A Sense of the Infinite

by Hilary T. Smith

  Something about her reminded me of a goat. In Kingdom of Stones, she would be Penny-foo, the annoying milkmaid. I remembered what Margot was like in middle school, an earnest girl with long braids. Always at the edge of things, trying to buy her way into the center by impressing people with scandalous information.

  Margot Dilforth: “Are you and Oliver getting married?”

  Me: “Not that I know of.”

  Margot Dilforth (scratching her long, freckly nose): “I heard you are.”

  Steven was away on a theater trip that day. In Art, I had to sit alone. I wanted to call him, but suddenly our little triangle had gotten very messy. Steven was wrong. It wasn’t as simple as being friends instead of friends-by-association. He was dating the association, and right now, the association hated my guts.

  I planned all my routes to avoid intersecting with Noe, but I came across her by accident, in a basement hallway, surrounded by a feathery knot of gym birds. There was nowhere to hide. Nobody to hide behind. I stood tall and walked past them at a slow, normal, nothing-is-wrong pace while everything in me longed to run.

  Noe was crying. The gym birds were comforting her.

  Nobody looked at me while I walked past.

  97

  SCHOOL WAS LONELY. WORDLESSLY, WITH NO further discussion or negotiation, Noe and I ceased to be, the way a dry leaf detaches itself from the branch and spirals silently toward the ground. The soccer fields outside the school building were messy expanses of trampled ice. The classrooms smelled like wet coats. In Art, Steven and I whittled totem poles out of our pencils. We named the ancient paper cutter on the counter of the art morgue Ernestine.

  “Ernestine looks lonely today,” Steven would say, and we would take turns getting up to pet her.

  “Ernestine is hungry,” I’d say, and we’d find excuses to chop some paper up with her heavy old blade.

  In the hallways, posters for the Valentine’s Day ball. The Senior Leaders set up tables outside the cafeteria selling tickets. You couldn’t walk in for lunch without them shaking their bags of Hershey’s Kisses at you.

  “Bought your tickets for the ball?” they’d shout like hawkers outside a football stadium (or “Hey! You like balls?” if they were guys). They made you feel like crap if you walked past without stopping, like you were the one being rude. They did it to everyone, even the nervous freshmen, especially the nervous freshmen. Like all the other nervous people, I scuttled past with my eyes averted, muttering, “No thanks.”

  “Why not?” they’d call after me, as if to prolong the humiliation by extracting a detailed explanation.

  I pushed my earbuds deeper into my ears and kept walking.

  At the lockers across the hall from mine, Noe and Dulcie Simmonds made plans: dress shopping, hair and makeup, restaurant selection, what Steven and Mark would wear. They had an entire shared notebook full of Valentine’s Ball to-do lists and clippings from hairstyle magazines. Steven’s mom was taking them to her manicurist, then for something called a radiant light treatment at the Twin Oaks Spa.

  “What about my radiant light treatment?” said Steven.

  “You will be getting a car wash,” Noe said.

  “Annabeth,” called Steven. “Are you in on this?”

  He had been trying to get Noe and me to make up for the past two weeks. It was a complicated dance, and I could tell it was wearing him out. I’d seen them arguing again, and I’d hurried past with my head hunched, wishing he would just do as I’d pleaded and enjoy the rest of the year without worrying about me. I’d been doing my best to keep my distance outside Art so as to not mess things up for him, but he wasn’t making it easy.

  Noe ignored Steven and kept chatting with Dulcie. I shook my head. He gazed at me forlornly. “You two,” he said, to no one in particular.

  98

  I HAD TOLD MYSELF I WOULDN’T miss Noe, that I would simply ignore her for the rest of the year. But there was a part of my brain where Noe lived, like a program I couldn’t figure out how to delete from my phone. Now that we weren’t speaking anymore, it played all the time. When I took a bite of my sandwich, I could hear Noe saying, Somebody’s hungry today. When Ava called to see how I was doing, Noe said, How are you even talking to that freak? When I caught myself feeling happy at odd moments, Noe said, Aren’t you even a little ashamed?

