Until It Hurts to Stop (3 page)

I know I should let Sylvie go, but I linger on the phone. I want to ask about Raleigh, who is apparently now on the yearbook committee with Sylvie, but the questions pile up in my mind, unasked. How long has Raleigh been back from Italy? Has she mentioned my name, and if so, what did she say? How many allies is she gathering around her this time?

I’m scared of the answers. I need to know—it’s a matter of survival—but I don’t
want
to know. At the very edges of my mind, I still hear Raleigh’s screech.

“Is something wrong?” Sylvie asks.
“No . . .”
“Well, I should go. Once I figure out what a cotangent is, I can go meet Wendy.”

“Say hi to her for me.”
When we hang up, I take out Nick’s knife. Opening it, I admire the gleaming blade, beautifully sharp even if it is only two inches long. I work the miniature scissors. Then I touch the polished stone and the silver links of the necklace around my neck.

My parents gave me gifts, too, of course: sheet music and money, both of which I wanted, and clothes, which I didn’t especially want, especially the ruffled shirt Mom says I can wear “someplace dressy.” Since I will not be hosting state dinners or signing treaties any time soon, I doubt I’ll find the right occasion for it. But the necklace and the knife are special because they’re from people who aren’t required by blood to give me anything. I cradle the knife in my hands, feel its weight, and touch the necklace again. Somehow it comforts me that both gifts are made of metal. They seem more permanent that way.

I go downstairs to try out the new music on the piano. I used to play every day in junior high, filling the house with waves of sound. I pounded out my anger and my fear of the school halls.

My playing has dropped off in the past couple of years, though. After I started high school, playing felt less urgent, harder to make time for. Last year when my old teacher stopped giving lessons, I didn’t even look for a new one.

It takes a lot of energy to bring music to life, and then to sharpen it, to master it. Channeling a complicated piece is like taming a tiger: you set all these sounds in motion. You start themes, establish a rhythm, and then you have to keep it going. You’ve unleashed a tiger in the room and now you have to use every note and rest to show off its power and beauty, while keeping it under control. If you slip, a claw swipes at your leg or slashes a hole in your wall. I used to release that beast every day and control it, put it through its paces.

High school has been calmer—or I’ve been calmer, I’m not sure. Now the tiger mostly naps in a corner of the room. But today I’m a little hungry for that feeling again, a little restless. I run through some old songs before trying the new pieces.

“Glad you like the music,” Dad says, touching my shoulder on his way through the room.

Although Raleigh Barringer has the same lunch period as me, I manage to avoid her for days. I sit with Nick and pretend that a protective barrier surrounds our table. If it’s one of the occasions when he prefers grunting and nodding to conversation, then I text Sylvie, who is usually at some club meeting. It doesn’t matter whether I have much to say. Just touching base with her reassures me. It lets me know I’m no longer alone, the way I was in junior high. It reminds me the world is bigger than this cafeteria.

the salad bar has mysterious brown things on it today
,
I text her on Wednesday.
i have no idea what they are
.
nick dared me to eat one
.

A minute later, I add:
nick says he will eat one of the brown things if i do
.
i
’
m thinking there should be money in this
.
And then:
now nick says i shouldn
’
t want money
.
i should do it for the sake of adventure
.
Sylvie replies:
nick has a strange definition of adventure
.

I laugh and show that one to Nick.
“She’s just finding that out?” he says.

Then Sylvie texts:
you shouldn
’
t do it because if you have a bad reaction and go to the hospital
,
they
’
ll ask what you ate
,
and you
’
ll say
:
a brown thing
.
and they
’
ll say
,
but what was it
?
and you
’
ll have to say
,
i don
’
t know
.
and they
’
ll say
,
why did you eat something when you didn
’
t even know what it was
?

I answer:
you have a point
.
also
,
i don
’
t really want to eat a mysterious brown thing
.
even for adventure
.

