Her name was Rickie. She was named after an aunt Rivka in her dad’s family but she found the name, which just meant Rebecca in Yiddish, too straight out of the shtetl, so she just went by Rickie. Like Rickie Lee Jones, her mom would sometimes tell people, and we’d smile politely because it seemed like the right thing to do.

One time her mom serenaded us with Chuck E’s In Love, which didn’t really help, to be honest. I asked my parents, and they didn’t know who Rickie Lee Jones was either, but I was used to that. When you’re raised Orthodox Jewish, like my mom was, and you go to an all-girl’s school that you later teach at, and you get married at twenty and start having kids before you’re twenty, you don’t have much chance to be different. I was the oldest of five. My dad, like Rickie’s mom, was a Baal Teshuva, meaning someone who wasn’t raised religious but returned to God. He had great stories that he’d tell my sisters and I before bed, and even better stories that he’d tell me when we went for walks.

My sisters’ favorite story was the one about the horse. My dad loved horses, and he and his brother took a bus out to the country, with all their money saved to an answer an ad they’d read. Some guy was willing to sell them an old, dusty white horse, but the saddle cost almost as much and they could afford one or the other. They chose the horse, figuring they could build a saddle out of the awful leather jacket their parents had given my dad for his birthday. When they got home, their mom threatened to send it to the glue factory, so they sold it to a neighbor.

When we went for walks alone, my dad would tell me things about my mom that I never knew, how she’d always wanted to try lobster, how the smell of it cooking in butter made her momentarily rethink keeping kosher for the first time in her life, and when she was nineteen, she wanted to get a yellow butterfly tattooed on her right ankle. I knew the fact that my dad was newly religious appealed to my mom.

“His love of Judaism is so pure,” I heard her tell my aunt one day. “When we first met, it was like watching a kid discover the kind of small miracles you take for granted.”

Once he told me about a miscarriage my mom had months before she got pregnant with me. “You’re our miracle baby, that’s why we called you Nessa” he said, which means miracle of God, in Hebrew. “Then after you, Baruch Hashem, everything was easy.”

It was a big decision on their part to send me and my sister to a co-ed Jewish high school. He wanted us to us to go to university and have actual careers.

One of my dad’s friends told him that no respectable guy from our community would ever want to marry us if we went there.

I secretly hoped that his friend was right.

When I became friends with Rickie, my parents assumed she was religious because of her name. She was always dressed appropriately in front of them, which made me laugh. After she turned twelve, her parents gave her a choice, so she wore jeans and tank tops, went out on Shabbat and only ate kosher in front of her parents. Her crew of non- Jewish friends from her neighborhood called her Becky. I never corrected them.

She had a birthday dance party in the basement of a kosher restaurant, but all I told my parents was a kosher restaurant so they let me go.

There was a dinner set up upstairs. Rickie walked in, wearing a short satin-y yellow dress, and her black hair pulled back with a red hair band. I always thought she looked a little like snow white, but tonight, with her skin looking extra pale, and her lips shellacked red to match her hairband, she really did.

I looked down. A few days before, I told Rickie I had nothing to wear, Rickie brought me a whole wardrobe of clothes like the best friend in a sitcom to try on. In the end, I wore my own white t shirt, her jeans and a jacket that I wore all the way zipped up.

I shellacked my cheeks with green Jerome Russell body glitter and the first thing she said when she saw me was that I was the shiniest person she’d ever seen.

“Is that good?” I asked her.

“Of course. When I think of you, I always think, sparkling, and now other people can see it too.”

Rickie sat beside me, and ordered a million things, matzoh ball soup, grilled chicken on a bun, fries, pastrami sandwich, and took a few small bites of each, then said she was full.

I ordered chicken fingers, like I always did when I ate there.

I used to always get wings in a basket with fries, but one time when I was younger I ordered it and accidentally swallowed part of the small bone.

We were with our next-door neighbors, and I’d done this thing of breaking off a small piece from the middle of a piece of breadbasket bread. The mom embarrassed me in a way that confused me at first, pretending she was empathizing ‘I know it’s kind of a fun thing to do’ when really she was calling me out. She leaned in when I started choking. Maybe she thought I was faking it. She told me to settle down, but I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t talk. My parents rushed me to the ER, and we never socialized with them again.

I tried to eat as daintily as she had, but I kept dropping my chicken fingers, and she kept laughing at me.

Later that night, we hung out with her other friends, at a park near her house and I got drunk for the first time. After they left, we were sitting side by side on the bridge of a big jungle gym.

She’d lost her hairband and eyeliner was pooled under her eyes.