  She lived inside me as a critical voice, telling me what a failure I was and how undeserving of love. Every time I passed her in the hall, or glanced at her accidentally in English, something inside me sent up a guilty flare. I wrapped my sandwich in a napkin. I deleted the email I was mentally composing to Loren Wilder. I pulled the sleeves of my sweater over my hands.

  When I saw her, a sick shiver happened in the quease of my stomach. She had become frightening to me. I was hyperaware of her, the way you can’t stop thinking about a spider in your room. Even when I wasn’t looking directly at her, I could sense her, two rows behind me in the auditorium, twenty feet ahead of me in the hall. My ears pricked to every syllable of her voice laughing with other girls. I detected her every footfall, every toss of her oily black hair.

  She cornered me in the hall one day.

  “I just want you to know that it wasn’t me who wrote that thing on your bag,” she said. “It was Kaylee.”

  Noe’s hair smelled like pomegranate. Her hands were calloused from the vault. It had been weeks since we’d stood this close to one another, or spoken face-to-face. I’d been building up this whole demonic story about her—Noe was controlling, Noe was cruel, Noe had never been my friend, and she didn’t really love Steven either—but standing near her, smelling her smell, I couldn’t see her as a demon anymore, even though I wanted to. What I did see: a girl who was just as scared as I was, and hurting just as much.

  Noe, I wanted to say. I see you. I can see you again. Can you see me?

  But I didn’t say anything. I was too stunned.

  We stood in the hall, people flowing past us like water. It seemed like the kind of moment in which we might have forgiven each other, in which two people with a history of friendship might reasonably be expected to forgive each other. I could see the moment of forgiveness blowing past us like a flowered dress tumbling in the wind on the side of the highway. Either of us could have said, Pull over and grab it! But neither of us did.

  Noe turned. I adjusted my backpack with shaky hands and walked away.

  99

  AFTER THAT I STARTED SPENDING LUNCH in the sound booth. The auditorium was always empty these days; even Steven didn’t think to look for me there. I read How to Survive and played with the lights, blending greens and blues and purples on the empty stage.

  Other times I just sat in the dark and didn’t move until it was time to go home.

  100

  IN ART, MR. LIM GAVE ME back my jar of stones with a yellow sticky note with a big letter R for Redo. I wished he would just give me a zero, since the assignment was now almost five months late.

  The jar of stones sat on my desk all through class. People looked at it, and looked at me, and my neck prickled with self-consciousness. Midway through class, Steven slipped a note across the table.

  Dear A, the note said.

  Morgue Master Lim is clearly a dilettante. The substitution of stones for fruit speaks volumes. Instead of something sweet and ripe, something cold and hard. The stones/secrets are sealed inside her; the smooth glass surface of the jar belies the disordered rubble within, barely keeping it at bay.

  The juxtaposition of the two pieces, furthermore, is striking. The first, dry twigs, are fruitless and bare. The second piece is full to the brim, but still manages to speak of hunger. She is trying to nourish herself with food only fit for a ghost. I would be worried about her, too.

  Regards,

  Steven McNeil

  I slipped out of class as soon as the bell rang, in what had become my daily escape routine. Steven didn’t come after me, but the note burned in my pocket for the rest of the day.

  On the radio
, blizzard warnings.

  At home, bags of driveway salt.

  The local paper showed a picture of Noe in the sports section, leaping over a vault to nowhere. LOCAL GYMNAST SOARS TO NEW HEIGHTS.

  I wondered if Kaylee Ito had always hated me.

  101

  THAT NIGHT I WENT FOR A walk past the half-built houses near Lorian Woods, their harsh geometry softened by snow. I felt sorry for them. They looked hungry, hungry and dumb, like tourists who hadn’t come dressed for the weather. I walked into the woods and looked at the way the branches fractured the sky. I put my hand on a tree’s bark and felt a quiet current of friendship there.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to freeze in a snowbank. It sounded almost dreamy, almost pleasant.

  “Annabeth’s wandered out and frozen,” they’d say. “It’s very sad.”

  I walked to the edge of the woods and lay in a snowbank. I looked at the stars and remembered being younger.

