A Sense of the Infinite (21 page)

I THOUGHT THAT STEVEN WOULD BE
shattered by the sight of Noe and Alex holding hands in the hall and studying together in the library. Already, the gym birds were chirping about them like they were the Couple of the Year. Every minute I wasn’t beside Steven, I was worrying about him. But after a few days, he actually seemed happier. There was a spring in his step, and a freshness to the way he clicked open his pencil box to draw. At lunch, he dragged me to a table where Win from my drama class was sitting.

“You two should be friends,” he said. “Win, Annabeth. Annabeth, Win. You should do your one-act play together.”

Win and I exchanged glances and mutually rolled our eyes
as if to say,
Crazy old Steven McNeil
.

“I’m serious,” said Steven. “You’re perfect for each other. You’re both insanely smart, you both love trees. You should write a play together. I demand it.”

“What is this, Steven, your last will and testament?” joked Win.

He said nothing, but put one of his hands on Win’s and one on mine and piled the hands together.

“Be friends,” he said. “Sit together at lunch.”

The cafeteria rattled around us. Sun poured through the window, the weak sun of almost-spring, slung low in the treetops. All I knew was I was happy to see Steven okay.

For the next few days, Steven glowed brighter than ever. He shined his shoes. They glowed too. They looked like Magic 8 Balls. When we passed each other in the hall, he would slip his arm through mine and twirl me around. Or he would be singing a Gershwin song, and he would smile and widen his eyes at me without breaking pace. He didn’t seem like a boy who had just had his heart broken. He seemed like a boy in love. After he’d cried on my shoulder in the bathroom, I’d started to plan a whole consoling afternoon. I had an idea that we would skip art class and drink gin and smoke cigars and ride the SkyTram over the river. That seemed like a good post-breakup thing to do, a good distraction.

But Steven didn’t seem like he needed distraction. His resilience threw me off. I didn’t know how to broach the subject of the breakup with him.

At our newly founded lunch table, he seemed almost manic, piling up the salt and pepper shakers into towers twenty shakers tall. He talked incessantly, comic prattle about books and teachers and food and theater and the tutor his parents had hired to stop him from failing math. He didn’t mention Noe at all. It was like he had forgotten her, or was immune to her.

I couldn’t imagine being immune to Noe.

Even now, several weeks after the incident, I still winced when I passed her in the hall. I still felt a stab in my heart when my eyes fell on one of the ten thousand tokens of her that cluttered my desk and my bedroom walls, or when I overheard other girls making plans to go to Paris, or open funny restaurants together, or get matching tattoos on the day after graduation. It felt like a certain key bone in my skeletal system had been deleted, and I was still learning how to walk without it.

Or maybe I’d been limping all along, and this was just what it felt like to find my stride.

WIN AND I STARTED SMILING AT
each other in the halls, as if we had a shared joke and that joke was the ridiculousness that was Steven. It felt good to have another person to smile at in the hall; with Steven, that made two. I liked it. It wasn’t much, but it anchored me. I started looking forward to it. I started preparing funny expressions for when I passed Win. She started making goofy faces at me, too.

It sort of became our thing. Goofy faces, no words.

Steven caught us doing it once.

“You two,” he said, and he sounded pleased.

I didn’t suspect a thing.

I really didn’t suspect a thing.

I HAD NO IDEA HOW WRAPPED
around the rails Steven was about Noe until one afternoon in art class almost three weeks after he and Noe had broken up. He seemed miraculously intact. Like a friendly universe had granted him a reprieve. I’d seen him campaigning for Pee Sisters in the hall, accompanying this freshman named Kris to the boys’ bathroom, playing matchmaker like crazy. It wasn’t just me and Win. He spent lunch flitting around the cafeteria, introducing everybody he knew to someone they had to meet. It was like he wanted everyone he cared about to be provided for.

That should have been a sign.

IN THE ART MORGUE THAT AFTERNOON,
I was feeling better than I had in a long time. Mr. Lim had given my latest self-portrait a pass. Steven had drawn it for me one day at lunch, and it was pretty good.

“What should I call it?” I’d said when he ripped it out of his sketchbook and passed it to me across the table. “
Portrait of the Artist as a Cheater
?”

“The assignment said
any medium
,” Steven replied. “In this case, your medium happened to be me.”

Steven was wearing a black suit and a black tie. His polished shoes shone under the table. I thought he was dressed that way for something in his drama class. Maybe he was doing
a monologue or a one-act play.

“Good morning, Annabeth,” he said.

