A Sense of the Infinite (2 page)

ON THE FIRST DAY OF NOE,
the raspberries are always ripe. The sprinkler makes a gentle
phut-phut-phut
in the backyard, spraying misty rainbows over the grass. When I hear Noe’s footsteps on the gravel, I get up from the computer and rush down the stairs. I catch the first glimpse of her out the window: Noe striding up the driveway, feet wedged into flimsy sandals, a neon-pink Band-Aid on her knee, a flossy bracelet, or several, piling up on her wrists like offerings on a shrine. I burst through the door, her name rushing out of my mouth. We collide in a spinning hug, and for those seconds we become a dervish twirling as one body on the gravel.

“Annabeth!” she sings.

“Noe!” I squeal.

And we hurry down the street without breaking contact for a second, as if our bodies have as much to say to each other as we do. We walk, and she tells me about her summer teaching back flips to the ponytailed nine-year-olds of Camp Qualla Hoo Hoo, the counselor intrigues and minor maimings. We cut across the soccer field, and I tell her about my summer scooping ice cream at the Botanical Gardens—the lady off the tour bus who got trapped in a bathroom stall, the boy who got a beesting on his tongue and almost died. We thread our way through the crowded school parking lot and trade rumors about the upcoming year, whether it was true that Mr. Harrison and Ms. Bean were getting married, if they were really putting a frozen-yogurt machine in the cafeteria.

We sit on the bleachers and pull out Noe’s phone to watch the circus videos she wants to show me and listen to the music she’s planning to use for her latest gymnastics routine.

We talk about all the things we’re going to do when we’re eighteen: save up and travel to Paris, get matching dandelion tattoos, open a restaurant where the food is sold by the ounce and eaten with tiny silver spoons.

Her friendship was a jewel I guarded like a dragon, keeping it always in the crook of my hand.

I didn’t know who I would be without the shape of it pressing into my palm, without its cool glitter to light my way.

It was the first day of senior year, and Noe was striding up my driveway.

“Noe!” I called.

“Annabeth!” she screamed.

My outstretched arms found hers, and I was home.

MY SCHOOL, E. O. JAMES, SAT
at an intersection across from a Burger King, an EasyCuts hair salon, and a funeral parlor. There was a girl in my grade whose parents owned the funeral parlor; every year on Career Day, her dad gave the same jokey speech about the perks of being a mortician. I wasn’t sure why they kept bringing him back. By the time we’d graduated college and were ready to consider such career paths, technology would have advanced such that most people would probably be turned into nanopellets and shot into outer space.

The first day of school wasn’t really school, more like a cut-rate carnival that got more exhausting and pointless every year.
In the morning, they made us play team-building games on the soccer fields. The team-building games largely consisted of throwing basketballs at people you despised. Occasionally, you were also supposed to capture a flag or form a human pyramid; I never figured out when or why.

After the team-building games, there was an all-school barbecue where teachers who would stare past you with glazed eyes for the rest of the year smiled and handed you an Oscar Mayer wiener instead.

After the barbecue, there was a motivational speaker, who was invariably a not-quite-famous cyclist who lost a leg to cancer and discovered the true meaning of determination.

The motivational speaker was supposed to get us excited about life, but I always ended up lost in daydreams about having cancer and dying and not having to be myself anymore. Noe loved the motivational speakers and always lined up to get their autograph, and I would hang behind her, lost in fantasy, imagining the cancer spreading through me, which would be so much better than having to clock another seventy years as Annabeth Schultz, Deeply Flawed and Reluctant Human.

It was weird to know that this first day was going to be our last one ever. When Noe and I got to school, the Senior Leaders had set up tables where you were supposed to pick up your name tag and get assigned to a team. They were wearing bright
purple T-shirts with
E. O. James
on the front. The whole point of Senior Leaders was to make the school a friendlier place, but despite their best intentions they ended up terrorizing as many kids as they helped. If you got confused and didn’t go where they pointed, they shouted and blew their whistles in a way that could give you a lifelong case of PTSD.

Noe wasn’t afraid of the Senior Leaders.

“Come on,” she said.

She grabbed my arm and we slipped around a barricade of folding tables and into the quiet cool of the school building. We hurried down the echoey hallway, two thieves in the forbidden fortress.

