“You’re going to have so much fun with Ava. She’s changed so much since she went away. Maybe she can give you some advice about which classes to take.”
She plucked a pair of socks out of my dresser and stuffed it cheerfully into my bag.
I almost told her then, but I didn’t.
48
WHEN MOM WENT TO BED, I walked to the end of our block and called Ava.
It was snowing. Flakes landed on my nose while I waited for her to pick up.
She owed me a favor, I thought to myself. If it came down to it, I could blackmail her into taking me. If Mom or Nan or Uncle Dylan found out that Ava had told me about my dad, they would never forgive her, even though she was crazy when she did it. Even though the first thing she did when she stopped being crazy was write me a letter apologizing, a letter I still had buried in my dresser drawer.
The phone rang and rang. Nine weeks, I thought to myself. The internet said nine weeks was an okay time to do it. At least I wasn’t too late. At least I wasn’t in denial for months, like Mom was, or paralyzed by distress. At least I had Ava to call, and money from my ice-cream job, and a bus ticket to a town far away. I was better off than a lot of people. There were so many ways it could have been worse.
In case of emergency, says Wilda McClure in How to Survive in the Woods, enumerate your advantages.
I stood in the snow and enumerated, and on the eighth ring Ava picked up the phone.
49
“HEY, LADY,” SHE SAID.
I swallowed hard. “Hey,” I said.
“Are you still coming tomorrow?”
Her voice was cheerful. It was hard to get used to the new Ava. Sometimes the change still startled me. I went through a real shitty time in high school and I’m sorry I inflicted that shittiness on you, she’d written in her letter. I think in some ways I was jealous because everyone loved you so much, and I felt like I came second to you and Max. I’m sorry about your dad and sorry you had to find out in such a horrible way. If you ever want to talk about it, I’m here, even though I understand if you don’t like me very much anymore.
I shivered. The truth was, I never wanted to talk about it. Not with Mom, not with Ava, not with anyone. It was too disgusting. It made my skin creep. And even though Ava had taken back some of the terrible things she had said, in my worst moments I still felt like an interloper.
Ava was waiting for me to answer.
My voice trembled. “Yeah.”
Snowflakes were falling around me in dense flurries. The houses on the street were quiet and dark.
“What’s wrong?” Ava said.
I didn’t answer.
“Annabeth,” she said more sternly, “what’s wrong?”
“I need a favor,” I said.
50
THE NEXT DAY, MOM DROVE ME to the Greyhound station to catch the bus to Maple Bay. It had snowed all night, and the fire hydrants wore fat white hats. Parked cars had sheets of snow draped over their windshields. They looked like hospital patients.
“Did you remember your toothbrush?” Mom said. She acted happy on the drive, but I could tell she was as nervous as I was. She hugged me and I tensed involuntarily, afraid she would detect my still-undetectable condition through both our snow coats.
“Give Pauline a hug for me,” said Mom. “Ava too.”
“I will.”
She gave me a twenty-dollar bill for no apparent reason and kissed me on the cheek. “Love you, Annabean. Have fun up there.”
“Love you too.”
51
THE BUS RIDE TO MAPLE BAY had a million stops. Every bus station had the same crumbly look as all the others, a concrete lip where people waited with their overstuffed bags, dirty yellow lights. Every highway exit had the same fast-food restaurants and gas stations. I slumped against the window and tried to pick out a tree or plant, some green thing my heart could curl its tendrils around and try to befriend. Why had we done this? I thought to myself. If nobody loved it, why? It was insane to build places that nobody loved. It was insane to cover all that was green and tender with parking lots and garbage bins.
I wondered if anyone else felt that way, or if I was just a freak. As the bus huffed and belched and pulled back onto the highway, a loneliness overcame me that was worse than anything I’d felt all year.
Midway through the morning, Noe texted me.
are you still mad at me?
i didn’t realize you thought i was promising to go with you.
i thought we were just talking and having fun.
