A Sense of the Infinite

by Hilary T. Smith

  87

  NOE WAS GOING TO KILL ME.

  Noe was going to kill me.

  Guilt bloomed inside me, hot and loud and red. If I hadn’t gone to sit on the bleachers, if I hadn’t been just sitting there, if I’d thought to compose an innocent face and say, No . . . in a surprised and wondering way. Noe would think I had sold her out, Noe would think I had betrayed her. As I watched her perform her floor routine, the guilt tossed and turned inside me until I felt like I was the one who was going to throw up. When would Ms. Bomtrauer confront her? Today? Later? I could feel the clock ticking, the moment approaching when a furious Noe would storm up to me and say, Next time, how about you give me a little warning before you tell our coach that Sphinx Lacoeur gave me a personal puking lesson?

  I copied Noe and drank a bottle of water during lunchtime, rationing evenly so that it wouldn’t slosh around inside me as she’d warned me that it could. I walked away from the spot on the floor where everyone was eating and practiced my switch jumps, my stomach panging with vindictive jabs of hunger. I wished I would faint or break my ankle so I could be driven away in an ambulance, the medical emergency rendering me saintly, making me innocent and lovable again. On one side of the gym, a photographer was taking team photographs. Flocks of gym birds posing for the camera flash.

  A few minutes before my floor event, Noe walked over.

  “Hey, squirrel. You look amazing,” she said, holding me at arm’s length to inspect me like a creation of hers that had turned out particularly well. “Did you eat?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good girl. We’ll go to Subway after this, Alicia and Kaylee are going to need food too.”

  I gazed at her miserably. A bunch of girls came to join us on the bleachers where Noe and I were sitting. Soon Noe was chattering up a storm with them, analyzing the day’s victories and defeats. The organizer called my name. I stood up to go to the floor. Noe tore herself away from the conversation for a moment.

  “You look amazing, doll,” she said again.

  I grunted my thanks.

  The music started. I sailed through the first cartwheel, the hip swivel and shoulder thrusts, aware of the fluorescent gym lights on my bare arms and legs. I’d wrestled my hair into a clumsy French braid and shellacked it in place with some of Kaylee Ito’s gel. Now my own head smelled foreign to me, like a head out of a magazine.

  I landed the second cartwheel smoothly and remembered to smile on the landing.

  From the sidelines, a blinding flash. I glanced over and saw the photographer from the Tribune crouching there with his camera. He took another picture, snap, and grinned at me encouragingly. I threw myself into the round-offs. The next time I came up for air, I spied Ms. Bomtrauer approaching the bleachers where Noe was sitting. Step, step. I watched Ms. Bomtrauer summon Noe away from the rest of the girls and lead her to the wall to talk. Stag leap, stag leap. Noe’s face changing from sunlight to storm clouds. Noe stalking back to the bleachers alone while Ms. Bomtrauer walked toward the vault area.

  Half turn, stag leap, round-off. Noe sliding back into the front row. I came up from a somersault.

  Bitch, Noe mouthed at me.

  I faltered. The mat stretched out before me, blank and impenetrable. I wished it would turn to water so I could dive under its surface and swim away. If this was a legend, I thought to myself, it would turn to water and I would swim away, and forever be known as the ghost mermaid who pulled hapless gymnasts into the mat to drown.

  I turned, glimpsed Noe’s face again, and this time I lost my grip on the smile. I could almost hear it dropping on the mat, a muffled tink. Lindsay Harris’s tampon fell out in the middle of her beam routine, Noe had said. And Annabeth’s smile slipped off her face and shattered into a hundred pieces. With the smile gone I lost control of my face, then my body, as if it had been the one thing pinning everything together. I thumped across the mat, feeling more and more angry with every slap of my feet.

  Snap, went the camera. Snap, snap.

  The music stopped. I swept my hands up, nodded tersely at the table of adjudicators, and walked off the floor, my face burning. I could feel Noe’s eyes on the back of my head the whole way.

