“How’s school?” Ava said. “Did you finish your college applications?”
I watched a stray cat dart across the road. Another bus rasped into the station, its tires coated in grit. Slowly, I arranged my brain into normal conversation mode.
“I had to write an essay about my campus visit,” I said. “A blog post, actually. For the E. O. James blog. Did you know E. O. James had a blog?”
“How twenty-first century,” Ava said.
“We had to talk about either the dorms, the campus, the food, or one other thing I can’t remember. The bathrooms maybe? Or the library?”
“Proximity to bars that don’t card?”
“Maybe that was it.”
“I never got to take you to the Sun Dog,” Ava said. “If you end up coming here, I call dibs on your initiation. They have a jukebox that plays a hundred percent Neil Young.”
“My mom would love that.”
“She’s probably been there. You should ask. I bet she and Pauline used to go there all the time.”
The mention of Mom and Pauline made me think about how Noe wasn’t applying to Northern like we’d planned. I let out a whimper in spite of myself.
“What’s wrong?” said Ava.
“I just can’t believe Noe’s not coming with me.”
“You’ll make tons of friends.”
“I know. But you don’t understand. I already have all these amazing memories of me and Noe going to college together, and now they’re not even going to happen.”
“Maybe you needed to imagine those things more than you needed to actually do them,” said Ava. “The same way that kids make elaborate plans about running away to desert islands.”
I didn’t like the implication that Noe’s and my plans for our college dorm room and Paris and the restaurant with the tiny spoons were anything like a desert island fantasy. Was I the only person in the world who was actually serious about the plans that everyone else blew around for fun?
The poise I had drummed up for the phone call was slipping away fast. My mouth tasted like gravel. My mind was turning back to Scott’s house, to everything that was wrong with my life.
“I have to go, Ava,” I said. “My phone’s almost out of battery.”
“Don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t.”
I put my phone back in my pocket and walked out the wrought-iron cemetery gate. My boots sounded harsh against the messy crust of ice that covered the sidewalk. After talking to Ava, I felt like even more of a hypocrite.
A broken window. What was a stupid window? If I was brave, I thought, I would have said something. Why hadn’t I said something? When it came down to it, I was no better than the girls at the ice-cream shop where I worked in the summer, simpering and cooing at whatever asshole with four dollars happened to walk into the store. Being nice and polite just because I’d been raised that way, nodding and saying Yeah to a freaking rapist because there was no entry in the ice-cream girl playbook for Fuck you, burn in hell, the ax in the forehead, the sword in the heart.
There was something out there, something larger than me. A suffocating thing, like ropes that only got tighter the more you wriggled against them.
I should have thrown it at his head, I thought, and something inside me howled and howled and howled until I thought I would hear it howling my whole life.
79
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, I floated along on a tide of numbness. I went to the New Year’s Eve concert with Noe and Steven and everyone else from our school and froze in the snow while a B-list band made love to their microphones. I went to the mall with Nan and froze in the dressing room while she handed post-Christmas sale sweaters over the door. I shoveled the driveway with Mom, the whole world reduced to the sound of scraping metal and thudding boots, and afterward froze in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil for tea.
Finally, it was time to go back to school.
“One more semester,” said Mom. “And then graduation!”
She squeezed my shoulders. Walking down the driveway, I slipped on a patch of ice and almost fell.
80
IT FELT LIKE THE WHOLE WORLD had gone crazy over Christmas break. There was something in the air, I guess, or maybe the frozen waterfall had messed with people’s brains. Noe and Steven had run into Steven’s theater friends at the New Year’s Eve concert after I’d gone home, and afterward they’d had their first big argument. “Do you know what Dominic calls me?” Noe had told me on the phone. “The bitch-monster from hell. He told me I was ruining Steven’s life. And I’m like, ‘You think I’m ruining his life? Who got him so drunk he tried to kill himself?’”
I hadn’t realized that Noe had all but forbidden Steven to hang out with his old friends. I tried to sympathize with her like I always did when she was indignant about something, but the truth was I liked Steven’s theater posse, and could understand why they’d be up in arms over the loss of him.
The first week back at school, two kids got expelled for drug dealing, another one got suspended for vandalism, and they had to stop the annual drunk-driving presentation twenty minutes in because the kids in the back row had smuggled in a bottle of vodka and were hollering so loudly you couldn’t hear the speaker. We had a big meet coming up in gymnastics, and Ms. Bomtrauer gave us a speech about proper form, and that very same practice Vanessa Guittard fell off the uneven bars and broke her wrist.
Noe’s New Year’s resolution was to master something called a double aerial, which Sphinx had started to teach her at Gailer. The first time she didn’t show up outside the Art room before lunch, Steven and I waited in the hall for fifteen minutes and then spent another fifteen searching the whole school for her. We found her in the gym, practicing on the beam, her backpack slumped against the wall.
“I’ll meet you guys in the cafeteria,” she panted, waving us back out like little mice.
Steven built her this whole beautiful tray with a sandwich and salad and an apple he somehow cut into heart-shaped slices, but when she finally showed up it was one minute before the bell, and all she did was chug the water, coo over the apple hearts, wipe the sweat off her forehead, and ask if anyone had gum.
Now that Noe wasn’t coming to lunch consistently, Steven and I started hanging out in the bathrooms more. Our favorite one was the old-fashioned ladies’ room near the computer labs. It had nice acoustics, and Steven liked to sing in there. Other times we’d go to the theater wing to hang out with Steven’s friends and play card games. At first I couldn’t make sense of the rules, but Steven’s friends were patient, and pretty soon I started to get the hang of it.
One day, there were printed notices taped to all the bathroom doors informing students that anyone caught using the opposite sex’s facilities would be subject to disciplinary action. Steven was called into the office. He came back enraged.
“This school is stuck in the Dark Ages,” he said. “I try to end bathroom apartheid, and he treats me like a sex offender. ‘You think you’re pretty cute, McNeil. There’s nothing cute about being a pervert.’”
He was quivering with the injustice and humiliation. His hands curled and uncurled on the table. I imagined Mr. Beek towering over him, spit spritzing out of his mouth as he lectured Steven about respect and behavior.
“The world isn’t ready for pee parity,” I said. “All the great revolutionaries were once considered perverts. It’s kind of a rite of passage.”