It was so like Noe to wait until a time when we wouldn’t see each other for several days to start a dialogue like this.
i don’t know, I texted back.
it was the way you came back from the gym expo
and didn’t even bother to talk to me
like i should just adapt to your plans
A few seconds later, a string of texts from Noe came back.
i don’t want you to adapt to my plans
you should always do what you want, k?
you’re so incredible and smart
you don’t need me to tell you what to do
I stared at my phone. I didn’t have the energy to contradict her or call out all the truths she wasn’t acknowledging. It was easier to snuggle into the familiar ritual of flattery and reconciliation; easier to be lovable Annabeth, pliant and understanding, than to let out a more disruptive version of myself. I thought of the sunny afternoon when I told her about Oliver, and tears pricked at my eyes.
i know, I typed back.
i just got scared
i don’t want to lose you
you won’t lose me
we’ll visit all the time
i’ll come stay in your dorm room
and you’ll come home on breaks
: )
steven says you’re fascinating, btw
we talked about you for like an hour
aww
he was all, “she’s an undercover badass!”
and i was like, “i know!”
you guys are the best
oh
bus is stopping
have to pee
talk soon
talk soon
In a McDonald’s bathroom noisy with flushing toilets and keening hand dryers, I splashed cold water on my face, shook out my stale ponytail, finger-combed my hair. Beside me, enterprising women were brushing their teeth, putting on lipstick, taking swipes at their armpits with deodorant sticks.
“You done with the sink?” a woman said, elbowing in beside me and planting her enormous purse on the water-spotted countertop.
“Yeah, sorry,” I stuttered. I wished I could feel as confident as her. Swing my purse around. Take out a can of perfume and spray it at myself with such gusto that anyone in a six-foot blast radius must duck or be scented with Eau de Sex Sugar.
I trudged back to the empty bus, climbed on, and rummaged in the overhead bin for How to Survive. The seats with their detritus of squashed sweaters and half-drunk soda bottles looked like the little shrines people make at gravestones; plastic flowers gone crooked and leaky from wind and rain.
Our next rest stop had a mini grocery. I circled around the aisles, picking things up, inspecting them, and mentally disqualifying them. Everything was too expensive: two dollars for a flimsy little Oats ’n Honey bar that wouldn’t fill me up, a dollar twenty-five for a waxy, red, poisonous-looking apple, three dollars for something called a Yogurt Parfait, which was a plastic cup with white stuff at the bottom, then purplish jelly, then some oaty stuff that was supposed to be granola but surely couldn’t be. I could hear Noe’s voice inside my head, reading the ingredients lists out loud. Gelatin, delicious. Chocolate milk? You might as well drink a cup of corn syrup.
I circled for ten minutes, deliberating, half swooning under the too-bright fluorescent lights. All around me, people were grabbing things off the racks and buying them, filling paper cups with soft drinks from the machines against one wa
ll, retrieving sunburned-looking hot dogs from the heated glass display case on the counter. I had that terrible feeling like in musical chairs, when the music stops and everyone else has gone for their chair and you run around the circle in a panic and you just can’t find one.
Finally I spied some discount cinnamon rolls, on special two for ninety-nine cents.
Two cinnamon rolls for ninety-nine cents. It sounded pretty Special to me. It wouldn’t pass the Noe test, but I was getting desperate. I took them back to the bus and ate them one after the other, unpeeling the sticky spirals until I got to the nutty place at the middle. When I was finished my hands were covered in sugar goo. I crumpled up the plastic wrap they had come in and tucked it into the seat pocket in front of me. The bus rumbled and bounced over the highway. A few minutes later I was not feeling good.
“Excuse me,” I said to the woman sitting next to me. “I have to get out.”
She grunted and moved her legs grudgingly. I clambered over them and staggered down the aisle to the very back of the bus, where there was a tiny bathroom. Before the flimsy door shut behind me, two very Special cinnamon buns had curdled into poison inside me.
