A Sense of the Infinite (6 page)

AT HOME, IN MY BEDROOM, I
spun around three times, kissed the orchid I had stolen, and pressed it between the pages of my Spanish-English dictionary.

I lay on my bed and felt the ceiling whirl.

I opened the window and let the night air creep in, let it envelop the older, wiser, worldlier person I had just become.

“SO WHAT’S THE BIG SECRET?”
said Noe.

We were sitting on her bed. It was early afternoon, and Noe was still in her pajamas, purple flannel with cows on them. The flowers Steven had given her were on her dresser in a big glass vase. When I looked at them, my whole body fluttered with the memory of orchids. I wasn’t used to being the one whose life was more romantic, but last night, for the first time ever, I was pretty sure I had won. I’d been holding on to the news all morning, like a brightly colored button I was smuggling under my tongue. When Noe still wasn’t answering texts by one o’clock, I’d called her mom on the landline and she’d gone upstairs to rouse a sleepy Noe out of bed.

“I went to the orchid house with Oliver Mazetti,” I blurted.

As soon as I said it, I could feel it all over again—the moonlight, and the dew on my skin, and the low, rumbly, squee-inducing timbre of Oliver’s voice when he asked if I was sure I wanted to. My toes curled, and I brought my fists to my mouth and rocked back and forth a little, as if the fact of it was so momentous that to think about it left me physically incapable of staying still.

“Wait,
what
?” said Noe.

“I went outside to cool off, and he walked past the place I was sitting, and we ended up drinking Jack Daniel’s and Gatorade and talking
forever
, and then he asked if I wanted to go for a walk, and we snuck into the Botanical Gardens, and he took me to this secret place that only the groundskeepers know about, and we—um . . .” I trailed off, trembling in anticipation of Noe’s reaction.

“You made
out
with him?” Noe screeched.

“We did more than that.”

It took a second for that to sink in.

“Ohmigod,” screamed Noe. “Annabeth, you WHORE!”

She threw a pillow at me. I made a squawk of surprise, and then we both started laughing, a juddering, unstoppable laughter like a machine gone out of control. It filled Noe’s bedroom and seemed to rock the entire house. The fact of it was too huge. There was no sensible thing to say.

“I feel like I should ask you questions, but I don’t know what to ask,” said Noe when she recovered her breath. “Was it thrilling?”

I picked up the pillow she’d thrown at me and hugged it to my chest. “Um. Yes.”

“Did he seduce you or did you seduce him?”

“It was a mutual seduction,” I said.

We both started cracking up again, the giddiness of the conversation too much for the small bedroom.

“Are you going to see him again?” said Noe. “Or was it, like, a crazy one-night thing?”

The question had been buzzing around in my head all morning. I’d imagined every possible scenario—from never seeing Oliver again and keeping our night at the orchid house as my wildest, most fabulous memory, to starting a whirlwind romance involving three weeks of orchid house escapades before Oliver’s tragic departure for Alaska.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We traded numbers, but it was more of a thanks-for-a-great-night thing than a hey-let’s-be-boyfriend-and-girlfriend thing. I don’t think we’d have much to talk about.”

“Steven and I haven’t done
anything
,” Noe said. “We tried making out with our shirts off one time, and it was so awkward. We were both like, ‘Let’s put our shirts back on and play another round of Speed.’”

“What made it awkward?” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Noe. “Steven’s family’s really religious, and he was afraid of accidentally doing something wrong or disrespectful. We talked about it for a long time, and he was like, ‘I just want to kiss you and bring you lots of flowers and not do things for a long time,’ and I was like, ‘That’s okay with me.’”

I suppressed a smile. Noe had always been skittish about physical stuff, and had kissed her last boyfriend exactly twice. She never seemed to realize that the awkwardness came as much from her as from the boys she dated. It was cute and a little heartbreaking, this inability of Noe’s to admit her own apprehension. It made me want to protect her even more.

“Do you feel different?” said Noe.

“Kind of.”

“How?”

We lay back on Noe’s bed, our bodies blanketed in sunlight.

“It’s like . . .” I struggled to find the right metaphor. “When you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about jumping off a high diving board, and wondering if it will be scary, and if you’ll get water up your nose, and then you do it and you’re like, ‘Okay, I could do that again,’ and the next time you see someone do it in a movie you’re like, ‘I’ve done that.’”

“I just can’t believe it was
last night
. It’s so random.”

“So perfect,” I said.

Outside the window, cicadas were going
chirrrrrr-chirr-chirr-chirr-chirr
. Noe squeezed my hand.

“It feels like everything’s
happening
, Bethy. You know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” I said, and the room seemed to glow and pinken like a flower about to burst into light.

“SO, ANNABETH,” SAID STEVEN. “WHAT’S
this I hear about you sneaking off from the dance?”

We were in the cafeteria, and Noe and I had been telling Steven about our restaurant idea, with the tiny spoons and the order slip where you could specify exactly two and a half ounces of soup so there would never be any waste. Last night, Oliver had texted me when I was still at Noe’s house, and we’d pored over the message together—
hey
—and determined my response, a noncommittal yet encouraging
hey
☺. I’d turned off my phone before he could text back, too overwhelmed by the drama of the first exchange to contemplate a second move, or a third.

