I wanted Noe back, I thought with a pang. Noe of the spinning hug in the driveway, Noe of Camp Qualla Hoo Hoo. Noe before she became Little Miss Daughter-in-Law, before Sphinx Lacoeur. I missed that Noe. I missed myself. I missed us.
I thought about the night I came back from Northern, running out to meet her in the street. Were we even still ourselves back then, or had we already changed into these other people? Did we really mean it, or were we playing out our old rituals one last time, as a kindness, or a half-life, the way that light from a dying star continues to reach the earth for years after the star has burned out?
That afternoon, I went to the forest after school and trudged around the trails in the snow.
“You’re pink,” Mom said when I came home. “It’s nice to see you outdoors.”
I sank onto the couch and buried my head under a blanket.
Whatever was happening, I wouldn’t call it nice.
83
THE SUNDAY BEFORE THE GYM MEET, I went to the YMCA and endured four and a half hours of Noe-directed torture. Halfway through, Ava called to see how I was doing. I went outside to talk with her, happy for an excuse to leave the mirrored dance room where Gym Bird Number Twelve was running through her floor routine for the fourth time while Noe made adjustments to her shoulders and hips and told her to aim for greater fluidity in all aspects of movement.
We talked for a while about Ava’s friends and the theater festival she was helping put on.
“How are things with your mom?” Ava said.
“Pretty good.”
“Pretty good?”
I looked at the sidewalk. Ever since Scott’s house, I’d hardly been able to eat. It felt like the rock hadn’t gone through his window, but was lodged in my stomach instead. I thought of Ava’s room the day that she’d told me, the sadness that lived there.
“Ava?” I said. “I went to his house.”
“Whose house?”
“Scott’s. I broke his window.” Something was clawing at my throat. In my stomach, the rock was burrowing itself as deep as it would go. “I saw him,” I said. “He waved hello and said what a beautiful night it was.”
“That’s fucked up,” Ava said.
“Yup.”
From the sidewalk, I could hear the music Noe was playing for Hannah Garrity’s floor routine one story above, muted against the window glass.
“Should I tell my mom?” I said. “About the window?”
“I don’t know,” Ava said. She sounded genuinely uncertain. “God, Annabeth. I don’t know.”
When I went back into the gym, Noe pounced on me. “There you are! Onto the mat, it’s your turn. And take that sweater off.”
She peeled it off me and tossed it onto the pile of sweaters and coats in the corner.
I shivered through the rest of practice. Someone had brought a box of clementines wrapped up in blue paper. I spent the last half hour sitting against the wall with a clementine cradled in my hands, its bright orange skin like a promise of warmth I could hold close to myself but never feel.
84
ON THE DRIVE HOME FROM THE YMCA, I told Noe I was thinking of going to see Bob again.
Noe pulled back, aghast. “Why?”
For some reason, I blushed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I do find it hard to eat sometimes. A lot of the time. When I’m feeling bad.”
Noe dismissed this with a flick of her hand. “That’s different. They can’t make you go. Not unless your mom signed a form or something. It’s illegal.”
She kissed me on the cheek, a kiss that smelled vaguely sour. For some reason I thought about what Margot Dilforth had said. Maybe Noe was taking the fluidity thing even further than I realized. I shook the traitorous thought from my mind. Noe and I had been more or less back to normal since the basic human instinct conversation. At least, we made our normal jokes and had our normal interactions, although I could sense that something beneath the surface had changed.
Some friendships ended all at once and some were like Athenian ships, each part slowly replaced over the years until one day, even if you had never left the deck, you couldn’t recognize it anymore. Lately when I talked to Noe I felt like one of the old people who came to the ice-cream shop year after year, even though the soul of the place had long ago drained out of it: they knew it wasn’t the same anymore, but they simply didn’t know where else to go.
“Get a good sleep,” Noe said when we pulled up at my house. “Don’t forget to shave your legs tomorrow morning or you’ll look like a monkey. Bus leaves at seven sharp. No coffee unless you want your sweat to smell like the Java Bean.” She winked at me. “Bye, doll.”
85
GYM MEET, THE NEXT MORNING: FIRST the idling school bus, then the half-hour ride that smelled of hair spray, everyone brushing and braiding and squirting gel into their hair and hunting in their gym bags for spare elastics. Music playing on cell phones. Noe striding up and down the central aisle with a clipboard, authoritative in her black-and-purple tracksuit, attending to a thousand details whose significance escaped me. I knew she was the team captain, but still it was strange to see her like that, a Noe with no special allegiance to me, who did not sit next to me at the seat I’d saved for us by the window, who did not even alight there, but breezed past in a whiff of Wintermint to confer with Ms. Bomtrauer about that morning’s twentieth emergency.
I watched the town flash past outside the muddy bus window. Strip mall, gas station, then the highway. I wondered what would happen if someone opened the door of the bus and let us all fly away. Girls in spangled leotards hopping through the windows, pecking uselessly at the snow. Making eyes at themselves in toy mirrors while the winter wind froze first their spindly legs, then their blue feathers, then finally their tiny, twinkly hearts.
86
THE GYMNASIUM WHERE THE MEET WAS taking place was huge and busy, with multiple events going on at once. I had expected something more formal, with an audience and clapping, but in the junior levels it was more like waiting to take a driver’s test: lots of standing in line and then a nervous two minutes on the equipment while the world continued to hum and churn around you. The real action was at the advanced events, where girls like Noe sailed through gravity-defying combinations of jumps and twists.
After my beam event (tippy two minutes scuttling up and down the plank) and my bars event (actually-kind-of-enjoyable two minutes bouncing and swinging eight feet above the ground) and my vault event (annoying: vault cleared, but only just), I went to the bathroom. The lights in there were buzzing quietly. The bathroom fixtures were even older than the ones at E. O. James, clammy faucets and an avocado-green paper towel dispenser right out of the seventies.
There was a girl retching in one of the toilet stalls. My first thought was that she was pregnant. I took an extralong time washing my hands, waiting for her to come out. Who knew? Maybe I could be her magic spirit friend. I still had that piece of birthday cake in my backpack. It was hard as a brick and dry as tinder. In a pinch, you could use it to light a campfire.
Hey, I would say. If you need someone to talk to, I happen to have some experience in this domain.
I dried my hands and waited quietly for another minute. Finally, the stall door swung open and Noe stepped out.