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If I was the clever, brave, and sassy girl in a high school drama, I would have said, And besides, I didn’t have a baby. I had a bundle of cells the size of a pencil eraser. But I was too stricken to even think that, and it didn’t occur to me until much later.
“It’s not something you can think or not think,” Noe said. “It’s biology. Lots of women get really depressed afterward. One of the girls at Darla’s church committed suicide last year.”
I was used to hearing Noe hold forth about everything under the sun. I rarely had a reason to contradict her real or presumed authority. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the muzzle trying to catch all my complicated words before they found their way out. The bell started ringing, and fourth-period gym class kids came through the gym doors in noisy clusters of two and three.
“Maybe she wouldn’t have done that if people hadn’t given her the idea that she was supposed to,” I said to Noe as we stood up to put the beam away.
I should have said more. If I were Ava or one of Ava’s ru
The gym was filling up with kids in white T-shirts and purple basketball shorts. My throat felt swollen and achy from sorting through all the things I could and could not say.
“I’m just worried about you,” Noe said before we parted ways for our separate classes. “I want you to be okay.”
She gave me a big, tight, Darla-scented hug. I nodded dumbly and walked away with my head reeling, wishing Noe had called me a slut or said I was going to hell. It would have been so easy to respond to an attack. This softer thing was more confusing. This feeling of bafflement at being so completely misunderstood. Even worse was the feeling that Noe and I no longer meshed in the same ways but still acted like we did.
I wanted Noe back, I thought with a pang. Noe of the spi
I thought about the night I came back from Northern, ru
That afternoon, I went to the forest after school and trudged around the trails in the snow.
“You’re pink,” Mom said when I came home. “It’s nice to see you outdoors.”
I sank onto the couch and buried my head under a blanket.
Whatever was happening, I wouldn’t call it nice.
83
THE SUNDAY BEFORE THE GYM MEET, I went to the YMCA and endured four and a half hours of Noe-directed torture. Halfway through, Ava called to see how I was doing. I went outside to talk with her, happy for an excuse to leave the mirrored dance room where Gym Bird Number Twelve was ru
We talked for a while about Ava’s friends and the theater festival she was helping put on.
“How are things with your mom?” Ava said.
“Pretty good.”
“Pretty good?”
I looked at the sidewalk. Ever since Scott’s house, I’d hardly been able to eat. It felt like the rock hadn’t gone through his window, but was lodged in my stomach instead. I thought of Ava’s room the day that she’d told me, the sadness that lived there.
“Ava?” I said. “I went to his house.”
“Whose house?”
“Scott’s. I broke his window.” Something was clawing at my throat. In my stomach, the rock was burrowing itself as deep as it would go. “I saw him,” I said. “He waved hello and said what a beautiful night it was.”
“That’s fucked up,” Ava said.
“Yup.”
From the sidewalk, I could hear the music Noe was playing for Ha
“Should I tell my mom?” I said. “About the window?”
“I don’t know,” Ava said. She sounded genuinely uncertain. “God, A
When I went back into the gym, Noe pounced on me. “There you are! Onto the mat, it’s your turn. And take that sweater off.”
She peeled it off me and tossed it onto the pile of sweaters and coats in the corner.
I shivered through the rest of practice. Someone had brought a box of clementines wrapped up in blue paper. I spent the last half hour sitting against the wall with a clementine cradled in my hands, its bright orange skin like a promise of warmth I could hold close to myself but never feel.
84
ON THE DRIVE HOME FROM THE YMCA, I told Noe I was thinking of going to see Bob again.
Noe pulled back, aghast. “Why?”
For some reason, I blushed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I do find it hard to eat sometimes. A lot of the time. When I’m feeling bad.”
Noe dismissed this with a flick of her hand. “That’s different. They can’t make you go. Not unless your mom signed a form or something. It’s illegal.”
She kissed me on the cheek, a kiss that smelled vaguely sour. For some reason I thought about what Margot Dilforth had said. Maybe Noe was taking the fluidity thing even further than I realized. I shook the traitorous thought from my mind. Noe and I had been more or less back to normal since the basic human instinct conversation. At least, we made our normal jokes and had our normal interactions, although I could sense that something beneath the surface had changed.
Some friendships ended all at once and some were like Athenian ships, each part slowly replaced over the years until one day, even if you had never left the deck, you couldn’t recognize it anymore. Lately when I talked to Noe I felt like one of the old people who came to the ice-cream shop year after year, even though the soul of the place had long ago drained out of it: they knew it wasn’t the same anymore, but they simply didn’t know where else to go.
“Get a good sleep,” Noe said when we pulled up at my house. “Don’t forget to shave your legs tomorrow morning or you’ll look like a monkey. Bus leaves at seven sharp. No coffee unless you want your sweat to smell like the Java Bean.” She winked at me. “Bye, doll.”
85
GYM MEET, THE NEXT MORNING: FIRST the idling school bus, then the half-hour ride that smelled of hair spray, everyone brushing and braiding and squirting gel into their hair and hunting in their gym bags for spare elastics. Music playing on cell phones. Noe striding up and down the central aisle with a clipboard, authoritative in her black-and-purple tracksuit, attending to a thousand details whose significance escaped me. I knew she was the team captain, but still it was strange to see her like that, a Noe with no special allegiance to me, who did not sit next to me at the seat I’d saved for us by the window, who did not even alight there, but breezed past in a whiff of Wintermint to confer with Ms. Bomtrauer about that morning’s twentieth emergency.