“Can I tell him?” Noe said to me. “Please?”

“Noe—”

“Annabeth went to the orchid house,” she said, waggling her eyebrows on
orchid house
and shimmying her shoulders like a burlesque dancer.

“She got arrested?” said Steven.

“Yes,” I said. “Public indecency.”

“No,” said Noe, “it means she took acid.”

“No,” I said, “it means I frequented a brothel.”

“Actually,” Noe said, “Annabeth is a drugged-out criminal prostitute.”

“I
knew
it,” said Steven, smacking his hand on the table.

I laughed into my milk carton. I had a vision of Noe and me at Northern next year, the cool intellectual table in the cafeteria, trading jokes until they shut down the dinner service and practically had to kick us out. Later, in our dorm room, Noe would chat with Steven on the computer, and I’d stretch out on my bed and recall the details of my latest romantic encounter.

Steven’s theater friends came up to our table to talk to him, and soon they’d squeezed onto the benches beside us and were dealing out a card game. Noe hooked her arm through mine.

“Shall we?” she said.

It took me a second to catch her meaning. “Sure,” I said.

We got up to make our escape. As we left the crowded cafeteria, Steven’s voice wafted after us—“What? What? You guys aren’t going to play euchre?”—until we were both doubled over in the laughter of conspirators who can’t even remember what the conspiracy is.

That afternoon after school, I walked to the train tracks. The train tracks are my favorite place in our town. They run along the edge of a psychedelic forest that thrums and buzzes with insect song until you are sure you have crossed into another world. This forest is filled with bee balm and goldenrod and dusty stands of sumac. You can break off a furry red horn and suck the berries for their fuzzy, sour juices and in this manner avoid getting scurvy.

When I got there, the last of the fireflies were bobbing and flashing in tunnels of leaves. I sat against the abandoned car that has been rusting there since Mom was a kid and listened to the freight trains shudder and moan.

I built a little pile of leaves and sticks and gravel, like a shrine to something, I don’t know what. All I knew was I felt happy and loved, a trembling leaf on the great big tree of the world. The cicadas mounted their deafening drone around me and I stood up and danced, a private madness overcoming me, the madness of being seventeen and no longer a virgin on the last warm night of fall.

Thank you
, I whispered to no one in particular.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

A train whistle blew. I bowed and touched the ground, aware of how crazy I must look, and how little, in that moment, I cared.

OLIVER STARTED CHATTING ME EVERY
night after school, but we didn’t have much to say, and after making vague plans to get together again before he left for Alaska, the chats tapered off and then stopped. I was relieved. The truth was, Oliver himself was almost peripheral to the whole experience. More intoxicating was the romance of it, the movie-script perfection of the evening we’d shared. All week at school, I’d been buzzing, trying to keep the tremulous brightness of it inside myself. Now and then, Noe and I would exchange a glance, or we’d walk home after gymnastics with our arms around each other’s shoulders, feeling the hugeness of things.

When we get our tattoos
, we kept saying.

When we have our dorm room.

When we open our restaurant.

I thought of the birdcalls in Mom’s book. The birdcall for Noe and Annabeth:
When-we, when-we, when-we
.

OCTOBER TURNED COLD THE WEEK
before Halloween, just gave up its hold on the summer like a doomed mountain climber letting go of the edge of a cliff. The leaves dropped off the trees and Mom brought our winter box up from the basement, the one with all the hats and scarves and mismatched mittens. Slowly, slowly, the thrill of the orchid house gave way to commonplace things.

In English, we discussed the three forms of irony.

In Media Studies, we dissected the hidden messages in various advertisements.

In gym practice, Noe regaled me with tales of E. O. James gymnasts past and present. There was Lindsay Harris, whose tampon fell out when she lifted her leg for a split in the middle
of her beam routine. There was Mindy Chafik, who got drunk before a gym meet and did a spinning projectile vomit from the top of the bars. There was Cassidy LaClaire, who nobody had realized was a cutter until she appeared on the floor in her leotard, a ladder of scars running down each inner thigh. Noe was an expert on these girls and many others. Noe knew every secret, had the inside scoop on every transgression. I listened with a mixture of horror and awe. There were so many ways for a girl to ruin herself, Noe seemed to imply. How lucky we were to be above all of that.

A few days before Halloween, we had a mini meet at the Catholic high school, St. Barnabas. There weren’t too many teams there, and everyone from E. O. James got at least one ribbon. Mostly, we huddled on the bleachers and made fun of the St. Barnabas gymnasts, who were matronly and stout and looked like jiggling sides of ham in their pink and white leotards with the St. Barnabas cross on the butt. I got third place for my bar routine, our whole team erupted in applause, and on the bus ride home all Noe could talk about was how
incredible
I was. “You should have seen yourself, Bethy. I wish you could have seen yourself. You looked like a gymnast!”

In Business Math, we learned about compound and simple interest.

In Drama, we acted out scenes from various Shakespeare plays.

