Until It Hurts to Stop (9 page)

Along with the occasional snake and rainstorm.
As the fall sports teams finish their practices, the football players, cross-country runners, and soccer players straggle back toward the building. The guys on the basketball court end their game. They cluster around the water fountain, jostling and joking, and I gather my books.
Raleigh Barringer pauses at the fountain on her way back from the soccer field, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. The guys move aside for her; I wish I knew why. If I got up for a drink, they’d tell me to get in line.
After drinking, she straightens and says to Luis, “Nice shorts, Morales.” Luis likes bright colors—today it’s electric orange.
He grins and turns his back to her. Over his shoulder, he says, “Enjoy the view. It’s not the shorts that count; it’s what’s
in
the shorts that counts.”
Everyone laughs, including Raleigh, who says, “Will you be showing us
that
next?”
“If you insist.” He reaches for his waistband.
Half the guys groan or say, “No! Don’t take ’em off!” while the other half hoot and urge him on. “Give the people what they want!”
Luis pulls his waistband down maybe an inch while he watches Raleigh, both of them laughing, him daring her to tell him to stop. But she crosses her arms and stands her ground, and even taps her foot with mock impatience.
“Nobody needs to see that.” Nick elbows Luis. “Come on, you want a ride home or not?”
“Aw, Nick, there you go, spoiling all the fun,” Raleigh says.
My nerves prickle at the sound of his name in her voice. Nick and Luis didn’t go to our junior high. How has she learned everyone’s names so quickly?
“That’s my job,” Nick says.
“You got that right,” Luis says.
“Just for that, you can ride on the roof,” Nick tells him.
When they pass Raleigh, she says, “See you later,” in a way that makes it sound like a real promise, instead of the throwaway line it usually is.
As Nick and Luis come toward me, the other guys cluster around her. “Say something in Italian, Raleigh.”
She obliges, syllables rolling off her tongue like music.
“What’s that mean?” They hang on her words, tantalized. She draws them toward her like fish on a line.
And then she snaps the line, laughing.
“It means, ‘I want to buy some cheese.’” With that, she waves at them and walks away.

I wait until after we’ve dropped off Luis to ask Nick, “How do you know Raleigh?”
“She’s in my gym class.”
I fight not to ask, because I know it sounds paranoid, but I can’t stop myself. “Do you talk to her a lot?”
“No.” He stops for a light. “Maggie, she’s no threat to you. Junior high’s over.”
“That’s what I thought . . . until she showed up here.” It’s bad enough to see her in the halls, in the cafeteria. But it’s worse to see her at Sylvie’s, or to watch her flirt with Luis and Nick at the water fountain. It’s like she’s infiltrating my circle, small as it is. Is that her plan—to cut me off from my friends, the way a wolf cuts a weak deer from the herd?
If anyone should understand, it’s Nick. Because our friendship started in the depths of the Raleigh Years.

Nick went to Eastern District Junior High, and I went to West End. At first, we were just two kids whose mothers were friends. Back then, my mom had to work a lot of afternoon shifts and Phoebe didn’t, so I went to Nick’s house after school.

We sometimes made halfhearted stabs at our homework, but mostly we raided the kitchen. One afternoon in seventh grade, I was eating cookies. They were chocolate mint cookies with a fudgy coating, and as I rolled that richness over my tongue I wondered how it could be so good while the rest of my life was so horrible. And I began to cry. I wasn’t sobbing outright, but I knew by the sudden salt in my mouth, and the way the kitchen blurred, that tears were creeping down my face.

“What’s wrong?” Nick asked.

I shook my head. Nick didn’t push, but he didn’t walk away from it, either. He could have shrugged it off or changed the subject. But he waited for me to tell him.

