A Sense of the Infinite (19 page)

THE WALK BACK TO MY HOUSE:
rattled and uncomprehending, close to tears.

Overhead, yellow leaves flapped in the treetops. A crow cawed. I bent mid-stride and scooped up a piece of gravel from the road and put it in my mouth and sucked until the top of my mouth had turned to blood.

THE NEXT MORNING, I PACKED MY
backpack slowly, deliberately, as if packing for a desert island. Peanuts, fresh water, textbooks, pens.
How to Survive
. I still hadn’t read the poem Loren had sent me, or written back to his email. I printed the poem, folded it in half, and stuck it between the chapters on shelter and navigation. Something told me I was going to have lots of time to read for the rest of the year.

I combed my hair and brushed my teeth.

“Your gym coach called,” Mom said when I went downstairs. “Were you sick yesterday?”

She was wearing her No Frills uniform, a yellow apron over a white blouse. For a second, I considered playing the
get-out-of-school card. But the truth was, I was feeling abundantly healthy. And I knew that to hide now would only make things worse.

“Sick of gymnastics,” I said. “You were right. It’s been horrible. Noe’s on my case all the time and everyone cares too much about their stupid hair and makeup and I just want to kick something.”

The fridge hummed. Mom picked up her purse. “Just make sure to get that deposit back for the leotard,” she sighed.

IF YOU COME TO MY SCHOOL
in late January, you will inevitably wonder why the building hasn’t been condemned as a health hazard.

The classrooms in which the heaters work are warm and damp, like incubators for mold.

The classrooms in which the heaters don’t work are so cold you can’t hold a pencil.

The couches in the back corner of the library are polka-dotted with gum and tobacco juice and the crusty stains of bodily fluids that will not be cleaned off until next fall.

The floors are covered in a brown layer of slush that nobody ever mops up. You can literally slide to your classes.

All these conditions serve to make the students bored and aggressive and prone to gossip.

Sometimes it feels like nobody gets out of here without a broken bone or two.

THE FIRST DAY WITHOUT NOE WAS THE
hardest. For the most part, I avoided eye contact with anyone in our year, and kept my ears firmly plugged with earbuds at all times during which it wouldn’t earn me a detention to do so. I started
Kingdom of Stones
again from the beginning. It was comforting to hear about Rae as a young villager again, before she has any of her harrowing adventures. I wished I could go back to Book One of my own life, when all was good and peaceful in Riddlespoon and the Stone King hadn’t yet sown his death-seeds through the land.

My campaign of avoidance wasn’t entirely successful.

Margot Dilforth: “Is it true that you’re pregnant?”

Me: “No.”

Margot Dilforth: “That’s what everyone’s saying.”

Something about her reminded me of a goat. In
Kingdom of Stones
, she would be Penny-foo, the annoying milkmaid. I remembered what Margot was like in middle school, an earnest girl with long braids. Always at the edge of things, trying to buy her way into the center by impressing people with scandalous information.

Margot Dilforth: “Are you and Oliver getting married?”

Me: “Not that I know of.”

Margot Dilforth (scratching her long, freckly nose): “I heard you are.”

Steven was away on a theater trip that day. In Art, I had to sit alone. I wanted to call him, but suddenly our little triangle had gotten very messy. Steven was wrong. It wasn’t as simple as being friends instead of friends-by-association. He was
dating
the association, and right now, the association hated my guts.

I planned all my routes to avoid intersecting with Noe, but I came across her by accident, in a basement hallway, surrounded by a feathery knot of gym birds. There was nowhere to hide. Nobody to hide behind. I stood tall and walked past them at a slow, normal, nothing-is-wrong pace while everything in me longed to run.

Noe was crying. The gym birds were comforting her.

Nobody looked at me while I walked past.

SCHOOL WAS LONELY. WORDLESSLY, WITH NO
further discussion or negotiation, Noe and I ceased to be, the way a dry leaf detaches itself from the branch and spirals silently toward the ground. The soccer fields outside the school building were messy expanses of trampled ice. The classrooms smelled like wet coats. In Art, Steven and I whittled totem poles out of our pencils. We named the ancient paper cutter on the counter of the art morgue Ernestine.

“Ernestine looks lonely today,” Steven would say, and we would take turns getting up to pet her.

