A Sense of the Infinite (3 page)

AT THE BARBECUE, I MOVED DOWN
the food table quickly, making myself a plate from the picked-over piles of buns, cheese, chips, and watermelon. I fished a can of soda out of the ice-filled garbage can and walked over to where Noe and Steven were sprawled under a tree.

“Hey, doll,” said Noe. “How’d it go?”

I sank into the grass with my plate.

“Oh, fabulous,” I said. “I have an appointment with Bob the Nutritionist. She’s sending all the vegetarians to talk to him, so watch out.”

“Are you kidding me?” said Noe.

I shook my head. “Better keep your meatless ways on the sly or you’ll be next.”

Noe made a hiss of exasperation. “She should be sending all the carnivores to the school psychiatrist to get their heads checked for psychopathy.”

Steven whimpered, midway through a bite of his hamburger. Noe picked up the top half of her bun and chucked it at his head. “That includes you, Cow Killer McNeil.”

“My mommy says that hamburgers come from the Happy Farm,” said Steven in a little-boy voice.

Noe shot him a dark look. “Well, Mommy lied.”

Noe and Steven had been dating since June. He was typical Noe material: intelligent and well mannered, with a special talent (acting!), professional parents (lawyers!), and none of the character flaws (a fondness for hallucinogens! the playing of team sports! weakness in grammar and punctuation!) that Noe held in such contempt. I’d watched him play the part of Willy in
Death of a Salesman
, but had never interacted with him close up until Noe announced, just before exam time, that she and he were an item.

Steven had Noe’s favorite hoodie in his lap and he was mending the kangaroo pocket with a needle and thread. It was jarring to see Noe’s hoodie receiving surgery from a boy I still considered basically a stranger. I knew they’d talked on the phone every day over the summer, and he’d even driven up to visit her at Camp Qualla Hoo Hoo, but because this had all taken place outside my sight, my brain still had Steven filed
in the “abstraction” category and had not yet updated him to a living, breathing reality.
What are you doing?
I almost said when I saw Noe’s hoodie spread out on his lap.
That’s mine.
Noe’s boyfriends demonstrated a degree of devotion I still found incredible after more than three years of knowing her. Whether this trait was something Noe selected for or cultivated after the fact was a mystery I was still unraveling.

I cracked open my soda and took a sip.

“I didn’t even know we had a nutritionist,” Noe said.

“They just got funding for him. Yippee.”

“They can afford a nutritionist, but they can’t spring for new gym leotards?”

“The idea is to fatten everybody up to the point that we fit in the saggy old ones.”

Noe made a face. “Bad mental image,” she said. She picked up the rest of her bun and started throwing pieces of it at a crow that was eyeing us from the grass.

I watched the way it hopped forward to snatch them.

“Caw, caw,” Steven said.

IT WAS WEIRD TO SEE ALL
the new freshmen swarming around at the barbecue, talking and laughing as if they already owned the place.

When I started high school, I was a total mess.

After prolonged backroom deliberations, my mom and grandmother had determined that the summer before freshman year was a good time to inform me that I was half monster. My crazy cousin Ava caught wind of the plan and beat them to it.

It was Ava’s birthday and I’d been charged with keeping her corralled in her room while the adults decorated the table and put the finishing touches on her cake. We sat on her bed,
and she turned up the volume on the screaming music she kept playing twenty-four hours a day, her version of a white-noise machine.

“How much has your mom told you about your dad?” she’d said.

I blushed and shrugged. Ava and I used to play together when we were little, but when she started high school Ava changed. Now when we hung out, it felt like she was always pushing and pushing, trying to get a reaction. “Do you know what this is?” and she would show me a cut on her arm. Or she would name the creepiest boy at her school and tell me all the things she had done with him, or worse, say that he liked me and wanted to go out. I longed to be in the bright kitchen with Mom and Nan. I could hear them laughing, shouting at Uncle Dylan to find them some tape to wrap Ava’s present.

“His name is Scott,” I said. “He went to Northern. They only slept together once. He was mean to Mom and she didn’t want him around me.”

Mom had dropped out of college to have me. She was nineteen. I’d never met my dad, but I imagined him as the popular quarterback in a teen movie, the one who starts falling in love with the girl from the outdoors club, only to cave in to social pressure and publicly snub her in favor of the hot cheerleader. I knew lots of other kids whose parents weren’t together, so my lack of a father had never caused undue torment, although it
was true that Mom was the youngest parent at my school.

“She didn’t sleep with him,” Ava said. “He raped her. They’re going to tell you before school starts. I heard them talking about it yesterday.”

