on her chair, and slips off a pair of knit gloves with embroidered bellflowers.
Brill instantly falls desperately in love with her.
And here he is, three years later, with the same feelings that he silently stews in, next to her at the drive-in, next to the girl he’s secretly enamored with.
Brill doesn’t know what movie is being projected up on the movie screen – some beach party flick starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello with lots of musical numbers.
Beverly liked musicals a whole lot, but Brill was the only one she entrusted with that information when they were signing up for classes at the end of eighth grade.
A semester of an art credit was required to graduate high school, and while most of her peers chose art, orchestra, or band, Beverly chose choir.
“I don’t know. I sang a lot when I used to live in California,” she explains as she fills out the paperwork. “It’s just something I do. I don’t know.”
“I bet you have a nice voice.”
Brill noticed the way her face flushed as she turned back to her paperwork. “I’m nothing special, honestly.”
Singin’ in the Rain was her favorite. She told him that her father took her to see all the places they filmed the flick back when she lived in California, how he’d take her to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre whenever he could before they moved to Tulsa.
The exact same day she told him, Brill bought a print of a re-release and watched it four times.
Sometimes he’d catch her humming some of the tunes from the film in school. It was usually Singin’ in the Rain or Good Morning as she jotted down notes from lectures or as she put her books in her locker at the end of the day, but he never pointed it out. She had a pretty voice even if it was just humming, and Brill liked to listen to it. She’d stop if he pointed it out.
It was a particularly good day whenever she hummed You Were Meant For Me. That never failed to get his heart pumping and his blood flowing through his veins.
It was his favorite song in the flick, and he’d be lying to himself if he didn’t rewatch the movie every now and then just for the dance that Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds shared. It was horribly romantic, sappy, and dreamlike. He couldn’t help but picture Beverly in Debbie Reynolds’s shoes, in her dress of silvery lilac. He’d have to promptly turn off the film whenever his mind wandered to that thought in order to compose himself.
The movie in front of them wasn’t nearly as good as Singin’ in the Rain, but it was a musical. And at least Beverly looked somewhat happy sitting next to him with eyes fixated on the screen before them as if she were hypnotized.
Beverly always looked real pretty whenever Brill could look at her from the side. Tonight, she was wearing this pretty set of pearls in her ears that were no doubt expensive as hell (as he’s come to notice everything she owns usually is).
She’s leaning forward with her arms crossed over the seat in front of her, her head tilted to the side just enough that Brill can admire the gentle curve of her jawline, the slope of her nose, the soft lips she started to paint in a delicate pink now that they were freshman in high school.
She was effortlessly beautiful. She didn’t need makeup or fancy dresses or dainty jewelry to make her pretty.
She already was.
“Are you gonna stare at me all evening or are you gonna watch the movie?”
Beverly glances at him, and Brill looks back at her with an expression of dread as if he’d just been caught red-handed at the scene of a crime.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, turning his attention from her to the movie screen.
“Do you even know what’s happening in the movie?”
“No…do you?”
Beverly laughs. “No, not really. It’s not very good, is it?”
Brill casts her a grin. “I thought you liked musicals?”
“Tasteful musicals,” she clarifies through a chuckle. “Not whatever this is.”
“Noted.”
Beverly looks back at the movie screen and Brill can breathe again.
Even after being friends with Beverly for three years, she never fails to suck the breath from his lungs with a simple glance. His throat closes up, his heart begins to race a million miles a minute, and his lungs miraculously stop working whenever her eyes land on him. And despite these physical restraints, he can’t help but long for the next time her eyes lock with his.
Brill can tell the movie is beginning to draw to an end, and the words that he’s practiced over and over this past week still haven’t slipped from his lips. She’s right there. It shouldn’t be this hard to confess his feelings he’s harbored since seventh grade, but the words die on his tongue every time he tries to open his mouth.
But this is killing him. He’s unsure if he can survive another day with these unsaid confessionals weighing heavy on his conscience.
Brill looks at the ground, his hands twisting and turning the ring on his middle finger.
Here goes nothing.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he murmurs, the words slipping out quieter than he meant, the words getting lost in the music of the movie.
Beverly keeps looking at the movie. “Pardon?”
Oh, God, there’s no backing down now.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he blurts, louder this time.
