A Sense of the Infinite

“What’s your name?” they asked me.

“A

“How old are you? Where do you live? I like your jeans. Aren’t her jeans cute? Where did you get them? Did you drive up here alone? A bunch of us are going out for breakfast tomorrow morning, do you want to go out for breakfast?”

I kept hoping Ava would step in to save me like Noe always did when people were overwhelming me with too much attention, but she left me to answer for myself.

“I took the bus,” I said, “I’m seventeen,” feeling like the contestant in a rapid-fire trivia game.

“Were you on the eight o’clock?” said a girl with dreadlocks.

“Mm-hmm.”

“My friend was on that bus, she said there was this girl who was crying and throwing up the whole way.”

Heat flooded my face. If Noe were here, she’d be distracting Ava’s roommates, telling them about vegetarianism or gymnastics. She’d be making plans for us to go to a physics lecture with one of them and a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals meeting with another. I wouldn’t have to talk at all except to peep my excitement or consent. This was why I couldn’t go to Northern without her, exactly this: surrounded by strangers, my only ally a cousin who apparently refused to protect me.

“What’s wrong?” said the girls. “What’s wrong?”

I was doing my werewolf thing, my capacity for language disappearing, my ability to smile and present a functional social face melting away. Where’s Noe? my inside self was howling. Already, my mind was frantically making plans. I would tell Mom I hated Northern, I would rip up the application I’d been working on, I would go to Gailer College and be the water girl for the gymnastics team and never leave Noe again.

Ava was gazing at me across the kitchen. She raised her eyebrows and tipped her head to the side as if to say, What’s going on in there?

“Nothing,” I squeaked at the girls who had asked me what was wrong. “The bus ride was shitty.”

I looked at the floor. The roots of my plant were crying out in alarm and groping for familiar soil. I ordered myself to stay and talk, but my feet began to move without my consent and suddenly I was on the front steps of Ava’s dorm, huddled up against a brick column. Through the kitchen window, I could hear Ava and her friends.

“Is she okay? She, like, bolted.”

“She’s really shy. It’s pretty much her first time away from home. I’ll go out there in a minute if she doesn’t come back in.”

I took out my phone and called Noe, but she didn’t answer. I remembered that tonight was the tiki party. Noe was probably dancing in a little group with all the other kids from our school, her phone crammed deep in her purse or forgotten on some bathroom counter.

There was a text from Mom I hadn’t noticed before.

if you get this in time, take a picture for me when you go past moose rock!

I stared at the text for a moment, wondering what she was talking about, then remembered that a bunch of people had taken pictures out the bus window when we passed a weirdly shaped boulder a few minutes from town. It was strange to think that Mom had spent a part of her life here, that she knew this place that I was just discovering. I thought about how excited I was when I’d first pulled How to Survive in the Woods out of our basement. Mom had made notes in the margins, blue ink additions to the diagrams of cooking shelters and proper canoe-paddling strokes. In the plant identification section, she’d marked a date and place next to each plant on the day that she first found it. Wild strawberries were marked Maple Bay National Park the summer before I was born.

Next year! she’d written next to a place on the map, a zigzagging network of lakes and rivers.

Next year had never happened. Next year, she was back home.

As I sat on the steps, anger welled up inside me for the lost girl of the survival book, full of exclamation marks and opinions on the proper way to build a fire in the rain. She wanted so much for me to discover myself, and I was afraid to even try.

It was starting to snow. I texted Mom back quickly and stood up to go back inside.

56

WHEN I WENT BACK INTO THE kitchen, the girls were making cookies. The counter was littered with dirty spoons and mixing bowls, and half the contents of the cupboards were piled up on the table.

“Were you hiding?” said the girl with dreadlocks, whose name might have been Beatrice. “We didn’t mean to scare you away.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I was just embarrassed.”

“Awwww,” said Beatrice. “So you were the puking girl. Are you feeling better now? What happened?”

I hesitated. How could I tell a bunch of strangers when I hadn’t told Noe? Wasn’t that a kind of betrayal? Maybe I was still angry at her for ditching our plans so easily, and this was my twisted way of getting back at her. Or maybe I trusted Ava’s friends in a way I didn’t trust Noe. They seemed so grown-up, and we were still kids. I needed a grown-up right now, not a kid—did that make me a traitor? I wasn’t sure.

I thrust these complicated thoughts aside and blurted, “I had an accident. With a boy. Ava’s taking me to the clinic tomorrow.”

The kitchen was quiet for a moment. Then one by one, the girls put down their bowls and spatulas and teacups and came to put their hands on my shoulders and back.

“Are you scared?” they said.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Don’t be scared!” they said. “Don’t be scared!”

The girls all had some story about a close call they had had with a broken condom or a birth control pill.

“My twin sister tried to do an herbal abortion when we were fifteen,” said a big, dark-haired girl who might have been called Jade or Jane or Jacey. “She got the recipe out of a fantasy novel. We stayed up all night brewing herbs on the stove.” She chomped her cookie, then peered at it suspiciously. “How old was that butter?”

“Which book was it?” everyone wanted to know.

“That one with the fairies.” She glanced at me appraisingly. “We could do one tomorrow, if you want. Co-op opens at eight, they have all the herbs.”

“Keep your witchy paws off my baby cousin,” said Ava. “A

A girl named Leah started telling a story about a time she got pregnant by accident. “He was like, ‘It broke and I don’t have another one!’ And I was like, ‘Okaaaaay, I guess we have to stop.’ And then we were like, ‘What if we’re really, really careful? Like, ninja-careful!’”

Leah had had an abortion at the same clinic I was going to in the morning.

“The people at the clinic are really nice,” she said. “They’re really nice. You’re going to be okay.”

Ava’s roommates reminded me of a chorus of batty aunts in a musical, trading off solos in a medley of reassurance and advice. I couldn’t believe they were only three years older than me and Noe and everyone in our year at school. They seemed so different, somehow. Like they belonged to a bigger world.

When Ava took out the last tray of cookies, everyone gathered around to gobble them up. I hung back, grateful for the distraction. When the cookies were gone, the girls had moved on from their cheerful interrogation and started talking among themselves.

At one a.m. Ava’s roommates dumped the cookie trays in the sink without washing them and tromped up the stairs to bed.

“Tired?” Ava said.

I nodded.

“Come on. I’ll show you my room.”

57

IN THE MORNING, AVA TOOK ME to the clinic. The nurse asked me some questions and had me pee in a cup, and put me down for an appointment the following morning. They couldn’t fit me in the same day. At first I was disappointed, then relieved. It meant I wouldn’t have to miss the campus tour that Mom had signed me up for. Even though that was a small thing, it seemed important somehow—like at least I wouldn’t have to let her down in that one regard. So when she asked me about Northern, I’d have something to tell her about.