A Sense of the Infinite (9 page)

I APOLOGIZED TO MOM.

I really cannot stand to see her hurting because of something I said or did.

We spent her birthday going for a hike in the forest, like we used to do all the time when I was younger. It had rained the night before, and the woods smelled fresh and wet and cold.

Later, Uncle Dylan and Aunt Monique and Nan came over and we sat in the kitchen eating a strawberry angel food cake Nan had made. “Leslie says you’re thinking about visiting Ava at Northern,” Uncle Dylan said. “She’d love to see you.”

My uncle Dylan has a ginger mustache and grayish-blue eyes. He used to play on the E. O. James hockey team, and now
he has a construction business. My aunt Monique grew up in Chippewa, and now she is a kindergarten teacher. When I was little, I spent a lot of time at their house, playing with my cousins Ava and Max and watching movies on their big TV. I had my own bed there, and the same number of presents at Christmas. Uncle Dylan came to my soccer games and school recitals with Mom so I wouldn’t have a smaller audience representation than the other kids.

I love Uncle Dylan. In some ways, it was harder to let him down than Mom.

“I’ll pay for the bus ticket,” Uncle Dylan said. “How about that?”

I nod-shrugged. My cousin Max had sold me his old Honda last summer, but it was unreliable at the best of times and even I wasn’t stubborn enough to insist on driving it all the way to Northern alone.

Uncle Dylan ruffled my hair. “Thattagirl.”

I was on the couch after dinner, watching TV with a cup of tea, when I overheard Mom and Nan whispering in the kitchen.

“Leslie, she’s too skinny.”

“She’s tall, Ma.”

“You weren’t skinny like that when you were seventeen.”

“Scott was.”

A horrible silence. Evil spirits invoked. Moments later,
the industrious clanging of pots and pans, as if to drive them away. Nan came out to the living room to say good-bye, and we talked for a few minutes, stupid stuff about school and gymnastics and the TV show I was watching. Mom stayed in the kitchen, putting away the rest of the cake.

Upstairs, later, I stepped onto the old pink scale in the bathroom. I was light as a feather but heavier, heavier, heavier than the sea.

I WOKE UP IN THE HOLE.

This happened sometimes.

The trapdoor swung open and there was nothing I could do.

Someone had sprayed fake snow on the windows at the Burger King. The funeral parlor had a wreath of bloodred holly on its door. The cafeteria at school was still hung with fake cobwebs. Due to budget cuts it was doubling as snow.

In Business Math I was a zombie.

In Art I stared at Steven’s pencil as it wound its way around the page.

In gymnastics I couldn’t stand the harsh fluorescent lights or the chirping voices of the girls who gossiped as they did their
stretches and ran through their moves on the beam. Ms. Bomtrauer was on my case about my floor routine. I found myself clamping my teeth in irritation at every reminder to point my toes or lift my chin up when I finished a round-off.

“What are you doing?” Noe said, surprising me by the bench where our backpacks were piled.

“I’m taking a break,” I said.

“Bullshit,” said Noe. “Back to the mat.”

Her “team captain” mode was not without irony, but the briskness still grated. I wasn’t used to Noe treating me like another distractable girl who needed managing, instead of the best friend that I was. I followed her across the gym. On the floor, I went through my moves halfheartedly. Since overhearing Mom and Nan in the kitchen, I’d felt haunted and shaken. That morning at breakfast, Mom had pushed a bottle of vitamin pills at me.

“Nan wants you to take these,” she’d said.

The vitamin pill had stuck in my throat. It took three glasses of water to push it all the way down. All morning it seemed to dig inside me like a seed, thrusting little roots all through my stomach, sucking up my energy. By lunchtime, it felt like a vine had grown inside me, and an enormous black fruit, cold and bulbous, feeding off me to make itself grow.

As I planted my hands and thrust my legs into the air, I felt a spot of pain where the vitamin pill was still digging. Noe
watched me, hands on perfectly rounded hips.

“Shoulders back,” Noe said. “Put some effort into it. And take that sweater off.”

“I’m cold.”