Brill can sense her gaze shift from the movie screen over to him even if his eyes are planted on the ground. He can feel her staring at him. And usually it would feel good to have her eyes on him. Hell, he’d go through his entire day wishing she’d look at him for a second, but right now, it doesn’t feel too hot.
“Do you mean as friends?” Beverly replies.
God, this is hard. He’s rehearsed this in his mind for years, planned out the perfect time to lay down the truth, but nothing seems to be going right no matter how much he’s repeated the words to himself in the mirror. How is he supposed to respond to that? It wasn’t a response he had planned for, that’s for sure.
Brill swallows a lump in his throat. His eyes slip shut as he keeps his head tilted at the floor. “No, I mean…I mean for real.”
He lifts his head to the movie screen, opening his eyes to catch the end title card flickering on the partition. “‘Cause, like, you’re the coolest person I’ve ever met,” he turns to glance at Beverly sitting next to him. “And you don’t even have to try, y’know?”
“I try really hard actually,” Beverly confesses quietly.
What?
“What?”
“I mean, being the new girl isn’t exactly a walk in the park,” Beverly continues. “I basically had to start over at square one. There were lots of times I felt I didn’t belong, y’know?
“I was lucky two of the most popular girls in school wanted to be my friends. I was cool just by association.”
“You’re cool on your own,” Brill interjects.
“Really?”
“You’re the coolest person I’ve ever met,” he repeats. “You’re naturally smart, you’re bitingly witty, you hold your own whenever the guys give you grief, and you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever set eyes on.”
Beverly smiles at him, a smile that instantly makes his heart pump faster, “So, you think you’re in love with me?”
“Well, no. Yes! I mean, well, I know I’m in love with you. I have been for a while, but I just didn’t know how to tell you,” Brill exhales. “I didn’t wanna ruin our friendship.”
“How long?”
Brill’s eyebrows knit in confusion, “How long?”
Beverly nods, “How long?”
Oh, now she’s getting a kick out of this.
“Since seventh grade.”
“Seventh grade?”
Brill nods, a terrible flush of embarrassment turning the tips of his ears pink.
Beverly grins, “Sorry to burst your bubble, but I think I got you beat.”
“Huh?”
She’s still smiling that damn smile that makes his heart perform acrobatics in his chest as she looks out at the ever-clearing drive-in. The projector’s been long shut off now, and he knows it’s only a matter of time before his dad’s Jaguar pulls up to take them home.
“Sixth grade,” Beverly clarifies. “I’ve liked you since sixth grade.”
“What?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Beverly scoffs amusedly, “The man’s supposed to make the first move, not the girl. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I told you I didn’t wanna ruin our friendship!”
“Right.”
Silence overtakes the two of them, but it isn’t uncomfortable this time. Brill can tell they’re the last few people left at the drive-in, sitting here in the seats outlooking the vacant lot. Tentatively, he stands and offers his hand to her, and when she takes it, the touch sends a jolt of electricity through his veins. Her hand is scarily soft, and Brill already knows he won’t ever want to let it go now that he’s gotten a taste of how good it feels to hold it.
He starts to lead her through the clearing and towards the exit where his dad is surly waiting, quiet before he speaks again.
“You don’t think I’m weird?”
“Why would I think you’re weird?”
Brill doesn’t reply. He can’t tell her why, at least, not yet. That’ll be a conversation for later, once they’ve been together for a while. Once he deems her safe enough to tell.
Beverly reaches over a tentative hand and brushes away the single curl on his forehead. “Of course I don’t think you’re weird. And even if you were, I’d still be in love with you.”
“Bev…” Brill blinks. “Can I call you Bev?”
She grins. “Yeah, sure. It sounds pretty coming from you.”
Beverly has to be some divine entity, Brill concludes, because he’s never met someone so perfect. Sent down from the Heavens. Some spiritual being just for him. Only for him.
He grins at the thought. “The angels must have sent you, and they meant you just for me.”
Beverly whips her head over to him fast enough to give her whiplash. “You’ve seen Singin’ in the Rain?”
Brill blinks. “Did I not tell you?”
“No.”
“I thought I did.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
Quiet.
“Did you like it?”
“Of course I liked it.”