“Where are we going?” I said, my heart fluttering with the ecstasy of minor mischief.

“Nurse’s office,” said Noe.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to play the heatstroke card,” I said. “The games haven’t even started yet, she’ll never believe you.”

Noe hated being outdoors. I spent as much time in the forest as I could. In the fairy tale of our lives, she would be Rapunzel and I’d be Robin Hood: Noe in her tower, courted by princes, me ranging through the woods with my bow. That she managed to spend entire summers at Camp Qualla Hoo Hoo without getting so much as a sandal tan was an achievement that continued to astound me year after year.

“It’s not for me,” said Noe. “You need to get your health form signed for gymnastics. It’s official business. I’m simply escorting you.”

“That might work better as an excuse if we were actually walking in the
direction
of the nurse’s office,” I said.

“Details, details,” said Noe. “Come on, I want to show you a few things on the beam.”

We came to the gym—where I had known Noe was heading all along—and she compelled the door open with one thrust of her strong, slightly hairy arms. As we entered the empty gym I felt a pleasant shiver, remembering the afternoon last spring when Noe had taken me to talk to the gymnastics coach, Ms. Bomtrauer.

“Annabeth would like to sign up for next year’s team,” Noe had said, thrusting me forward like a hundred-dollar pair of shoes she had snatched out of the ten-cent box at a garage sale. “She’s strong as a horse, she has a stellar physique, and she is going to be phenomenal.”

I am not a leotard person, or a bathing-suit person, or really a single-layer-of-clothing person at all. I like to stay well insulated at all times, in case there is an emergency that requires me to be cold: freak snowstorm, locked in the deep freeze, battle with the Abominable Snowman. But standing in the gym, with Noe’s arm around my shoulder, I found myself nodding and grinning and trying not to bounce, like a turtle
so intoxicated by a songbird’s tales of flight that it forgets it doesn’t have wings.

Now Noe dragged the balance beam away from the wall.

“Up you go!” she commanded.

“It’s too high. I need a helmet.”

“Up up up!”

I mounted the beam clumsily. “What now?” I said.

Noe climbed onto the beam and began to demonstrate some easy moves. I mirrored her as best I could, holding my arms up high and trying not to wobble. I lost my balance a couple of times and had to jump off, but soon I discovered that as long as I focused my eyes on Noe and never looked down, I could stay pretty stable. Noe began to talk.

“So Leigh had a sleepover for all the girls on her soccer team, and her parents ordered all this pizza and Chinese food and they only finished half of it, and in the morning the last two pizzas, twelve fortune cookies, three orders of chow mein, and all the fried rice were gone.”

“What happened to it?” I said, delighted, as always, to receive Noe’s latest report on the lives of our classmates. Although I would never admit it, there was a small, proud part of my heart that believed Noe only bothered being friends with other girls so she would have stories to cackle over with me.

“Megan Bronner ate it,” said Noe.

“How is that even possible? She’s tiny.”

“She puked it all up.”

“Nooooo . . .”

“Yup. Every last bit. Leigh found a fortune floating in the toilet.”

“What did it say?”

Noe twirled on her toes. “God, Annabeth, she didn’t fish it out and
read
it.”

“I would have read it. Now we’ll never know what it said.”

“Great fortune will come on the day you stop barfing. Lucky number 7, 12, 44, 72.”

“Good thing she doesn’t work at the ice-cream shop,” I said. “They’d have to lock up the waffle cones.”

Noe looked me up and down. “Now try lifting your leg,” she said.

“Like this?”

“Yup. Yup. Good. Amazing. Now stop! Hold it!”

“I can’t hold it!”

“Yes you can!”

The morning could have gone on like that forever: Noe and I high up on the beam, our laughter echoing through the empty gym, while the rest of the school played tedious games outside. Our best moments were always like this, I thought to myself: separate, secret, quietly superior. As I lowered my leg and attempted a half turn, I could feel senior year stretching out ahead of us in a glittering ribbon.

“Did you hear about the guy who was stalking Phinnea?” I
started to say, when the gym door creaked open and Ms. Bomtrauer’s voice barked, “Ladies, what are we doing indoors?”