Did I look like him? The thought appalled me. A sweater wasn’t enough to hide under. A cave would be the best.

“You’re not going to be able to wear a sweater at our gym meets,” said Noe, “so you’d better get used to it.”

“They should insulate these things,” I grumbled.

After practice, I helped Noe push the beam and vault against the back wall and pile the mats into a neat stack. She chattered the whole time, analyzing this girl’s beam routine and that girl’s troubles with handstands.

“Alicia Morrow was driving me crazy. The girl couldn’t be any clumsier on vault if she was a pack mule.”

I half listened, making appropriate noises of shock, disapproval, and sympathy.

“Are you okay?” Noe said. “You’re so spacey today.”

“I’m just tired,” I said.

I wondered what it would be like to be a person who felt strong and even every day, who didn’t fall into these craters where everything was too bright.

Noe lifted the last mat onto the pile with a grunt. “You need to get that round-off nailed in time for the meet,” she said.

As we walked out of the gym, Noe continued her gym babble. Ms. Bomtrauer had ordered a new vault to replace the one that got damaged in the flood. Kaylee Ito couldn’t tell the difference between a split leap and a stag, despite constant coaching. Suddenly, everything about Noe seemed irritating to me. The way she cut her food into tiny pieces that were never allowed to touch. The way she bought new binders every year instead of reusing the old ones. The way she sucked up to teachers and coaches and choir directors, fawning over them and insisting that everyone around her do the same. The way she clucked over the gymnastics girls like a mother hen, braiding hair and correcting posture and secretly criticizing everyone behind their backs. The way she waited for Steven after class, claiming him like a child she was picking up from nursery school. The way she showered you with attention when it was convenient for her, only to withdraw it when you needed it the most.

Part of being in the hole was that things I normally didn’t mind became unbearable to me.

“Can we not talk about gymnastics?” I burst out.

“If you didn’t want to work, you shouldn’t have joined the team,” clucked Noe. “It’s not a social club.”

She was so serious since the Gym Expo, all
discipline
and
commitment
and
sports nutrition
and
electrolytes
. She’d started carrying around this textbook called
The Science of Gymnastics
that Sphinx had apparently recommended, and talking about majoring in kinesiology.

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s not about that.”

“Then what is it about?”

I had promised myself I would not bring it up, but the angst that was swarming inside me needed an outlet.

“I thought we were going to Northern together,” I exploded. “I thought we were going to be roommates.”

It was humiliating to say it out loud, like admitting to having some creepy disease. I could see my utter dependence on her showing through like a badly concealed case of acne. For the second time within the hour, I wished I could do the world a favor and crawl into a cave. That way everyone would be rid of me—Noe, my mom, maybe even myself.

“Tell me more,” said Noe in a reasonable voice.

I recognized this tactic from the last time I’d aired this kind of grievance. Noe’s strategy when it came to arguments was to let you rant and babble until you felt so shrill and hysterical you willingly retracted whatever charges you had brought against her. Still, I fell for it every time.

“We’ve been planning it forever. We even named our freaking goldfish. And then you come back from the gym thing and announce you’re going to Gailer, and you don’t even ask how I
feel
.”

We came to the bench in front of the flagpole but didn’t
sit down. The wretchedness of last night was surging through me. Industrious clanging of pots and pans. I opened my mouth again. “I know you’re going to say that plans change and you never promised anything, but it’s more than that. Sometimes I feel like our friendship is this leaky boat, but nobody’s allowed to admit the boat is leaking. We just sit there with our feet getting wet, but I can’t say,
Hey, my feet are wet
, because you’ll throw me overboard.”

“Nobody’s throwing you overboard,” said Noe calmly. “You’re having a bad day.”

“I thought we were going to be roommates,” I said, my voice taking on a panicked edge as it hit me that I was going to have to room with a total stranger.

Noe put her hands on my shoulders. “Plans change, my dear. I didn’t know what I wanted back then.”

“You can do gymnastics at Northern, too,” I said.

