A Sense of the Infinite

by Hilary T. Smith

  I kept hoping Ava would step in to save me like Noe always did when people were overwhelming me with too much attention, but she left me to answer for myself.

  “I took the bus,” I said, “I’m seventeen,” feeling like the contestant in a rapid-fire trivia game.

  “Were you on the eight o’clock?” said a girl with dreadlocks.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “My friend was on that bus, she said there was this girl who was crying and throwing up the whole way.”

  Heat flooded my face. If Noe were here, she’d be distracting Ava’s roommates, telling them about vegetarianism or gymnastics. She’d be making plans for us to go to a physics lecture with one of them and a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals meeting with another. I wouldn’t have to talk at all except to peep my excitement or consent. This was why I couldn’t go to Northern without her, exactly this: surrounded by strangers, my only ally a cousin who apparently refused to protect me.

  “What’s wrong?” said the girls. “What’s wrong?”

  I was doing my werewolf thing, my capacity for language disappearing, my ability to smile and present a functional social face melting away. Where’s Noe? my inside self was howling. Already, my mind was frantically making plans. I would tell Mom I hated Northern, I would rip up the application I’d been working on, I would go to Gailer College and be the water girl for the gymnastics team and never leave Noe again.

  Ava was gazing at me across the kitchen. She raised her eyebrows and tipped her head to the side as if to say, What’s going on in there?

  “Nothing,” I squeaked at the girls who had asked me what was wrong. “The bus ride was shitty.”

  I looked at the floor. The roots of my plant were crying out in alarm and groping for familiar soil. I ordered myself to stay and talk, but my feet began to move without my consent and suddenly I was on the front steps of Ava’s dorm, huddled up against a brick column. Through the kitchen window, I could hear Ava and her friends.

  “Is she okay? She, like, bolted.”

  “She’s really shy. It’s pretty much her first time away from home. I’ll go out there in a minute if she doesn’t come back in.”

  I took out my phone and called Noe, but she didn’t answer. I remembered that tonight was the tiki party. Noe was probably dancing in a little group with all the other kids from our school, her phone crammed deep in her purse or forgotten on some bathroom counter.

  There was a text from Mom I hadn’t noticed before.

  if you get this in time, take a picture for me when you go past moose rock!

  I stared at the text for a moment, wondering what she was talking about, then remembered that a bunch of people had taken pictures out the bus window when we passed a weirdly shaped boulder a few minutes from town. It was strange to think that Mom had spent a part of her life here, that she knew this place that I was just discovering. I thought about how excited I was when I’d first pulled How to Survive in the Woods out of our basement. Mom had made notes in the margins, blue ink additions to the diagrams of cooking shelters and proper canoe-paddling strokes. In the plant identification section, she’d marked a date and place next to each plant on the day that she first found it. Wild strawberries were marked Maple Bay National Park the summer before I was born.

  Next year! she’d written next to a place on the map, a zigzagging network of lakes and rivers.

  Next year had never happened. Next year, she was back home.

  As I sat on the steps, anger welled up inside me for the lost girl of the survival book, full of exclamation marks and opinions on the proper way to build a fire in the rain. She wanted so much for me to discover myself, and I was afraid to even try.

  It was starting to snow. I texted Mom back quickly and stood up to go back inside.

  56

  WHEN I WENT BACK INTO THE kitchen, the girls were making cookies. The counter was littered with dirty spoons and mixing bowls, and half the contents of the cupboards were piled up on the table.

  “Were you hiding?” said the girl with dreadlocks, whose name might have been Beatrice. “We didn’t mean to scare you away.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I was just embarrassed.”

  “Awwww,” said Beatrice. “So you were the puking girl. Are you feeling better now? What happened?”

  I hesitated. How could I tell a bunch of strangers when I hadn’t told Noe? Wasn’t that a kind of betrayal? Maybe I was still angry at her for ditching our plans so easily, and this was my twisted way of getting back at her. Or maybe I trusted Ava’s friends in a way I didn’t trust Noe. They seemed so grown-up, and we were still kids. I needed a grown-up right now, not a kid—did that make me a traitor? I wasn’t sure.