  Sometimes, Dad was the moon. Sometimes he was the man on the radio singing “Brown Eyed Girl.” Sometimes he was the truehearted woodsman in Little Red Riding Hood, about to stride in with his ax to claim me. On one too-fast hike with Mom, the snacks all gone and the winter sunlight waning, I let her get farther ahead of me than ever before. I’d left the trail and sat down under a tree, pulling my hood up and cinching my jacket more tightly around my waist and neck. Before long, I knew, he would come striding through the woods in tall leather boots and a green feathered cap (he was Robin Hood, sometimes) and carry me on his shoulders all the way to a sturdy log cabin with cookies on the table and a tiny orange kitten like the one in my fantasies that Mom would never let me have. Say hello to Stallion, Dad would say, pouring the purring animal into my arms (How did he know her name would be Stallion?). She’s yours.

  Instead the sky had darkened and the temperature dropped. After several hours—five minutes, maybe—I heard Mom calling my name, and glimpsed her coming down the trail. In spite of myself I’d leaped up and shouted, “I’m here,” my five-year-old’s resolve wavering at the sight of her familiar sweater and hat. She scooped me up and hoisted me onto her back, and within a few minutes I was lulled to sleep by the steady up-down jostle of her stride. That night was pizza-and-ice-cream at Uncle Dylan’s house, and a turn on my cousin Max’s new computer game. They were always especially nice to me, Uncle Dylan and Aunt Monique and Nan and the cousins. By the time Mom put me to bed, I’d forgotten about the orange kitten for a while.

  Overhead, the ice-encrusted branches rattled in the breeze, sending down a flurry of snow. For a long time now, there had been no benevolent moon-spirit watching over me, no radio-father singing “Brown Eyed Girl,” and the man in the forest was a smirking boy I must be prepared to fight hand-to-hand and, if necessary, kill.

  How were you supposed to move on from something like that?

  I lay in the snowbank and waited to sleep. Eventually I got up and walked back home.

  What’s that Tom Waits song? “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me Today.”

  The snowbank didn’t want me. There was no use fighting. I don’t believe everything I hear in songs, but when you lie in a snowbank for an hour without falling asleep, the message is pretty clear.

  102

  IN DRAMA, WE HAD A NEW teacher, Ms. Hoffstadter, who was on loan from some school in England. I guess teachers can go on exchange too. She wore bloodred pants and a white blouse, and earrings made of slender purple feathers. For the first couple of weeks she had us doing drama exercises, which were pretty okay because they were largely silent—pretend you are carrying a staggering weight on your back, pretend you are dragging your weight across the floor, pretend you are being crushed beneath it. I didn’t have to talk to anyone, just walk around in circles with these invisible torments. She had us memorize parts in a Lillian Hellman scene, then put on the scene without speaking.

  “Words are the last layer,” she said. “The tip of the iceberg. Ninety-nine percent of theater takes place in the body.”

  We pulled our invisible weights around, and moved them from shoulder to shoulder, and put them down and walked away and came back and picked them up exactly where we had left them. At the end of each class, Ms. Hoffstadter made us stack our weights neatly against one wall.

  One day, I got so tired from dragging my weight around the gritty floor that I fainted. I don’t know how it happened. It was a gray day. I was cold all the way through. I had been cold for days. The cold was inside my skull. I couldn’t knock it out or melt it. That morning I’d taken a hot shower, but the cold was still there when I got out. My arms got all goose-bumpy under my sweater. You know when you put something in the oven but forget to turn it on, then you go to check it and it’s still frozen? My goose-bumpy arms were like that. Still frozen, even though I’d been inside the school building all day.

  We were doing our usual warm-up with our invisible weights, and I felt like I was going to sneeze, and then I woke up with my cheek on the floor and seven or eight people standing over me. Ms. Hoffstadter dispatched a girl named Win to walk me to the nurse’s office. I hadn’t realized I had a fever. Win felt my forehead while we were walking down the hall.

  I drank the burning juice the nurse gave me and sat in a chair with a fleece blanket that smelled like cupboard and waited for my mom to come.

  She stroked my forehead on the car ride home. She had the radio on, some talk show with a scientist. I fell asleep but didn’t realize it, and the talk show kept going in my dream.