  As I pushed through the changing room door, the next girl’s routine was already starting. I glanced back and saw her land her first handstand, the confident way her arms swept through the air. There were moves, I realized, sequences in life you had to learn. A certain dance unlocked a certain door: a friendship, a romance, a progression from one level of things to the next. And while everyone else sailed through the steps, the best I could do was desperately ape them.

  In the changing room, I was a girl with ten thousand reasons to hate herself. I sank onto the clammy wooden bench and held my face in my hands, feeling the reasons swarm over me like flies and cover me whole.

  88

  ON THE BUS RIDE HOME, NOE wouldn’t even look at me. I hunched against the window. A hundred times, I tried to catch her eye—It wasn’t my fault, I swear, she asked me, I didn’t tell her—but Noe turned her face away. When we got to the school, Steven and Darla were waiting for Noe in the parking lot. They got out of Darla’s huge car and waved. There was no nonawkward way of leaving the parking lot without saying hello to Steven, so I tromped behind Noe all the way to their car.

  “How’d it go, honey?” Darla sang, sweeping Noe into her arms like a long-lost daughter. “DiMaggio’s or Casa Italia? Your choice.”

  Just like that, Noe was Ms. Shiny-Brite again. “You’re taking me out for dinner?” she squealed. “You guys are too sweet. Let’s do DiMaggio’s, I love their gnocchi.”

  I guess it was safe to eat again, provided Noe didn’t need to do any double handsprings within the next three hours.

  “Are you coming?” said Steven.

  “I’m pretty wiped,” I said.

  “Please please please?”

  “No thanks,” I said glumly. “You guys have fun.”

  I said good-bye and walked away before Steven could wheedle me into coming. My muscles ached and I was hungry.

  On the walk home, I kept scanning the sidewalks and the branches of the bare trees, as if I’d lost a precious necklace that might be wedged in a crack or snagged on a twig. I remembered the mixture of fear and certainty I’d felt when I confronted Noe in the bathroom, like a fantasy novel heroine uttering magic words to break a spell.

  But that was where the analogy stopped. If I’d finally said the magic words, why had the treasure disappeared?

  89

  WHEN I GOT HOME, MOM COULD tell something was wrong.

  “How was the gym meet?” she said.

  “Fine.”

  “Win any ribbons?”

  “A stupid photographer took my picture.”

  “Wow,” said Mom mildly. “You’re going to be famous.”

  I peeled off my hat and scarf and threw them onto the coatrack. My winter coat was heavy and damp. I slithered out of it and dumped it onto a hook. The kitchen was warm and moist with cooking beans, a smell that was suddenly comforting. I leaned against the counter with my arms crossed, trembling with humiliation at the way Noe had stalked ahead of me to where Darla and Steven were waiting without even acknowledging that I was there.

  “What are you cooking?” I said.

  “Vegetarian chili.”

  “It smells good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can I chop something?”

  “How about some onions?”

  She made room for me at the counter. I took an onion from the wooden bowl and peeled off the papery yellow skin. Mom was using the good knife, so I poked around in the drawer until I found one that was almost as sharp.

  “Do you want to invite Noe over for dinner?” Mom said.

  “She went to a restaurant with her boyfriend and his mom.”

  “Aha,” said Mom. “I was wondering why she’d been so scarce around here. I haven’t seen her in months.”

  We peeled and chopped. It had been a
long time, I realized, since I’d confided in Mom about anything. The last time was when my seventh-grade best friend, Emily Lincoln, had two birthday parties, a boring one with me and Carly Ocean and Eliza Grinette, and a fun one with her cool friends where there was dancing and making out and somebody brought a beer. I couldn’t believe I’d been assigned to the “boring friend” category, lumped in with Carly Ocean. Mom had taken me on a walk in the woods and listened to me wail, and afterward we’d picked up Nan and gone out for French fries at Dick’s Chips and everything had started to feel okay. Ever since Ava told me about Scott, I’d stopped unpouring myself to Mom, like my problems were silly compared to what she’d been through. Like I owed it to her to be perfect so she wouldn’t have any more reasons to regret me.

  Now the knife I was holding blurred before my eyes. I set it down.

