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I wasn’t ready to go home yet, so I walked around the old cemetery that’s across the street from the bus station, sucking on my mouthful of gravel and wondering what it would be like to die of starvation. The headstones were sunk deep in the snow. Some of them had frozen flowers piled on top of them. I imagined myself as a zombie-wraith, haunting this town. The old revulsion was seeping up from inside me, like a clogged bathtub drain I shouldn’t have disturbed.
I couldn’t be like Noe or Steven, I thought to myself. I would never be warm like that, or happy like that, or so certain of my place in the world, so entitled. I thought of them under the trees at the park, dappled light on the backs of their sweaters.
My phone rang. I tensed, my mind swinging irrationally to the thought that it was Scott (how would he have my number?) or the police. But when I looked at the tiny screen, it was Ava. I spat out my mouthful of gravel and pressed the yes button with a mittened finger.
“Hey, chickie,” Ava said.
It was weird to be talking to Ava in the snowy cemetery, at midnight. I sank against a tree and pressed the cold phone against my ear.
“Hey, Ava.”
“How are you?”
How was I? I scuffed my boots at the snow. It was hard to switch from being deep in my head to talking on the phone, to vocalizing. Words felt clunky and crude, like using wooden blocks to communicate. How could I explain these things to another human using wooden blocks? Build a tower? Juggle them?
The night had been beautiful. Icicles glittered on the trees. The sky was clear and star-studded over the rooftops, and muted window light glowed on the snow. What did it mean that the world could be beautiful and also contain horrible things?
“I’m fine,” I said.
Fine? Was that the best I could do? I wondered if everyone walked around with a muzzle that filtered out all but the most banal of statements, leaving all that was rough, contradictory, or confusing to collect inside them until there was almost no room left to file it. I broke Scott’s window, I wanted myself to want to say. But something in me butted up to stop any such gesture of intimacy. Even with Ava. Maybe especially with Ava.
“How’s school?” Ava said. “Did you finish your college applications?”
I watched a stray cat dart across the road. Another bus rasped into the station, its tires coated in grit. Slowly, I arranged my brain into normal conversation mode.
“I had to write an essay about my campus visit,” I said. “A blog post, actually. For the E. O. James blog. Did you know E. O. James had a blog?”
“How twenty-first century,” Ava said.
“We had to talk about either the dorms, the campus, the food, or one other thing I can’t remember. The bathrooms maybe? Or the library?”
“Proximity to bars that don’t card?”
“Maybe that was it.”
“I never got to take you to the Sun Dog,” Ava said. “If you end up coming here, I call dibs on your initiation. They have a jukebox that plays a hundred percent Neil Young.”
“My mom would love that.”
“She’s probably been there. You should ask. I bet she and Pauline used to go there all the time.”
The mention of Mom and Pauline made me think about how Noe wasn’t applying to Northern like we’d pla
“What’s wrong?” said Ava.
“I just can’t believe Noe’s not coming with me.”
“You’ll make tons of friends.”
“I know. But you don’t understand. I already have all these amazing memories of me and Noe going to college together, and now they’re not even going to happen.”
“Maybe you needed to imagine those things more than you needed to actually do them,” said Ava. “The same way that kids make elaborate plans about ru
I didn’t like the implication that Noe’s and my plans for our college dorm room and Paris and the restaurant with the tiny spoons were anything like a desert island fantasy. Was I the only person in the world who was actually serious about the plans that everyone else blew around for fun?
The poise I had drummed up for the phone call was slipping away fast. My mouth tasted like gravel. My mind was turning back to Scott’s house, to everything that was wrong with my life.
“I have to go, Ava,” I said. “My phone’s almost out of battery.”
“Don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t.”
I put my phone back in my pocket and walked out the wrought-iron cemetery gate. My boots sounded harsh against the messy crust of ice that covered the sidewalk. After talking to Ava, I felt like even more of a hypocrite.
A broken window. What was a stupid window? If I was brave, I thought, I would have said something. Why hadn’t I said something? When it came down to it, I was no better than the girls at the ice-cream shop where I worked in the summer, simpering and cooing at whatever asshole with four dollars happened to walk into the store. Being nice and polite just because I’d been raised that way, nodding and saying Yeah to a freaking rapist because there was no entry in the ice-cream girl playbook for Fuck you, burn in hell, the ax in the forehead, the sword in the heart.
There was something out there, something larger than me. A suffocating thing, like ropes that only got tighter the more you wriggled against them.
I should have thrown it at his head, I thought, and something inside me howled and howled and howled until I thought I would hear it howling my whole life.
79
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, I floated along on a tide of numbness. I went to the New Year’s Eve concert with Noe and Steven and everyone else from our school and froze in the snow while a B-list band made love to their microphones. I went to the mall with Nan and froze in the dressing room while she handed post-Christmas sale sweaters over the door. I shoveled the driveway with Mom, the whole world reduced to the sound of scraping metal and thudding boots, and afterward froze in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil for tea.
Finally, it was time to go back to school.
“One more semester,” said Mom. “And then graduation!”
She squeezed my shoulders. Walking down the driveway, I slipped on a patch of ice and almost fell.
80
IT FELT LIKE THE WHOLE WORLD had gone crazy over Christmas break. There was something in the air, I guess, or maybe the frozen waterfall had messed with people’s brains. Noe and Steven had run into Steven’s theater friends at the New Year’s Eve concert after I’d gone home, and afterward they’d had their first big argument. “Do you know what Dominic calls me?” Noe had told me on the phone. “The bitch-monster from hell. He told me I was ruining Steven’s life. And I’m like, ‘You think I’m ruining his life? Who got him so drunk he tried to kill himself?’”
I hadn’t realized that Noe had all but forbidden Steven to hang out with his old friends. I tried to sympathize with her like I always did when she was indignant about something, but the truth was I liked Steven’s theater posse, and could understand why they’d be up in arms over the loss of him.
The first week back at school, two kids got expelled for drug dealing, another one got suspended for vandalism, and they had to stop the a
Noe’s New Year’s resolution was to master something called a double aerial, which Sphinx had started to teach her at Gailer. The first time she didn’t show up outside the Art room before lunch, Steven and I waited in the hall for fifteen minutes and then spent another fifteen searching the whole school for her. We found her in the gym, practicing on the beam, her backpack slumped against the wall.