A Sense of the Infinite

“Did you make out with Bryan Drexel?” Noe asked me on the bus ride home. “Rhia

“Extenuating circumstances,” I croaked. “You had to be there.”

“You’re getting to be so scandalous,” Noe said. “You never even used to talk about boys, and suddenly you’re the one-night-stand queen.”

“I don’t think a kiss counts as a one-night stand,” I said.

“Darla thinks you’re acting out your father issues,” Noe said.

“What does Steven’s mom know about my father issues?”

“Just because your dad left your mom doesn’t mean that any boy you actually like is going to leave you.”

“Noe. I was bored. I made out with Bryan Drexel. You don’t have to come up with some big interpretation.”

The bus jolted over a pothole, and I felt a wave of fatigue. I couldn’t wait to get home and lie down. “In other news,” I said, “Margot Dilforth has been telling people you throw up in the bathrooms.”

Noe made a gesture of contempt encompassing the bus, the scenery, and the universe at large. She put her arm around my shoulder as if to assert our solidarity against the meddling Margot Dilforths of the world. “Margot Dilforth is an idiot,” she said.

37

THE FIRST FRIDAY BACK FROM Thanksgiving, they herded all the seniors into the auditorium to drill us on the rules for campus visits. No drinking. No illegal substances. No sexual escapades. Noe and Steven held hands throughout the entire presentation, making plans to video chat every night of the three-day separation.

I wasn’t quite so gung ho.

Uncle Dylan had called Ava to say I was coming and bought my Greyhound tickets online to get the early-bird price. Mom called her best friend, Pauline, who lives in the same town, to arrange for me to go over for di

The town, Maple Bay, was an eight-hour bus ride away. “We’ll see each other all the time,” Noe had reassured me when I’d expressed my dismay a second time. “You’ll still come home for Christmas and stuff. Don’t worry.”

I stared at the map on my computer screen, with the route snaking across it in blue. I turned off my computer and lay on my bed with How to Survive in the Woods, but the route stayed pi

I had never been that far from home before.

38

THE MORNING BEFORE I WAS SUPPOSED to leave, I threw up in the garbage can next to my bed. I stared at the throw-up numbly, my body filling up with a terrible foreknowledge.

Not possible, I thought. So not possible.

But my body clenched and rumbled and I threw up again.

I sat on my bed, my body curiously rigid, curiously light.

No, I thought to myself, no, no, no, no.

I listed all the reasons it couldn’t be true: I was taking exactly half my pills, and Noe had said that was enough. The condom we’d used had mostly stayed on. I was underweight—the nutritionist had said so. Ski

I tried to remember when I’d had my last period, but before the Pill I got it only every three or four months, and I wasn’t sure when it was supposed to happen now that I was taking it.

Mom had left for work half an hour ago. I went downstairs, threw on my coat, and fired up the Honda, which I’d barely driven since my last shift at the ice-cream shop. The familiar houses jerked by, and the dented newspaper boxes that had melted snow pooled inside them, and the convenience store with wet bundles of firewood stacked beside the door. It seemed disloyal of the world to change like that, to be cold and dismal where it had been bright and scented and thrumming three months before. Change back, I wanted to scream. Change back. As if the winter was a cruel withholding by a universe that could just as easily churn out spring.

The drugstore was practically empty at that time of day, just a scattering of old men looking at vitamins and tired moms trying to resist their children’s efforts at grabbing Christmas candy. There’s no reason to panic, I told myself. Any sane person wouldn’t even bother with a test. I’m being paranoid.

I found the tests in aisle 7 and put one in my basket, then covered it with a box of tampons and a pack of hair elastics and a chocolate Santa. The checkout clerk probably wouldn’t even notice what I was buying, I told myself. They sca

At home, in the bathroom, a plus sign appeared. I wrapped the test up calmly, neatly, as one would in case of fire, and slid it to the bottom of the trash. I walked back to my bedroom and sat on my bed.

Outside, the last of the leaves on the birch tree were detaching themselves and spiraling down, detaching and spiraling down, landing on the snow-covered lawn. I watched them fall one by one, observing where they landed, as if I would be called to give an account of them later. When it got too windy to watch the leaves anymore, I put on The Velvet Undergound and listened to the entire album three times.

Finally, there was nothing to do but leave the house, so that is what I did.

39

IN THE “UNEXPECTED PREGNANCY” EPISODE of the TV series, the girl in trouble always Considers Her Options and Struggles with the Decision. She changes her mind a bunch and later, always wonders if she Did the Right Thing.

I was not a girl in a TV show. I’d made my decision in the seconds it took me to throw up in a garbage can. There was no going back and forth. No waiting for the decision to appear like a package in the mail. It just landed there, thud.

It was strange to be so certain.

You were supposed to agonize.

What did it mean that I wasn’t agonizing?

In the TV show, the girl in trouble cried on her bed.

I listened to The Velvet Underground and walked in the forest.

I was more visibly upset the time I was eight and found a tick on my arm when I pulled off my sweater after one of our hikes—Get it off me, get it off me!—while Mom calmly went for the matches and tweezers.

Maybe it was her example that made me so certain, and so calm. Tick in jar. Tweezers in drawer. Then back to cooking the soup and chopping the wood, one cord for our fireplace and one for Nan’s.

Isn’t this what you secretly wanted? said a mean voice in my head. An excuse to stay at home forever and never leave?

Noe would want to be its auntie, I knew. She would coo and fuss and make lists of names in her day pla

The woods were quiet. In my head, I was taking a magic pill that would make it go away. I was shaving my moustache. I was anywhere but here.

40

AFTER THE FOREST I DROVE DOWNTOWN. It looked smaller in the snow, and drearier. Raccoons rummaged in the ditches where garbage cans had overflowed. Buses sloshed up and down the street.