A Sense of the Infinite (17 page)

I TRIED TO RIDE OUT THE
craziness by cocooning into myself.

I ripped the CDs that Bob had lent me and loaded them onto my music player.

The Stone King has not been seen for two hundred years, but holds the land of Riddlespoon captive through a silent reign of terror. Can Rae of Riddlespoon free her people from his grasp?

“What are you listening to?” said Noe.

“Nothing.”

“I was saying you should come to the YMCA on Sunday to work on your floor routine.”

I turned down the volume. “Okay,” I said.

The land of Riddlespoon used to be lush and verdant but was slowly turning to stone. The people were ruled by fear. Rae’s mother, Genewren, lay paralyzed by the Stone King’s curse, her once-strong limbs turned gray and cold.

“I will avenge her,” Rae swore, and set out for the Doom Crags.

“Want to go to the Java Bean?” Noe said.

I pressed pause. “Sure.”

The sidewalks were brown slush and flattened coffee cups. Shopping carts rattled unmoored across parking lots. Noe was wearing a pink-and-white knitted hat with a sparkly pom-pom on top, gloves to match. Her black coat was speckled with white lint.

When we got to the Java Bean, Steven’s mom—Darla—was in line getting a cappuccino. Noe sang a hello and they traded air kisses while I stood awkwardly by the donut case.

“Hi there,” Darla said, beaming down on me for a moment before turning back to ask Noe about her plans for spring break.

Her mouth was painted red and she was wearing a perfume you could smell all the way from the door, like a Mister Cookie outlet that pumps its odor of brownies and gingerbread a little too aggressively onto the sidewalk.

When Noe talked to Darla, she transformed. Gestures came out that I had never seen Noe do before, twirls of the wrist and rolls of the eye that mirrored Darla perfectly. They reminded me of the birds displaying their feathers in
Planet
Earth
: tweet tweet, flap flap. A bizarre kind of mating dance, it unsettled me to observe.

“Do you girls want a ride home?” Darla said.

“Would you?” Noe cooed, clapping her hands together as if a ten-block car ride was the greatest treat on earth.

Darla paid for our drinks and we walked out to her very clean, very new, very white SUV. The radio was tuned to a Christian rock station.

“Have you been to this nail salon yet?” Darla said, tapping her finger at a pink-and-silver storefront on the corner.

“No,” Noe said. “We should
totally
go.”

I put my earbuds on and started
Kingdom of Stones
.

THE NEXT DAY, AT LUNCHTIME, I
sat on the gym floor and watched Noe practice.

She was beautiful on the beam, fluid as water. She looked like the ballerina in a jewelry box, her black hair drawn up to a bun on the top of her head, her eyes focused, the grip of her toes determined. I sat on the floor with my knees drawn up to my chest. I couldn’t take my eyes away from her. Suddenly, the beam seemed so high and lonely it might as well have been a mountaintop. She turned lightly on the tips of her toes and my throat got so tight I thought I would cry. For some reason, I was remembering the time in tenth grade when Noe’s dog had died. She’d cried on my bed and I hugged the soft, rumpled
heap of her, and thought to myself that Noe was the person I loved most in the world.

As I was having that one memory, all sorts of other memories started flooding into me until it felt like I was seeing a replay of every heartbreaking moment in my entire life. Suddenly, I was in front of Scott’s house again, alone in the cold twilight with a rock clenched in my hand.

“What?” Noe said.

I shook my head. When I blinked, the gym lights wobbled and swam.

“Are you sad?” Noe said, hopping down from the beam and walking over to crouch beside me. She ran her fingers through my hair like she always did when someone was crying or upset. It was one of her techniques. I bet she had read in a magazine that having your head scratched released endorphins or something. That was a very Noe thing to remember and put into practice.

She sat down cross-legged on the floor. Her fingernails were painted to match our gym leotards and she smelled different, more grown-up. I felt the secret tremble inside me like a butterfly beating its wings inside my hand, everything in me wanting to succumb to the comfort of
telling Noe
. So far I’d managed to avoid giving in to that particular temptation when it came to Scott.

“Poor thing,” Noe said. “Are you regretting it?”

