Writersoul groaned as she shifted in her seat and reached groggily for the seatbelt. She grabbed her earbuds and rolled the cord around her iPod almost vindictively, as though she was trying to strangle it. She HATED airplanes.
This was the girl whose first reaction to landing on the holy soil of Eretz Yisrael had been to vomit. This was the girl who chewed four pieces of gum in a useless bid to keep her hears from popping as the plane took off. This was the girl who brought five vomit bags per flight, and dreaded sem year more for the twenty-four hours of flights it would entail than for the ten months of school in between.
And she’d been shunted off to Ecuador!
As the passengers disembarked, writersoul gripped her carryon bag, trying to somehow remain inconspicuous. Falling down in a dizzy faint is conspicuous. Yes, it is. Yes, even if you feel like you’re going to puke again. Remember that.
Now, she had to figure out where Rivky lived. Eliyahu Rainden was careful- he wasn’t going to let the NSA figure out his address. Writersoul would have to figure it out on her own.
Two hours later, she was walking up the stairwell of the Raindens’ building. Three months ago, it might have been hard to find them, but now, with all of the yeshiva bochurim who’d moved there, she’d just needed to stop off at one of Quito’s three takeout food stores (Thursday night cholent a specialty) to ask a passerby their address. A well-meaning shadchan, moved down to where the clients were, had tried to set her up with seven different guys (“You’ll only need a week!”) as she paid for her Coke (not diet, which had earned her a weird look from the shadchan, who then remembered that this was a girl’s market and the girl was about to walk away with her soda and change), but writersoul had managed to get out and, using her high school Spanish (“No comprendo Espanol. ?Comprende Ingles?”), got to the front door of Mishpachas Rainden.
She could hear a baby screaming inside and a woman walking. The baby’s decibel level went down a smidgen, and writersoul could hear the woman- must be Rivky- talking softly to the baby as he quieted down.
So this was Rivky. In person. The Rivky who had caused all of the trouble that the NSA had to deal with now. The Rivky who was on the rotten-egg-throwing list of every boy’s mother and shadchan in the tri-state area. The Rivky who hid out in Ecuador as the ramifications of her deed realized themselves.
The Rivky who, writersoul realized, was about to suffer a very, very big shock.
Writersoul almost felt sorry about what she had to do.