A Sense of the Infinite (12 page)

THERE WERE TREES OUTSIDE THE WINDOW
now. I wondered when that had happened. They were standing thick and dense on either side of the road. The bus began to climb a hill, and suddenly the trees dropped away to reveal a view of low mountains with forests stretching as far as I could see. My breath stopped, and I craned my neck to see better, as if I could get closer to that view, climb into it and have it belong to me.

So this is what Mom was talking about, I thought. This is what she wanted me to feel. A tug of belonging. A sense of the infinite.

I put my head against the window and sobbed.

WHEN THE BUS GOT INTO MAPLE
Bay, Ava was waiting for me at the station. She was wearing a green velvet coat and an orange knitted cap. Her hair was dyed blue and her eyes were their regular color. When I walked up to her with my bag, she pulled me into a hug whose ferocity surprised me.

“Your mom is going to kill me,” she said.

AVA’S DORM WAS ACTUALLY AN OLD
brick house on the west side of campus. It had six bedrooms, a kitchen, and a wood-paneled study room like the library in
Clue.
The kitchen had a bookshelf built into the wall. I looked at the books while Ava made tea.
The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Waiting for Godot, 50 Short Plays, The Actor Prepares
. I watched the self-assured way Ava moved around the kitchen, pawing through the cupboard for clean mugs and retrieving a crusty jar of honey from some hiding place under the counter.

“Besides certain dickheads in Alaska,” said Ava, “how’s life?”

“Fine,” I said. “Mom’s good. Nan’s good. I’m on the gymnastics team.”

Even though Ava had reformed, I still felt shy around her. The fact that she was a Good Witch now instead of a Bad Witch hardly mattered; any way you sliced it, change was still uncomfortable.

“Where’s your friend?” said Ava. “When I saw you in the summer, your mom said you guys were planning to drive up here together.”

“She’s touring Gailer College.”

Ava made an
I knew it
face. “She seemed like the Gailer type.”

I’d forgotten that Ava had met Noe briefly, at my house. “I’m applying there too,” I said stoutly, as if to defend Noe from whatever
the Gailer type
implied. “Everybody is. The only reason I even came up here was because Mom made me.”

It was weird to see Ava so bright and capable. Uncle Dylan was right. She’d really come into her own at Northern. The darkness that had been suffocating her before had dissipated, like a plant that only seemed to be dying until you shook out its roots and planted it in a deeper hole. Ava didn’t come back to our town much anymore, even for Christmases and Thanksgivings. The avoidance was definitely intentional. Some people fought tooth and nail to keep their old life alive when they went away, but as far as I knew Ava never talked to her high school friends, never came home on college breaks to work her old summer job and go to parties with people she’d
known since she was a kid.

I couldn’t tell if it was better to be a person who held on or a person who let go. Maybe it was less about better and worse, and more about which thing you needed to do in order for your plant to grow.

Ava handed me a chipped mug that was shaped like a mushroom. It had some green flecks inside it that must be the tea. Before that, I’d only ever had Lipton tea in bags with a string and a tag. When I sipped the mushroom mug, the green flecks stuck to my teeth.

“I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t gotten out of there,” Ava said. “Probably killed myself.”

“Why?”

“Sit by the railroad tracks one day and think about it,” Ava said.

I had spent plenty of days by the railroad tracks.

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

The grass there is bleached to pale white straw, and crickets jump past your legs like popcorn kernels zinging off a hot pan. When the trains come by they huff and chug and clang your brain to noisy oblivion. Afterward you can follow the tracks to a dusty grove where kids make jumps for their dirt bikes and hobos leave behind nests of broken glass.

“Mom and Nan and Uncle Dylan seem to like it okay,” I said.

“They all left and went back. That’s different. Your mom really wants you to come here,” said Ava. “And you’re Nature Girl. Come on. There’re a million acres of national park fifteen minutes away.”

Are you a Noe?
she seemed to be saying,
or an Ava? Are you going to hold on to what you already have, or start from scratch?

I gazed into my mug. The green flecks were swirling around in the tea like the snow inside a snow globe.

“I just don’t know yet,” I said, and set it down.

I WAS HOPING AVA AND I
would go to bed right away so we wouldn’t have to talk anymore, but Ava’s roommates started bubbling in and soon it was impossible to escape.

Ava’s roommates were different from anyone I knew from back home. I couldn’t keep their names straight. Girls in thick glasses and tight sweaters and dresses rescued from the costume department thrift sale, they made tea and sat on the counter and picked at the runs in their stockings.

“What’s your name?” they asked me.

“Annabeth.”