It took me a second to realize that Noe was talking about Maple Bay, and not about throwing the rock at Scott’s window.

“No,” I said truthfully.

“Are you sure?” Noe said. Her voice was all sympathy, her eyes their wide familiar brown. It was so
easy
to talk to Noe when she was like this, to climb into the warm fuzzy nest of that voice and feel yourself completely understood. No wonder she knew everyone’s secrets. This time, however, I didn’t have a secret to confess—at least, not the one Noe was fishing for.

“Of course,” I said. “You think I secretly wanted a baby?”

Noe gave me a look. “Darla says all women want their babies unless they were, like, raped. It’s a basic human instinct.”

“I don’t think so,” I said stiffly.

If I was the clever, brave, and sassy girl in a high school drama, I would have said,
And besides, I didn’t have a baby. I had a bundle of cells the size of a pencil eraser.
But I was too stricken to even think that, and it didn’t occur to me until much later.

“It’s not something you can think or not think,” Noe said. “It’s biology. Lots of women get really depressed afterward. One of the girls at Darla’s church committed suicide last year.”

I was used to hearing Noe hold forth about everything under the sun. I rarely had a reason to contradict her real or presumed authority. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the muzzle trying to catch all my complicated words before they found
their way out. The bell started ringing, and fourth-period gym class kids came through the gym doors in noisy clusters of two and three.

“Maybe she wouldn’t have done that if people hadn’t given her the idea that she was supposed to,” I said to Noe as we stood up to put the beam away.

I should have said more. If I were Ava or one of Ava’s runny-stockinged roommates, I could have given Noe this whole feminist education about all the reasons Darla was wrong, citing historical references and psychology papers. People got sad after making all kinds of decisions. It didn’t mean the decisions were wrong. I wanted to tell Noe that sad and happy were things you lived with no matter which choices you made. That you couldn’t stop them any more than you could stop the seasons from changing.

The gym was filling up with kids in white T-shirts and purple basketball shorts. My throat felt swollen and achy from sorting through all the things I could and could not say.

“I’m just worried about you,” Noe said before we parted ways for our separate classes. “I want you to be okay.”

She gave me a big, tight, Darla-scented hug. I nodded dumbly and walked away with my head reeling, wishing Noe had called me a slut or said I was going to hell. It would have been so easy to respond to an attack. This softer thing was more confusing. This feeling of bafflement at being so completely
misunderstood. Even worse was the feeling that Noe and I no longer meshed in the same ways but still acted like we did.

I wanted Noe
back
, I thought with a pang. Noe of the spinning hug in the driveway, Noe of Camp Qualla Hoo Hoo. Noe before she became Little Miss Daughter-in-Law, before Sphinx Lacoeur. I missed that Noe. I missed myself. I missed us.

I thought about the night I came back from Northern, running out to meet her in the street. Were we even still ourselves back then, or had we already changed into these other people? Did we really mean it, or were we playing out our old rituals one last time, as a kindness, or a half-life, the way that light from a dying star continues to reach the earth for years after the star has burned out?

That afternoon, I went to the forest after school and trudged around the trails in the snow.

“You’re pink,” Mom said when I came home. “It’s nice to see you outdoors.”

I sank onto the couch and buried my head under a blanket.

Whatever was happening, I wouldn’t call it
nice
.

THE SUNDAY BEFORE THE GYM MEET,
I went to the YMCA and endured four and a half hours of Noe-directed torture. Halfway through, Ava called to see how I was doing. I went outside to talk with her, happy for an excuse to leave the mirrored dance room where Gym Bird Number Twelve was running through her floor routine for the fourth time while Noe made adjustments to her shoulders and hips and told her to aim for greater fluidity in all aspects of movement.

We talked for a while about Ava’s friends and the theater festival she was helping put on.

“How are things with your mom?” Ava said.

“Pretty good.”

“Pretty good?”

I looked at the sidewalk. Ever since Scott’s house, I’d hardly been able to eat. It felt like the rock hadn’t gone through his window, but was lodged in my stomach instead. I thought of Ava’s room the day that she’d told me, the sadness that lived there.

“Ava?” I said. “I went to his house.”