  I thrust these complicated thoughts aside and blurted, “I had an accident. With a boy. Ava’s taking me to the clinic tomorrow.”

  The kitchen was quiet for a moment. Then one by one, the girls put down their bowls and spatulas and teacups and came to put their hands on my shoulders and back.

  “Are you scared?” they said.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Don’t be scared!” they said. “Don’t be scared!”

  The girls all had some story about a close call they had had with a broken condom or a birth control pill.

  “My twin sister tried to do an herbal abortion when we were fifteen,” said a big, dark-haired girl who might have been called Jade or Jane or Jacey. “She got the recipe out of a fantasy novel. We stayed up all night brewing herbs on the stove.” She chomped her cookie, then peered at it suspiciously. “How old was that butter?”

  “Which book was it?” everyone wanted to know.

  “That one with the fairies.” She glanced at me appraisingly. “We could do one tomorrow, if you want. Co-op opens at eight, they have all the herbs.”

  “Keep your witchy paws off my baby cousin,” said Ava. “Annabeth, don’t listen to her, she has no idea what she’s talking about.”

  A girl named Leah started telling a story about a time she got pregnant by accident. “He was like, ‘It broke and I don’t have another one!’ And I was like, ‘Okaaaaay, I guess we have to stop.’ And then we were like, ‘What if we’re really, really careful? Like, ninja-careful!’”

  Leah had had an abortion at the same clinic I was going to in the morning.

  “The people at the clinic are really nice,” she said. “They’re really nice. You’re going to be okay.”

  Ava’s roommates reminded me of a chorus of batty aunts in a musical, trading off solos in a medley of reassurance and advice. I couldn’t believe they were only three years older than me and Noe and everyone in our year at school. They seemed so different, somehow. Like they belonged to a bigger world.

  When Ava took out the last tray of cookies, everyone gathered around to gobble them up. I hung back, grateful for the distraction. When the cookies were gone, the girls had moved on from their cheerful interrogation and started talking among themselves.

  At one a.m. Ava’s roommates dumped the cookie trays in the sink without washing them and tromped up the stairs to bed.

  “Tired?” Ava said.

  I nodded.

  “Come on. I’ll show you my room.”

  57

  IN THE MORNING, AVA TOOK ME to the clinic. The nurse asked me some questions and had me pee in a cup, and put me down for an appointment the following morning. They couldn’t fit me in the same day. At first I was disappointed, then relieved. It meant I wouldn’t have to miss the campus tour that Mom had signed me up for. Even though that was a small thing, it seemed important somehow—like at least I wouldn’t have to let her down in that one regard. So when she asked me about Northern, I’d have something to tell her about.

  Ava and I drove back to campus and she left me in the student union building to wait for my tour guide. I sat on a purple couch and took out How to Survive in the Woods. A few minutes later, a boy in a bright blue shirt with NORTHERN UNIVERSITY on the front asked if I was Annabeth. He had
geeky glasses and a hat with earflaps and a button that said NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENT CENTER.

  “I love that book,” he said, tapping the cover. “They sell it in the bookstore here. Did you know Wilda McClure’s from Maple Bay?”

  The boy’s name was Loren, and he was in his first year, studying forestry.

  “We can swing by her old house after the tour, if you want. It’s a museum now. It’s kind of cool.”

  First, we went to the Arts building and the Science building and the Engineering building and the Music building, and through the freshman dorms. Some people had their doors open. I peeked into the rooms as we walked down the hall, making a mental note to tell Noe that they already came with mini-fridges before I remembered that she wasn’t applying. Loren told me about the dragon boat race that happened every April, and the community farm where students could grow their own vegetables and learn to milk a cow.

