A Sense of the Infinite

I couldn’t imagine being immune to Noe.

Even now, several weeks after the incident, I still winced when I passed her in the hall. I still felt a stab in my heart when my eyes fell on one of the ten thousand tokens of her that cluttered my desk and my bedroom walls, or when I overheard other girls making plans to go to Paris, or open fu

Or maybe I’d been limping all along, and this was just what it felt like to find my stride.

114

WIN AND I STARTED SMILING AT each other in the halls, as if we had a shared joke and that joke was the ridiculousness that was Steven. It felt good to have another person to smile at in the hall; with Steven, that made two. I liked it. It wasn’t much, but it anchored me. I started looking forward to it. I started preparing fu

It sort of became our thing. Goofy faces, no words.

Steven caught us doing it once.

“You two,” he said, and he sounded pleased.

I didn’t suspect a thing.

I really didn’t suspect a thing.

115

I HAD NO IDEA HOW WRAPPED around the rails Steven was about Noe until one afternoon in art class almost three weeks after he and Noe had broken up. He seemed miraculously intact. Like a friendly universe had granted him a reprieve. I’d seen him campaigning for Pee Sisters in the hall, accompanying this freshman named Kris to the boys’ bathroom, playing matchmaker like crazy. It wasn’t just me and Win. He spent lunch flitting around the cafeteria, introducing everybody he knew to someone they had to meet. It was like he wanted everyone he cared about to be provided for.

That should have been a sign.

116

IN THE ART MORGUE THAT AFTERNOON, I was feeling better than I had in a long time. Mr. Lim had given my latest self-portrait a pass. Steven had drawn it for me one day at lunch, and it was pretty good.

“What should I call it?” I’d said when he ripped it out of his sketchbook and passed it to me across the table. “Portrait of the Artist as a Cheater?”

“The assignment said any medium,” Steven replied. “In this case, your medium happened to be me.”

Steven was wearing a black suit and a black tie. His polished shoes shone under the table. I thought he was dressed that way for something in his drama class. Maybe he was doing a monologue or a one-act play.

“Good morning, A

“Good morning, Steven.”

“I’d like you to have this,” Steven said. He took out the small red mood journal the school counselor was making him carry around.

“Why?” I said.

I noticed he’d drawn a circle around his pinky finger in blue pen. I didn’t think anything of it. Steven was always writing stuff on his hands.

“A

He pushed his chair out from the table and stood up.

“Steven?” I said.

He strode to the long counter where the art supplies were kept. Everyone else had their heads down, working on their paintings. Mr. Lim was marking midterms for his human kinetics class. There was a pleasant hum of industry to the art morgue. Outside the windows, cars were splashing by on the main road. The plastic board outside the Burger King said WHOPPERS 2 X $1.99 CENTS. The funeral parlor still had a Christmas wreath on its front door. I was thinking how sad it was that nobody had taken it down when I heard a thwack and Amy McDougall started to scream.

117

HE HAD CUT OFF HIS FINGER. His pinky finger. The one he used to link with Noe’s all the time. It shot across the classroom and landed near the recycle bins. If I wasn’t sitting right near them, I wouldn’t have heard the barely audible tap as it hit the floor.

The art morgue was chaos. Ernestine’s ruled cutting surface had blossomed with comically perfect splatters of blood. Steven calmly produced a white handkerchief from his pocket, which he had apparently brought for the purpose, and pressed it to the bleeding stub. Amy McDougall was shrieking.

Mr. Lim shouted at everyone who wasn’t Steven to leave the classroom. I pushed toward Steven, but Mr. Lim said, “Out!” and then the principal and security guard showed up and they started hustling everyone out of the classroom, too. On my way out, I ducked and fished Steven’s finger out from behind the recycle bins. It had landed in something sticky. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I wrapped it in a few tissues from one of the little packets Mom always stuck in my backpack during cold season and put it in my pocket.

In the hall, everyone was milling around like at halftime during a hockey game.

“Shit, did you see that?” people kept saying. Everyone was crowded around the tiny frosted window in the door, trying to see in. You could hear the principal and Mr. Lim’s voices, talking to Steven. After a minute, there was an ambulance siren outside. Before I could figure out what to do, Mr. Beek came stomping out of the room.

“Get your butts to the library,” he roared.

I hung back. I’ve never been good at talking to teachers, but with Steven’s finger in my pocket I figured it was pretty urgent.

“Library,” he barked. “Move it along.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Move it along, Ms. Schultz,” he said. “Steven will be fine.”

“Um,” I said. “But I need to give his—”

The doors at the end of the hallway burst open and some ambulance people walked in. Mr. Beek clapped his hands.

“Anyone NOT signed in at the library within the next ten seconds will get to spend their next ten lunch periods in my office.”

“I have his finger,” I said. “What should I do with it?”

“Go to the library,” he said. “Mr. Ternary will give you instructions for the rest of the period.”

“No, but—”

I could tell he wasn’t listening. But what was I supposed to do? Everything was confusion. Everyone started rushing for the library and somehow I got pulled along. I had a vague idea I would tell the librarian about Steven’s finger, but the library was confusion too, with everyone crowding around the table to sign in. I sat in a chair by the newspapers and waited for the line to die down, but I started reading King Lear, and the bell was ringing for next period, and I had a midterm in that class and couldn’t be late, and somehow I forgot Steven’s finger until I was halfway home and put my hands in my pockets to warm them up and felt it there in its bundle of tissue.

I ran the rest of the way home and called Steven’s house.

Darla answered the phone.

“It’s A

You would be surprised how good some people are at swearing.

118

IT TURNS OUT IT WAS TOO late to save Steven’s finger. I guess you’re supposed to put it on ice right away. By the time I called Steven’s house, the finger was gray and dead and waxy like a candle stub.

To say that it felt weird to have Steven McNeil’s dismembered finger in my pocket would be the understatement of the year.

I felt guilty about the finger. I could tell Steven’s parents were upset. They tried not to show it, but questions kept popping out.