A Sense of the Infinite

by Hilary T. Smith

  One day when I was cleaning my room, I found the postcards I’d bought at the Wilda McClure house. I took them downstairs and gave them to Mom.

  “These are for you,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. She stuck them to the fridge with magnets. A forest, a lake, a beaver dam, a pair of snowshoes. They looked small and dumb on the fridge, doing nothing to conjure the wilderness I’d glimpsed from the bus window.

  We had been careful with each other since Maple Bay. Overly polite. She took me to see a doctor to “check things out,” and on the way home we hardly spoke. I wanted to tell her about the journal I had found, but I knew it would only make her sad. Instead, I carried around the image of Scott’s face like a stone lodged in my throat.

  I looked up his address on the internet. It wasn’t very hard, since I had his full name and the town.

  It was strange to think of him having a house and a car and a whole normal life. It made me angry. It creeped me out.

  I fantasized that I was on the canoe trip with Mom and Pauline and I came to Mom’s rescue. In some versions, I whacked him over the head with a paddle. In other versions I came running with a can of bear spray.

  Sometimes in my dreams, I killed him over and over again, but he kept on getting up like a zombie and there was no way to make him die.

  75

  THAT CHRISTMAS, THE WATERFALL FROZE for the first time in two hundred years. The whole town came out to peer at it: a palace of ice, intricate and spired and still, so terribly still, where we had only ever seen it tumble and churn. I went with Mom and Nan and Aunt Monique to huddle by the iron railing and take turns saying how we’d never, ever, ever, seen a thing like that before.

  At Nan’s house, presents. We ate the gingerbread my cousin Max had baked, and Uncle Dylan plunked out “We Three Kings” on the old piano. Ava had stayed in Maple Bay to volunteer at a women’s shelter over Christmas. She called, and Uncle Dylan passed the phone around, but it was hard to talk with everybody there. Then Aunt Monique’s parents came over, Max and Ava’s other grandparents, the ones who were horrified that Mom didn’t give me up for adoption, and still acted stiff and uncomfortable around me, although they tried to be nice. They said hello and asked me about school, but I could tell I made them nervous, and we all excused ourselves from the conversation as fast as we could.

  I wondered what Scott was doing, and what my other grandparents were doing, the ones I’d never met. I sat on the edge of Nan’s plaid couch and fussed with the fireplace, adding logs and blowing on the coals and moving things around.

  “Annabeth,” called Mom. “It’s your turn for charades.”

  The card I pulled was Star Wars. Star: a finger pointing at the sky. Wars: an imaginary gun firing willy-nilly.

  “Sky shooter!” everyone shouted. “Battle sky!”

  I was glad when the whole thing was over.

  76

  A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER I packed my backpack, told Mom I was going to Noe’s, and walked two miles to the station to catch a bus to a suburb of a suburb of a suburb of a big city an hour and a half east. I didn’t trust myself to drive, and what if the Honda broke down along the way? My hands trembled in my lap. The highway flashed past outside the window, miles and miles of dreary asphalt, the warehouses and factory stores annihilating the landscape. I spread my notebook open on my knees and wrote letter after ink-smeared letter. You’re a bastard, I wrote, a horrible bastard. I hope you die. I signed the final one Leslie’s daughter, folded it up, and put it in the outside pocket of my coat.

  When I got off the bus, it was twilight. I walked another two miles, following the directions I’d written on a piece of paper. The house was at the end of a wide, curving street with lots of landscaping. As I approached, my breath got ragged and short. I gripped the rock in my pocket—somehow, the sword of my fantasies had failed to materialize—and felt its coldness and hardness rise through my skin to surround me like a shield.

  Hey, I would shout. Do you know who I am?

  Smash! Blood and brains! Moaning pleas for forgiveness!

  A car pulled into the driveway of the house as I was walking past it. A man got out. Tall, thin. Handsome. As he walked to his front door, he gave me a neighborly wave.

  “Beautiful night,” he said.

