A Sense of the Infinite (20 page)

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.

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 whose 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?

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.

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.

Noe had started to wear a tiny gold cross on a fine chain. You could barely make out its glimmer around her neck. She carried around a thick book called
Foucault’s Pendulum
and a pink travel mug with
GAILER COLLEGE
embossed on the side.

Margot Dilforth had shocked everyone by making out with another girl at a St. Patrick’s Day party. Now they were walking around the halls arm in arm. I had never seen Margot Dilforth looking radiant before. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. Now she glowed.

At lunch, I went to the nutritionist’s office, knocked, and walked in. He was knitting a green-and-white dog sweater and had a new audiobook playing. I saw the CD case on his desk:
Entering Mist
.

The way to Master Tung’s house was up the twelve-peaked mountain . . .

Bob didn’t bother to scramble for the stop button. He set his knitting down, leaned forward, and gently clicked the player off.

“Annabeth,” he said. “What a surprise.”

I tossed a small blue notebook onto his desk and plunked myself onto the creaky plastic chair.

“I was thinking we could start over,” I said.

He picked up the notebook and flipped through it. As he read through the columns, he began to sit up straighter. When
he looked back at me, there was something like confidence in his face. He cleared his throat and adjusted the collar on his shirt.

“So, Annabeth. How long have you had trouble eating?” he said.

I WASN’T TRYING TO STARVE MYSELF.
I was just too sad to eat.

Bob said that happened sometimes, when people got stressed.

He said the main thing was learning to feel good again.

“What would make you feel good?” he said.

I didn’t have an answer for that, so mostly we ate Cheez-Its and listened to
Entering Mist.

I STARTED GOING BY BOB’S OFFICE
now and then when I got hungry. He kept a cardboard box full of trail mix packets outside the door. I felt like a bird visiting a bird feeder throughout the winter. I started making detours to go past the box throughout the day. Sometimes I was afraid it would be empty, but it never was. I tore into the packets as I hurried away, and inhaled the nuts and seeds so fast I couldn’t taste them.

ONE DAY, STEVEN CAUGHT ME PAWING
through the trail mix box. I jerked away guiltily. We were the only two people in the hall.

“Annabeth,” he said, and I bolted like a deer, unable to make myself look back.

After that, there were sometimes chocolate éclairs in the box, and sometimes chili garlic peanuts, and sometimes neatly wrapped bowls of spinach-mushroom ravioli.

Somehow, I was always able to eat the things that came from Steven, as if the charm of friendship was the one thing powerful enough to overcome the curse of the Stone King.

SPRING BREAK WAS COMING UP. STEVEN
was going to Connecticut with his mom to visit his dying grandpa. In Art, I made a
PEE SISTERS
badge for him and sewed it into the sleeve of his sweater, just above the wrist. When he saw what I had done, he got to work on a badge for me. When we walked out, we both had neon-green hearts hidden under our cuffs. Before splitting up at the end of the hall, I gave him a big hug.

“Take good care of your grandpa,” I said, before slipping away.

THE LAST TIME I HUNG OUT
in Bob’s office before the break, we got to the part in
Entering Mist
where Wu goes to stay with a band of forest monks who rely on magical tree energy to stay alive. The tree energy is called “nwiffer,” and the monks absorb it by being somewhere green.

When we got to that part in the audiobook, I blurted, “I used to be like that.”

“Like what?” said Bob.

“Full of nwiffer.”

As I said it, I remembered a time before the monster. The feeling started in my toes and spread upward, a pale green leaping. I remembered the hush of wind in the treetops, and the
striking red of Mom’s hat against the leaves. I remembered gazing at the mirror in my vain moments, so pleased with myself. So certain of my own valor. So
certain
.

Bob said that my task for spring break was to get some nwiffer, and if I happened to eat more that would be a bonus.

I spent the week walking all the old trails, letting the green feeling spread from my toes to my ankles to my knees. I sat by the river and listened to the water until my body seemed to disappear in the sound. I thought about everything that had happened that year, from the first morning of school, to the moment Oliver and I began to kiss in the orchid house, to the abortion, to the gym meet, and everything in between. As the memories rose to my mind, they seemed to flow through me and disappear with each new swirl in the river. Maybe this was what life was, just this: one big ripple. I could live with that. I could let it go on and on.

In the evenings, Mom and I pored over the course catalog that Northern had sent, and talked on the phone with Ava and Pauline. Mom was thinking about going back to school to be a paramedic; one day her own fat envelope came in the mail, and we pored over that instead.

ON THE FIRST DAY BACK FROM
spring break, Steven came to Art wearing a crown of daisies in his hair, and a chain of tiny bells around his ankle that he’d found on the street.

“I just want to
be
springtime,” he said to me. “Don’t you?”

He seemed floatier than usual, not quite okay. He wouldn’t answer my questions about his grandpa. Finally, I dragged him to the bathroom and sat him down on the edge of the sink.

“Steven,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing,” he sang, and then he dropped his head onto my shoulder and began to weep.

SPRING BREAK HAD BEEN A DISASTER.

On his second day in Connecticut, Noe had chatted him, saying all this stuff about how
concerned
she and Darla were about Steven going off to NYU, and encouraging him to stay closer to home.

“Concerned why?” I said.

“I’m depressed,” he said. “Remember? If Noe’s not there to monitor me, I could tumble into a downward spiral and end up like my uncle.”

“What’s wrong with your uncle?”

“He’s a writer. He smokes pot. He wears pretty shoes.”

“He sounds cool.”

“He
is
.”

After an hour and a half of discussing Steven’s “depression,” she’d finally gotten to the point: she’d gone for a walk with Senior Leader Alex and discovered the true meaning of romance.

Steven took out his phone and showed me the chat transcript. I cringed, skimming the long exchange.

we haven’t really been together since new years
, Noe had said.

what do you mean?
Steven had said.

what about the valentines ball?

and that day we played chess in the library?

and all the notes?

you spent half the valentines thing at margot and dominic’s table

i hardly even saw you

and we haven’t kissed since rhiannon’s party

we’ve hardly had lunch together since last semester

i figured we’d reverted

?!?!?!

“reverted”

?

i thought it was mutual

i didn’t think it needed some big discussion

we said “i love you.”

you don’t revert from “i love you” without a big discussion

that’s what “i love you” means

Steven’s tears and snot were soaking into my sweater. The daisies in his hair were getting crushed, the white petals curling in. I pulled the vial of lavender oil out of my pocket and quietly anointed him on the wrists, forehead, and heart, thinking that the mysterious thing about love is that you don’t have to know what you’re doing in order to do it exactly right.