A Sense of the Infinite

I watched the town flash past outside the muddy bus window. Strip mall, gas station, then the highway. I wondered what would happen if someone opened the door of the bus and let us all fly away. Girls in spangled leotards hopping through the windows, pecking uselessly at the snow. Making eyes at themselves in toy mirrors while the winter wind froze first their spindly legs, then their blue feathers, then finally their tiny, twinkly hearts.

86

THE GYMNASIUM WHERE THE MEET WAS taking place was huge and busy, with multiple events going on at once. I had expected something more formal, with an audience and clapping, but in the junior levels it was more like waiting to take a driver’s test: lots of standing in line and then a nervous two minutes on the equipment while the world continued to hum and churn around you. The real action was at the advanced events, where girls like Noe sailed through gravity-defying combinations of jumps and twists.

After my beam event (tippy two minutes scuttling up and down the plank) and my bars event (actually-kind-of-enjoyable two minutes bouncing and swinging eight feet above the ground) and my vault event (a

There was a girl retching in one of the toilet stalls. My first thought was that she was pregnant. I took an extralong time washing my hands, waiting for her to come out. Who knew? Maybe I could be her magic spirit friend. I still had that piece of birthday cake in my backpack. It was hard as a brick and dry as tinder. In a pinch, you could use it to light a campfire.

Hey, I would say. If you need someone to talk to, I happen to have some experience in this domain.

I dried my hands and waited quietly for another minute. Finally, the stall door swung open and Noe stepped out.

“Hey, doll,” she said when she saw me. “Excited for your floor routine?”

She turned on the tap and swished her hands beneath the hot water. I watched her soap and rinse them, stu

I couldn’t believe I’d never seen that before. I couldn’t believe I’d told myself that not seeing it made me special and understanding, instead of simply a coward.

“Noe,” I said. “I know what you’re doing.”

She kept on washing her hands, patient and businesslike. Her face in the mirror was undecipherable. She had put on lipstick and mascara so she wouldn’t look “washed out” under the bright lights. Up close, the makeup made her look ghoulish, even vampiric.

“Emergency measures,” Noe said. “My floor event got moved an hour earlier. No warning. If there’s anything in your digestive tract, it can give you cramps.” She patted my arm. “Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”

She was the same old Noe, amused and reassuring. Poor dear this and poor darling that. She pecked at the pins in her hair, rearranging them to fasten stray strands of hair out of the way.

“No,” I said. “It’s not emergency measures. It’s crazy. Normal people don’t make themselves throw up ever. You’re hurting yourself.”

I wanted her to soften, to yield, to let me gather her up and say, Tell me everything. Instead, Noe raised her eyebrows at me.

“Sphinx said not to eat a minimum of three hours before an event. Any less than that and it affects your fluidity. If they hadn’t changed the stupid schedule, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I didn’t work this hard all year just to let my floor routine get sabotaged.”

“I don’t think he meant for you to throw up.”

“Actually, he said it was okay in emergency situations.”

I hesitated. The light in the bathroom hummed. Noe put a hand on her hip. “Sphinx was an Olympic gymnast, A

“He sounds like a dick.”

“Can we table this?” said Noe. “I have to go stretch.”

“Noe,” I said. “You can talk to me about it. You don’t have to be so invulnerable all the time.”

“I need to go, Bethy. Seriously, don’t worry.”

She breezed past me and pushed the door open with both palms. I trailed after her, stu

I didn’t know what to do with myself until my next event, so I sat on some bleachers and took How to Survive out of my backpack. I was reading the part about poisonous plants when the coach, Ms. Bomtrauer, tapped me on the shoulder.

“Were you in the bathroom just now?” she said.

I nodded, surprised.

“Was Noe doing something she shouldn’t be doing?”

I froze. I hadn’t decided what to do yet. Instead of nodding or shaking my head, I made a slight shrug with my shoulders, as if to say, Don’t ask me, I don’t want to be involved, Noe will kill me, I wasn’t going to say anything, I don’t know.

Ms. Bomtrauer sighed and drummed her fingers on her clipboard. “That’s all I needed to know.”

She started to walk away.

“Ms. Bomtrauer?” I said.

“Mm-hmm?”

“The coach from Gailer told her—he said it was okay in emergencies.”

Shit shit shit. I wasn’t making it better at all. Ms. Bomtrauer frowned, and a deep furrow formed between her eyebrows. “What coach at Gailer?”

“Sphinx Lacoeur,” I squeaked, regretting the moment I opened my stupid mouth.

“Hmph,” she said, and walked away.

87

NOE WAS GOING TO KILL ME.

Noe was going to kill me.

Guilt bloomed inside me, hot and loud and red. If I hadn’t gone to sit on the bleachers, if I hadn’t been just sitting there, if I’d thought to compose an i

I copied Noe and drank a bottle of water during lunchtime, rationing evenly so that it wouldn’t slosh around inside me as she’d warned me that it could. I walked away from the spot on the floor where everyone was eating and practiced my switch jumps, my stomach panging with vindictive jabs of hunger. I wished I would faint or break my ankle so I could be driven away in an ambulance, the medical emergency rendering me saintly, making me i

A few minutes before my floor event, Noe walked over.

“Hey, squirrel. You look amazing,” she said, holding me at arm’s length to inspect me like a creation of hers that had turned out particularly well. “Did you eat?”

“Not yet.”

“Good girl. We’ll go to Subway after this, Alicia and Kaylee are going to need food too.”

I gazed at her miserably. A bunch of girls came to join us on the bleachers where Noe and I were sitting. Soon Noe was chattering up a storm with them, analyzing the day’s victories and defeats. The organizer called my name. I stood up to go to the floor. Noe tore herself away from the conversation for a moment.