“It’s not just gymnastics. I don’t
want
to go to a tiny school in the middle of nowhere. I don’t care about the hiking trails and the canoe club, or whatever. I want to be somewhere with shoe stores. We’re not married, Annabeth. You’re being insane.” Steven appeared fresh from the theater. “Ladies,” he said.

“Steveous!” Noe exclaimed and ran to embrace him, her laughter a pointed cue that the conversation was over.

I waited by the flagpole while they went through their several-times-daily ritual of kisses and whispers, a process that
had grown considerably more elaborate since their declarations on Halloween night. Angry thoughts were still running through my head. I wondered what Steven would think if he knew what Noe had said about his best friend, Dominic, after they’d run into him at the Pita Pit: “Oh my God, Annabeth, it was horrible. He was, like, this creepy little mole person. He came and stood right by our table and said, ‘So, Noe, what are your intentions with Steven?’ in this annoying theater voice, and then Steven got all mad when I didn’t make room for him to sit with us.”

I’d had a class with Dominic last year. He was probably the shyest person I’d ever met. It was cruel of Noe to call him a creepy little mole, just plain cruel.

The skinny tree the school planted on Earth Day last year was shivering in the wind, its leaves dried up into tiny yellow curls like fingernails.

“Annabeth,” Steven called. “You look like you’re going to cry.”

“She’s having a bad day,” Noe said, throwing a consoling arm around my shoulder.

“Really?” said Steven. “What happened?”

“Gymnastics problems,” I said. “Ms. Bomtrauer is trying to kill me.”

“I would be concerned about that too,” said Steven. “Do you check the uneven bars every time you get up there? It would all
look like an accident . . .”

I let out a small moan, remembering my frustration as Ms. Bomtrauer made me try the impossible moves again and again and again while the sleeker, better-coordinated girls looked on.

“Poor Bethy,” Noe cooed.

“It’s okay,” I said, letting myself be hugged, letting the familiar ocean of Noe restore me. The bad moment throbbed and ebbed and faded away, like a headache successfully quashed by a tab of aspirin.

We walked across the parking lot together, our jackets zipped up against the cold.

“If we do find your dead body squashed beneath a floor mat, we’ll know who did it,” Steven said.

THANKSGIVING WAS DUMB, AS ALWAYS.
Noe went to her grandparents’ place, then joined Steven at some fancy ski resort with his family. She called me gushing about all the intense conversations she and Steven had been having, and about the breakfast room at the ski lodge where you could pour your own espresso shots from a machine. I went tobogganing with my cousin Max and his friends and hung around the house feeling bored.

“You should call Carly Ocean one of these days,” Mom said on Saturday morning, patting my hand.

As if I would go crawling to dumpy, pious Carly Ocean from my old elementary school, Carly Ocean who I never wanted to
hang out with, ever, but who called me every break, persistent as a bloodhound.

“Carly Ocean’s not my friend,” I said.

But that same afternoon, Carly called and Mom guilted me into hanging out with her. We went to this stupid place for hot chocolate, and Carly gave me a pair of sparkly socks with a candy cane taped to the wrapping paper, as if we were still in fourth grade. Afterward, Carly wanted to go to a teen dance at the Lions Club. We picked up her friend Renata, a short girl with her hair in tiny braids. Carly and Renata went to the Catholic high school, St. Barnabas. Everything about Carly was pale and dull and slow. In my head, I could hear Noe saying,
What a cow.
When we got to the dance, there were some kids smoking a joint in the parking lot, and Carly and Renata made this wide circle to avoid walking near them.

“Well,
that’s
illegal,” Carly huffed.

I had a mean desire to tell her about Oliver just to see the look on her face, but I knew she’d tell her mom, and it wasn’t worth the trouble.

I tried to dance with them, but I couldn’t stand it. Carly smelled like eggs. She and her friend kept talking about the little kids they babysat, or asking me questions like was it true that a bunch of kids from E. O. James had gotten caught doing E, and acting like they felt sorry for me that I went to such a “bad” school.

I couldn’t stand Carly’s eggy sweat and Renata’s braying giggle. They were asking me about boys at E. O. James when I spotted two of my coworkers from the ice-cream shop, Billie and Phinnea, across the gym. I left Carly and Renata behind and caught up with them.