“How old are you? Where do you live? I like your jeans. Aren’t her jeans cute? Where did you get them? Did you drive
up here alone? A bunch of us are going out for breakfast tomorrow morning, do you want to go out for breakfast?”

I kept hoping Ava would step in to save me like Noe always did when people were overwhelming me with too much attention, but she left me to answer for myself.

“I took the bus,” I said, “I’m seventeen,” feeling like the contestant in a rapid-fire trivia game.

“Were you on the eight o’clock?” said a girl with dreadlocks.

“Mm-hmm.”

“My friend was on that bus, she said there was this girl who was crying and throwing up the whole way.”

Heat flooded my face. If Noe were here, she’d be distracting Ava’s roommates, telling them about vegetarianism or gymnastics. She’d be making plans for us to go to a physics lecture with one of them and a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals meeting with another. I wouldn’t have to talk at all except to peep my excitement or consent. This was why I couldn’t go to Northern without her, exactly this: surrounded by strangers, my only ally a cousin who apparently refused to protect me.

“What’s wrong?” said the girls. “What’s wrong?”

I was doing my werewolf thing, my capacity for language disappearing, my ability to smile and present a functional social face melting away.
Where’s Noe?
my inside self was howling. Already, my mind was frantically making plans. I would tell Mom I hated Northern, I would rip up the application I’d
been working on, I would go to Gailer College and be the water girl for the gymnastics team and never leave Noe again.

Ava was gazing at me across the kitchen. She raised her eyebrows and tipped her head to the side as if to say,
What’s going on in there?

“Nothing,” I squeaked at the girls who had asked me what was wrong. “The bus ride was shitty.”

I looked at the floor. The roots of my plant were crying out in alarm and groping for familiar soil. I ordered myself to stay and talk, but my feet began to move without my consent and suddenly I was on the front steps of Ava’s dorm, huddled up against a brick column. Through the kitchen window, I could hear Ava and her friends.

“Is she okay? She, like,
bolted
.”

“She’s
really
shy. It’s pretty much her first time away from home. I’ll go out there in a minute if she doesn’t come back in.”

I took out my phone and called Noe, but she didn’t answer. I remembered that tonight was the tiki party. Noe was probably dancing in a little group with all the other kids from our school, her phone crammed deep in her purse or forgotten on some bathroom counter.

There was a text from Mom I hadn’t noticed before.

if you get this in time, take a picture for me when you go past moose rock!

I stared at the text for a moment, wondering what she was
talking about, then remembered that a bunch of people had taken pictures out the bus window when we passed a weirdly shaped boulder a few minutes from town. It was strange to think that Mom had spent a part of her life here, that she knew this place that I was just discovering. I thought about how excited I was when I’d first pulled
How to Survive in the Woods
out of our basement. Mom had made notes in the margins, blue ink additions to the diagrams of cooking shelters and proper canoe-paddling strokes. In the plant identification section, she’d marked a date and place next to each plant on the day that she first found it. Wild strawberries were marked
Maple Bay National Park
the summer before I was born.

Next year!
she’d written next to a place on the map, a zigzagging network of lakes and rivers.

Next year had never happened. Next year, she was back home.

As I sat on the steps, anger welled up inside me for the lost girl of the survival book, full of exclamation marks and opinions on the proper way to build a fire in the rain. She wanted so much for me to discover myself, and I was afraid to even try.

It was starting to snow. I texted Mom back quickly and stood up to go back inside.

WHEN I WENT BACK INTO THE
kitchen, the girls were making cookies. The counter was littered with dirty spoons and mixing bowls, and half the contents of the cupboards were piled up on the table.

“Were you hiding?” said the girl with dreadlocks, whose name might have been Beatrice. “We didn’t mean to scare you away.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I was just embarrassed.”

“Awwww,” said Beatrice. “So you were the puking girl. Are you feeling better now? What happened?”

I hesitated. How could I tell a bunch of strangers when I hadn’t told Noe? Wasn’t that a kind of betrayal? Maybe I was still angry at her for ditching our plans so easily, and this was
my twisted way of getting back at her. Or maybe I trusted Ava’s friends in a way I didn’t trust Noe. They seemed so grown-up, and we were still kids. I needed a grown-up right now, not a kid—did that make me a traitor? I wasn’t sure.

I thrust these complicated thoughts aside and blurted, “I had an accident. With a boy. Ava’s taking me to the clinic tomorrow.”

The kitchen was quiet for a moment. Then one by one, the girls put down their bowls and spatulas and teacups and came to put their hands on my shoulders and back.

