A Sense of the Infinite

“You look amazing, doll,” she said again.

I grunted my thanks.

The music started. I sailed through the first cartwheel, the hip swivel and shoulder thrusts, aware of the fluorescent gym lights on my bare arms and legs. I’d wrestled my hair into a clumsy French braid and shellacked it in place with some of Kaylee Ito’s gel. Now my own head smelled foreign to me, like a head out of a magazine.

I landed the second cartwheel smoothly and remembered to smile on the landing.

From the sidelines, a blinding flash. I glanced over and saw the photographer from the Tribune crouching there with his camera. He took another picture, snap, and gri

Half turn, stag leap, round-off. Noe sliding back into the front row. I came up from a somersault.

Bitch, Noe mouthed at me.

I faltered. The mat stretched out before me, blank and impenetrable. I wished it would turn to water so I could dive under its surface and swim away. If this was a legend, I thought to myself, it would turn to water and I would swim away, and forever be known as the ghost mermaid who pulled hapless gymnasts into the mat to drown.

I turned, glimpsed Noe’s face again, and this time I lost my grip on the smile. I could almost hear it dropping on the mat, a muffled tink. Lindsay Harris’s tampon fell out in the middle of her beam routine, Noe had said. And A

Snap, went the camera. Snap, snap.

The music stopped. I swept my hands up, nodded tersely at the table of adjudicators, and walked off the floor, my face burning. I could feel Noe’s eyes on the back of my head the whole way.

As I pushed through the changing room door, the next girl’s routine was already starting. I glanced back and saw her land her first handstand, the confident way her arms swept through the air. There were moves, I realized, sequences in life you had to learn. A certain dance unlocked a certain door: a friendship, a romance, a progression from one level of things to the next. And while everyone else sailed through the steps, the best I could do was desperately ape them.

In the changing room, I was a girl with ten thousand reasons to hate herself. I sank onto the clammy wooden bench and held my face in my hands, feeling the reasons swarm over me like flies and cover me whole.

88

ON THE BUS RIDE HOME, NOE wouldn’t even look at me. I hunched against the window. A hundred times, I tried to catch her eye—It wasn’t my fault, I swear, she asked me, I didn’t tell her—but Noe turned her face away. When we got to the school, Steven and Darla were waiting for Noe in the parking lot. They got out of Darla’s huge car and waved. There was no nonawkward way of leaving the parking lot without saying hello to Steven, so I tromped behind Noe all the way to their car.

“How’d it go, honey?” Darla sang, sweeping Noe into her arms like a long-lost daughter. “DiMaggio’s or Casa Italia? Your choice.”

Just like that, Noe was Ms. Shiny-Brite again. “You’re taking me out for di

I guess it was safe to eat again, provided Noe didn’t need to do any double handsprings within the next three hours.

“Are you coming?” said Steven.

“I’m pretty wiped,” I said.

“Please please please?”

“No thanks,” I said glumly. “You guys have fun.”

I said good-bye and walked away before Steven could wheedle me into coming. My muscles ached and I was hungry.

On the walk home, I kept sca

But that was where the analogy stopped. If I’d finally said the magic words, why had the treasure disappeared?

89

WHEN I GOT HOME, MOM COULD tell something was wrong.

“How was the gym meet?” she said.

“Fine.”

“Win any ribbons?”

“A stupid photographer took my picture.”

“Wow,” said Mom mildly. “You’re going to be famous.”

I peeled off my hat and scarf and threw them onto the coatrack. My winter coat was heavy and damp. I slithered out of it and dumped it onto a hook. The kitchen was warm and moist with cooking beans, a smell that was suddenly comforting. I leaned against the counter with my arms crossed, trembling with humiliation at the way Noe had stalked ahead of me to where Darla and Steven were waiting without even acknowledging that I was there.

“What are you cooking?” I said.

“Vegetarian chili.”

“It smells good.”

“Thanks.”

“Can I chop something?”

“How about some onions?”

She made room for me at the counter. I took an onion from the wooden bowl and peeled off the papery yellow skin. Mom was using the good knife, so I poked around in the drawer until I found one that was almost as sharp.

“Do you want to invite Noe over for di

“She went to a restaurant with her boyfriend and his mom.”

“Aha,” said Mom. “I was wondering why she’d been so scarce around here. I haven’t seen her in months.”

We peeled and chopped. It had been a long time, I realized, since I’d confided in Mom about anything. The last time was when my seventh-grade best friend, Emily Lincoln, had two birthday parties, a boring one with me and Carly Ocean and Eliza Grinette, and a fun one with her cool friends where there was dancing and making out and somebody brought a beer. I couldn’t believe I’d been assigned to the “boring friend” category, lumped in with Carly Ocean. Mom had taken me on a walk in the woods and listened to me wail, and afterward we’d picked up Nan and gone out for French fries at Dick’s Chips and everything had started to feel okay. Ever since Ava told me about Scott, I’d stopped unpouring myself to Mom, like my problems were silly compared to what she’d been through. Like I owed it to her to be perfect so she wouldn’t have any more reasons to regret me.

Now the knife I was holding blurred before my eyes. I set it down.

“I thought we were going to be friends forever,” I burst. “I care about her so much. But it’s like we’re not communicating anymore.”

“You’re still pretty disappointed about the roommate thing, aren’t you?” said Mom.

“Not as much since I visited Ava,” I said. “But yeah. It’s like she decided to become this whole different person, but I’m not allowed to become a different person too.”

“People are like trees,” said Mom. “They need one kind of food when they’re seedlings, and a different kind of food once they’ve been growing for a few years. Maybe you and Noe needed each other in ninth grade in a way you don’t need each other now.”

I imagined myself as a scrawny sapling, the fertilizer of Noe slowly being withdrawn, the wooden stakes pulled up.