Copyright 1998 Sarah Siegel

Other than Craig, there was a collection of Jewish boys at Merkaz Torah, a nighttime Jewish education program for high school students. I would stand around during the break, wishing boys would approach me because maybe the right one would be attractive enough and I could stop having gross thoughts about other girls and women. When the boys did approach, it seemed they were always there to flirt with my friend, Malka.

Malka was South African by way of London and had just moved to Stamford. She was adorable. She was everything I could have been hoping to find at Merkaz Torah: a young Jew who was actively Jewish, extremely attractive, athletic, charming and kind. The only barrier was our gender....

At the end of ninth grade, I got to go to Israel and spend eight weeks with my cousins....

Their village looked as it did when I had visited at eight and 11. The painted bomb shelters – adorned with murals by kids – and the juicy, red hibiscus flowers that Yaffa would teach me to pluck, then suck the nectar from. The hibiscus hedges lined one patch of sidewalk and belonged to the owner of the house whose lawn led to them. Everything was exciting about being there....

During mid-summer, Yaffa and I stayed up to see a cactus flower that grew on the front of her family’s house, and that bloomed at midnight just once every summer. It had big, white blooms that looked almost as if they were glowing in the dark.

When Yaffa and I got changed that night, I let myself glance at the Iris logo of the Israeli Society for the Protection of Nature on the front of her T-shirt, dappled as it was by the moonlight coming in through the slats of the window shutters. The night was charged, fueled by the glow of the cactus-flowers....

Read the next excerpt, " Losing my dad at 17" or return to the home page of Sarah Siegel's Coming-of-age Memoir.

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