That first week I had to read more pages in Hebrew than I’d read in Tira all the way through to the ninth grade. I gave up and didn’t do anything. They also had a placement test in physics. Adel got a hundred, and I couldn’t answer a single question. One week was enough. It was obvious that I was going home for good.

When I tell my family what I’ve been through this week, they’ll never send me back, I thought. They’ll understand me. They’ll realize it’s a different world, and I can’t live there. I’ll tell them how out of place I felt during the Rosh Hashanah meal, how I don’t know a single word of their songs. I’ll tell them how I cry myself to sleep each night. And how I can’t stop thinking about my family, because I worry that something bad will happen to them: that Grandma will die or Father will have a car accident. I’ll tell them there are some bad kids at the school, with earrings, and the girls walk around in shorts. I’ll explain it has been the hardest week of my life, and they’ll let me stay home.

Polanski

When it was time to go home for the Rosh Hashanah break, I packed everything I’d brought with me and got on the bus. It was my first trip alone on a public bus, and if I hadn’t followed some of the kids who’d gotten on before me, I would never have known you have to pay the driver right at the beginning.

Adel and I took our seats on one bench. There was no one on the bench across from us, and Adel said maybe the girls from the our school would sit there, but it didn’t happen. All the kids from our school sat down in front, carrying on and making a hell of a racket.

I was petrified of the trip, afraid I wouldn’t make it home or that I’d get off at the wrong stop and be lost. My father had written it all down for me in a notebook:

Take the bus to the central bus station, get off with everyone else. Then he wrote: Bus 947, Haifa local, get off at the Kfar Sava stop. Walk as far as Meir hospital, then look for the Tira taxi stand. Take taxi to Tira.

Adel was supposed to go to his village, Nahf, which is a much longer journey. You go as far as Haifa, then take another bus to Karmi‘el, and there you can spend hours waiting for a bus that goes by his village. He said he’d probably walk from Karmi‘el. “It’s not that far, just half an hour’s walk.”

Adel didn’t want to go home. He was disappointed to have to leave after just one week. He asked the principal if he could spend the holiday break at school, but Pinhas said that was impossible. I invited him to Tira, and he accepted. I was glad to have someone to help me find the way, and he was glad to save time and money. He asked if we had any pretty girls in our neighborhood.

The bus leaves from the front gate of the school, and its first stop is just a few minutes away, at the Polanski Vocational School. The students there look different from the ones at our school, and Adel and I don’t look like any of them. The bus is full of students now, shouting and swearing, and girls in black high-heeled shoes and big earrings who spend the whole bus ride putting on makeup.

Three kids crowd into the seat facing Adel and me, and two others stand next to them, holding on to the metal bars. I feel stifled, dead. I tell Adel I’m getting off at the next stop. “Don’t be a retard.” he says. “I’m not going to pay for another ticket to the central bus station.”

I’m already sorry I invited him, sorry I ever met him, sorry I got on the bus with him. I can tell we’re in trouble, and within minutes my fears prove true.

One of the kids on the bench across from us asks Adel where he’s from.

“Nahf,” Adel says.

The kids laugh and turn to me. “And you?”

I put on the biggest grin I can muster, trying to be the most polite person in the world. They’re not going to hurt me. I was in Seeds of Peace. I know Jews. They’ve got to leave me alone. “From Tira,” I say. “It’s near Kfar Sava.” I try to keep up the smile, even though they’re already laughing at me. Quickly I whisper to Adel, “Let’s get off, I’ll pay for your ticket.” But he won’t do it. One thing’s for sure: I’m never getting on this bus again.

The kids across from us are whispering, laughing, repeating the names of our villages and deliberately mispronouncing them. They’re laughing at our names, and we don’t do anything about it. To take part in the general hilarity would be ridiculous, so I keep quiet. They start singing something that sounds familiar, but instead of “The Jew is dead”—the way we sing it — they sing “Mohammed is dead.” They sing loudly, and some of their classmates join in. I press the STOP button. The hell with Adel. I’m getting off. I pick up my bag, controlling myself, holding back my tears.

Once I get off, Adel decides to get off too. I see him only after I’m on the sidewalk. One of the students opens a window and spits. He misses us.

Adel starts shouting at me. “I can’t believe it! Do you even know where we are? Do you have any idea what bus we need to take now? Why do you think the same thing won’t happen on the next bus we take?”

I was willing to risk being lost. I was just so relieved it was over. My father had given me enough money. We took a cab back to the central bus station. All I wanted was for the Polanski kids not to get on our bus to Kfar Sava.

Ben Gurion

There was nothing in my father’s explanations about Ben Gurion Airport. The sonofabitch lied to me. How I hated him then. When the bus stopped for the first time, I was sure we’d reached Kfar Sava, but it was the roadblock at the entrance to Ben Gurion Airport.

A soldier got on and told Adel and me to get off. Then he asked us for our IDs.

“We’re not sixteen yet,” Adel told him, and answered all his questions: where we’re from, where we’re going, where we study.

The soldier asked us to open our bags, and the bus went into the airport without us. The soldier searched through our books, our sheets, and our clothes and said we should wait for the bus to return and pick us up on the way out of the airport.

I’m not getting back on that bus, I decided. I’m not willing to be stared at like I-don’t-know-what. I’ve had it. I can’t take this anymore. I’d survived the roommates, the dining room, and the Polanski kids, but this was the last straw. I cried like a baby. I broke down. Even the soldier felt uneasy. He said it was just routine. He brought me some water. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

I didn’t drink it. I phoned my father at home. I could barely blurt out the words.

My father screamed, “Calm down, what happened?” He was upset.

“Come here and get me right away,” I shouted, to make sure he understood I wasn’t coming home on my own. “I’m at the airport.”

Adel preferred to keep quiet. He said he could have been in Nahf already and he was sorry he’d joined me.

I sat there crying, waiting for my father.

“What happened?” my father asked, when he finally arrived to pick us up. I didn’t answer. I sat in front and Adel sat in back. My face was all swollen, and Adel told him that a soldier had taken us off the bus and I wouldn’t get back on. Father said, “Are you crazy? What’s got into you? Is that something to cry about?”

“I told him a million times, but he wouldn’t listen,” Adel said.

I didn’t say a word.

Adel and my father talked about school, about the food they gave us there, and about what they called “four o’clock snack,” which was cake and juice. Adel said they serve meat for dinner every day. They talked about the big library and the playground. My father said a million kids would like to be in my place, and there I was, crying like a baby. “Do you want to come back to Tira, to study with all the bums, is that what you want? Fine, suit yourself. But don’t come complaining to me later if everyone says they threw you out of school after a single week. Do you want people to say you flunked, that you couldn’t make it at a good school? Have you thought about how people will look at you?”