  Finish him. “Yeah,” I said, and kept walking.

  He went into his house. I walked faster. The trees on his street were covered in frost. It made them shimmer in the moonlight like something out of a dream.

  When I came to the end of the block I stopped on the sidewalk. Cold air knifed into my lungs with every breath. There were frozen candy bar wrappers in the gutter that reminded me of the first day of school. Frozen ghosts with nowhere left to go. A truck drove past that reminded me of Mom’s: rusty tailpipe, rattly bed. I hesitated a moment longer, the rock damp and jagged against my palm, then turned around and walked quickly and deliberately back to Scott’s house. His curtains were closed. The car in his driveway was new, glossy. A nice suburban car. A nice suburban house. There were strings of Christmas lights wrapped around his front bushes, the bulbs glowing greenly through the snow.

  I could have stared at the house all night: wondering, watching, gathering anger like fistfuls of cotton fluff. But then a light turned on upstairs. It startled me. Reminded me where I was.

  I threw the rock at his front window and heard it shatter.

  I wished I could have saved a piece of the glass, but I was running hard hard hard until the lights of the main road, and I didn’t even think about getting a souvenir until it was too late.

  77

  I CAUGHT THE NEXT BUS BACK to my town and hugged my backpack against me the whole way. My ears were ringing. Adrenaline made my arms and legs both rigid and loose, like I was either going to harden into a statue or melt into a puddle.

  I didn’t know why I had gone there. I didn’t know why I had thrown the rock.

  The December moon was cold and brittle.

  The heater vents blew stale breath at my head.

  The bus was half an hour from my town when I reached into my pocket and realized the letter had fallen out.

  78

  WHEN THE BUS PULLED INTO THE station there was a scurrying thing in my stomach like a hamster was trapped inside there. What if he found the letter? What if he called the police?

  That would be rich. Scott calling the police.

  My hands were sweaty and slick inside my mittens. I crouched in the parking lot and dug a handful of gravel out from under the snow and put it in my mouth. It tasted like exhaust. In How to Survive in the Woods, Wilda McClure says that sucking on stones can stave off hunger and thirst, but only for a little while. I should have walked to Scott’s house, I thought to myself. I should have trekked for days with only stones to suck on, ground them in my teeth until they were sharp as daggers, then walked right up to him and spat them in his face.

  I wasn’t ready to go home yet, so I walked around the old cemetery that’s across the street from the bus station, sucking on my mouthful of gravel and wondering what it would be like to die of starvation. The headstones were sunk deep in the snow. Some of them had frozen flowers piled on top of them. I imagined myself as a zombie-wraith, haunting this town. The old revulsion was seeping up from inside me, like a clogged bathtub drain I shouldn’t have disturbed.

  I couldn’t be like Noe or Steven, I thought to myself. I would never be warm like that, or happy like that, or so certain of my place in the world, so entitled. I thought of them under the trees at the park, dappled light on the backs of their sweaters.

  My phone rang. I tensed, my mind swinging irrationally to the thought that it was Scott (how would he have my number?) or the police. But when I looked at the tiny screen, it was Ava. I spat out my mouthful of gravel and pressed the yes button with a mittened finger.

  “Hey, chickie,” Ava said.

  It was weird to be talking to Ava in the snowy cemetery, at midnight. I sank against a tree and pressed the cold phone a
gainst my ear.

  “Hey, Ava.”

  “How are you?”

  How was I? I scuffed my boots at the snow. It was hard to switch from being deep in my head to talking on the phone, to vocalizing. Words felt clunky and crude, like using wooden blocks to communicate. How could I explain these things to another human using wooden blocks? Build a tower? Juggle them?

  The night had been beautiful. Icicles glittered on the trees. The sky was clear and star-studded over the rooftops, and muted window light glowed on the snow. What did it mean that the world could be beautiful and also contain horrible things?

