A Sense of the Infinite (8 page)

THE NEXT MORNING, THERE WAS A
meeting in the cafeteria for all the seniors. The guidance counselor, Ms. Hack, gave a little speech and passed around forms we had to fill out saying which school we were going to visit during our days off, and then there was a presentation by some people from Gailer College. They handed out free candy bars and showed a PowerPoint of the new athletic facilities and talked about all the exciting activities they had planned for campus visit week, and Noe and all the others who were planning to go there cheered and clapped.

In Art, Steven poked me. “Are you okay?” he said.

“Why?”

“You look . . . blank. When I look like that, Ricardo says I am presenting a negative affect.”

“You
never
seem negative. I don’t even know why they think you’re depressed.”

“That’s because I have Noe now. I really think she cured me. My mood journal has been all tens since June seventeenth.”

I sighed. In my head, I was saying good-bye to the Campus Outdoors Club, and the national park, and the long drive with the pit stop at Smoothie Town, and the dorm room with the Gulört rug and the goldfish bowl. The form was in my backpack, with
Gailer College
penciled into the appropriate field.

“Are you sure you’re not anemic?” said Steven. “I think Noe’s anemic. What if you guys ate grain-fed beef? It’s
almost
the same as grain.”

I wondered if Steven knew about Noe’s emergency-puking thing. The other day, she’d done it for the first time in a long while. The first time that I knew of, anyway. “Did you eat that soup?” she’d said. “Did you know it had chicken broth? Why do they call it Potato Vegetable if what they really mean is Potatoes in Torture Juice?”

“Where are you going for campus visits?” I asked Steven to change the subject.

“NYU,” he said.

“Aren’t you going to miss Noe?”

“Oh, terribly. It’s going to be great. We’ll pine for each other
all week, and have dazzling weekends of ecstatic reunion. I’m going to get us a family membership to the Museum of Modern Art.”

I put my head on the desk and tried not to wail.

At lunch, the tables were littered with plastic orange bracelets that the Gailer College people had left behind, and coupons for free admission to the River Rats game. Whoever had printed them had done the punctuation wrong:
RIVER RAT’S
. I stuffed a coupon into the bottom of my backpack.

I probably wouldn’t have joined the Campus Outdoor Club anyway.

After all, Noe hated camping.

AT HOME, MOM FROWNED AT THE
form she had to sign but said nothing. We went to Nan’s house for dinner, watched a
Masterpiece
show, and played a few rounds of Scrabble. I thought I was off the hook, but on the drive home the words Mom had been suppressing since the afternoon bubbled out of her.

“Are you sure, Annabeth? You should visit Northern. You can stay in Ava’s dorm.”

“What’s wrong with Gailer College?” I said.

Outside the car window, glowy lights of strip malls. We drove past the fortune-teller and the factory outlet mall and the Flying Saucer restaurant where you can get eggs and toast
for $2.99. Mom turned the radio down.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with Noe, does it?” Mom said.

The Flying Saucer restaurant was a tinny movie prop in the rearview mirror. It really is shaped like a flying saucer; you can pretend to be an alien looking out at the town while you are eating your breakfast.

“No,” I said. “Noe has nothing to do with it. I don’t get what’s wrong with Gailer College.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Gailer,” said Mom. My cousin Max was going there, so she had to be a little careful with what she said. “I just want to make sure you’re not passing up Northern because of Noe.”

“It’s a good school,” I said stoutly. “I’ll save so much money living at home.”

“You know Nan’s offered to pay for housing.”

“Well, this way she won’t have to.”

We drove in silence for a moment or two.

“I thought Noe was going to apply to Northern,” Mom said for the second time since we’d gotten in the car.

“I already told you. The gym coach pretty much begged her to go to Gailer. He’s going to get her a scholarship and everything.”

“That’s great for her, but what about you?”

I made an irritated sound,
like
What are you even
talking
about?

“You let Noe lead the way in so many areas. I
see
you doing it. And I see you retreating from things you love because she’s not interested in them.”

My head was starting to ache. “I don’t retreat from things,” I said.