“It’s those bitches at school,” I said at last, and rubbed the wetness off my face. I licked chocolate crumbs from my teeth.
He’d probably already gathered that I was on the fringes at my school, but Nick didn’t worry about things like that, about popularity and the social pecking order. Even if we’d gone to the same school, he might not have seen everything that was happening. His other friends were boys, boys he played basketball with. Sometimes I was amazed at how the guys at school seemed to live in a totally different world from the girls. They didn’t know much about our fights and gossip, our alliances and broken friendships.
“Raleigh Barringer and Adriana Lippold worst of all,” I said. “I wish they would die.”
Nick played with a twist tie someone had left on the table, bending it, knotting it.
“They never stop picking on me. They go after me in the hall, in the girls’ room, everywhere. They have a page about me online. They had another one before, and I complained to the host site and got it taken down, but they started up the same thing somewhere else. They make up lies about me. They tell me I’d be better off dead.”
Nick twisted the tie into a corkscrew shape, a helix.
“I’ve been reading about these poisonous mushrooms, and I keep imagining how I could sneak toadstools into their lunch and have them die in front of the whole school, their faces turning blue and their muscles cramping up—”
The words spilled out. I seldom talked this way because people (especially adults) always acted so shocked, so disapproving, if I said anything angry. But Nick leaned forward.
“Do poison mushrooms really turn your face blue?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “The book doesn’t say.” “But it tells you which ones are poison?”
“Yeah. Well, not all of them. Some of them, people aren’t sure. And some people eat mushrooms that other people call poisonous.”
He was still leaning forward, so I showed him the book. We paged through it, searching for all the fungi marked poisonous. Picturing the death throes of Raleigh and Adriana gave me a coziness in my stomach, even better than the cookies.
Or that’s what I thought then. Now I think that what made me feel better was the fact that Nick listened to me, that he understood, that he didn’t tell me I was awful for thinking this way.
“You know I’m not serious,” I told him, suddenly alarmed at how much I’d said, when the time came for me to go home. Would he tell his mother—or even worse, mine? Would he rat me out, get me expelled from school for threatening other students? “I wouldn’t really poison anyone.”
“Yeah, I know that,” he said.
My skin was damp with nervousness by then, my gut churning. Raleigh and Adriana told me a thousand times a day that they wanted me to die. They threatened to break my arms, burn me, and scar my skin. They told me I should kill myself. And yet when I fantasized about poisoning them, I felt guilty.
The worst thing Raleigh and the other girls did was to plant that lump of coal inside me, the shame of believing I was the wrong one, wrong in every way. After all, there must be something wrong with me
or why else would they be picking on me?
But Nick never told anyone what I’d said. I didn’t know why he understood how I felt. I only knew that Nick did understand, and from then on he was not just the guy whose house I had to stay at while my mother worked. From then on, we were friends.

So I don’t know how he can say that Raleigh isn’t a real threat to me. I open my mouth to argue with him, when his phone goes off. Beethoven’s Seventh rings out like a bad omen, a warning.

Nick groans. “Will you get that? Tell him I’m driving.” He shoves the phone at me.
“Why don’t you let it go to voice mail?”
“He hates voice mail.”
Only Nick’s father could try to deny a fact of life as ingrained as voice mail, but I answer the phone. “Hello?”
“Who’s this?” Nick’s father booms.
“It’s Maggie, Dr. Cleary. Nick’s driving right now.”
“He couldn’t pull over? Never mind. Tell him I can’t take him to dinner tonight after all. My idiot post-doc screwed up a month’s worth of data, and I’m going to be working all night.”
“Okay.”
“But tell him to text me about how he’s doing in history. I want to know what’s going on there.”
“I will.”
“Good. Thank you, Margaret.” Dr. Cleary hangs up before I can say good-bye. Or anything else.
I pass on the message to Nick, who says, “That breaks my heart, that I can’t spend the whole night getting grilled about my history grade.”
“Aw, don’t worry, Nick. I can grill you about your history grade if you want.”
“Sounds like a fun night.”
“Seriously, though—if you want help, I could work with you. I got an A in Connard’s class last year.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
That night, when we’re going over the causes of the Great Depression at his kitchen table, I lean over to point out a date on the time line in his book. When he looks up from the page, we’re eye to eye, our faces close enough to kiss. He draws back, and as soon as he does, I do, too, so I’m not left leaning in toward him as if I expect something. We can barely look at each other for another half hour or so.
And it’s like a slap, because before last weekend, that awkwardness was never there. As much as I wish he would’ve leaned in toward me just now, I would settle for his not springing away from me as if I’ve scalded him.
He gets up to hunt for something to eat, and trips over some books he piled behind his chair, knocking them across the floor. He says, “For my next trick, I’ll use my athletic skill to scale Crystal Mountain.”
We laugh, and I help him pick up the books, and we ease back into our old selves. Yet I wonder how many times we’re going to stumble over moments like these, how long it’s going to take to get all the way back to normal—if normal is even possible.

fourteen

Nick and I are on our way to Vanessa’s party. My nerves tighten when he turns onto Ridgway, the curving road leading to her house. I can tell that he has just showered—the dampness of his hair, the scent of soap—and it seems strange for the two of us to be out after dark, as clean as if it’s morning. I’m chewing a cinnamon candy because someone once told me it was better for your breath than mint, and my shoulders are cold. I shouldn’t have worn a shirt this thin, but I saw the same shirt on a girl at school, so I figured it would fit in at the party. If only Sylvie hadn’t been preoccupied with her cousin’s wedding tonight, I could’ve asked her what to wear. As it was, I texted her about forty times today.

I spent the afternoon playing the darkest, most powerful piano pieces I could find, in the hope that it would give me confidence. When I was able to play my final song without a single mistake, I told myself it was a sign that the party would go all right. I’m trying to hold on to the music, but already it’s slipping away, drowned out by the growl of the car engine.

Nick parks on the street behind a long line of cars. Every light in Vanessa’s house is on. My fingers go cold as we walk up to her front door. Music pulses behind that door, a faint thump I feel in my feet and deep inside my ears. I tell myself, “Fun, this is supposed to be fun,” in a desperate attempt to lighten up. But I can’t shake the feeling I’m walking into a trap, a prison.