  “Butterflies burrow underground in the winter,” the scientist was saying. “Their dens are often six feet deep.”

  My brain pawed through these secret caches of butterflies like a hungry raccoon. Noe and I should go digging for them, said my dream-brain.

  “Here we are, Annabean,” Mom was saying. She undid my seat belt for me, click.

  She hadn’t called me Annabean in years. Maybe she called me that all the time, and I didn’t notice.

  I lay on the couch and she tucked me in with blankets and gave me a candy for my throat. It burned a hole in my cheek. I spat it into a tissue. The clock on the DVD player said 10:11 a.m., which seemed too early to be taking a nap.

  Mom was in the kitchen making tea. I fell asleep before the tab on the kettle clicked up.

  103

  I WAS SICK FOR FIVE DAYS, hot all the way through except when I stood up or moved, in which case the cold reasserted itself in queasy flashes. I wore a hat inside the house, and thick socks. When I was sleeping, I thought I was hiking. Every time I woke up, confusion: where were the snow and the pine trees? Then I’d fall asleep again—Ah, there they are. Sometimes I’d get up and chug half a box of orange juice and hurry back to the couch so I could be on my hike again. The hike made sense. The hike had clear parameters and a clear sense of momentum. The hike was all body. It had nothing to do with words. I wished I could turn all my problems into sacks of stones I only had to carry around, into mountains I only had to wear my legs out climbing. I was tired of trying to think my way through life, of having to explain and justify and make myself acceptable to the world. I wanted to lift, to drag, to climb, to smash, to bushwhack.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late to have a lobotomy and finish my life as the Incredible Hulk, pure muscle. I could follow directions. I’d make a great firefighter, charging in with my hose. Maybe I should join the army. I wouldn’t have to decide what to wear, or what to eat, or who to say hi to or not say hi to in the hall. Uncle Dylan was always hassling Max to sign up. Maybe I’d ask him about it, next time we went over for dinner.

  I fell in and out of these thoughts, in and out, in and out. I dreamed I had already joined the army, and had a narrow gray bed in a cell like a nun’s. I dreamed Noe and I were best friends.

  Mom read in the living room. Cars hummed up and down the street. I felt like a drop of blood, all surface tension. I felt like the deer heart the hunter presented to the evil stepmother instead of Snow White’s. I would always be the flea-bitten deer w
hose heart gets chopped out to save Snow White, I thought to myself. And maybe that was okay. Maybe that was worth it. In my dreams, I saved an old lady from a bathroom stall again and again.

  I shivered and shivered. Mom came and went from work.

  Wrapped up on the couch with a fever, exempt from all duties of life. Was there anywhere safer in the world?

  104

  ON THE FIFTH DAY MOM CAME home from work early. I was frozen solid. Several times I told myself to greet her, but somehow I ended up asleep before the “Hi, Mom” came out. I remembered and forgot and fell asleep, woke, remembered, forgot, until she woke me herself, lowering herself to the floor beside me.

  “Annabeth,” she said. “I think you should try to sit up for a while.”

  I shifted on the couch. Every time I moved, snow packed into the newly exposed parts of my body. I sat up with difficulty, my teeth chattering.

  Mom was holding a big envelope. “Look what came,” she said.

  She handed it to me. The front of the envelope said CONGRATULATIONS. The return address said NORTHERN UNIVERSITY.

  I wept while Mom called Nan and Uncle Dylan. I wept while she called Pauline to tell her the news. I wept until I felt her arms lift me up and carry me, too easily, to bed.

  105

  WHEN I WENT BACK TO SCHOOL on Monday, grass was showing through the snow in damp green patches. The sun looked like a scrambled egg. At some point in the week I was gone, the school had received the projectors that were supposed to arrive in September as part of a Technology in the Classrooms grant. In class, the teachers mostly fussed with them while we sat bathed in cancerous blue light.

  Sphinx Lacoeur had gotten fired, or almost fired, after Ms. Bomtrauer had called Gailer College to complain about the questionable health advice he was giving impressionable young gymnasts—I never got the whole story. The gym birds were up in arms over the injustice. You could see them twittering and puffing in the halls, skinny hips cocked, arms folded.