“You used to be my happy nature girl, and now you’re talking about going to school in a shopping mall. Frankly, I think you’d hate Gailer College, and I think you
know
you’d hate it, but you’re too—
stuck
—on Noe to do what you really want.”

“I’m not
stuck
,” I said. My voice was getting shrill.

“You don’t seem to have any other friends, you haven’t been out with any boys since Jonathan Wellsey in ninth grade, and—”

“What do you know?” I screeched. “What do you even
know
?”

That got her attention. “You
are
seeing a boy?”

“No,” I said, but it was too late. She’d detected something in my tone.

“Annabeth, is there something you’re not telling me? If there is a boy, I want to meet him.”

I stiffened my face. “There isn’t a boy.”

That only made it worse. I could see her mentally working through the possibilities.
She says there’s no boyfriend, and yet
—

Mom swung her eyes off the road to look at me. “Are you having
sex
?” she squawked.

“None of your business,” I said, but there was no way to stop
the blush that leaped to my cheeks.

“If you are, I want to know.”

“I said,
none of your business.
”

That last statement, I shouted. She glanced at me a second time before glaring back at the road.

“Something’s really going on with you, isn’t it, Annabeth,” she muttered.

“I didn’t ask you to have me,” I said.

IN THE HOUSE, MOM SLAMMED AROUND
the kitchen making herself a plate of food, which she carried upstairs to her room. I shook some cereal into a bowl, but when I went to get the milk I realized we were out. I grabbed my wallet.

“I’m going to the corner store,” I shouted up the stairs. “We’re out of milk.”

The latter sentence came out bursting with accusation, as if all that was wrong in my life came down to her failure to feed me. I made sure to slam the door on my way out of the house.

When I left the convenience store with the milk jug under my arm, the blue of twilight had deepened into ink. The street was
quiet. The porch lights were on and I could see TVs through the curtains of houses.

I walked past the liquor store and past the big drugstore where a weary attendant in a rust-colored apron was slamming the shopping carts into one another and shoving them into their metal corrals for the night.

I thought of Noe and Steven with hearts sewn into their clothes, and brought my wrist to my mouth and bit it.

I thought of the photograph of my mother holding me up while I leaned over the railing to reach for the mist that rose from the waterfall, anchoring herself to the concrete while I strained toward the rushing water.

A breeze fluttered up my shirt. My feet were sore and sweaty inside my running shoes.

Stop looking at me like that
, I said inside my head, although I couldn’t say exactly who I was saying it to.

THAT NIGHT I COULDN’T FALL ASLEEP.
I kept stewing and stewing, carrying on the argument with Mom inside my head. It wasn’t fair, that happy-nature-girl comment.

All I could think about was the time I was thirteen. I had just discovered the box full of Mom’s old wilderness books in our basement and read
How to Survive in the Woods
cover to cover, and now I was ready for adventure. I imagined myself tromping through the forest, victorious, stoic, hardy, capable. I imagined myself walking from my back door all the way to the North Pole.

It was a day or two after eighth-grade graduation, and the summer hadn’t yet turned bad. I’d dragged Mom’s old tent out
of the basement, and the curious, musty sleeping bag and camping mat. In my room, I packed a sweater, a hat, extra socks, and the rechargeable flashlight Mom made me keep plugged into the wall in case of a power outage.

“Hey, Mom?” I’d said when my pack was ready. “I’m going camping. I’ll be back on Sunday.”

Camping. I might as well have said I was going to go pick up strange men outside the Thunderbird Casino. The flurry that word caused!

My backpack: unzipped and picked apart, my perfectly adequate supplies declared to be insufficient.

My ability to survive in the woods for two nights questioned, unknown dangers emphasized.

Nan was over, using our computer to look up cake recipes for my cousin Ava’s birthday. She’d come upstairs to see what the fuss was about.

“What’s all this?”

“I’m going camping.”

“Are you going to let her go with only
crackers
, Leslie?” That’s Nan, holding up a box of Wheat Thins.

“You’re leaving out the rest of the food,” I’d protested, motioning at the hard-boiled eggs I’d bundled up in paper towels.

“Annabeth,” said Mom. “You know that’s not enough for two days.”