“You’re so beautiful,” I said, and she kissed me. Her lips were soft and felt electric. For a few minutes, it felt like there was glitter in my bloodstream. It’s rare when something you’ve imagined for ages turns out better in real life. I wanted to take a thousand photos of her, of us, of the playground, anything so I could keep replaying how it all felt. This is what a real miracle feels like, I thought.

I started to talk, to try to tell her that but she leaned forward and threw up all over the big plastic red slide. I leaned in and tried to hold her hair back.

After that, I walked her home but nothing else happened. When we got to her door, she thanked me for being such a good friend.

I thought about it as I walked back to my neighborhood. I thought about my parents and figured it was probably just as well. I had no idea what they would do if they found out. Moving me to a more religious school where I’d be surrounded by all girls didn’t exactly seem like a punishment. I knew they wouldn’t know how to deal with it. They lived in a world where gender roles were so prescribed. Even their personal tastes were like that. My mom loved lace and romance novels. My dad didn’t think women should drink beer. My mom wouldn’t let me drive until I was eighteen. I knew I wouldn’t be able to fake it forever. I knew one day I wouldn’t be the daughter that they wanted.

We didn’t avoid each other after that, but we didn’t talk about it either. She’d hug me, and for a few minutes after, my clothes would smell like the vanilla amber perfume oil she rolled on her neck and in her hair. It was important to her that we still acted like friends. I didn’t want to be a creep that hung all over her, all love struck and desperate, so I kept my distance.

I focused on school. I babysat my siblings. I let my mom sign me up as one of the babysitters at our synagogue’s Shabbat daycare. I even went on a few awkward dates that my mom’s matchmaker friend set me up with. My lack of interest made me seem pious and modest, so naturally they all wanted second dates, but I refused.

My mom wanted me to go to seminary in Israel for a year, and I agreed, knowing that I planned to drop out after a few weeks and move in with my not religious at all cousins, who’d already agreed to it.

My cousins lived in Tel Aviv, and they figured me out right away, even when I was too afraid to say it.

They took me out to bars, gay bars and dance clubs. I went to my first Pride Parade.

I went out on real dates. I had sex for the first time. After almost a year, I finally had a girlfriend. Her name was Linnea, and she was Swedish, and not Jewish. She was doing her master’s at Tel Aviv university in public health.

A few months later, I got a message from Rickie. She was living in Jerusalem now, going to a seminary.

She wanted to meet up, and I was shocked when I saw her. She was wearing a floor length denim skirt and a loose, striped long sleeved blue and white shirt, even though it was ninety degrees out. Her dark hair was shorter and pulled back in a messy ponytail.

“You look so different,” she kept saying. “You look taller.”

I was dressed casually, shorts and a green tank top, so my tattoos were all visible. I had a small rainbow tattoo on my right inner wrist. I got the small butterfly on my ankle that I knew my mom would never get. I hadn’t spoken to my family in months. I had a line from a Fiona Apple song across my left shoulder, in beautiful, looping script.
“Be kind to me/or treat me mean/I’ll make the most of it/I’m an extraordinary machine.”

She didn’t ask me anything but I found myself blurting it out, desperate to see her reaction.

I told her all about Linnea. “She’s so smart, and interesting. I never thought I’d meet someone who would love me too.”

She looked sad. “Everyone has a Jewish soulmate,” she said, and it sounded absurd and laughable, like that 80’s animated movie I saw as a kid, All Dogs Go to Heaven.

“So if my girlfriend was Jewish, you’d be okay with me being gay?”

She shook her head, started to talk, then stopped herself.

“I’m getting married,” she said, and looked me in the eye for the first time.

“Wow. Mazel tov,” I sputtered.

“Who’s the lucky guy?”

“His name is Chezi. Short for Yechezkel.”

“Wow.”

“How well do you know this guy?”

“Pretty well. We’ve gone on three dates. I know all the stuff that matters. I met him after I went on a date with his friend.”

Her eyes light up for the first time. “He was this guy from Brazil, so cute and so interesting. We went out twice, and the first time he told the matchmaker how much he liked me. I have no idea what happened.”

I wanted to tell her that everyone gets rejected, that it was ridiculous to marry someone’s friend just because the person you wanted jilted you. Instead, I reached over and hugged her.

I expected her to flinch, but she didn’t. She pulled me closer and told me I smelled fresh, like the ocean.

We stood there for what felt like hours, hugging each other. She kissed me on the forehead, and it still felt a tiny bit magical, like a stray piece of glitter that I couldn’t wash off no matter how many times I tried.

Danila Botha is the author of three short story collections, Got No Secrets, and For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known. Her new collection, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness will be published in 2024 by Guernica Editions. She is also the author of the award winning novel Too Much on the Inside which was recently optioned for film. Her new novel, A Place for People Like Us will be published in 2025.