“Good morning, Steven.”

“I’d like you to have this,” Steven said. He took out the small red mood journal the school counselor was making him carry around.

“Why?” I said.

I noticed he’d drawn a circle around his pinky finger in blue pen. I didn’t think anything of it. Steven was always writing stuff on his hands.

“Annabeth Schultz,” said Steven. “It’s been a pleasure knowing you.”

He pushed his chair out from the table and stood up.

“Steven?” I said.

He strode to the long counter where the art supplies were kept. Everyone else had their heads down, working on their paintings. Mr. Lim was marking midterms for his human kinetics class. There was a pleasant hum of industry to the art morgue. Outside the windows, cars were splashing by on the main road. The plastic board outside the Burger King said
WHOPPERS 2 X $1.99 CENTS
. The funeral parlor still had a Christmas wreath on its front door. I was thinking how sad it was that nobody had taken it down when I heard a
thwack
and Amy McDougall started to scream.

HE HAD CUT OFF HIS FINGER.
His pinky finger. The one he used to link with Noe’s all the time. It shot across the classroom and landed near the recycle bins. If I wasn’t sitting right near them, I wouldn’t have heard the barely audible tap as it hit the floor.

The art morgue was chaos. Ernestine’s ruled cutting surface had blossomed with comically perfect splatters of blood. Steven calmly produced a white handkerchief from his pocket, which he had apparently brought for the purpose, and pressed it to the bleeding stub. Amy McDougall was shrieking.

Mr. Lim shouted at everyone who wasn’t Steven to leave the classroom. I pushed toward Steven, but Mr. Lim said, “Out!”
and then the principal and security guard showed up and
they
started hustling everyone out of the classroom, too. On my way out, I ducked and fished Steven’s finger out from behind the recycle bins. It had landed in something sticky. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I wrapped it in a few tissues from one of the little packets Mom always stuck in my backpack during cold season and put it in my pocket.

In the hall, everyone was milling around like at halftime during a hockey game.

“Shit, did you see that?” people kept saying. Everyone was crowded around the tiny frosted window in the door, trying to see in. You could hear the principal and Mr. Lim’s voices, talking to Steven. After a minute, there was an ambulance siren outside. Before I could figure out what to do, Mr. Beek came stomping out of the room.

“Get your butts to the library,” he roared.

I hung back. I’ve never been good at talking to teachers, but with Steven’s finger in my pocket I figured it was pretty urgent.

“Library,” he barked. “Move it along.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Move it along, Ms. Schultz,” he said. “Steven will be fine.”

“Um,” I said. “But I need to give his—”

The doors at the end of the hallway burst open and some ambulance people walked in. Mr. Beek clapped his hands.

“Anyone NOT signed in at the library within the next ten
seconds will get to spend their next ten lunch periods in my office.”

“I have his finger,” I said. “What should I do with it?”

“Go to the library,” he said. “Mr. Ternary will give you instructions for the rest of the period.”

“No, but—”

I could tell he wasn’t listening. But what was I supposed to do? Everything was confusion. Everyone started rushing for the library and somehow I got pulled along. I had a vague idea I would tell the librarian about Steven’s finger, but the library was confusion too, with everyone crowding around the table to sign in. I sat in a chair by the newspapers and waited for the line to die down, but I started reading
King Lear
, and the bell was ringing for next period, and I had a midterm in that class and couldn’t be late, and somehow I forgot Steven’s finger until I was halfway home and put my hands in my pockets to warm them up and felt it there in its bundle of tissue.

I ran the rest of the way home and called Steven’s house.

Darla answered the phone.

“It’s Annabeth,” I said. “I have Steven’s finger.”

You would be surprised how good some people are at swearing.

IT TURNS OUT IT WAS TOO
late to save Steven’s finger. I guess you’re supposed to put it on ice right away. By the time I called Steven’s house, the finger was gray and dead and waxy like a candle stub.

To say that it felt weird to have Steven McNeil’s dismembered finger in my pocket would be the understatement of the year.

I felt guilty about the finger. I could tell Steven’s parents were upset. They tried not to show it, but questions kept popping out.

“You had it in your pocket for how long?” “You went to class with it?” “The principal told you to take it to the
library
?”

Steven’s house had stables out back, and a three-car garage. I hadn’t realized Steven’s family was that rich. I wondered why he went to E. O. James instead of the private school, Forest Oaks, where the kids wear blue blazers with gold buttons up the front and play field hockey instead of normal sports like basketball.

