A story for your classroom

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Eli and the Empty Seat

Chapter 1The Laugh

Eli walks into the lunchroom with his tray and his heart already thumping. Yesterday three boys from his class laughed while he walked past, and Eli was sure they were laughing at him. He has thought about it all night. He thought about it while brushing his teeth, and again on the bus, and again during davening.

Today the long table by the window has one empty seat. Eli stops with his tray in both hands. The three boys are sitting there. Dovid is telling something with big hand movements, and Pinchas has his head down on the table, shaking.

Eli decides the empty seat is the one nobody wants him to take. He turns and walks to the far end of a different table, where nobody is sitting at all. He eats his sandwich in small, fast bites and does not look up.

Chapter 2The Voice

Inside Eli's head, a voice keeps talking. It sounds calm and very sure of itself. "They think you are strange," it says. "They are talking about you right now. You will always be the boy nobody picks."

Eli tries to think about something else. He counts the tiles on the floor. He reads the label on his juice box twice. The voice just waits, and then it starts again.

"Look how they are looking over here. See?"

By the time the bell rings, Eli's stomach is tight and his shoulders are up by his ears. His hands feel cold, and his breathing is quick and shallow. He feels like he has been running, though he only sat still. His body is giving him a clue. It is sounding an alarm for danger, even though nothing dangerous happened.

All that happened was a laugh, and a guess.

Through the afternoon he cannot follow the lesson.

The rebbi asks him a question and Eli answers a different one. Somebody giggles, and Eli's face turns hot. He is sure that this, too, is proof.

At dismissal he keeps his head down in the hallway, and still he hears it, a burst of laughing from the end of the corridor. He does not turn around. His backpack strap digs into his shoulder. He walks faster, past the trophy case, past the water fountain, out the double doors, and he does not breathe properly until the cold air hits his face.

Chapter 3Gavi's Paper

On the walk home, his older cousin Gavi falls into step with him. Gavi is fifteen, and he has a way of noticing things without making a big deal of them.

He does not say anything for half a block. Then he says, "Rough day?"

Eli tells him all of it. He tells him about the table, the laughing, and the empty seat. Gavi listens all the way to the corner without interrupting, even when Eli's voice cracks.

"Can I ask you something?" says Gavi. "When the voice in your head says they think you are strange, how do you know it is right?" Eli opens his mouth and closes it. He does not know. The voice just sounds so sure. "Sounding sure is not the same as being right,"

says Gavi.

He pulls a folded paper from his pocket, soft at the creases, as if he has unfolded it many times. It has three lines in pencil. "What is the thought? What do I know, and what am I guessing? What else could be true?" Eli reads it twice.

They sit on a low wall by the corner. Eli says the thought out loud: "They were laughing at me." It sounds different in the air than it did in his head.

What he knows: three boys laughed, and he was walking near them. What he is guessing: that it was about him. And what else could be true? A joke from recess. Something one of them said that morning, before Eli even got there. The guess still hurts a little, but it feels smaller now, like a shout turned into a talk.

"Now pick one small thing to do, even if the voice says no," says Gavi. "It does not have to be big." Eli thinks. He could sit at the long table tomorrow. Or he could just say hello.

Chapter 4The Seat by the Window

That night Eli's stomach flips whenever he thinks about tomorrow. He does the check again at his desk, with a pencil, on the back of his homework.

Thought: they will not want me there. Know: nothing, really. Guess: everything. Other ideas: they will not mind, or will not even notice.

The next day the seat by the window is empty again.

Eli's hands are cold. The voice says, "Don't. You will look foolish." He stands still with his tray. He does not argue with it, and he does not obey it either. He breathes out slowly, the way he does before a hard test, and he counts to four. Then he walks over. The floor feels longer than it did yesterday. He passes the milk crates and the smell of tomato soup.

Somebody drops a fork and it clatters, and Eli flinches as if it were meant for him.

"Is this seat taken?" he asks. His voice comes out smaller than he wanted. Dovid looks up. "Nope. We were saving it for somebody who can keep a straight face. Pinchas can't."

Eli sits. "The day before yesterday," says Dovid, "when you walked by, Pinchas had just sneezed into his soup and tried to pretend he had not. That was the laugh." Pinchas does the sneeze again, slowly, with sound effects, and Eli laughs. It is a real laugh, and it surprises him. So that was it. The laugh that he had carried around for two whole days had never been about him.

On the way out, Dovid says, "Sit here tomorrow too."

Eli says okay. He does not say that for two days he has been sure they hated him. He just carries his tray to the counter, lighter than it was. At the door he looks back. The seat by the window is full now, and nobody is looking at him at all. For two days he had been sure that every eye in the room was on him.

Nobody, it turns out, had been watching.

That night Eli folds Gavi's paper and tapes it inside the cover of his notebook. The voice in his head will probably come back. Minds do that. But next time, Eli thinks, he will ask it a question first. How do you know?

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