I am a skinny person. There is not room in my stomach for so much burning slop. But still it came surging up my throat, retch retch retch, until I was dizzy, seeing spots, and had to grab at the grubby stall walls for balance.
I rinsed my mouth at the dirty sink. I was pretty sure the whole bus had heard me heaving. Back in my row, the woman who was sitting next to me had changed seats—so much the better.
I sat down carefully and took a sip of water from the bottle Mom had made me bring. I felt so nauseous from the shuddering and the cinnamon buns and from the thought, urgent and terrifying, that things at the clinic would not work out (the river would rise! the horse would stumble! a log would fall across the road!) and I would be stuck with a drooling, screaming Oliver-baby I did not want and could not love. I stuck my earbuds into my ears and played The Velvet Underground, but I kept thinking about everything that could go wrong.
I must have looked like I was crying or something. An old woman bundled up in a bright pink snowsuit moved herself across the aisle to sit beside me.
“Where are you headed, honey?”
I grappled with the earbuds, collected myself, and smiled at her. “Maple Bay.”
“Is that home?”
I shook my head. “I’m supposed to go on a tour of Northern University.”
“You look too young to be going to university.”
“I’m seventeen.”
“Where’s home for you?”
I named my town.
“Oh, I love it there. The Botanical Gardens.”
The old lady had violet eye shadow and violet nail polish to match. I imagined her house. It would have an upright piano and a basket full of magazines and a mischievous poodle that barked at the mailman.
“You’ve been to the Gardens?” I said. “I work at the ice-cream shop in the summer.”
“You do?” she said. “How lovely.”
The bus rolled over a pothole. I felt my throat rise, and made a grab for the paper barf bag in the seat pocket. The old lady patted my shoulder sympathetically.
“Was that you throwing up in the bathroom?” she said.
I cringed. “Sorry,” I said. “I know it’s gross.”
“Would you like a ginger pill? I get sick on buses too.”
She dug a small bottle out of her purse and held it out to me. I shook my head. “It won’t help.”
“It’s good for all kinds of motion sickness.”
“It’s not that kind of sickness,” I said. “It’ll be over soon.”
I don’t know why I said it like that, so obvious. I guess I was hoping the old lady would turn out to be a magic spirit friend who would give me wise advice and send me off with a talisman, an eagle feather or a mantra to repeat in my darkest hour. Everyone deserves a second chance, honey cakes. Be strong.
Rumble rumble rumble, went the bus. The old lady dug in her purse again and pulled out a religious tract. In a high, quavering voice she began to read out loud.
“Lord, drive out the forces of Satan—”
I popped up from my seat, grabbed my backpack, and fled to the back of the bus.
“Was that old lady reading Scripture at you?” said the heavily mascaraed twentysomething girl I wedged myself next to. She was wearing a ripped black T-shirt and had a backpack shaped like a teddy bear.
I nodded.
She popped her gum. “Crazy bitch.”
52
THERE WERE TREES OUTSIDE THE WINDOW now. I wondered when that had happened. They were standing thick and dense on either side of the road. The bus began to climb a hill, and suddenly the trees dropped away to reveal a view of low mountains with forests stretching as far as I could see. My breath stopped, and I craned my neck to see better, as if I could get closer to that view, climb into it and have it belong to me.
So this is what Mom was talking about, I thought. This is what she wanted me to feel. A tug of belonging. A sense of the infinite.
I put my head against the window and sobbed.
53
WHEN THE BUS GOT INTO MAPLE Bay, Ava was waiting for me at the station. She was wearing a green velvet coat and an orange knitted cap. Her hair was dyed blue and her eyes were their regular color. When I walked up to her with my bag, she pulled me into a hug whose ferocity surprised me.
“Your mom is going to kill me,” she said.