Steven was in his bedroom, which I located only with detailed directions from Darla. When I went in, he was lying on his bed. He wasn’t listening to music or anything, just lying there with a scowl on his face, still in his suit, hell, still in his shiny shoes. His right hand was bandaged.

“I’m sorry,” I burst out. “I should have taken your finger to the nurse’s office.”

“Fuck that finger,” said Steven. “I never want to see it again.”

I sat on the edge of his bed. It had a nice bedspread with matching pillows. It looked like someone other than Steven cleaned his room. There was an acceptance letter from NYU on his desk. I realized that even though he was lying down, Steven’s body was rigid, the same as if he were standing. I could feel the tension in his muscles through the mattress. A cat padded into the room, looked around disdainfully, and padded out again.

“She won’t even look at me,” said Steven.

“I know,” I said quietly. “She won’t look at me either.”

Quiet, quiet. Two rigid people on a bed. I reached over and touched the place where Steven’s finger used to be.

“HE’S BETTER OFF WITHOUT HER,” WIN
said, shoving an armful of books into her locker. “Steven needs to kiss a few boys before he decides to nest for life with a girl like Noe. Or any girl, really. Or any boy.”

“I know,” I said. “Once he gets away from his parents, he’s going to explode with pent-up brilliance. I wish I was going to be there to see it. I don’t think he’s even going to realize how badly he was hurting until he goes to New York and experiences something different.”

“I think a lot of people are going to realize that once they leave here,” Win said.

LATER THAT DAY I OVERHEARD NOE
conferring with Ms. Bomtrauer by the water fountains. It turned out she was going to assistant coach the E. O. James gym team next year while she was going to Gailer.

Noe stopped carrying around
Foucault’s Pendulum
. Now the book under her arm was a catalog of gymnastics equipment. In English she leafed through it with a highlighter, swiping in yellow the item numbers of mats and trampolines and bar equipment. Funding had come through for new leotards: at lunch, the gym birds huddled around a glossy spread of styles to choose from. Did they want a sequined starburst across the breasts, or a sporty flash up each side of the rib cage? I strained
my ears to hear Noe’s voice in spite of myself, listening to the authoritative way she wielded her new vocabulary of V-necks and bias cuts and sparkle counts.

As I listened to her holding forth on pricing and sizing, a spooky thing danced on the crown of my skull. I thought of her trading air kisses with Darla at the Java Bean and putting girls through their paces at the crumbling YMCA. Buying hair gel at the Walmart, watching circus videos in her bedroom, arranging the dried flowers on her dresser.

Her voice trailed after me all the way out of the cafeteria, like a song you can’t get out of your head, a scent you’re surprised to find still lingering on your clothes.

You’d be amazed who leaves and who doesn’t, at the end of the day.

STEVEN WASN’T IN SCHOOL THE NEXT
day, or the next. His spot next to mine in the art morgue was empty. The school had run out of art supplies, so we were down to the cheapest possible art form: that old standby, the collage.

I worked on my collage in silence, cutting pictures out of magazines and dutifully gluing them to the page. My collage looked like everyone else’s. Maybe the assignment would have worked better if we weren’t all cutting things out from the same stack of magazines. Or maybe that was the point: we were all working from the same material, even if we didn’t acknowledge it, even if we could trick ourselves into thinking we were so
different from one another by holding the scissors differently or getting creative with the layout of the words and images on the page.

Win and I sat together at lunch. Dominic and Kris sat with us too. Sometimes Margot and Eliza joined us and sometimes they didn’t. Steven had succeeded in that regard: suddenly, we were our own little friend group. It was actually really nice. If I hadn’t been so sad about Steven, it would have been even nicer. I still felt something inside me shrink when I walked past Noe or one of the girls from the gym team, but now at least I had people to be with, and I wasn’t completely alone.

“Have you heard anything from Steven?” Win said.

That surprised me. I always assumed everyone was closer with everyone else than I was, but in this case Win thought I was the closer friend, and as I started to talk about Steven I realized it was true.

I am close with Steven
, I thought to myself. It was a strange thought. It was strange to think of myself as being close with someone who wasn’t Noe. I didn’t know it was possible to add people to your repertoire of closeness. I don’t know why I thought that; I just did.

“Yeah,” I said, and I told Win some of what I knew.

It felt strange to be the person who knew things, instead of the person who had to find them out by asking other people. It
meant that someone trusted me. Did that mean that Noe had never trusted me?

I slipped the thought into my pocket with all the others that had been collecting there that year.