“Are you scared?” they said.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Don’t be scared!” they said. “Don’t be scared!”

The girls all had some story about a close call they had had with a broken condom or a birth control pill.

“My twin sister tried to do an herbal abortion when we were fifteen,” said a big, dark-haired girl who might have been called Jade or Jane or Jacey. “She got the recipe out of a fantasy novel. We stayed up all night brewing herbs on the stove.” She chomped her cookie, then peered at it suspiciously. “How old was that butter?”

“Which book was it?” everyone wanted to know.

“That one with the fairies.” She glanced at me appraisingly. “We could do one tomorrow, if you want. Co-op opens at eight, they have all the herbs.”

“Keep your witchy paws off my baby cousin,” said Ava.
“Annabeth, don’t listen to her, she has no idea what she’s talking about.”

A girl named Leah started telling a story about a time she got pregnant by accident. “He was like, ‘It broke and I don’t have another one!’ And I was like, ‘Okaaaaay, I guess we have to stop.’ And then we were like, ‘What if we’re really, really careful? Like, ninja-careful!’”

Leah had had an abortion at the same clinic I was going to in the morning.

“The people at the clinic are really nice,” she said. “They’re really nice. You’re going to be okay.”

Ava’s roommates reminded me of a chorus of batty aunts in a musical, trading off solos in a medley of reassurance and advice. I couldn’t believe they were only three years older than me and Noe and everyone in our year at school. They seemed so different, somehow. Like they belonged to a bigger world.

When Ava took out the last tray of cookies, everyone gathered around to gobble them up. I hung back, grateful for the distraction. When the cookies were gone, the girls had moved on from their cheerful interrogation and started talking among themselves.

At one a.m. Ava’s roommates dumped the cookie trays in the sink without washing them and tromped up the stairs to bed.

“Tired?” Ava said.

I nodded.

“Come on. I’ll show you my room.”

IN THE MORNING, AVA TOOK ME
to the clinic. The nurse asked me some questions and had me pee in a cup, and put me down for an appointment the following morning. They couldn’t fit me in the same day. At first I was disappointed, then relieved. It meant I wouldn’t have to miss the campus tour that Mom had signed me up for. Even though that was a small thing, it seemed important somehow—like at least I wouldn’t have to let her down in that one regard. So when she asked me about Northern, I’d have something to tell her about.

Ava and I drove back to campus and she left me in the student union building to wait for my tour guide. I sat on a purple couch and took out
How to Survive in the Woods
. A few minutes later, a boy in a bright blue shirt with
NORTHERN
UNIVERSITY
on the front asked if I was Annabeth. He had geeky glasses and a hat with earflaps and a button that said
NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENT CENTER
.

“I love that book,” he said, tapping the cover. “They sell it in the bookstore here. Did you know Wilda McClure’s from Maple Bay?”

The boy’s name was Loren, and he was in his first year, studying forestry.

“We can swing by her old house after the tour, if you want. It’s a museum now. It’s kind of cool.”

First, we went to the Arts building and the Science building and the Engineering building and the Music building, and through the freshman dorms. Some people had their doors open. I peeked into the rooms as we walked down the hall, making a mental note to tell Noe that they already came with mini-fridges before I remembered that she wasn’t applying. Loren told me about the dragon boat race that happened every April, and the community farm where students could grow their own vegetables and learn to milk a cow.

The Wilda McClure house had an exhibit on the ground floor with all her old camping stuff. Wilda McClure’s tent. Wilda McClure’s backpack. The binoculars and notebook with which Wilda McClure tracked the comings and goings of wolves. Loren caught me staring at the glass display case with the canoe and smooth wooden paddles in which Wilda McClure had explored over two hundred lakes.

“My mom would love this,” I said. “It’s actually her book.”

“Want me to take a picture of you with the canoe?”

“Nah.”

“Come on. You’ve got to have something to show the parents.”

Loren grinned. I hesitated, then dug my phone out of my bag. “The camera’s not very good.”

I stood beside the canoe with my arms at my sides.

“Smile,” Loren said.

While he was taking the picture, the museum attendant came out from behind her booth. “Now one of you together,” she said.

It was weird to explain that we were complete strangers, so Loren gave her the phone and I moved over so he could stand beside me.

“Say cheese,” said the museum attendant.

“Cheese,” Loren and I said.

I texted the first picture to Mom while we were walking back to the student union building.

oh my god, is that the wilda mcclure house?
she texted back.

It made my heart break a little to know that Mom was so excited for me.

campus tour was awesome
, I typed.
going to lunch with ava, then theater lecture.

amazing!
Mom wrote.
have fun.