I dug my hands into Ava’s quilt. In the kitchen, laughter, banging cupboards, the finding of candles, the taking down of plates. Ava was a fan of dark secrets and skeletons in the closet. She had subjected me to some pretty disturbing stories over my lifetime, but this one beat them all.

“Everyone was shocked when she decided to keep you,” Ava said. “She came
this close
to giving you up for adoption. My dad says the whole time she was pregnant, she hardly spoke at all. She wouldn’t even tell anyone what happened until almost eight months. She must have felt like there was this monster growing inside her and it was too late to stop it.”

Ava was studying my face for a reaction. I kept it carefully blank, a skill I had learned from other encounters in Ava’s room.
Monster
, I thought to myself, feeling the shape of the word settle into me, feeling it quietly reconfigure every cell in my body, like hitting the translate command by accident and seeing all the writing on your screen suddenly and incontrovertibly turn to Japanese.

“You don’t believe me, do you,” said Ava.

I shook my head.

“Or you do believe me, and you don’t want to show it.”

I’d kept still. There was no wriggling out of Ava’s grasp once
she started in on you. She preempted every escape, called you on every strategy. She was astonishingly good at reading people, which is part of what made her so terrifying: Ava always knew what you were thinking.

“You should try to find him someday,” Ava had said. “I would if I were you. I’d get my friends together and go to his house and beat the shit out of him.”

I swallowed hard. I’d never thrown a real punch, let alone beat anyone up.

“You should probably get tested,” Ava continued. “Who knows what kind of diseases he had?”

Monster
, my brain was still thinking.
Monster
.

“Are you crying?” Ava said.

I focused my eyes on the Satan poster on Ava’s wall. Satan had a black goatee and piercing yellow eyes. He was ripped, too. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Hades. “No,” I’d said.

Ava took my chin in her hands and looked straight into my eyes. Her irises were purple from contact lenses. It was like staring into the eyes of a sea snake.

“You’re lucky,” Ava said. “It takes some people a lifetime to figure out how fucked up the world is, and you got to find out at thirteen.”

From the kitchen, Mom had called us. “A-
va
, Anna-
beth
, time for ca-
ake
.”

Ava let go of my face. My chin hurt where her fingers had held it. “Don’t tell them I told you,” she said. “Promise.”

“I promise,” I said.

Just then, Nan opened the door. She peered into the room in her Nannish way, her pants dusted with icing sugar. The scent of cake wafted in the open door, along with the sounds of the adults in the living room.

“Ava, Annabeth, we are ready for you to come out.”

“Okay, Nanna,” said Ava with an angelic smile. She hopped off the bed, suddenly bouncy.

I went to the bathroom and stared into the mirror, wondering how I’d managed to go thirteen years without noticing.

MOM AND NAN HADN’T TOLD ME
for another week.

At my friend Hailey’s pool party, I’d sat on the edge in a sweater and jeans and wouldn’t swim. If I got into the water, people would see my monster-body and they would know.

At lunch, I couldn’t eat. If I ate, the monster would be eating, too, and if it grew any bigger it would crowd out the only part of me that was still good.

Shopping with Mom, all I could feel was the shame and horror throbbing out from me in a tortured halo. Up until that point, I’d had no filter. Now, for the first time, I grew watchful. I pulled my hands up into the sleeves of my sweatshirt and strained to hear double meanings in everything Mom said.

“What’s up, Annabean?” Mom asked. “You’re never this quiet.”

“Just daydreaming,” I said and twitched my mouth into a smile.

Finally, the night arrived. Nan came over and they cooked my favorite dinner, and instead of playing Scrabble like we normally did, they sat me down on the couch to talk, as if I were a cancer patient about to go in for a frightening surgery.

“Annabeth,” said Mom, “your grandma and I need to talk to you about something that you might find pretty upsetting.”

I sat very still. If I made a sound too early, they would know that I knew. So I killed the howl that was struggling to escape me, wrung its neck like a rabbit, and dropped it as far down as it would go.

“What is it?” I’d said.

My father was a boy Mom had known from some of her classes. He was friendly and a flirt, which had made things harder after the canoe trip. People take your side when it’s a stranger with a knife, less so when it’s a handsome boy playing “Blister in the Sun” at a campfire sing-along.

Mom said she’d always known she wanted to have a kid, and even though it happened in a terrible way, she knew she was going to love me just as much as any other baby. The way Mom told it, the story was smooth and hopeful. She didn’t mention the part about not speaking for eight months, or how
she’d almost given me up for adoption. Maybe she was saving that conversation for when I was an adult.

“Did he go to jail?” I’d asked.

Ava had already told me that he hadn’t, but I had to ask things or they’d figure out that I already knew.