“Ernestine is hungry,” I’d say, and we’d find excuses to chop some paper up with her heavy old blade.

In the hallways, posters for the Valentine’s Day ball. The Senior Leaders set up tables outside the cafeteria selling tickets. You couldn’t walk in for lunch without them shaking their bags of Hershey’s Kisses at you.

“Bought your tickets for the ball?” they’d shout like hawkers outside a football stadium (or “Hey! You like balls?” if they were guys). They made you feel like crap if you walked past without stopping, like you were the one being rude. They did it to everyone, even the nervous freshmen, especially the nervous freshmen. Like all the other nervous people, I scuttled past with my eyes averted, muttering, “No thanks.”

“Why not?” they’d call after me, as if to prolong the humiliation by extracting a detailed explanation.

I pushed my earbuds deeper into my ears and kept walking.

At the lockers across the hall from mine, Noe and Dulcie Simmonds made plans: dress shopping, hair and makeup, restaurant selection, what Steven and Mark would wear. They had an entire shared notebook full of Valentine’s Ball to-do lists and clippings from hairstyle magazines. Steven’s mom was taking them to her manicurist, then for something called a radiant light treatment at the Twin Oaks Spa.

“What about my radiant light treatment?” said Steven.

“
You
will be getting a car wash,” Noe said.

“Annabeth,” called Steven. “Are you in on this?”

He had been trying to get Noe and me to make up for the
past two weeks. It was a complicated dance, and I could tell it was wearing him out. I’d seen them arguing again, and I’d hurried past with my head hunched, wishing he would just do as I’d pleaded and enjoy the rest of the year without worrying about me. I’d been doing my best to keep my distance outside Art so as to not mess things up for him, but he wasn’t making it easy.

Noe ignored Steven and kept chatting with Dulcie. I shook my head. He gazed at me forlornly. “You two,” he said, to no one in particular.

I HAD TOLD MYSELF I WOULDN’T
miss Noe, that I would simply ignore her for the rest of the year. But there was a part of my brain where Noe lived, like a program I couldn’t figure out how to delete from my phone. Now that we weren’t speaking anymore, it played all the time. When I took a bite of my sandwich, I could hear Noe saying,
Somebody’s hungry today
. When Ava called to see how I was doing, Noe said,
How are you even talking to that freak?
When I caught myself feeling happy at odd moments, Noe said,
Aren’t you even a little ashamed?

She lived inside me as a critical voice, telling me what a failure I was and how undeserving of love. Every time I passed her in the hall, or glanced at her accidentally in English, something
inside me sent up a guilty flare. I wrapped my sandwich in a napkin. I deleted the email I was mentally composing to Loren Wilder. I pulled the sleeves of my sweater over my hands.

When I saw her, a sick shiver happened in the quease of my stomach. She had become frightening to me. I was hyperaware of her, the way you can’t stop thinking about a spider in your room. Even when I wasn’t looking directly at her, I could
sense
her, two rows behind me in the auditorium, twenty feet ahead of me in the hall. My ears pricked to every syllable of her voice laughing with other girls. I detected her every footfall, every toss of her oily black hair.

She cornered me in the hall one day.

“I just want you to know that it wasn’t me who wrote that thing on your bag,” she said. “It was Kaylee.”

Noe’s hair smelled like pomegranate. Her hands were calloused from the vault. It had been weeks since we’d stood this close to one another, or spoken face-to-face. I’d been building up this whole demonic story about her—Noe was controlling, Noe was cruel, Noe had never been my friend, and she didn’t really love Steven either—but standing near her, smelling her smell, I couldn’t see her as a demon anymore, even though I wanted to. What I did see: a girl who was just as scared as I was, and hurting just as much.

Noe
, I wanted to say.
I see you. I can see you again. Can you see me?

But I didn’t say anything. I was too stunned.

We stood in the hall, people flowing past us like water. It seemed like the kind of moment in which we might have forgiven each other, in which two people with a history of friendship might reasonably be expected to forgive each other. I could see the moment of forgiveness blowing past us like a flowered dress tumbling in the wind on the side of the highway. Either of us could have said,
Pull over and grab it!
But neither of us did.

Noe turned. I adjusted my backpack with shaky hands and walked away.

AFTER THAT I STARTED SPENDING LUNCH
in the sound booth. The auditorium was always empty these days; even Steven didn’t think to look for me there. I read
How to Survive
and played with the lights, blending greens and blues and purples on the empty stage.