In this way, I’m determined to keep my own little world alive, as if the rest of the cafeteria doesn’t matter. Walling off Raleigh, pretending not to hear her even when she’s braying ten feet from me, is something I perfected in junior high. It’s strange how my stone-faced tunnel-vision abilities have come right back, though I haven’t used them much since the end of eighth grade.

This is how I used to feel every day.
Raleigh had so many followers in junior high; I never knew where the attacks would come from. But our high school draws students from two junior highs and two middle schools, so the old pool of Maggie-haters has been diluted. And in high school it’s not considered okay to beat up on the losers so openly. It reeks of trying too hard, of having no life of your own.
Even so—if anyone can figure out a way to carry it off, if anyone can stir an entire school against a single person, it’ll be Raleigh. Which means that I can never completely relax.

On Thursday, Raleigh catches me off guard in the hall between history and English. Somewhere behind me, she squeals, “I don’t belieeeve it!” I react instantly, fleeing from her voice, that piercing
eeeee
. Reaching the girls’ room, I glance under the stalls for feet. I lock myself in and press my forehead against the cold metal of the door—all this before stopping to think, before asking myself what I’m doing.

I’ve watched Raleigh flip her shiny, black hair, glide down the school halls with her head up. I’ve heard her voice plenty of times since she’s been back. So I don’t know why hearing it now zaps me this way, fries my nerves.

It’s something about that note in her voice: the note of danger, the exact frequency of trouble. “She’s heeere,” Raleigh would call when I appeared at school every morning, signaling the start of the day’s attacks. “Oh, Maggieee,” she would sing out, and it was always the opening to an insult, a threat, or an order. “Oh, Maggieee,
cover
yourself, so your ugly face won’t make me throw up!”

I have to stop these flashbacks.
I belong here just as much as she does. I can’t crawl through the halls on my belly until we graduate. I only hope she didn’t see me running, that she didn’t catch the scent of my fear the way a shark smells blood in the ocean.
Slippery-palmed, dry-tongued, I force myself to open the door.

five

I’m in no mood to dissect a frog with Adriana Lippold this afternoon, but that is what I’m destined to do. Formaldehyde prickles the inside of my nose as we snip and slice silently, identifying the organs and drawing them on our lab diagrams. I’ve never thought of Adriana as particularly smart—maybe because of her obsession with makeup and clothes, or the way she always trotted around at Raleigh’s heels—but I realize now there’s no reason to assume she’s stupid. In fact, maybe the surgical precision she once used to dismantle my ego should’ve prepared me for her skill at cutting up dead animals.

“Wow, look how big the liver is,” she says.
“Yeah.” I’ve been thinking the same thing. At first, I thought the liver was the stomach, but the stomach is much smaller than I’d expected.
We exchange a few more remarks about frog anatomy. At one point I study her face, wondering what’s going on behind the frosting of blush and mascara and lip gloss. I wish I knew why she used to get such joy from helping Raleigh tear me apart, how she could’ve liked the taste of that poison in her mouth.
And I can’t help wondering if she and Raleigh are already plotting against me, starting up a new wave of anti-Maggie operations. Maybe they’ve just been waiting for Raleigh to get over her jet lag and gather her army of haters.
When Adriana looks up at me, I turn back to the frog, steadying my hands on the pins and scalpel.
Concentrate,
I tell myself.
This is your job
.
Maggie Camden, Amphibian Coroner.
Sounds like a TV show nobody would ever watch. But I get through the rest of the lab.

Friday night marks my survival of another week of school. I sleep over at Nick’s so we can get an early start for Eagle Mountain the next morning. Nick’s mom is in bed when I get there, but Perry is watching a martial-arts movie and flipping through atlases.

Perry loves maps—not antique maps, but maps from fifty or sixty years ago, including road maps. He buys tons of them at yard sales. He frames his favorites and hangs them on the walls, even though Phoebe isn’t crazy about them. “Not another one, Perry,” she’ll groan. But I’m so used to them that an aerial view of Yellowstone Park will forever remind me of their living room, and an old road map of Nevada means we’re in the upstairs hall. Perry gave Nick the topographic map of Crystal Mountain that hangs on his bedroom wall next to the photograph of its summit.