I waved the plant ID book at her. “The whole point is to supplement with wild things. Milkweed. Sumac. Raspberries.”

“Raspberries!” said Nan. “Leslie, she can’t go a whole weekend on raspberries.”

I should have left a note. Forty-five minutes of bitter negotiation later, they’d driven me to the regional park, where there are official campsites, and a ranger who checks to make sure that you paid, and all sorts of old people sitting outside their trailers on folding chairs drinking cans of off-brand soda. They made me bring an emergency whistle, and a cooler full of sandwiches and fruit and little foil-wrapped packages of Nan’s cabbage rolls. My two nights in the forest were reduced to one. One night at the regional park, in the hot dog–smelling air.

If Nan hadn’t been there, I would have said a whole lot more to Mom than I did.

Like
How can you do this to me?

And
If I was a boy you’d let me.

And
You of all people should understand.

The things I couldn’t say out loud with Nan in the car, I said with my eyes instead. I knew that Mom caught every one by the way she looked back at me in the rearview mirror.

“Annabeth,” she said, and I shook my head.

I felt like I was swimming through a school of jellyfish: my whole body prickled and burned. We crept along the asphalt ring road, past the enormous Coleman tents with people
barbecuing, until we came to the campsite the ranger had assigned me, number fourteen. It was under some scrubby maple trees. There was a fire ring with a dirty grate propped up over it, and the half-burned remains of someone’s cardboard beer box underneath. Mom and I barely spoke as we set up the tent. Someone in a nearby campsite had a radio playing top-forty hits. Another radio was broadcasting the baseball game. As we drove the tent stakes into the ground, an unspoken
I hate you
sizzled between us like a coal.

“Well, I think Annabeth’s very adventurous,” Nan kept saying. “How many thirteen-year-old girls go on camping trips alone?”

“It’s not really camping,” I’d grumbled.

“And you have your own little water spout. Look at that.”

As we unrolled the camping mat and sleeping bag, Nan wandered off to meet the people in the neighboring campsite.

“Will you keep an eye on my granddaughter?” I heard her saying. “She’s camping out all by herself.”

Mom and I stood across from one another in front of the car, enveloped in bitter silence. I wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Great campsite,” I said. “Think I’ll see any stars with all those streetlights?”

“Someday we’ll go on a real camping trip.”

“I was going to go on a real camping trip this weekend.”

We didn’t say another word. We only stood there, on the
packed dirt where nothing grew, while the baseball announcer’s voice clamored through the thin scrim of trees.

“Annabeth,” called Nan. “Come here and meet your neighbors. They’ve invited you over for supper, isn’t that nice?”

I shot Mom a look and started dismantling the tent.

“Take me home,” I growled.

I could see on Mom’s face that there was something terrible going on inside her, but in my anger it never occurred to me that she was being anything other than selfish and unreasonable.

On the car ride home, Nan had kept patting her hand.

I didn’t know then.

I didn’t know, and now she wanted to call me her happy nature girl, and tell me to go three hundred miles away on my own, to the very place where the whole ugly mess of my life had started, without even Noe to make it okay.

IT FELT LIKE THE HOUSE WAS
filled with paint fumes: instant migraine when you walked in the door. Mom and I avoided each other’s eyes and timed our comings and goings to avoid intersection in the kitchen or hall. My head swarmed with equal parts guilt and indignation. Guilt for shutting her out. Indignation at the suggestion that Noe was anything less than my dearest friend in the world.

One day I came home to find a box of condoms on my bed, and a pamphlet titled
What Is Consent?

As I skimmed it, my cheeks burned with something I tried to convince myself was mortification, but knew to be heartbreak instead.

Mom worried about boys. The first time it emerged that I had kissed one, she made me practice shouting
No!
and kneeing her in the groin until we both started crying.

Personally, I have never required the knee, although God help the poor fool who incites me to deploy it.

Oliver had been a sweet and respectful person in that department, and as I sat on my bed, I wished I could break ranks for long enough to tell Mom that one thing, just that.

The worst part of fighting is the moment you realize the other person is really hurting. It’s pretty impossible to keep going after that.