A Sense of the Infinite

Noe looked so happy: blushing and breathless, like a bride, or a princess. I shot her a questioning look.

“Campus visits are going to be so fun,” said Kaylee. “My brother promised he’d get us into the Alpha Delta Phi tiki party, but we need to get orange bikinis.”

They all squeezed each other’s hands in the middle of the table.

“I can’t wait,” said Noe. “Three weeks!”

Joyous squealing. The plan had clearly been brewing since at least Sunday.

I could imagine them talking about it on the drive home from the Gym Expo, everyone crammed into the car with all their new loot.

Don’t panic, I thought to myself. Don’t panic.

I started to wrap my sandwich in a napkin.

“What’s A

The gym girls had long since given up on trying to get me to talk and taken to asking Noe instead. The truth is, I preferred this arrangement. Noe was so much better at explaining me than I was.

“A

“I’m saving it for later,” I protested, folding the napkins around the remains of my food so that it formed a tidy white package. I tucked the packet into my backpack and zipped it up, blushing slightly under Kaylee’s gaze. I didn’t like to have my rituals watched. Noe was used to them, others not so much. For this reason, I avoided eating lunch with new people.

“She’s so cute,” Kaylee said, and everyone laughed.

I tried to catch Noe’s eye again—You’re just having fun with the Sphinx Lacoeur thing, right?—but a couple of freshmen from the choir came up to ask her a question, and then the bell rang for our next class.

26

I SPENT MY NEXT TWO CLASSES trying not to fall apart.

Outside the window, the first flurries of winter were falling. I watched the flakes dust the soccer field, a thin, fuzzy layer of white like a consolation prize for actual snow.

“Ms. Schultz,” roared Mr. Genanotron. “Will you please read the next paragraph out loud?”

Suddenly, I was in ninth grade again, too small and too quiet and afraid of everything, my heart beating like a rabbit’s every time anyone looked at me, certain that everyone could tell; that they could look at me and see all the slimy things crawling around in there like worms inside a compost bin. Dead inside and coming to life only in the moments that Noe alighted beside me, like a bike light that lights up and flashes only when someone is turning the pedals, like a radio that fritzes and statics unless calmed by the right hand.

Mr. Genanotron was staring at me, and people were starting to snicker.

Oh, to be a snowflake, a blade of grass, a bird, a chunk of concrete. Anything but what I was: half human, half disease. Half things that yearned to grow and live, half thing that craved to die.

Gailer College wouldn’t be so bad, I thought to myself. It wouldn’t be so bad.

“I don’t know where we are,” I said.

“Speak up,” Mr. Genanotron barked.

“I don’t know where we are.”

27

“ARE YOU COMING TO GAILER FOR campus visits?” said Noe. “Kaylee needs to let her brother know how many tickets to get for the tiki party.”

She was in full Noe pla

I had been pla

“Probably,” I said. “I’m probably coming.”

“Good girl,” said Noe, and wrote my name down on her list.

I hesitated. “What are you doing after this? Want to come over?”

“I can’t,” Noe said. “I’m having coffee with Darla.”

“Who’s Darla?”

“Steven’s mom.”

She said it as if I ought to know, like I would naturally keep track of the names of her boyfriends’ parents.

“Why are you having coffee with Steven’s mom?” I said.

“We hang out sometimes,” said Noe. “She’s really sweet. She wants me to sing in her choir.”

Noe had crazy notions about things. Sometimes I forgot how different we were. Then she would paint her fingernails pink and a

The Ve

28

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 pla

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.