Thanks to Noe’s unsinkable talent when it came to charming teachers, we left the gym with no more than a stern scolding for using the equipment unsupervised, plus some embarrassing cooing over my unbounded potential as a gymnast. (“You should have seen her, Ms. Bomtrauer, she did a perfect arabesque on her first try!”) As we hurried to the nurse’s office, I imagined myself as the girl Noe seemed to think I could be: a graceful Annabeth, ambitious and disciplined, a pony-tailed swan under bright lights. A nice girl, unimpeachable, a girl anyone would like.

For a moment the fantasy intoxicated me. I saw myself on the uneven bars, beloved, adored.

“Are you excited?” Noe said.

I said nothing, but a sheepish grin weaseled its way out from my lips.

“I knew it!” said Noe, slapping her thigh. “You are going to be incredible.”

Noe was the kind of friend who could make you believe, however fleetingly, in the possibility of
incredible.
I clutched her arm close and took a deep breath of her, grateful for the thousandth time that she was mine.

THE NURSE WORE ONE OF THOSE
big, shapeless nurse shirts and flowered pants, and she had gold hoop earrings. The room was a little too warm and the walls were cluttered with faded posters. I sat on the firm, high examination bench and read the slogans:
DARE TO BE DRUG-FREE. EAT THE RAINBOW
.

The nurse winked at me. “I’ll try to make this quick so you don’t miss the barbecue.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t eat meat anyway.”

“Oh yeah?” said the nurse approvingly. “My younger daughter’s vegetarian.” She strapped the blood-pressure thing to my arm and pumped it a few times. “We call my daughter
the rabbit,” she said. “My husband likes to cook big steaks.” She laughed a big, steak-y laugh and ripped off the Velcro armband. “Blood pressure’s good. Now I need you to hop onto the scale.”

I went to the creaky scale, climbed on, and stood perfectly still while she adjusted the metal tabs. There was a water balloon fight going on outside the window. Every year, Principal Beek broke out a bright orange Super Soaker and pretended to be a fun guy for five minutes.

“I’m going to zip through a few questions,” said the nurse, “and we’re done.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Any allergies?” said the nurse.

“No.”

“Asthma?”

“No.”

“Any medications?”

“I’m taking the Pill for acne,” I said.

She gaped at me in mock disbelief. “But your skin is perfect.”

“You should have seen me last year,” I said. “It wasn’t pretty.”

I smiled, remembering the conversation I’d had with Noe on the day I got the pills.

“Ohmigod,” Noe had said, snatching the packet off my desk. “Vanessa Guittard was taking these and she grew a moustache.”

“What?” I’d said.

“It works the same if you take half. The every-day thing is just for people who are too dumb to remember.”

Thanks to Noe’s tip, I now had no zits and no moustache, and I hadn’t gained a hundred pounds either, like another girl Noe knew.

“Any other meds?” said the nurse.

“Nope.”

“All right.”

She scribbled a note on my chart, then picked up my Clearance for Participation in Extracurricular Athletics form, signed her name, and wrote something on the bottom.

“All done?” I said.

“Almost. Which period do you have free on Thursdays?” She took a day planner out of the pocket of her shirt and paged through it.

“Second,” I said. “Why?”

“Our school just got funding for a nutritionist to come in once a week. His name is Bob and he’s wonderful. I’m sending all the vegetarians to talk to him. I’m putting you down for next Thursday, ten a.m.” She said it with the gleefulness of a child who has just learned a new magic trick and is eager to subject it to anyone and everyone she can.

“Vegetarian doesn’t mean anorexic,” I said. “They even have separate entries in the dictionary.”

This was one of Noe’s favorite rants.
Look it up, people! Vegetarian: person who opposes the systematic torture of animals.
Anorexic: person who opposes the systematic eating of food.

The nurse winked at me. “Bob’s lots of fun. He can help you come up with a plan to get more protein and iron. After all, we don’t want you keeling over on the high beam.”

“I get more iron than the average carnivore,” I said, again quoting Noe. “Did you know that spinach has more iron than steak?”

She patted my shoulder. “That’s something you can talk about with Bob. It looks beautiful out there. Enjoy the rest of your day.”