Other times I just sat in the dark and didn’t move until it was time to go home.

IN ART, MR. LIM GAVE ME
back my jar of stones with a yellow sticky note with a big letter
R
for Redo. I wished he would just give me a zero, since the assignment was now almost five months late.

The jar of stones sat on my desk all through class. People looked at it, and looked at me, and my neck prickled with self-consciousness. Midway through class, Steven slipped a note across the table.

Dear A
, the note said.

Morgue Master Lim is clearly a dilettante. The substitution of stones for fruit speaks volumes. Instead
of something sweet and ripe, something cold and hard. The stones/secrets are sealed inside her; the smooth glass surface of the jar belies the disordered rubble within, barely keeping it at bay.

The juxtaposition of the two pieces, furthermore, is striking. The first, dry twigs, are fruitless and bare. The second piece is full to the brim, but still manages to speak of hunger. She is trying to nourish herself with food only fit for a ghost. I would be worried about her, too.

Regards,

Steven McNeil

I slipped out of class as soon as the bell rang, in what had become my daily escape routine. Steven didn’t come after me, but the note burned in my pocket for the rest of the day.

On the radio, blizzard warnings.

At home, bags of driveway salt.

The local paper showed a picture of Noe in the sports section, leaping over a vault to nowhere.
LOCAL GYMNAST SOARS TO NEW HEIGHTS
.

I wondered if Kaylee Ito had always hated me.

THAT NIGHT I WENT FOR A
walk past the half-built houses near Lorian Woods, their harsh geometry softened by snow. I felt sorry for them. They looked hungry, hungry and dumb, like tourists who hadn’t come dressed for the weather. I walked into the woods and looked at the way the branches fractured the sky. I put my hand on a tree’s bark and felt a quiet current of friendship there.

Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to freeze in a snowbank. It sounded almost dreamy, almost pleasant.

“Annabeth’s wandered out and frozen,” they’d say. “It’s very sad.”

I walked to the edge of the woods and lay in a snowbank. I
looked at the stars and remembered being younger.

Sometimes, Dad was the moon. Sometimes he was the man on the radio singing “Brown Eyed Girl.” Sometimes he was the truehearted woodsman in
Little Red Riding Hood
, about to stride in with his ax to claim me. On one too-fast hike with Mom, the snacks all gone and the winter sunlight waning, I let her get farther ahead of me than ever before. I’d left the trail and sat down under a tree, pulling my hood up and cinching my jacket more tightly around my waist and neck. Before long, I knew, he would come striding through the woods in tall leather boots and a green feathered cap (he was Robin Hood, sometimes) and carry me on his shoulders all the way to a sturdy log cabin with cookies on the table and a tiny orange kitten like the one in my fantasies that Mom would never let me have.
Say hello to Stallion
, Dad would say, pouring the purring animal into my arms (How did he know her name would be Stallion?).
She’s yours
.

Instead the sky had darkened and the temperature dropped. After several hours—five minutes, maybe—I heard Mom calling my name, and glimpsed her coming down the trail. In spite of myself I’d leaped up and shouted, “I’m here,” my five-year-old’s resolve wavering at the sight of her familiar sweater and hat. She scooped me up and hoisted me onto her back, and within a few minutes I was lulled to sleep by the steady up-down jostle of her stride. That night was pizza-and-ice-cream
at Uncle Dylan’s house, and a turn on my cousin Max’s new computer game. They were always especially nice to me, Uncle Dylan and Aunt Monique and Nan and the cousins. By the time Mom put me to bed, I’d forgotten about the orange kitten for a while.

Overhead, the ice-encrusted branches rattled in the breeze, sending down a flurry of snow. For a long time now, there had been no benevolent moon-spirit watching over me, no radio-father singing “Brown Eyed Girl,” and the man in the forest was a smirking boy I must be prepared to fight hand-to-hand and, if necessary, kill.

How were you supposed to move on from something like that?

I lay in the snowbank and waited to sleep. Eventually I got up and walked back home.

What’s that Tom Waits song? “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me Today.”

The snowbank didn’t want me. There was no use fighting. I don’t believe everything I hear in songs, but when you lie in a snowbank for an hour without falling asleep, the message is pretty clear.