“Hey, Mom?” I’d said when my pack was ready. “I’m going camping. I’ll be back on Sunday.”
Camping. I might as well have said I was going to go pick up strange men outside the Thunderbird Casino. The flurry that word caused!
My backpack: unzipped and picked apart, my perfectly adequate supplies declared to be insufficient.
My ability to survive in the woods for two nights questioned, unknown dangers emphasized.
Nan was over, using our computer to look up cake recipes for my cousin Ava’s birthday. She’d come upstairs to see what the fuss was about.
“What’s all this?”
“I’m going camping.”
“Are you going to let her go with only crackers, Leslie?” That’s Nan, holding up a box of Wheat Thins.
“You’re leaving out the rest of the food,” I’d protested, motioning at the hard-boiled eggs I’d bundled up in paper towels.
“Annabeth,” said Mom. “You know that’s not enough for two days.”
I waved the plant ID book at her. “The whole point is to supplement with wild things. Milkweed. Sumac. Raspberries.”
“Raspberries!” said Nan. “Leslie, she can’t go a whole weekend on raspberries.”
I should have left a note. Forty-five minutes of bitter negotiation later, they’d driven me to the regional park, where there are official campsites, and a ranger who checks to make sure that you paid, and all sorts of old people sitting outside their trailers on folding chairs drinking cans of off-brand soda. They made me bring an emergency whistle, and a cooler full of sandwiches and fruit and little foil-wrapped packages of Nan’s cabbage rolls. My two nights in the forest were reduced to one. One night at the regional park, in the hot dog–smelling air.
If Nan hadn’t been there, I would have said a whole lot more to Mom than I did.
Like How can you do this to me?
And If I was a boy you’d let me.
And You of all people should understand.
The things I couldn’t say out loud with Nan in the car, I said with my eyes instead. I knew that Mom caught every one by the way she looked back at me in the rearview mirror.
“Annabeth,” she said, and I shook my head.
I felt like I was swimming through a school of jellyfish: my whole body prickled and burned. We crept along the asphalt ring road, past the enormous Coleman tents with people barbecuing, until we came to the campsite the ranger had assigned me, number fourteen. It was under some scrubby maple trees. There was a fire ring with a dirty grate propped up over it, and the half-burned remains of someone’s cardboard beer box underneath. Mom and I barely spoke as we set up the tent. Someone in a nearby campsite had a radio playing top-forty hits. Another radio was broadcasting the baseball game. As we drove the tent stakes into the ground, an unspoken I hate you sizzled between us like a coal.
“Well, I think Annabeth’s very adventurous,” Nan kept saying. “How many thirteen-year-old girls go on camping trips alone?”
“It’s not really camping,” I’d grumbled.
“And you have your own little water spout. Look at that.”
As we unrolled the camping mat and sleeping bag, Nan wandered off to meet the people in the neighboring campsite.
“Will you keep an eye on my granddaughter?” I heard her saying. “She’s camping out all by herself.”
Mom and I stood across from one another in front of the car, enveloped in bitter silence. I wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Great campsite,” I said. “Think I’ll see any stars with all those streetlights?”
“Someday we’ll go on a real camping trip.”
“I was going to go on a real camping trip this weekend.”
We didn’t say another word. We only stood there, on the packed dirt where nothing grew, while the baseball announcer’s voice clamored through the thin scrim of trees.
“Annabeth,” called Nan. “Come here and meet your neighbors. They’ve invited you over for supper, isn’t that nice?”
I shot Mom a look and started dismantling the tent.
“Take me home,” I growled.
I could see on Mom’s face that there was something terrible going on inside her, but in my anger it never occurred to me that she was being anything other than selfish and unreasonable.
On the car ride home, Nan had kept patting her hand.
I didn’t know then.
I didn’t know, and now she wanted to call me her happy nature girl, and tell me to go three hundred miles away on my own, to the very place where the whole ugly mess of my life had started, without even Noe to make it okay.
32
IT FELT LIKE THE HOUSE WAS filled with paint fumes: instant migraine when you walked in the door. Mom and I avoided each other’s eyes and timed our comings and goings to avoid intersection in the kitchen or hall. My head swarmed with equal parts guilt and indignation. Guilt for shutting her out. Indignation at the suggestion that Noe was anything less than my dearest friend in the world.
One day I came home to find a box of condoms on my bed, and a pamphlet titled What Is Consent?
As I skimmed it, my cheeks burned with something I tried to convince myself was mortification, but knew to be heartbreak instead.
Mom worried about boys. The first time it emerged that I had kissed one, she made me practice shouting No! and kneeing her in the groin until we both started crying.
Personally, I have never required the knee, although God help the poor fool who incites me to deploy it.
Oliver had been a sweet and respectful person in that department, and as I sat on my bed, I wished I could break ranks for long enough to tell Mom that one thing, just that.
The worst part of fighting is the moment you realize the other person is really hurting. It’s pretty impossible to keep going after that.
33
I APOLOGIZED TO MOM.
I really cannot stand to see her hurting because of something I said or did.
We spent her birthday going for a hike in the forest, like we used to do all the time when I was younger. It had rained the night before, and the woods smelled fresh and wet and cold.
Later, Uncle Dylan and Aunt Monique and Nan came over and we sat in the kitchen eating a strawberry angel food cake Nan had made. “Leslie says you’re thinking about visiting Ava at Northern,” Uncle Dylan said. “She’d love to see you.”
My uncle Dylan has a ginger mustache and grayish-blue eyes. He used to play on the E. O. James hockey team, and now he has a construction business. My aunt Monique grew up in Chippewa, and now she is a kindergarten teacher. When I was little, I spent a lot of time at their house, playing with my cousins Ava and Max and watching movies on their big TV. I had my own bed there, and the same number of presents at Christmas. Uncle Dylan came to my soccer games and school recitals with Mom so I wouldn’t have a smaller audience representation than the other kids.
I love Uncle Dylan. In some ways, it was harder to let him down than Mom.
“I’ll pay for the bus ticket,” Uncle Dylan said. “How about that?”
I nod-shrugged. My cousin Max had sold me his old Honda last summer, but it was unreliable at the best of times and even I wasn’t stubborn enough to insist on driving it all the way to Northern alone.
Uncle Dylan ruffled my hair. “Thattagirl.”
I was on the couch after dinner, watching TV with a cup of tea, when I overheard Mom and Nan whispering in the kitchen.
“Leslie, she’s too skinny.”
“She’s tall, Ma.”
“You weren’t skinny like that when you were seventeen.”
“Scott was.”
A horrible silence. Evil spirits invoked. Moments later, the industrious clanging of pots and pans, as if to drive them away. Nan came out to the living room to say good-bye, and we talked for a few minutes, stupid stuff about school and gymnastics and the TV show I was watching. Mom stayed in the kitchen, putting away the rest of the cake.
Upstairs, later, I stepped onto the old pink scale in the bathroom. I was light as a feather but heavier, heavier, heavier than the sea.