“Whose house?”

“Scott’s. I broke his window.” Something was clawing at my throat. In my stomach, the rock was burrowing itself as deep as it would go. “I saw him,” I said. “He waved hello and said what a beautiful night it was.”

“That’s fucked up,” Ava said.

“Yup.”

From the sidewalk, I could hear the music Noe was playing for Hannah Garrity’s floor routine one story above, muted against the window glass.

“Should I tell my mom?” I said. “About the window?”

“I don’t know,” Ava said. She sounded genuinely uncertain. “God, Annabeth. I don’t know.”

When I went back into the gym, Noe pounced on me. “There you are! Onto the mat, it’s your turn. And take that sweater off.”

She peeled it off me and tossed it onto the pile of sweaters and coats in the corner.

I shivered through the rest of practice. Someone had brought a box of clementines wrapped up in blue paper. I spent the last half hour sitting against the wall with a clementine cradled in my hands, its bright orange skin like a promise of warmth I could hold close to myself but never feel.

ON THE DRIVE HOME FROM THE
YMCA, I told Noe I was thinking of going to see Bob again.

Noe pulled back, aghast. “Why?”

For some reason, I blushed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I do find it hard to eat sometimes. A lot of the time. When I’m feeling bad.”

Noe dismissed this with a flick of her hand. “That’s different. They can’t make you go. Not unless your mom signed a form or something. It’s illegal.”

She kissed me on the cheek, a kiss that smelled vaguely sour. For some reason I thought about what Margot Dilforth had said. Maybe Noe was taking the fluidity thing even further
than I realized. I shook the traitorous thought from my mind. Noe and I had been more or less back to normal since the
basic human instinct
conversation. At least, we made our normal jokes and had our normal interactions, although I could sense that something beneath the surface had changed.

Some friendships ended all at once and some were like Athenian ships, each part slowly replaced over the years until one day, even if you had never left the deck, you couldn’t recognize it anymore. Lately when I talked to Noe I felt like one of the old people who came to the ice-cream shop year after year, even though the soul of the place had long ago drained out of it: they knew it wasn’t the same anymore, but they simply didn’t know where else to go.

“Get a good sleep,” Noe said when we pulled up at my house. “Don’t forget to shave your legs tomorrow morning or you’ll look like a monkey. Bus leaves at seven sharp. No coffee unless you want your sweat to smell like the Java Bean.” She winked at me. “Bye, doll.”

GYM MEET, THE NEXT MORNING: FIRST
the idling school bus, then the half-hour ride that smelled of hair spray, everyone brushing and braiding and squirting gel into their hair and hunting in their gym bags for spare elastics. Music playing on cell phones. Noe striding up and down the central aisle with a clipboard, authoritative in her black-and-purple tracksuit, attending to a thousand details whose significance escaped me. I knew she was the team captain, but still it was strange to see her like that, a Noe with no special allegiance to me, who did not sit next to me at the seat I’d saved for us by the window, who did not even alight there, but breezed past
in a whiff of Wintermint to confer with Ms. Bomtrauer about that morning’s twentieth emergency.

I watched the town flash past outside the muddy bus window. Strip mall, gas station, then the highway. I wondered what would happen if someone opened the door of the bus and let us all fly away. Girls in spangled leotards hopping through the windows, pecking uselessly at the snow. Making eyes at themselves in toy mirrors while the winter wind froze first their spindly legs, then their blue feathers, then finally their tiny, twinkly hearts.

THE GYMNASIUM WHERE THE MEET WAS
taking place was huge and busy, with multiple events going on at once. I had expected something more formal, with an audience and clapping, but in the junior levels it was more like waiting to take a driver’s test: lots of standing in line and then a nervous two minutes on the equipment while the world continued to hum and churn around you. The real action was at the advanced events, where girls like Noe sailed through gravity-defying combinations of jumps and twists.

After my beam event (tippy two minutes scuttling up and down the plank) and my bars event (actually-kind-of-enjoyable two minutes bouncing and swinging eight feet above the
ground) and my vault event (annoying: vault cleared, but only just), I went to the bathroom. The lights in there were buzzing quietly. The bathroom fixtures were even older than the ones at E. O. James, clammy faucets and an avocado-green paper towel dispenser right out of the seventies.