  The Wilda McClure house had an exhibit on the ground floor with all her old camping stuff. Wilda McClure’s tent. Wilda McClure’s backpack. The binoculars and notebook with which Wilda McClure tracked the comings and goings of wolves. Loren caught me staring at the glass display case with the canoe and smooth wooden paddles in which Wilda McClure had explored over two hundred lakes.

  “My mom would love this,” I said. “It’s actually her book.”

  “Want me to take a picture of you with the canoe?”

  “Nah.”

  “Come on. You’ve got to have something to show the parents.”

  Loren grinned. I hesitated, then dug my phone out of my bag. “The camera’s not very good.”

  I stood beside the canoe with my arms at my sides.

  “Smile,” Loren said.

  While he was taking the picture, the museum attendant came out from behind her booth. “Now one of you together,” she said.

  It was weird to explain that we were complete strangers, so Loren gave her the phone and I moved over so he could stand beside me.

  “Say cheese,” said the museum attendant.

  “Cheese,” Loren and I said.

  I texted the first picture to Mom while we were walking back to the student union building.

  oh my god, is that the wilda mcclure house? she texted back.

  It made my heart break a little to know that Mom was so excited for me.

  campus tour was awesome, I typed. going to lunch with ava, then theater lecture.

  amazing! Mom wrote. have fun.

  58

  THAT NIGHT WAS AVA’S ROOMMATE’S birthday. We all ate cake and drank something called Moscow Mules in the warm, messy kitchen, then bundled up in our hats and coats and mittens and dragged some big pieces of cardboard to a place called Half Moon Mountain, which was really more of a steep, snowy hill at the far edge of campus that looked down over the forest and town. You could slide down on the cardboard like a toboggan, with the twinkly lights of town rushing at you and the dark, jagged trees whispering past on either side, then tromp back up the hill on stairs someone had cut into the snow.

  I slid again and again, sometimes sitting on the cardboard, sometimes Superman-style with my stomach bumping over the snow, sometimes in a long chain with Ava and Ava’s roommates. The sound was all muffled out there. Like if you brushed away the tiny sprinkling of voices and laughter, you could hear the sound of the earth itself. The more I climbed and slid and screamed, the louder the earth seemed to speak, until I could feel its voice all around me.

  Loren had said there was an outdoor program at Northern that was founded in honor of Wilda. You spent half the year “in the field,” tracking wolves and taking tests of river water and learning about forest fires. Maybe I could do that. Maybe I could be another Wilda. As I hurtled down the hill on my sled, it didn’t seem unthinkable anymore.

  On the way back to the dorm, Ava borrowed my phone to tell another one of her friends where we were. “Who’s the cutie?” she said, clicking the camera app shut to make the call.

  “He’s just the campus tour guy. The museum lady wanted to take a picture.”

  “Did you get his number?”

  I blushed. “Ava. I’m not exactly looking.”

  She put an arm around my shoulder. “Oh, don’t pull the fallen woman thing on me. That’s such horseshit. You think guys feel the need to punish themselves for the heinous crime of having a body?”

  “I need some time for myself.”

  “That’s different. Need some time, okay. Nobody can ever love me after this, not okay. I can’t love myself after this, not okay. Would you feel bad for meeting a cute boy if Oliver was the one having the appointment?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She bopped me on the shoulder. “Think about it.”

  Ava was big on think about it these days.

  We came to the dorm and went inside. While Ava was taking a shower, I took her laptop to the common room and curled up with it on a couch. Noe had uploaded a million pictures of the River Rats game and the tiki party, with Noe, Lindsay, Rhiannon, and Kaylee grinning in bright orange clothes. I’d come back from Half Moon Mountain in an expansive mood, but as I gazed at the screen my temples began to throb. There is something haunting about seeing pictures of your friends having a good time without you, even if you were having a good time in parallel, even if you were having the time of your life. Suddenly, you have one memory and your friend has another, and you’ll never be able to say, Remember that time? and never laugh together, remembering. A part of me would rather have had a mediocre time at a River Rats game with Noe than a great time on Half Moon Mountain, because the River Rats game would have increased the space where the circles in our Venn diagram overlapped, and Half Moon Mountain made it smaller. Maybe that was why so many people chose to do mediocre things, as long as their friends were doing them too: it was all about making the circles overlap, even at the expense of greater adventures, even at the expense of life itself.

