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All these conditions serve to make the students bored and aggressive and prone to gossip.
Sometimes it feels like nobody gets out of here without a broken bone or two.
96
THE FIRST DAY WITHOUT NOE WAS THE hardest. For the most part, I avoided eye contact with anyone in our year, and kept my ears firmly plugged with earbuds at all times during which it wouldn’t earn me a detention to do so. I started Kingdom of Stones again from the begi
My campaign of avoidance wasn’t entirely successful.
Margot Dilforth: “Is it true that you’re pregnant?”
Me: “No.”
Margot Dilforth: “That’s what everyone’s saying.”
Something about her reminded me of a goat. In Kingdom of Stones, she would be Pe
Margot Dilforth: “Are you and Oliver getting married?”
Me: “Not that I know of.”
Margot Dilforth (scratching her long, freckly nose): “I heard you are.”
Steven was away on a theater trip that day. In Art, I had to sit alone. I wanted to call him, but suddenly our little triangle had gotten very messy. Steven was wrong. It wasn’t as simple as being friends instead of friends-by-association. He was dating the association, and right now, the association hated my guts.
I pla
Noe was crying. The gym birds were comforting her.
Nobody looked at me while I walked past.
97
SCHOOL WAS LONELY. WORDLESSLY, WITH NO further discussion or negotiation, Noe and I ceased to be, the way a dry leaf detaches itself from the branch and spirals silently toward the ground. The soccer fields outside the school building were messy expanses of trampled ice. The classrooms smelled like wet coats. In Art, Steven and I whittled totem poles out of our pencils. We named the ancient paper cutter on the counter of the art morgue Ernestine.
“Ernestine looks lonely today,” Steven would say, and we would take turns getting up to pet her.
“Ernestine is hungry,” I’d say, and we’d find excuses to chop some paper up with her heavy old blade.
In the hallways, posters for the Valentine’s Day ball. The Senior Leaders set up tables outside the cafeteria selling tickets. You couldn’t walk in for lunch without them shaking their bags of Hershey’s Kisses at you.
“Bought your tickets for the ball?” they’d shout like hawkers outside a football stadium (or “Hey! You like balls?” if they were guys). They made you feel like crap if you walked past without stopping, like you were the one being rude. They did it to everyone, even the nervous freshmen, especially the nervous freshmen. Like all the other nervous people, I scuttled past with my eyes averted, muttering, “No thanks.”
“Why not?” they’d call after me, as if to prolong the humiliation by extracting a detailed explanation.
I pushed my earbuds deeper into my ears and kept walking.
At the lockers across the hall from mine, Noe and Dulcie Simmonds made plans: dress shopping, hair and makeup, restaurant selection, what Steven and Mark would wear. They had an entire shared notebook full of Valentine’s Ball to-do lists and clippings from hairstyle magazines. Steven’s mom was taking them to her manicurist, then for something called a radiant light treatment at the Twin Oaks Spa.
“What about my radiant light treatment?” said Steven.
“You will be getting a car wash,” Noe said.
“A
He had been trying to get Noe and me to make up for the past two weeks. It was a complicated dance, and I could tell it was wearing him out. I’d seen them arguing again, and I’d hurried past with my head hunched, wishing he would just do as I’d pleaded and enjoy the rest of the year without worrying about me. I’d been doing my best to keep my distance outside Art so as to not mess things up for him, but he wasn’t making it easy.
Noe ignored Steven and kept chatting with Dulcie. I shook my head. He gazed at me forlornly. “You two,” he said, to no one in particular.
98
I HAD TOLD MYSELF I WOULDN’T miss Noe, that I would simply ignore her for the rest of the year. But there was a part of my brain where Noe lived, like a program I couldn’t figure out how to delete from my phone. Now that we weren’t speaking anymore, it played all the time. When I took a bite of my sandwich, I could hear Noe saying, Somebody’s hungry today. When Ava called to see how I was doing, Noe said, How are you even talking to that freak? When I caught myself feeling happy at odd moments, Noe said, Aren’t you even a little ashamed?
She lived inside me as a critical voice, telling me what a failure I was and how undeserving of love. Every time I passed her in the hall, or glanced at her accidentally in English, something inside me sent up a guilty flare. I wrapped my sandwich in a napkin. I deleted the email I was mentally composing to Loren Wilder. I pulled the sleeves of my sweater over my hands.
When I saw her, a sick shiver happened in the quease of my stomach. She had become frightening to me. I was hyperaware of her, the way you can’t stop thinking about a spider in your room. Even when I wasn’t looking directly at her, I could sense her, two rows behind me in the auditorium, twenty feet ahead of me in the hall. My ears pricked to every syllable of her voice laughing with other girls. I detected her every footfall, every toss of her oily black hair.
She cornered me in the hall one day.
“I just want you to know that it wasn’t me who wrote that thing on your bag,” she said. “It was Kaylee.”
Noe’s hair smelled like pomegranate. Her hands were calloused from the vault. It had been weeks since we’d stood this close to one another, or spoken face-to-face. I’d been building up this whole demonic story about her—Noe was controlling, Noe was cruel, Noe had never been my friend, and she didn’t really love Steven either—but standing near her, smelling her smell, I couldn’t see her as a demon anymore, even though I wanted to. What I did see: a girl who was just as scared as I was, and hurting just as much.
Noe, I wanted to say. I see you. I can see you again. Can you see me?
But I didn’t say anything. I was too stu
We stood in the hall, people flowing past us like water. It seemed like the kind of moment in which we might have forgiven each other, in which two people with a history of friendship might reasonably be expected to forgive each other. I could see the moment of forgiveness blowing past us like a flowered dress tumbling in the wind on the side of the highway. Either of us could have said, Pull over and grab it! But neither of us did.
Noe turned. I adjusted my backpack with shaky hands and walked away.