  “I thought we were going to be friends forever,” I burst. “I care about her so much. But it’s like we’re not communicating anymore.”

  “You’re still pretty disappointed about the roommate thing, aren’t you?” said Mom.

  “Not as much since I visited Ava,” I said. “But yeah. It’s like she decided to become this whole different person, but I’m not allowed to become a different person too.”

  “People are like trees,” said Mom. “They need one kind of food when they’re seedlings, and a different kind of food once they’ve been growing for a few years. Maybe you and Noe needed each other in ninth grade in a way you don’t need each other now.”

  I imagined myself as a scrawny sapling, the fertilizer of Noe slowly being withdrawn, the wooden stakes pulled up.

  “You and Pauline stayed friends,” I said.

  “Pauline and I didn’t become friends until we were in college.”

  “Really?”

  She smoothed the hair off my forehead, a gesture I hadn’t allowed her to do in years. “Annabeth, honey, life keeps on changing. You don’t get one chance at friendship, or one chance at love. Things die. Things grow. It’s hard to see that when you’ve only been around for seventeen years, and you’ve only ever had one of everything, but it’s true.”

  “I just wish we could do it without turning into enemies.”

  “Well,” Mom sighed. “That’s the hard part.”

  We picked up our knives and started chopping again, and soon it was time to eat.

  90

  I HAD HOPED THAT NOE WOULD come around. But the next day in English, she sat down and opened her book without so much as a glance in my direction.

  Are you still mad? I wrote on a piece of paper I slipped onto her desk. She pushed it back without looking at it.

  For the rest of class, I felt as queasy as the time my cousin Max dared me to swallow a raw egg. When the bell rang, Noe picked up her backpack and stalked out. I dawdled, putting away my notebook and pens, the raw egg feeling creeping from my stomach to my throat.

  I left a note in Noe’s locker—Talk to me!—and hurried away. In the hallway, Mr. Beek was making Jamie Appleton pick up every single piece of trash from a garbage bin somebody had knocked over. Outside the window and across the street, the Burger King was advertising Double Bacon Cheeseburgers. I thought I glimpsed the nutritionist coming out the door, but it could have been some other big, sad person with their head bent over a paper bag.

  91

  THE NEXT MORNING, STEVEN PESTERED ME all through Art. “Noe won’t tell me what happened. Should I be afraid?”

  “It’s not about you,” I said. “She’s mad at me.”

  “Why?”

  Steven’s cheeks were always red in the winter, like apples in snow.

  “Have you figured out her food thing yet?” I said.

  “I have suspicions,” Steven said. “I’ve been badgering her. With reason, it appears?”

  I put my head on the table. I couldn’t even summon the energy to moan. Deep inside me, the place where Noe lived was aching and aching.

  “You’re going to think I’m a horrible friend,” I said.

  “Why?” said Steven. “Did you trick her into eating foie gras?”

  “I caught her throwing up. And I told her she should stop. And then Ms. Bomtrauer asked me if I’d seen Noe doing it, and I was too surprised to lie.”

  “That doesn’t make you a horrible friend,” said Steven.

  “But I’ve known for four years. And it was the first time I said anything.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Steven said.

  “You shouldn’t,” I said. “It will only make things worse.”

  The classroom smelled like paint, and paint remover. I wondered how many hours were left until graduation.

  92

  I DIDN’T WANT TO GO TO gymnastics practice, but I was afraid that flaking would make Noe even madder. Ms. Bomtrauer led us through a warm-up and started us on our usual rotation around the beam, bars, vault, and floor. I tried to act normal, but it felt like Noe was watching me the whole time.

  “Toes,” shouted Noe from across the gym, and I yelped, “Sorry,” landing my pivot leap flat on my feet.

  I tried to laugh it off—maximum-security gymnast and all that—but my face flooded with heat.

  “You’re so curled up,” Noe said irritably. “Shoulders back.”

  “They don’t go that far back,” I said.