  Ava appeared in the common room doorway wearing one of Nan’s old bathrobes, her damp hair giving off a scent of cedar. “Ready for bed?” she said.

  “I’ll be up in a minute,” I said.

  But while I was looking at the last of Noe’s photos, my mind kept darting to the procedure I was going to have the next morning. What if it hurt? What if something went wrong? I started loading the websites I’d looked at on the day I took the pregnancy test, the ones that explained what was going to happen during the abortion. From there, I started reading stories that other girls had posted, scanning forum threads, clicking link after link, getting more and more wound up until suddenly it was six a.m. and I hadn’t even gone to bed.

  I shut the laptop. My ears were ringing and my eyes were dry. Climbing the stairs, I could feel the quiet of the house, unbroken by so much as a birdcall. Four more hours, I thought, and my heart began to beat so hard I had to pause and lean against the wall.

  In Ava’s room, I set the laptop on the desk and crept over to her bed. After a moment’s hesitation, I shook her shoulder gently.

  “Ava?” I said. “I’m scared.”

  She let out a sleepy murmur and lifted her blanket. I slipped in beside her and she pulled me close. Within a few minutes, pale dawn light was creeping into the room. I had just started to drift off when the first birds of morning began to sing.

  59

  AVA AND I DIDN’T TALK MUCH on the way to the clinic. I was too nervous, and Ava was still waking up. She sipped the coffee she’d dumped into a travel mug on our way out of the dorm and honked at a trucker who cut us off.

  “Dickhead,” she grumbled, then, “Sorry, Annabeth. I tend to be a bitch until about noon.”

  She smiled at me, then patted my leg. “You didn’t sleep at all last night, did you?”

  I shook my head.

  “You think you’re scared now,” said Ava, “imagine if you didn’t have a choice.”

  She flicked the turn signal on and pulled into the parking lot. “Well, chickie. Here we are.”

  The nurse call
ed me in to sign some papers and talk over what was going to happen during the abortion, and then I had to go back out and wait for almost another hour. The waiting room was filled with teenage couples and twentysomething college students and grown women with kids. I wished I’d brought my headphones to tune out all the chaos. Instead, Ava and I hunched over a crossword puzzle in a magazine.

  “What if the doctor goes out to lunch before she gets to me?” I kept saying. “Do you think the nurse forgot I’m here?”

  “It’s okay, Annabeth,” Ava said. “The waiting is the worst part. Just remember, by the time you go to sleep tonight, this will be over.”

  Finally, the nurse came out and called my name. Ava squeezed my hand. “I’ll be right here,” she said.

  In the exam room, I undressed and put on the paper gown the nurse had left for me, then took out the tiny bottle of lavender oil Ava had given me in the car.

  “Take a deep breath of this if you’re feeling scared,” she’d said. “It helps.”

  Now I dabbed it on my wrists and under my nose, anointing myself like a priestess about to enter a holy mountain. I couldn’t believe that in five or ten minutes, this would be over. They would take it out of me, and when I walked out of this room it would not be there anymore. Good-bye, I thought, and then there was a knock on the door, and the nurse and doctor came in.

  60

  AVA’S FRIEND WAS RIGHT. THE awkward, tense, scary thing I’d been bracing myself for all night had barely gotten started when the doctor said, “And we’re done.”

  I couldn’t believe how quickly it was over. I kept thinking there were other steps, but no, said the nurse, I was really done.

  As I walked out with Ava, the world was bright and snowy, noisy with traffic. I wondered what Noe was doing. I wondered if Mom was having a good day at work. It was amazing that things could go back to normal so quickly. I guess I hadn’t realized it, but part of me had expected something terrible to happen. It was taking my brain a moment to get reoriented to the new, disaster-free reality.