“Hey, girl,” shouted Phinnea over the music. “You look hot.”

They pulled me into their crowd. It was a bunch of kids who work in the parks. I danced with them, and went to the bathroom with them to drink some flavored vodka that Billie had brought and take photos of the three of us on Phinnea’s pink cell phone.

“Ice-cream girlzzzzz,” said Billie, and the cell phone made a picture-taking sound. We drank another sip of vodka and Billie adjusted the pads in her bra. We went back out, and danced some more, and lip-synched along with the songs. We did silly dances and shouted ourselves hoarse.

Some of the SkyTram boys were there, and I ended up dancing with one of them. We shouted a few things at each other—name, school—but I couldn’t really hear what the boy said and I don’t think he heard me either.

Carly and Renata were somewhere, probably watching. The boy spun me around and our mouths met with a bump, more collision than kiss.

A panicky sorrow flapped in my chest. For some reason, I started thinking about the orchids nodding in the moonlight
on the night of the homecoming dance, and the feeling of my bare feet in the spilled potting soil. I wanted to be there right now, in the quiet garden, or the forest. I hated the flashing lights and noise inside the dance. Why couldn’t the whole world be like the wild place near the train tracks, soft and lush and humming? Why did everything people liked have to be so harsh and loud and plastic?

I broke away from the boy. “I have to go,” I said.

I pushed into the crowd without waiting for his response. From the corner of my eye, I saw him cast about in confusion.
The forest
, I thought to myself. The only good place left was the forest. Why couldn’t Noe love what I loved, for once? Why couldn’t she see?

Renata found me in the bathroom. “Carly is crying because she’s had really bad depression all year and she says you’re her oldest friend.”

I was ashamed. If I was the closest thing Carly had to a friend, her life had to be pretty dire. “I’ll go find her,” I mumbled.

I was friendly and attentive to Carly on the car ride home, but that almost made it worse. She sniffed and started telling me a long story about how all the boys at her school made fun of her because of how she smelled.

“They’re just dumb,” I said, but she
did
smell like eggs, and
I felt bad for lying and also hypocritical, because her eggy smell was part of what had driven me away.

“You got so skinny since we graduated from Wilson,” Carly said.

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

Carly’s beady eyes bored into me. “Margot Dilforth thinks you’re anorexic. You and that gymnastics girl.”

Margot Dilforth was one of the other kids from Wilson who went to E. O. James for high school. She’d always been a conspiracy theorist, reporting with wide-eyed earnestness about the kids she was “sure” were fighting or smoking pot or breaking up with one another.

“Oh, really,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Margot says she caught her throwing up in the bathroom.”

“Uh-huh.”

I didn’t know why I was acting like that, all superior. Margot probably
had
caught Noe in one of her emergency purges. It was true, I thought to myself, but not in the way Carly thought. Noe was different. Noe was Noe.
Bulimics eat an entire chocolate cake and puke it up. I’m just trying to get this dead animal out of my body, if that’s okay with you
. Even after all the messiness with our roommate plans, it still felt good to defend Noe, to be Annabeth, fiercely loyal one, the friend who understood.

“You
did
get skinnier,” Carly said.

I was grateful, for the ten thousandth time that night, that I
didn’t have to see Carly Ocean more than once or twice a year.

At home, I went straight to my room. My school photo from a couple of years ago caught my eye. Annabeth in eighth grade. Carly was right. My face was rounder then. I stared at the photo. I tapped my finger against it, as if the eighth-grade Annabeth were trapped in there and could come back out.

Something began to ache inside me. I felt bad for the eighth-grade Annabeth. If she knew what was coming, she would have stayed in that photo forever.

My phone buzzed. Text from Phinnea.

u ok? bryan rlly likes you, and he’s all worried that you left because you were mad at him.

I explained about Carly Ocean.
my friend was crying, i had to go.

The texting wore me out. I turned off my phone. Mom knocked on my door in her pajamas, all “How was the dance?” I tipped the eighth-grade photo down before she noticed it.

“Just shoot me,” I said.