With this attitude, I ought to be the queen of the party. Funseeking people always flock to the girl wearing the grimace of endurance! If only I could channel Sylvie.

Nick tries the door, and it’s unlocked. We step into a room smelling of sweat and beer, crammed with bodies. The music makes my fillings vibrate. Luis is already there, beer in hand, in a bright green shirt that reminds me of lime Popsicles. He hugs me while I decide it’s a good omen that he’s the first person I see. Maybe this won’t be so bad.

And then two guys from the basketball team drag Nick off somewhere. A girl grabs Luis’s hand and dances away with him, and already I am alone. Five minutes into the party, in the center of the room, I’ve become the wallflower.

Blend in
, I tell myself, and begin to walk. I have nowhere to go, but walking gives the illusion that I do.

I sit on the kitchen counter, nursing a Coke. I know everyone in the room—that is, I know their names. Phil Warren is making out with Darci Esposito in front of the fridge. Troy Truehalt hangs over the sink, his face a horrible shade of chartreuse. Janie Fletcher is nearly falling out of her dress, laughing at whatever Iggy Conant is saying.

Raleigh and Adriana stand in the corner, striking poses. Adriana flashes her teeth at everyone who passes; her squeal rises above every other noise in the room. She talks in exclamation points.
Bryan! It’s so good to see you! Hi, Cody! Hey, Iggy! Come here a second!

Out in the living room, someone must be chugging, judging by the shouts of “Drink! Drink!”
I text Sylvie, even though I know she can’t answer in the middle of a wedding. She’ll get the messages later. For now, I’m just saving my sanity by sending one after the other:

help
!
i
’
m trapped
!
.
vanessa
’
s kitchen floor has a very interesting pattern
.
not that i am bored or anything
.

how many decibels does it take for music to break windows
?
at a party is it considered impolite to take a box of cheez
-
its out of the cabinet and fling them everywhere like snow
?
or is this considered festive
?
not that anyone here
*
cough shayna burton cough
*
has done any such thing
.
should i pick the crackers out of my hair now
,
or wear them like ornaments
?

I could keep this up all night. And, unless Nick or Luis reappears, I may have to.
Lissa Carpenter joins Adriana and Raleigh. The main thing I always remember about Lissa is how she once said she wished she had cancer so she could get skinny. I sip my Coke and watch them from the sides of my eyes. I know better than to look directly at them. Lissa and Adriana bend toward each other, murmur, giggle, run nervous hands through their hair, wave their drinks around, pull at the hems of their shirts. They are never still for a moment. Raleigh is quieter, leaning back against the wall with an amused smile on her face that says this place is
okay,
but it’s no Venetian palazzo.
Into the kitchen swaggers Ethan Crannick. In eighth grade, egged on by Raleigh, he used to make retching noises at me. He hasn’t done it in a couple of years, but every time I see him, I spend the first few seconds expecting it, that thunderous gagging that used to turn heads in the hall.
He walks over to Adriana, who touches his sleeve and glows.
It’s all like watching a play. Except that in this play, I might be dragged up onstage and humiliated at any moment. I try not to make any sudden moves.
I am one with this kitchen counter
, I tell myself.
Raleigh glances at me, then whispers to Lissa and Adriana and Ethan. They all snicker, and I have to stop myself from jumping off the counter and running out of the house.
That’s how her campaign against me started in junior high: with whispers. Suppressed giggles. The hiss of words I couldn’t quite hear. Heads averted, eyes rolling to the corners of their sockets to see if I noticed. To make sure I noticed. Then Raleigh’s voice breaking out above the snickers: “Maggie picks her nose and eats it!” “Maggie walks like a gorilla!” “Maggie
smells
like a gorilla!” “Maggie tried to sell her body on Washington Street, but nobody would buy it!”
I can’t hear Raleigh now, but I can imagine what she might be saying.
I won’t take it this time
, I tell myself. I hunt for words to use against her, preparing for attack.
Raleigh, didn’t we already get rid of you once? What terrible thing did we do to Italy to make them send you back to us?
It doesn’t matter that it’s not the most brilliant insult ever invented. She doesn’t expect me to say
anything
, so if I can speak up at all, it’s better than nothing.
I’m grateful that at least she’s sticking firmly with her own group. Knowing that she’s in clubs with Sylvie and gym class with Nick, having seen her flirt with Luis, I’ve been worried that she might try to peel my friends away from me. But she hasn’t made any moves along that front, and tonight she’s surrounded by her own friends, with no sign of stepping more than six inches away from them. Her battle plan must be something else.
Raleigh, Lissa, Adriana, and Ethan move into the hall together, without another glance in my direction. Now I’m not sure if they were talking about me at all.
I never know. Just in case, I don’t let myself relax.