In Art, we had a mini opening during the last ten minutes
of class wherein we got to wander around the room looking at one another’s self-portraits and discussing their merits among ourselves, although nobody actually did. The art was pretty bad. Most people had done charcoal drawings of themselves, except for Steven, who had done a photomosaic consisting of a thousand tiny pictures of Noe, and Amy McDougall, who had done a pen-and-ink rendition of herself as an anime character, complete with the mile-high legs and miniskirt. And, of course, my bundle of sticks.

Steven and I trailed around the classroom together, peering at the portraits.

“Is that what I think it is?” said Steven.

I squinted at Amy’s drawing, which was tacked to the bulletin board in a sea of charcoal faces.

“Panties,” said Steven. “You can see her panties.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, wow.”

You could see her panties. You actually could.

At the end of the class, we got to collect our self-portraits along with our grade. I saw Amy check the back of her anime drawing and smile. Steven’s
Boy with the Rainbow Heart
had a
P
for Pass. My bundle of sticks had a slip of paper underneath with an
R
for Redo.

“This is an outrage,” I said as Steven and I walked out of the room. “How can he fail
RAW MATERIALS
but pass anime-panties McDougall?”

“You have to admit that anime-panties displays a fine mastery of the art of shading,” said Steven. “I cannot say the same for
RAW MATERIALS
.”

“Anime-panties is the visual equivalent of fan fiction,” I said. “
RAW MATERIALS
is a raw and powerful gesture.”

“
RAW MATERIALS
is a pile of sticks,” said Steven. “Lest we forget.”

“How can you say that?” I screeched. “You’re the one who told me to hand it in.
Ooh, I’m Steven, I’ve been getting straight A’s in art for years
.”

Steven looked pained. “The hallmark of great artists is being misunderstood. That Redo is just a sign that we’re on to some heady shit.”

We strolled down the hall and came to the bathrooms. I headed for the girls’. Steven followed me. I paused. “You’re coming in? It’s the girls’ bathroom.”

“I have to pee too,” said Steven.

“So go in the guys’ bathroom.”

“But we’re having a conversation!”

I hovered by the sinks. “Seriously, go away.”

“Oh, please, Annabeth. Like nobody’s heard you pee before.”

“Steven.”

“What? I thought we were friends.”

“Just because we’re friends doesn’t mean we need to be pee sisters,” I said.

“Pee sisters! Pee sisters!” Steven sang.

He went into a stall, the door swinging free behind him. A few seconds later, I heard a voluminous splashing.

“Come on, Annabeth. Pee with me.”

I opened my mouth to scold him, but instead I shrugged and went into a stall myself. Steven talked the whole time.

“You know that unisex bathrooms are the new thing. In fifty years, our grandchildren are going to think we’re so old-fashioned because we grew up with segregated toilets.”

I started talking too, mostly to cover up the sound.

“There will be pee riots,” I said. “The gender symbols will be ripped from bathroom doors and burned in public squares.”

“Exactly!” said Steven.

“Thousands were arrested in the great pee riots of 2024,” I said in my best news-announcer voice. “But in the referendums of 2025, bathroom suffrage was achieved at last.”

We joined at the sink to wash our hands.

“Pee sisters?” I said as we exited the bathroom.

Steven made a cockeyed salute. “Pee sisters forever,” he said.

We came upon Noe a few steps later. She was walking down the hall with Kaylee and Lindsay from the gym team.

“You guys looks awfully pleased with yourselves,” she said.

“We’re pee sisters,” I said.

Kaylee and Lindsay exchanged a look.

“Excuse me?” said Noe.

Steven giggled. “We subverted the dominant paradigm of gender-specific bladder relief.”

“We brought an antidisestablishmentarianist perspective to bear on the issue of male/female urination roles,” I said.

“O-kay,” Noe said. It was strange to see her like this, performing for Kaylee and Lindsay instead of joining in on our fun. It gave me a curious urge to poke her. The other day in gym practice, I’d overheard Noe telling them that she and Steven had come
this close
to doing it the last time she was at his house, which struck me as a pretty big elaboration considering what she had told me. Sometimes I forgot that Noe’s self-confidence had limits. When it came to other girls, she could be downright insecure.

“Speaking of gender roles,” Noe said to Steven, “you’re driving us to the movies at eight o’clock tonight.”

He seemed to sober up. “Yes, ma’am,” Steven said.

He fell into step beside her, hooking his pinky finger through hers like they always did. I groaned inwardly. Surely, Noe wasn’t worrying about what Lindsay and Kaylee thought of Steven. She was
Noe
. Who cared what anyone thought?

“You two are too cute,” said Lindsay Harris, she of the fallen-out tampon.

It was jarring to hear Lindsay Harris commenting on Noe and Steven in a familiar way, as if they belonged to her.
What are you doing?
I almost said.
That’s mine
.

As we walked down the hall, I found myself at the back of the group, and wondered how that had happened.

“Does anyone know what lunch is?” said Noe.

I tried to tell her it was spaghetti and slaughter balls, but everyone was talking so loudly I don’t think she heard.