I’d forgotten that Ava had met Noe briefly, at my house. “I’m applying there too,” I said stoutly, as if to defend Noe from whatever the Gailer type implied. “Everybody is. The only reason I even came up here was because Mom made me.”
It was weird to see Ava so bright and capable. Uncle Dylan was right. She’d really come into her own at Northern. The darkness that had been suffocating her before had dissipated, like a plant that only seemed to be dying until you shook out its roots and planted it in a deeper hole. Ava didn’t come back to our town much anymore, even for Christmases and Thanksgivings. The avoidance was definitely intentional. Some people fought tooth and nail to keep their old life alive when they went away, but as far as I knew Ava never talked to her high school friends, never came home on college breaks to work her old summer job and go to parties with people she’d known since she was a kid.
I couldn’t tell if it was better to be a person who held on or a person who let go. Maybe it was less about better and worse, and more about which thing you needed to do in order for your plant to grow.
Ava handed me a chipped mug that was shaped like a mushroom. It had some green flecks inside it that must be the tea. Before that, I’d only ever had Lipton tea in bags with a string and a tag. When I sipped the mushroom mug, the green flecks stuck to my teeth.
“I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t gotten out of there,” Ava said. “Probably killed myself.”
“Why?”
“Sit by the railroad tracks one day and think about it,” Ava said.
I had spent plenty of days by the railroad tracks.
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
The grass there is bleached to pale white straw, and crickets jump past your legs like popcorn kernels zinging off a hot pan. When the trains come by they huff and chug and clang your brain to noisy oblivion. Afterward you can follow the tracks to a dusty grove where kids make jumps for their dirt bikes and hobos leave behind nests of broken glass.
“Mom and Nan and Uncle Dylan seem to like it okay,” I said.
“They all left and went back. That’s different. Your mom really wants you to come here,” said Ava. “And you’re Nature Girl. Come on. There’re a million acres of national park fifteen minutes away.”
Are you a Noe? she seemed to be saying, or an Ava? Are you going to hold on to what you already have, or start from scratch?
I gazed into my mug. The green flecks were swirling around in the tea like the snow inside a snow globe.
“I just don’t know yet,” I said, and set it down.
55
I WAS HOPING AVA AND I would go to bed right away so we wouldn’t have to talk anymore, but Ava’s roommates started bubbling in and soon it was impossible to escape.
Ava’s roommates were different from anyone I knew from back home. I couldn’t keep their names straight. Girls in thick glasses and tight sweaters and dresses rescued from the costume department thrift sale, they made tea and sat on the counter and picked at the runs in their stockings.
“What’s your name?” they asked me.
“Annabeth.”
“How old are you? Where do you live? I like your jeans. Aren’t her jeans cute? Where did you get them? Did you drive up here alone? A bunch of us are going out for breakfast tomorrow morning, do you want to go out for breakfast?”
I kept hoping Ava would step in to save me like Noe always did when people were overwhelming me with too much attention, but she left me to answer for myself.
“I took the bus,” I said, “I’m seventeen,” feeling like the contestant in a rapid-fire trivia game.
“Were you on the eight o’clock?” said a girl with dreadlocks.
“Mm-hmm.”
“My friend was on that bus, she said there was this girl who was crying and throwing up the whole way.”
Heat flooded my face. If Noe were here, she’d be distracting Ava’s roommates, telling them about vegetarianism or gymnastics. She’d be making plans for us to go to a physics lecture with one of them and a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals meeting with another. I wouldn’t have to talk at all except to peep my excitement or consent. This was why I couldn’t go to Northern without her, exactly this: surrounded by strangers, my only ally a cousin who apparently refused to protect me.
“What’s wrong?” said the girls. “What’s wrong?”
I was doing my werewolf thing, my capacity for language disappearing, my ability to smile and present a functional social face melting away. Where’s Noe? my inside self was howling. Already, my mind was frantically making plans. I would tell Mom I hated Northern, I would rip up the application I’d been working on, I would go to Gailer College and be the water girl for the gymnastics team and never leave Noe again.
Ava was gazing at me across the kitchen. She raised her eyebrows and tipped her head to the side as if to say, What’s going on in there?
“Nothing,” I squeaked at the girls who had asked me what was wrong. “The bus ride was shitty.”
I looked at the floor. The roots of my plant were crying out in alarm and groping for familiar soil. I ordered myself to stay and talk, but my feet began to move without my consent and suddenly I was on the front steps of Ava’s dorm, huddled up against a brick column. Through the kitchen window, I could hear Ava and her friends.
“Is she okay? She, like, bolted.”
“She’s really shy. It’s pretty much her first time away from home. I’ll go out there in a minute if she doesn’t come back in.”
I took out my phone and called Noe, but she didn’t answer. I remembered that tonight was the tiki party. Noe was probably dancing in a little group with all the other kids from our school, her phone crammed deep in her purse or forgotten on some bathroom counter.
There was a text from Mom I hadn’t noticed before.
if you get this in time, take a picture for me when you go past moose rock!
I stared at the text for a moment, wondering what she was talking about, then remembered that a bunch of people had taken pictures out the bus window when we passed a weirdly shaped boulder a few minutes from town. It was strange to think that Mom had spent a part of her life here, that she knew this place that I was just discovering. I thought about how excited I was when I’d first pulled How to Survive in the Woods out of our basement. Mom had made notes in the margins, blue ink additions to the diagrams of cooking shelters and proper canoe-paddling strokes. In the plant identification section, she’d marked a date and place next to each plant on the day that she first found it. Wild strawberries were marked Maple Bay National Park the summer before I was born.
Next year! she’d written next to a place on the map, a zigzagging network of lakes and rivers.
Next year had never happened. Next year, she was back home.
As I sat on the steps, anger welled up inside me for the lost girl of the survival book, full of exclamation marks and opinions on the proper way to build a fire in the rain. She wanted so much for me to discover myself, and I was afraid to even try.
It was starting to snow. I texted Mom back quickly and stood up to go back inside.
56
WHEN I WENT BACK INTO THE kitchen, the girls were making cookies. The counter was littered with dirty spoons and mixing bowls, and half the contents of the cupboards were piled up on the table.
“Were you hiding?” said the girl with dreadlocks, whose name might have been Beatrice. “We didn’t mean to scare you away.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I was just embarrassed.”
“Awwww,” said Beatrice. “So you were the puking girl. Are you feeling better now? What happened?”