"I didn't say crab. Ah'crav. .. a, uh..." He's searching his brain for the English word so he can translate. "Scorpion?" he finally says.
"No."
"Are you hurt?" he asks. He's so calm I stop struggling against him.
"I don't know. It was..." I choke out the word. "A spider."
"A spider!"
Everyone else laughs hysterically.
"I... I think it was a black widow. It was really big! And hairy! And it was crawling on my SKIN!"
"Black widows aren't hairy," he says, but instead of making fun of me like everyone else, my boyfriend turns me around, takes my hands in his, and inspects them. "It's gone."
"What if it crawled up my shirt?" I say, squirming. I swear I feel little prickly legs on my back. It could be my imagination, like when you're talking about lice and you start scratching. But it really feels like spiders are crawling all over me.
"Don't panic."
I keep squirming. "I'm afraid it's still on me. Avi, help me. Please," I beg.
Without hesitation, he picks me up like I weigh close to nothing and calls out for Liron to follow us.
He hurries behind a large boulder. "Take your shirt off. Nobody can see you." He turns around, giving me privacy.
I unbutton the shirt as fast as I can while Liron stands next to Avi. Her back is to me, too. I think he called her over because he didn't want to have our entire unit see him take me somewhere alone. He doesn't want us to get in trouble again.
Liron is our chaperone.
I can't believe I need a chaperone when I'm with my boyfriend.
"Okay, it's off. I'm not going back out there in my bra." I mean, Avis seen me with just a bra on, but not in public.
Avi holds out his hand, his back still to me. "Give it to me."
"My bra?"
He glances back at me, even though we both know one word from Liron to Sergeant B-S about him seeing me with no shirt will probably have him doing pushups again. "No. The shirt."
After I hand it to him, I watch him carefully inspect it from top to bottom. He turns it inside out, making sure its free of creepy crawlers. He even opens the pockets and inspects those.
He tosses the shirt back to me. "There's nothing on it, or in it. Trust me."
"Thanks," I say. If there's anyone at the top of my trust list, it's Avi. Now that I'm calm, I can't confirm that the spider was hairy. And maybe it wasn't as big as I made it out to be.
Liron shakes her head. "If I didn't see it with my own two eyes, I wouldn't believe it."
"What can't you believe?" I ask her.
"Avi Gefen inspecting a shirt for a spider."
"Why?" My boyfriend is my hero; why shouldn't he help me?
Liron chuckles. "Avi tells everyone else in SayeretTzefa to suck it up, whether they're tired, bleeding, or throwing up from exhaustion. But with you... and a little spider..." She shakes her head. "I don't get it."
After I have the shirt back on, they both turn around to face me. Avi points to me as he talks to Liron. "You saw her--she was freaking out."
"And you came to her rescue. She's ruining your reputation."
"She's my girlfriend," Avi says defensively. "What would you want me to do?"
"Treat her like a soldier, like you treat the rest of us. She didn't sign up to be rescued, she signed up to be a trainee."
"This isn't about Amy. It's about us."
Wait. One. Second. Did he just say "us" as in Avi and Liron "us"... not Amy and Avi "us"?
"Oh, shit." Avi rubs his temples as he squeezes his eyes shut. "I didn't mean to say that in English."
Fear, deep and strong, slices through my body. I'm afraid to ask, but can't stop myself more than I can stop myself from breathing.
""What are you saying, Avi? Are you two, like, a couple or something?"
Chapter 11
milk + meat = not kosher my boyfriend + kissing another girl= not kosher
I turn to Liron for answers.
"Avi, tell her," Liron says.
""Yeah. Tell me." When he hesitates, my entire body goes numb. "It doesn't matter, anyway, because Nathan and I have been dating since February, after you left. I wanted to tell you, but I didn't want to upset you."
Phew. I can't believe I got the lie out without choking.
Crunching stones alerts us that someone is about to join us. It's Nimrod. He looks at Liron, then Avi, then me. "Hakol Beseder --everything okay? No more spiders?"
"No spiders," I say. "And everything is just hunky-dory. Right, Avi?"
I lied to Liron and Avi because I didn't know what else to do. I'm in total shock. "Was everything Avi told me back in Chicago about how much he loves me a complete lie? "Were all those letters he wrote me lies, too? He knows I have trust issues because my parents never married and I didn't even have a relationship with my father until last year.
No wonder Avi doesn't want me here. He wants to be free to have his relationship with Liron on base and then have me, his American girlfriend, on the side.
Ugh, the thought of it makes me sick.
I storm back to my group, leaving Nimrod with the lovebirds. Okay, Avi and Liron don't look or act like lovebirds, but he's obviously dating her behind my back. And I'm obviously the idiot girlfriend thinking it was worth it to spend time at a military boot camp to see my boyfriend.