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Fine? Was that the best I could do? I wondered if everyone walked around with a muzzle that filtered out all but the most banal of statements, leaving all that was rough, contradictory, or confusing to collect inside them until there was almost no room left to file it. I broke Scott’s window, I wanted myself to want to say. But something in me butted up to stop any such gesture of intimacy. Even with Ava. Maybe especially with Ava.

  “How’s school?” Ava said. “Did you finish your college applications?”

  I watched a stray cat dart across the road. Another bus rasped into the station, its tires coated in grit. Slowly, I arranged my brain into normal conversation mode.

  “I had to write an essay about my campus visit,” I said. “A blog post, actually. For the E. O. James blog. Did you know E. O. James had a blog?”

  “How twenty-first century,” Ava said.

  “We had to talk about either the dorms, the campus, the food, or one other thing I can’t remember. The bathrooms maybe? Or the library?”

  “Proximity to bars that don’t card?”

  “Maybe that was it.”

  “I never got to take you to the Sun Dog,” Ava said. “If you end up coming here, I call dibs on your initiation. They have a jukebox that plays a hundred percent Neil Young.”

  “My mom would love that.”

  “She’s probably been there. You should ask. I bet she and Pauline used to go there all the time.”

  The mention of Mom and Pauline made me think about how Noe wasn’t applying to Northern like we’d planned. I let out a whimper in spite of myself.

  “What’s wrong?” said Ava.

  “I just can’t believe Noe’s not coming with me.”

  “You’ll make tons of friends.”

  “I know. But you don’t understand. I already have all these amazing memories of me and Noe going to college together, and now they’re not even going to happen.”

  “Maybe you needed to imagine those things more than you needed to actually do them,” said Ava. “The same way that kids make elaborate plans about running away to desert islands.”

  I didn’t like the implication that Noe’s and my plans for our college dorm room and Paris and the restaurant with the tiny spoons were anything like a desert island fantasy. Was I the only person in the world who was actually serious about the plans that everyone else blew around for fun?

  The poise I had drummed up for the phone call was slipping away fast. My mouth tasted like gravel. My mind was turning back to Scott’s house, to everything that was wrong with my life.

  “I have to go, Ava,” I said. “My phone’s almost out of battery.”

  “Don’t be a stranger.”

  “I won’t.”

  I put my phone back in my pocket and walked out the wrought-iron cemetery gate. My boots sounded harsh against the messy crust of ice that covered the sidewalk. After talking to Ava, I felt like even more of a hypocrite.

  A broken window. What was a stupid window? If I was brave, I thought, I would have said something. Why hadn’t I said something? When it came down to it, I was no better than the girls at the ice-cream shop where I worked in the summer, simpering and cooing at whatever asshole with four dollars happened to walk into the store. Being nice and polite just because I’d been raised that way, nodding and saying Yeah to a freaking rapist because there was no entry in the ice-cream girl playbook for Fuck you, burn in hell, the ax in the forehead, the sword in the heart.

  There was something out there, something larger than me. A suffocating thing, like ropes that only got tighter the more you wriggled against them.

  I should have thrown it at his head, I thought, and something inside me howled and howled and howled until I thought I would hear it howling my whole life.

  79

  FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, I floated along on a tide of numbness. I went to the New Year’s Eve concert with Noe and Steven and everyone else from our school and froze in the snow while a B-list band made love to their microphones. I went to the mall with Nan and froze in the dressing room while she handed post-Christmas sale sweaters over the door. I shoveled the driveway with Mom, the whole world reduced to the sound of scraping metal and thudding boots, and afterward froze in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil for tea.

  Finally, it was time to go back to school.

  “One more semester,” said Mom. “And then graduation!”

  She squeezed my shoulders. Walking down the driveway, I slipped on a patch of ice and almost fell.

  80

  IT FELT LIKE THE WHOLE WORLD had gone crazy over Christmas break. There was something in the air, I guess, or maybe the frozen waterfall had messed with people’s brains. Noe and Steven had run into Steven’s theater friends at the New Year’s Eve concert after I’d gone home, and afterward they’d had their first big argument. “Do you know what Dominic calls me?” Noe had told me on the phone. “The bitch-monster from hell. He told me I was ruining Steven’s life. And I’m like, ‘You think I’m ruining his life? Who got him so drunk he tried to kill himself?’”