“The laws aren’t very smart,” said Nan. “At the time, some other women in your mom’s situation were running into problems with custody. We didn’t want there to be any chance that he could come along someday and say,
I want my kid.
”

I nodded. In my head, I was imagining a hairy stranger breaking through our front door and dragging me away. Maybe it would have been better if I had been adopted. At least then Mom could have finished college and started her life over, instead of ending up back in her hometown, working at No Frills, while people she’d known all her life treated her like trash.

Mom and Nan were back to talking about how special I was and how proud of me they were.

“We’ll go for a hike tomorrow,” said Mom, “and we can talk about it as much as you want.”

I wondered if Mom was sick of our dusty little forest, and the dusty little life to which I had consigned her. On the trail, the next day, I was too conscious of my arms and legs, my eyes and hands and hair.

“Are you angry, Annabeth?” Mom had asked. “I didn’t
want to tell you when you were too little to understand. But I didn’t want to wait too long either, because you’re growing up fast, and if, God forbid, you ever find yourself in a situation, I want you to have a better chance than I did.”

I’d never seen her so uncertain. Mom had always seemed invincible to me. She could walk the farthest and carry the heaviest pack. And as horrible as it was to find out that the delinquent-but-redeemable father I’d imagined was actually a demon, to glimpse a crack in Mom’s invincibility was almost as shattering.

“Why would I be mad at you?” I’d said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I imagined Mom getting back into her canoe the morning after it happened. Why hadn’t she told anyone? Why hadn’t she clawed his face off?

Monster, monster, monster
, said the pumping of my heart.

Monster, monster, monster
, until it was as normal as the sound of my own breath.

My first day at E. O. James, I got lost in the hallways and almost had a panic attack when a senior boy named Louis Vallero startled me in the out-of-the-way stairwell where I was hiding with a book.

At the barbecue, someone handed me a hot dog and I didn’t know what to do with it. I couldn’t see anywhere to throw it
out, and I was about to wrap it in a napkin and hide it when a girl I didn’t recognize wrinkled her nose at me.

“Gross, right?” she’d said.
“Welcome to high school, have some murdered pig parts
.”

“I know,” I said, even though I wasn’t even vegetarian at that point, just unhappy and overwhelmed.

“I’m Noe. What’s your name?”

I’d hesitated. “Annabeth.”

Since the summer, it had hurt me to say my own name. I wanted to go live in the forest, with sticks in my hair, like a medieval leper. At least that would be honest; at least that way, I wouldn’t have to pretend to be happy and normal. Nobody expects a medieval leper to make friends.

Noe didn’t seem to notice my leperhood. “Will you come to the bathroom with me?” she said. “It’s kind of an emergency.”

We started walking. “What happened?” I’d said.

“The Senior Leaders made me eat Skittles,” Noe said. “You know they’re made out of boiled horse hooves, right? I told them I was vegetarian, and they didn’t care.”

Her distress was palpable. We hurried into the school building and I held Noe’s hair as she threw up the detested substance.

“You
understand
,” Noe had said. “My best friend at my old school was all, ‘Oh my God, you’re bulimic,’ and I’m like, ‘Bulimics eat an entire chocolate cake and puke it up. I’m just
trying to get this dead animal out of my body, if that’s okay with you.’”

I’d felt a wave of protectiveness toward her, this vulnerable girl with oily black hair who the Senior Leaders had force-fed horse hooves. A wave of pride, too: I was not the shrill, childish friend of eighth grade. I was the one who
understood
.

I could be the friend who understood. It was better than being a monster. I had known Noe for only ten minutes, but already I could feel that protecting her would give me a purpose, give my tortured energy somewhere to go.

I had hardly spoken all day—all summer, it felt like—but walking next to Noe, words started spilling out of me. It was as if the cold hand that had sealed me off from the rest of humankind had left one airhole open, the airhole of Noe. I found to my surprise that I could breathe again, and laugh. The effect diminished when she paused to talk to teachers, and came back again when we walked on. I observed it with fascination, this loophole in my otherwise complete suffocation. I could be a normal human, as long as I was interacting with Noe.

Noe wanted to know where I lived, and which school I had gone to before E. O. James, and if I had heard that Ms. Kravenko was the hardest for math, and if I wanted to sign up for gymnastics with her because I looked like I would be good at it. She told me all about her old boyfriend, Sean, and a
summer camp with a weird name where she was going to be a junior counselor the next year.

By the time we’d settled into our auditorium seats to hear the motivational speaker, I was completely devoted to her.

With Noe beside me, I never got lost in the halls anymore. I stopped worrying about Louis Vallero. I kept her always in my field of vision, a guiding star.

“You found a friend,” Mom said. “That’s wonderful.”

I peeled the pepperoni off the pizza we were sharing and stacked it dutifully on the edge of my plate.