Katarina felt the heat of the room pressing down on her, suffocating her as if it were a large pillow pressed harshly against her face. The air was thick with humidity. She knew that if she were to get out of her bed and look at her reflection in the mirror, the girl staring back at her would show her just what she expected to see. Her curly blonde hair stuck out at odd angles. In her mind, Katarina pictured herself to look like some odd combination of an untrimmed shrub and a mythical creature who had never encountered hair product in all of her existence. With a sigh, she rolled over to her side, swinging her feet over the far side of her bed. They hit the floor with a thud.
“Katarina Audriana Catalin, are you up yet?” Her mother’s voice drifted up the stairs. Katarina ignored the question, instead focusing on one thing – her plan for the day. Each morning came with the same ritual. First, she would look at her calendar, searching for any special meaning that came with the date or the day of the week. On days that were not holidays or held little to no significance (which happened to be most of the days that she’d lived through), she would list her schedule for the day aloud. Breakfast, bus, school (here she would list her classes for the day, if only to make sure that when packing her bag, she had everything that she would need for her trip to the seven hours of prison she endured five days out of the week), bus, dinner, sleep.
Sometimes the day’s events totaled to a larger amount – but that was rare. Katarina was not a social creature by any meaning of the word. Many times she complained of having nothing to do. But an uneventful day, by Katarina’s logic, was far better than being forced to socialize with people she had no interest in.
“Katarina, I mean it! Are you just lying there in bed? Get up, or I’ll come and get you myself! We’re going to be late!” The voice of her mother sounded angry now, and the teenage girl knew that if she wanted to keep her head, she would have to oblige.
“I’m coming, mother, just give me a minute!” She jumped out of bed, frantically searching for the closest article of clothing. Settling on a black skirt and a purple blouse, Katarina headed for the stairs. Once at the top, she could see her mother, who was anxiously pacing as if they were running late for one of the most important meetings of their lives.
“Where’re we going?” she asked. Her mother did not answer, instead taking her pocketbook off of the railing of the stairs. “Ma, tell me.” Katarina hated being without answers. She liked to know exactly what was going on, where she was going, and the exact on-goings for the day to come. While her mother called her neurotic, she thought it was perfectly logical. One had to know what they were doing in order to meet their goals, after all.
“Today’s the sixteenth – we have that meeting at the synagogue. You know that,” her mother responded, picking up a pair of kitten heeled shoes and handing them to Katarina, “Now put these on and grab something for breakfast. I’ll meet you in the car.” Katarina let out a low sound, close to a grunt. It wasn’t that she was against her religion; she quite enjoyed being religious and all of the rules and regulations that came with being a member of her faith. Instead, she disliked going to the synagogue itself.
The building itself was rather ugly, from the buttery white exterior to the soft yellow paint that coated the classrooms that she spent six years of her life in during religious school. The texture of the building was also unpleasant; at the touch, it felt like stucco, rough and untended to, instead of the softness that she thought it should have been. It gave the building itself a strange juxtaposition. At first glance, it made the Jewish place of worship seem rough and unapproachable. But inside, if one took enough time to take a glance, the walls were the color of margarine, as if they’d melt at the slightest bit of warmth.
And then there were the people. The people were the part that Katarina despised the most. They were mostly old – and not the kind of old that could be justified with hard candy and exciting stories about wars gone by. The people who came to morning minyan had a constant look of constipated unhappiness painted on their faces, stuck in the wrinkles that surely had been created by endless years of never smiling. The women had little hair, but instead of allowing it to become thin and fragile, they attempted to make it larger than it had been in the days of their youth, straightening it and frying it until it became a pouf on top of their head that looked like a cotton ball had been dyed and glued to their scalp.