54
AVA’S DORM WAS ACTUALLY AN OLD brick house on the west side of campus. It had six bedrooms, a kitchen, and a wood-paneled study room like the library in Clue. The kitchen had a bookshelf built into the wall. I looked at the books while Ava made tea. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Waiting for Godot, 50 Short Plays, The Actor Prepares. I watched the self-assured way Ava moved around the kitchen, pawing through the cupboard for clean mugs and retrieving a crusty jar of honey from some hiding place under the counter.
“Besides certain dickheads in Alaska,” said Ava, “how’s life?”
“Fine,” I said. “Mom’s good. Nan’s good. I’m on the gymnastics team.”
Even though Ava had reformed, I still felt shy around her. The fact that she was a Good Witch now instead of a Bad Witch hardly mattered; any way you sliced it, change was still uncomfortable.
“Where’s your friend?” said Ava. “When I saw you in the summer, your mom said you guys were planning to drive up here together.”
“She’s touring Gailer College.”
Ava made an I knew it face. “She seemed like the Gailer type.”
I’d forgotten that Ava had met Noe briefly, at my house. “I’m applying there too,” I said stoutly, as if to defend Noe from whatever the Gailer type implied. “Everybody is. The only reason I even came up here was because Mom made me.”
It was weird to see Ava so bright and capable. Uncle Dylan was right. She’d really come into her own at Northern. The darkness that had been suffocating her before had dissipated, like a plant that only seemed to be dying until you shook out its roots and planted it in a deeper hole. Ava didn’t come back to our town much anymore, even for Christmases and Thanksgivings. The avoidance was definitely intentional. Some people fought tooth and nail to keep their old life alive when they went away, but as far as I knew Ava never talked to her high school friends, never came home on college breaks to work her old summer job and go to parties with people she’d known since she was a kid.
I couldn’t tell if it was better to be a person who held on or a person who let go. Maybe it was less about better and worse, and more about which thing you needed to do in order for your plant to grow.
Ava handed me a chipped mug that was shaped like a mushroom. It had some green flecks inside it that must be the tea. Before that, I’d only ever had Lipton tea in bags with a string and a tag. When I sipped the mushroom mug, the green flecks stuck to my teeth.
“I don’t know what I wou
ld have done if I hadn’t gotten out of there,” Ava said. “Probably killed myself.”
“Why?”
“Sit by the railroad tracks one day and think about it,” Ava said.
I had spent plenty of days by the railroad tracks.
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
The grass there is bleached to pale white straw, and crickets jump past your legs like popcorn kernels zinging off a hot pan. When the trains come by they huff and chug and clang your brain to noisy oblivion. Afterward you can follow the tracks to a dusty grove where kids make jumps for their dirt bikes and hobos leave behind nests of broken glass.
“Mom and Nan and Uncle Dylan seem to like it okay,” I said.
“They all left and went back. That’s different. Your mom really wants you to come here,” said Ava. “And you’re Nature Girl. Come on. There’re a million acres of national park fifteen minutes away.”
Are you a Noe? she seemed to be saying, or an Ava? Are you going to hold on to what you already have, or start from scratch?
I gazed into my mug. The green flecks were swirling around in the tea like the snow inside a snow globe.
“I just don’t know yet,” I said, and set it down.
55
I WAS HOPING AVA AND I would go to bed right away so we wouldn’t have to talk anymore, but Ava’s roommates started bubbling in and soon it was impossible to escape.
Ava’s roommates were different from anyone I knew from back home. I couldn’t keep their names straight. Girls in thick glasses and tight sweaters and dresses rescued from the costume department thrift sale, they made tea and sat on the counter and picked at the runs in their stockings.
“What’s your name?” they asked me.
“Annabeth.”
“How old are you? Where do you live? I like your jeans. Aren’t her jeans cute? Where did you get them? Did you drive up here alone? A bunch of us are going out for breakfast tomorrow morning, do you want to go out for breakfast?”
A Sense of the Infinite Page 10