There was a girl retching in one of the toilet stalls. My first thought was that she was pregnant. I took an extralong time washing my hands, waiting for her to come out. Who knew? Maybe I could be her magic spirit friend. I still had that piece of birthday cake in my backpack. It was hard as a brick and dry as tinder. In a pinch, you could use it to light a campfire.

Hey
, I would say.
If you need someone to talk to, I happen to have some experience in this domain.

I dried my hands and waited quietly for another minute. Finally, the stall door swung open and Noe stepped out.

“Hey, doll,” she said when she saw me. “Excited for your floor routine?”

She turned on the tap and swished her hands beneath the hot water. I watched her soap and rinse them, stunned into muteness. I had witnessed Noe doing this at least a dozen times since the Skittles incident in ninth grade. Now, for the first time, I saw it for what it was: Noe wasn’t exempt. She wasn’t different. She was a girl making herself puke in a toilet bowl.

I couldn’t believe I’d never seen that before. I couldn’t believe I’d told myself that
not
seeing it made me special and
understanding, instead of simply a coward.

“Noe,” I said. “I know what you’re doing.”

She kept on washing her hands, patient and businesslike. Her face in the mirror was undecipherable. She had put on lipstick and mascara so she wouldn’t look “washed out” under the bright lights. Up close, the makeup made her look ghoulish, even vampiric.

“Emergency measures,” Noe said. “My floor event got moved an hour earlier. No warning. If there’s anything in your digestive tract, it can give you cramps.” She patted my arm. “Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”

She was the same old Noe, amused and reassuring.
Poor dear
this and
poor darling
that. She pecked at the pins in her hair, rearranging them to fasten stray strands of hair out of the way.

“No,” I said. “It’s not emergency measures. It’s crazy. Normal people don’t make themselves throw up
ever
. You’re hurting yourself.”

I wanted her to soften, to yield, to let me gather her up and say,
Tell me everything
. Instead, Noe raised her eyebrows at me.

“Sphinx said not to eat a minimum of three hours before an event. Any less than that and it affects your fluidity. If they hadn’t changed the stupid schedule, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I didn’t work this hard all year just to let my floor routine get sabotaged.”

“I don’t think he meant for you to
throw up
.”

“Actually, he said it was okay in emergency situations.”

I hesitated. The light in the bathroom hummed. Noe put a hand on her hip. “Sphinx was an Olympic gymnast, Annabeth. Are you going to tell me he doesn’t know what he’s talking about?”

“He sounds like a dick.”

“Can we table this?” said Noe. “I have to go stretch.”

“Noe,” I said. “You can talk to me about it. You don’t have to be so
invulnerable
all the time.”

“I need to go, Bethy. Seriously, don’t worry.”

She breezed past me and pushed the door open with both palms. I trailed after her, stunned and hangdog, and watched her curved shape disappear into the churning gym.

I didn’t know what to do with myself until my next event, so I sat on some bleachers and took
How to Survive
out of my backpack. I was reading the part about poisonous plants when the coach, Ms. Bomtrauer, tapped me on the shoulder.

“Were you in the bathroom just now?” she said.

I nodded, surprised.

“Was Noe doing something she shouldn’t be doing?”

I froze. I hadn’t decided what to do yet. Instead of nodding or shaking my head, I made a slight shrug with my shoulders, as if to say,
Don’t ask me, I don’t want to be involved, Noe will kill
me, I wasn’t going to say anything, I don’t know.

Ms. Bomtrauer sighed and drummed her fingers on her clipboard. “That’s all I needed to know.”

She started to walk away.

“Ms. Bomtrauer?” I said.

“Mm-hmm?”

“The coach from Gailer told her—he said it was okay in emergencies.”

Shit shit shit
. I wasn’t making it better at all. Ms. Bomtrauer frowned, and a deep furrow formed between her eyebrows. “What coach at Gailer?”

“Sphinx Lacoeur,” I squeaked, regretting the moment I opened my stupid mouth.

“Hmph,” she said, and walked away.