“Eagle’s a good hike. I envy you,” Perry tells us now, taking his booted feet off the coffee table. One thing I love about Nick’s house is that you can put your feet up on the furniture whenever you want. Unlike at my house, where wood finish is practically sacred. This is one of Dad’s few annoying quirks— because he loves working with wood, he can’t bear to see it treated casually. We spend half our lives hunting down coasters to put under our drinks.

“Yeah, I can’t wait to get up there,” Nick says.
“Me neither.” I want to get out into the woods, to wash the staleness of school halls out of my lungs, to take a full breath without worrying about Raleigh around the next corner.
Perry clicks off his movie. “One thing, Nick. Your dad called. He said he couldn’t get through on your phone.”
“What did he want?”
“He didn’t say. Just that he’ll try to reach you again.” Perry appears to be on the verge of saying more. This happens a lot when he talks about Nick’s dad. Like he has to stop himself from whatever he really wants to say. In the four years he’s been married to Phoebe, I’ve never heard him say anything bad about Nick’s father, but he does seem to swallow a lot of words unsaid.
Nick gives a sour laugh. “Must’ve been real important.” Nick and I hang out in the living room for a while, going over the description of Eagle and planning what to bring for lunch. We bend over the trail map, our knees and arms brushing, our faces barely an inch apart. I’m hyperaware of the mixed soapand-sweat scent of his skin, of my hair brushing his cheek, of his leg against mine. I follow his finger along a mountain ridge with my eyes, wondering what would happen if I acted on this heat. It’s hard for me to imagine it working smoothly, the two of us sliding into each other’s arms like some movie couple. The way we’re sitting, we’d probably bump elbows, get tangled up in the map. And then there are our legs: What would we do with them?
For all I know, kissing Nick might be just as disappointing as kissing Carl Gurney. I’m not sure how much experience Nick has. Over the summer, he went out once or twice with a girl from the garden center where he worked. And last year, Luis teased him about some girl he met at a party thrown by one of the basketball players. But he’s never had a real girlfriend, never spent much time with any girl but me.
Does that mean there’s potential? Or does it mean I’ll always be just a friend, part of the scenery, no more lust-worthy than one of the thousands of trees we’ve hiked past?
I shouldn’t even be using up brain cells on this, since the mountain will give me enough to worry about. The contour lines on the map are closely drawn, dense, signaling steepness. It’ll be a long hard haul upward, tougher than anything we’ve hiked before. Phrases from the guidebook haunt me:
knife-edge ridges, dizzying ledges.

Before I go to bed on the foldout couch beneath the Yellowstone map, I slip out to the hall and study the photo of Perry on top of Eagle Mountain. He was slimmer then, with more hair and a blissful grin. The camera is focused on him, and I can’t see much of the view. It’s mostly sky. I’m trying to get a sense of how high Eagle is—well, I know that, I know its surveyed measurement, but I’m trying to get a sense of how high it
feels
.

I want to stand up there. Whenever Nick and I finish a day of hiking, especially when we do something I wasn’t sure I was capable of, I get a surge of power. It’s like the feeling of mastering a piece on the piano, but it’s a feeling of physical strength, too. Sometimes I think that if I’d started hiking before junior high, Raleigh wouldn’t have been able to push me around the way she did. I would’ve been too strong.

The thought of summiting Eagle thrills me as much as it scares me. I felt the pull of the Porte Range all the way from Silver Creek, when it was just a series of peaks on a distant horizon. It’ll be harder than anything we’ve ever done, so the power will be greater. And with Raleigh back in town, I need that power.

But whatever answers I’m looking for, they’re not in this photo. I return to the living room and line up all my hiking gear: boots, water bottles, rain suit, knife, flashlight, first-aid kit, trail guide, mushroom guide. My boots smell of leather. They’ve been rubbed satiny from previous hikes, but when I brush them with my fingertips, chocolate-colored dirt dusts my skin.