  When Noe was like this, I couldn’t meet her eyes. If I was ink, she was bleach. It burned to look at her, to see my own leaky blackness reflected in her expression, when all I wanted was for things to be tidy and clear. I worked on my pivot leap for the rest of practice, pointing my toes until they ached, forcing my shoulders into shapes that would never, ever look like the gentle ripple they were supposed to.

  There was something strange in the air. Everyone was acting weird. I felt the other girls’ eyes prickling on me as I teetered up and down the balance beam. At first I wrote it off to the drama of the gym meet. Annabeth told Ms. Bomtrauer that Sphinx Lacoeur brainwashed Noe and it isn’t even true.

  But as practice went on, the prickling got worse and worse. People were definitely looking at me. I saw them out of the corner of my eye. The queasy feeling came back. I moved from the beam to the uneven bars, trying to ignore it, but it only got stronger and stronger. I stopped mid-spin and dropped down from the bars, clutching my stomach as if to indicate that I had a cramp. As I limped toward the water fountain, I could feel the eyes of the entire team on me and hear whispers throughout the gym. I realized with a sickening tightness in my stomach that they had been told something. By the time I had made it the three hundred feet to the door, I knew.

  I picked up my gym bag. Someone had scrawled babykiller on the side in permanent marker.

  I pushed through the heavy doors and into the yellow hallway.

  I wanted to crawl into a tunnel made of dirt and stones and stay there until everyone I knew had grown old and died and there wasn’t anyone left to look at me like that anymore.

  93

  THE WALK BACK TO MY HOUSE: rattled and uncomprehending, close to tears.

  Overhead, yellow leaves flapped in the treetops. A crow cawed. I bent mid-stride and scooped up a piece of gravel from the road and put it in my mouth and sucked until the top of my mouth had turned to blood.

  94

  THE NEXT MORNING, I PACKED MY backpack slowly, deliberately, as if packing for a desert island. Peanuts, fresh water, textbooks, pens. How to Survive. I still hadn’t read the poem Loren had sent me, or written back to his email. I printed the poem, folded it in half, and stuck it between the chapters on shelter and navigation. Something told me I was going to have lots of time to read for the rest of the year.

  I combed my hair and brushed my teeth.

  “Your gym coach called,” Mom said when I went downstairs. “Were you sick yesterday?”

  She was wearing her No Frills uniform, a yellow apron over a white blouse. For a second, I considered playing the get-out-of-school card. But the truth was, I was feeling abundantly healthy. And I knew that to hide now wou
ld only make things worse.

  “Sick of gymnastics,” I said. “You were right. It’s been horrible. Noe’s on my case all the time and everyone cares too much about their stupid hair and makeup and I just want to kick something.”

  The fridge hummed. Mom picked up her purse. “Just make sure to get that deposit back for the leotard,” she sighed.

  95

  IF YOU COME TO MY SCHOOL in late January, you will inevitably wonder why the building hasn’t been condemned as a health hazard.

  The classrooms in which the heaters work are warm and damp, like incubators for mold.

  The classrooms in which the heaters don’t work are so cold you can’t hold a pencil.

  The couches in the back corner of the library are polka-dotted with gum and tobacco juice and the crusty stains of bodily fluids that will not be cleaned off until next fall.

  The floors are covered in a brown layer of slush that nobody ever mops up. You can literally slide to your classes.

  All these conditions serve to make the students bored and aggressive and prone to gossip.

  Sometimes it feels like nobody gets out of here without a broken bone or two.

  96

  THE FIRST DAY WITHOUT NOE WAS THE hardest. For the most part, I avoided eye contact with anyone in our year, and kept my ears firmly plugged with earbuds at all times during which it wouldn’t earn me a detention to do so. I started Kingdom of Stones again from the beginning. It was comforting to hear about Rae as a young villager again, before she has any of her harrowing adventures. I wished I could go back to Book One of my own life, when all was good and peaceful in Riddlespoon and the Stone King hadn’t yet sown his death-seeds through the land.

  My campaign of avoidance wasn’t entirely successful.

  Margot Dilforth: “Is it true that you’re pregnant?”

  Me: “No.”

  Margot Dilforth: “That’s what everyone’s saying.”