A Sense of the Infinite

35

THANKSGIVING WAS DUMB, AS ALWAYS. Noe went to her grandparents’ place, then joined Steven at some fancy ski resort with his family. She called me gushing about all the intense conversations she and Steven had been having, and about the breakfast room at the ski lodge where you could pour your own espresso shots from a machine. I went tobogganing with my cousin Max and his friends and hung around the house feeling bored.

“You should call Carly Ocean one of these days,” Mom said on Saturday morning, patting my hand.

As if I would go crawling to dumpy, pious Carly Ocean from my old elementary school, Carly Ocean who I never wanted to hang out with, ever, but who called me every break, persistent as a bloodhound.

“Carly Ocean’s not my friend,” I said.

But that same afternoon, Carly called and Mom guilted me into hanging out with her. We went to this stupid place for hot chocolate, and Carly gave me a pair of sparkly socks with a candy cane taped to the wrapping paper, as if we were still in fourth grade. Afterward, Carly wanted to go to a teen dance at the Lions Club. We picked up her friend Renata, a short girl with her hair in tiny braids. Carly and Renata went to the Catholic high school, St. Barnabas. Everything about Carly was pale and dull and slow. In my head, I could hear Noe saying, What a cow. When we got to the dance, there were some kids smoking a joint in the parking lot, and Carly and Renata made this wide circle to avoid walking near them.

“Well, that’s illegal,” Carly huffed.

I had a mean desire to tell her about Oliver just to see the look on her face, but I knew she’d tell her mom, and it wasn’t worth the trouble.

I tried to dance with them, but I couldn’t stand it. Carly smelled like eggs. She and her friend kept talking about the little kids they babysat, or asking me questions like was it true that a bunch of kids from E. O. James had gotten caught doing E, and acting like they felt sorry for me that I went to such a “bad” school.

I couldn’t stand Carly’s eggy sweat and Renata’s braying giggle. They were asking me about boys at E. O. James when I spotted two of my coworkers from the ice-cream shop, Billie and Phi

“Hey, girl,” shouted Phi

They pulled me into their crowd. It was a bunch of kids who work in the parks. I danced with them, and went to the bathroom with them to drink some flavored vodka that Billie had brought and take photos of the three of us on Phi

“Ice-cream girlzzzzz,” said Billie, and the cell phone made a picture-taking sound. We drank another sip of vodka and Billie adjusted the pads in her bra. We went back out, and danced some more, and lip-synched along with the songs. We did silly dances and shouted ourselves hoarse.

Some of the SkyTram boys were there, and I ended up dancing with one of them. We shouted a few things at each other—name, school—but I couldn’t really hear what the boy said and I don’t think he heard me either.

Carly and Renata were somewhere, probably watching. The boy spun me around and our mouths met with a bump, more collision than kiss.

A panicky sorrow flapped in my chest. For some reason, I started thinking about the orchids nodding in the moonlight on the night of the homecoming dance, and the feeling of my bare feet in the spilled potting soil. I wanted to be there right now, in the quiet garden, or the forest. I hated the flashing lights and noise inside the dance. Why couldn’t the whole world be like the wild place near the train tracks, soft and lush and humming? Why did everything people liked have to be so harsh and loud and plastic?

I broke away from the boy. “I have to go,” I said.

I pushed into the crowd without waiting for his response. From the corner of my eye, I saw him cast about in confusion. The forest, I thought to myself. The only good place left was the forest. Why couldn’t Noe love what I loved, for once? Why couldn’t she see?

Renata found me in the bathroom. “Carly is crying because she’s had really bad depression all year and she says you’re her oldest friend.”

I was ashamed. If I was the closest thing Carly had to a friend, her life had to be pretty dire. “I’ll go find her,” I mumbled.

I was friendly and attentive to Carly on the car ride home, but that almost made it worse. She sniffed and started telling me a long story about how all the boys at her school made fun of her because of how she smelled.

“They’re just dumb,” I said, but she did smell like eggs, and I felt bad for lying and also hypocritical, because her eggy smell was part of what had driven me away.

“You got so ski

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

Carly’s beady eyes bored into me. “Margot Dilforth thinks you’re anorexic. You and that gymnastics girl.”

Margot Dilforth was one of the other kids from Wilson who went to E. O. James for high school. She’d always been a conspiracy theorist, reporting with wide-eyed earnestness about the kids she was “sure” were fighting or smoking pot or breaking up with one another.

“Oh, really,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Margot says she caught her throwing up in the bathroom.”

“Uh-huh.”

I didn’t know why I was acting like that, all superior. Margot probably had caught Noe in one of her emergency purges. It was true, I thought to myself, but not in the way Carly thought. Noe was different. Noe was Noe. 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. Even after all the messiness with our roommate plans, it still felt good to defend Noe, to be A

“You did get ski

I was grateful, for the ten thousandth time that night, that I didn’t have to see Carly Ocean more than once or twice a year.

At home, I went straight to my room. My school photo from a couple of years ago caught my eye. A

Something began to ache inside me. I felt bad for the eighth-grade A

My phone buzzed. Text from Phi

u ok? bryan rlly likes you, and he’s all worried that you left because you were mad at him.

I explained about Carly Ocean. my friend was crying, i had to go.

The texting wore me out. I turned off my phone. Mom knocked on my door in her pajamas, all “How was the dance?” I tipped the eighth-grade photo down before she noticed it.

“Just shoot me,” I said.

36

I WAS GRATEFUL WHEN SCHOOL STARTED again. Even though the break was only four days long, it felt like forever. I’d gotten a cold the day after the dance and spent Sunday on the couch watching Fraggle Rock. I wasn’t too sick to go back to school, but I was still a little queasy and tired.

Noe had come back from the ski lodge wearing a brand-new coat with a fake fur collar. At our lockers that morning, she chattered about Darla. “She’s like a second mom to me, you know?”

Noe’s mom was perfectly nice: generous and exhausted, always making sure you had a drink and a snack. Noe couldn’t stand her.

“Why do you need a second mom?” I said, which seemed to make Noe a

That afternoon, we had a gym meet, the first one that counted for points. Noe got three first-place ribbons. My whole body felt heavy and I was sneezing so much I almost fell off the uneven bars, so for the rest of the afternoon I sat on the bleachers reading How to Survive in the Woods, two warm sweaters pulled over my leotard, a small mountain of tissues piling up beside me.