  I hadn’t realized that Noe had all but forbidden Steven to hang out with his old friends. I tried to sympathize with her like I always did when she was indignant about something, but the truth was I liked Steven’s theater posse, and could understand why they’d be up in arms over the loss of him.

  The first week back at school, two kids got expelled for drug dealing, another one got suspended for vandalism, and they had to stop the annual drunk-driving presentation twenty minutes in because the kids in the back row had smuggled in a bottle of vodka and were hollering so loudly you couldn’t hear the speaker. We had a big meet coming up in gymnastics, and Ms. Bomtrauer gave us a speech about proper form, and that very same practice Vanessa Guittard fell off the uneven bars and broke her wrist.

  Noe’s New Year’s resolution was to master something called a double aerial, which Sphinx had started to teach her at Gailer. The first time she didn’t show up outside the Art room before lunch, Steven and I waited in the hall for fifteen minutes and then spent another fifteen searching the whole school for her. We found her in the gym, practicing on the beam, her backpack slumped against the wall.

  “I’ll meet you guys in the cafeteria,” she panted, waving us back out like little mice.

  Steven built her this whole beautiful tray with a sandwich and salad and an apple he somehow cut into heart-shaped slices, but when she finally showed up it was one minute before the bell, and all she did was chug the water, coo over the apple hearts, wipe the sweat off her forehead, and ask if anyone had gum.

  Now that Noe wasn’t coming to lunch consistently, Steven and I started hanging out in the bathrooms more. Our favorite one was the old-fashioned ladies’ room near the computer labs. It had nice acoustics, and Steven liked to sing in there. Other times we’d go to the theater wing to hang out with Steven’s friends and play card games. At first I couldn’t make sense of the rules, but Steven’s friends were patient, and pretty soon I started to get the hang of it.

  One day, there were printed notices taped to all the bathroom doors informing students that anyone caught using the opposite sex’s facilities would be subject to disciplinary action. Steven was called into the office. He came back enraged.

  “This school is stuck in the Dark Ages,” he said. “I try to end bathroom apartheid, and he trea
ts me like a sex offender. ‘You think you’re pretty cute, McNeil. There’s nothing cute about being a pervert.’”

  He was quivering with the injustice and humiliation. His hands curled and uncurled on the table. I imagined Mr. Beek towering over him, spit spritzing out of his mouth as he lectured Steven about respect and behavior.

  “The world isn’t ready for pee parity,” I said. “All the great revolutionaries were once considered perverts. It’s kind of a rite of passage.”

  “Noe is horrified, of course,” Steven continued, not ready to be consoled. “She thinks I should just back down. I think it was someone on the gym team who complained.”

  Even though I knew about their recent friction, his tone still struck me. It was the first time I had ever heard Steven express frustration with Noe, or really anything except pure and unfettered adulation.

  “I’m sure she’s on your side,” I said, but later that day I saw them arguing by the far trees, and after that Steven stopped wearing the PEE SISTERS headband I’d made him for Christmas and which he’d been wearing every day since we got back from break.

  81

  I TRIED TO RIDE OUT THE craziness by cocooning into myself.

  I ripped the CDs that Bob had lent me and loaded them onto my music player.

  The Stone King has not been seen for two hundred years, but holds the land of Riddlespoon captive through a silent reign of terror. Can Rae of Riddlespoon free her people from his grasp?

  “What are you listening to?” said Noe.

  “Nothing.”

  “I was saying you should come to the YMCA on Sunday to work on your floor routine.”

  I turned down the volume. “Okay,” I said.

  The land of Riddlespoon used to be lush and verdant but was slowly turning to stone. The people were ruled by fear. Rae’s mother, Genewren, lay paralyzed by the Stone King’s curse, her once-strong limbs turned gray and cold.