I planned all my routes to avoid intersecting with Noe, but I came across her by accident, in a basement hallway, surrounded by a feathery knot of gym birds. There was nowhere to hide. Nobody to hide behind. I stood tall and walked past them at a slow, normal, nothing-is-wrong pace while everything in me longed to run.
Noe was crying. The gym birds were comforting her.
Nobody looked at me while I walked past.
97
SCHOOL WAS LONELY. WORDLESSLY, WITH NO further discussion or negotiation, Noe and I ceased to be, the way a dry leaf detaches itself from the branch and spirals silently toward the ground. The soccer fields outside the school building were messy expanses of trampled ice. The classrooms smelled like wet coats. In Art, Steven and I whittled totem poles out of our pencils. We named the ancient paper cutter on the counter of the art morgue Ernestine.
“Ernestine looks lonely today,” Steven would say, and we would take turns getting up to pet her.
“Ernestine is hungry,” I’d say, and we’d find excuses to chop some paper up with her heavy old blade.
In the hallways, posters for the Valentine’s Day ball. The Senior Leaders set up tables outside the cafeteria selling tickets. You couldn’t walk in for lunch without them shaking their bags of Hershey’s Kisses at you.
“Bought your tickets for the ball?” they’d shout like hawkers outside a football stadium (or “Hey! You like balls?” if they were guys). They made you feel like crap if you walked past without stopping, like you were the one being rude. They did it to everyone, even the nervous freshmen, especially the nervous freshmen. Like all the other nervous people, I scuttled past with my eyes averted, muttering, “No thanks.”
“Why not?” they’d call after me, as if to prolong the humiliation by extracting a detailed explanation.
I pushed my earbuds deeper into my ears and kept walking.
At the lockers across the hall from mine, Noe and Dulcie Simmonds made plans: dress shopping, hair and makeup, restaurant selection, what Steven and Mark would wear. They had an entire shared notebook full of Valentine’s Ball to-do lists and clippings from hairstyle magazines. Steven’s mom was taking them to her manicurist, then for something called a radiant light treatment at the Twin Oaks Spa.
“What about my radiant light treatment?” said Steven.
“You will be getting a car wash,” Noe said.
“Annabeth,” called Steven. “Are you in on this?”
He had been trying to get Noe and me to make up for the past two weeks. It was a complicated dance, and I could tell it was wearing him out. I’d seen them arguing again, and I’d hurried past with my head hunched, wishing he would just do as I’d pleaded and enjoy the rest of the year without worrying about me. I’d been doing my best to keep my distance outside Art so as to not mess things up for him, but he wasn’t making it easy.
Noe ignored Steven and kept chatting with Dulcie. I shook my head. He gazed at me forlornly. “You two,” he said, to no one in particular.
98
I HAD TOLD MYSELF I WOULDN’T miss Noe, that I would simply ignore her for the rest of the year. But there was a part of my brain where Noe lived, like a program I couldn’t figure out how to delete from my phone. Now that we weren’t speaking anymore, it played all the time. When I took a bite of my sandwich, I could hear Noe saying, Somebody’s hungry today. When Ava called to see how I was doing, Noe said, How are you even talking to that freak? When I caught myself feeling happy at odd moments, Noe said, Aren’t you even a little ashamed?
She lived inside me as a critical voice, telling me what a failure I was and how undeserving of love. Every time I passed her in the hall, or glanced at her accidentally in English, something inside me sent up a guilty flare. I wrapped my sandwich in a napkin. I deleted the email I was mentally composing to Loren Wilder. I pulled the sleeves of my sweater over my hands.
When I saw her, a sick shiver happened in the quease of my stomach. She had become frightening to me. I was hyperaware of her, the way you can’t stop thinking about a spider in your room. Even when I wasn’t looking directly at her, I could sense her, two rows behind me in the auditorium, twenty feet ahead of me in the hall. My ears pricked to every syllable of her voice laughing with other girls. I detected her every footfall, every toss of her oily black hair.
She cornered me in the hall one day.
“I just want you to know that it wasn’t me who wrote that thing on your bag,” she said. “It was Kaylee.”
Noe’s hair smelled like pomegranate. Her hands were calloused from the vault. It had been weeks since we’d stood this close to one another, or spoken face-to-face. I’d been building up this whole demonic story about her—Noe was controlling, Noe was cruel, Noe had never been my friend, and she didn’t really love Steven either—but standing near her, smelling her smell, I couldn’t see her as a demon anymore, even though I wanted to. What I did see: a girl who was just as scared as I was, and hurting just as much.
Noe, I wanted to say. I see you. I can see you again. Can you see me?
But I didn’t say anything. I was too stunned.
We stood in the hall, people flowing past us like water. It seemed like the kind of moment in which we might have forgiven each other, in which two people with a history of friendship might reasonably be expected to forgive each other. I could see the moment of forgiveness blowing past us like a flowered dress tumbling in the wind on the side of the highway. Either of us could have said, Pull over and grab it! But neither of us did.
Noe turned. I adjusted my backpack with shaky hands and walked away.
99
AFTER THAT I STARTED SPENDING LUNCH in the sound booth. The auditorium was always empty these days; even Steven didn’t think to look for me there. I read How to Survive and played with the lights, blending greens and blues and purples on the empty stage.
Other times I just sat in the dark and didn’t move until it was time to go home.
100
IN ART, MR. LIM GAVE ME back my jar of stones with a yellow sticky note with a big letter R for Redo. I wished he would just give me a zero, since the assignment was now almost five months late.
The jar of stones sat on my desk all through class. People looked at it, and looked at me, and my neck prickled with self-consciousness. Midway through class, Steven slipped a note across the table.
Dear A, the note said.
Morgue Master Lim is clearly a dilettante. The substitution of stones for fruit speaks volumes. Instead of something sweet and ripe, something cold and hard. The stones/secrets are sealed inside her; the smooth glass surface of the jar belies the disordered rubble within, barely keeping it at bay.
The juxtaposition of the two pieces, furthermore, is striking. The first, dry twigs, are fruitless and bare. The second piece is full to the brim, but still manages to speak of hunger. She is trying to nourish herself with food only fit for a ghost. I would be worried about her, too.
Regards,
Steven McNeil
I slipped out of class as soon as the bell rang, in what had become my daily escape routine. Steven didn’t come after me, but the note burned in my pocket for the rest of the day.
On the radio, blizzard warnings.
At home, bags of driveway salt.
The local paper showed a picture of Noe in the sports section, leaping over a vault to nowhere. LOCAL GYMNAST SOARS TO NEW HEIGHTS.