119
“HE’S BETTER OFF WITHOUT HER,” WIN said, shoving an armful of books into her locker. “Steven needs to kiss a few boys before he decides to nest for life with a girl like Noe. Or any girl, really. Or any boy.”
“I know,” I said. “Once he gets away from his parents, he’s going to explode with pent-up brilliance. I wish I was going to be there to see it. I don’t think he’s even going to realize how badly he was hurting until he goes to New York and experiences something different.”
“I think a lot of people are going to realize that once they leave here,” Win said.
120
LATER THAT DAY I OVERHEARD NOE conferring with Ms. Bomtrauer by the water fountains. It turned out she was going to assistant coach the E. O. James gym team next year while she was going to Gailer.
Noe stopped carrying around Foucault’s Pendulum. Now the book under her arm was a catalog of gymnastics equipment. In English she leafed through it with a highlighter, swiping in yellow the item numbers of mats and trampolines and bar equipment. Funding had come through for new leotards: at lunch, the gym birds huddled around a glossy spread of styles to choose from. Did they want a sequined starburst across the breasts, or a sporty flash up each side of the rib cage? I strained my ears to hear Noe’s voice in spite of myself, listening to the authoritative way she wielded her new vocabulary of V-necks and bias cuts and sparkle counts.
As I listened to her holding forth on pricing and sizing, a spooky thing danced on the crown of my skull. I thought of her trading air kisses with Darla at the Java Bean and putting girls through their paces at the crumbling YMCA. Buying hair gel at the Walmart, watching circus videos in her bedroom, arranging the dried flowers on her dresser.
Her voice trailed after me all the way out of the cafeteria, like a song you can’t get out of your head, a scent you’re surprised to find still lingering on your clothes.
You’d be amazed who leaves and who doesn’t, at the end of the day.
121
STEVEN WASN’T IN SCHOOL THE NEXT day, or the next. His spot next to mine in the art morgue was empty. The school had run out of art supplies, so we were down to the cheapest possible art form: that old standby, the collage.
I worked on my collage in silence, cutting pictures out of magazines and dutifully gluing them to the page. My collage looked like everyone else’s. Maybe the assignment would have worked better if we weren’t all cutting things out from the same stack of magazines. Or maybe that was the point: we were all working from the same material, even if we didn’t acknowledge it, even if we could trick ourselves into thinking we were so different from one another by holding the scissors differently or getting creative with the layout of the words and images on the page.
Win and I sat together at lunch. Dominic and Kris sat with us too. Sometimes Margot and Eliza joined us and sometimes they didn’t. Steven had succeeded in that regard: suddenly, we were our own little friend group. It was actually really nice. If I hadn’t been so sad about Steven, it would have been even nicer. I still felt something inside me shrink when I walked past Noe or one of the girls from the gym team, but now at least I had people to be with, and I wasn’t completely alone.
“Have you heard anything from Steven?” Win said.
That surprised me. I always assumed everyone was closer with everyone else than I was, but in this case Win thought I was the closer friend, and as I started to talk about Steven I realized it was true.
I am close with Steven, I thought to myself. It was a strange thought. It was strange to think of myself as being close with someone who wasn’t Noe. I didn’t know it was possible to add people to your repertoire of closeness. I don’t know why I thought that; I just did.
“Yeah,” I said, and I told Win some of what I knew.
It felt strange to be the person who knew things, instead of the person who had to find them out by asking other people. It meant that someone trusted me. Did that mean that Noe had never trusted me?
I slipped the thought into my pocket with all the others that had been collecting there that year.
122
I WENT TO SEE STEVEN AGAIN later that week. He was still lying on his bed. Still wearing his suit. Still wearing his polished shoes. I wondered if he got dressed like that every morning, or if he had never changed.
“I still have your finger,” I said. “It’s in my freezer. If you don’t ask for it soon, I’m going to get it taxidermied.”
When Steven didn’t make any sign of answering in the near future, I took out my music player and slipped an earbud into his ear. I lay down beside him on the bed and slipped the other one into my own.
We listened to The Velvet Underground, then a few chapters of Kingdom of Stones. When I got up to leave, Steven spoke suddenly.
“They all wanted me to cut off a piece of myself.”
I paused in his doorway. “Who?”
“Noe. My parents. The school. And I thought, I’d rather cut off my finger than my soul.” He looked at me with grim amusement. “I guess that’s pretty emo.”
I walked back to his bed and sat down. For some reason, my heart had begun to hammer. Normally, I would take that as a sign that I should make a hasty exit or steer the conversation toward a neutral topic, but then a funny thing happened in my throat. An unblocking.
“Steven?” I said. “If I tell you something really personal, will you tell me something really personal?”
“Annabeth Schultz wants to tell me something personal?” Steven said. “Even I’m not messed up enough to skip an opportunity like that.”
123
I HAD THOUGHT THAT THE FIRST time I told anyone about Scott, I would break down. And maybe I would have four years ago. But it was like I’d grown stronger without noticing it, the way a seed doesn’t look like much until you turn around and see that it’s grown into a tree whose fruit you can actually eat.
“You’re the only person I’ve told,” I said to Steven.
He made a small bow. “I’m honored,” he said.
There was a beautiful quietness to his bedroom, a sleepiness interrupted only by the occasional noise from downstairs. I thought about how grateful I was for that day in art class when Steven had said, In that case, we must introduce ourselves. How awful it would have been to miss out on all this—to miss out on knowing him. It was no small thing to turn to another human and say, I want to know you, with the implied opposite, I want you to know me.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said. “What happened the night you tried to kill yourself? With Dominic?”
There was a long silence. Downstairs, I could hear Darla jingling car keys and opening the garage door. When the car had pulled out and the garage door had rumbled closed again, Steven said, “I know what you’re really asking.”
“You don’t have to tell me. It just seems relevant.”
A bird called outside Steven’s window. He curled his remaining fingers, suddenly agitated.
“The answer is ‘I don’t know.’ It’s too loud inside my head to know. When I think about it, all I hear is alarm bells. Nothing happened with Dominic, but he asked very sweetly if I was maybe-possibly-theoretically open to the idea of something happening, and the alarm bells started ringing so loudly it short-circuited my brain. I still don’t know if the alarm bells mean I wanted something to happen, or if it was just knowing that I would be completely fucked, in terms of my parents, if I even entertained the possibility. And then I fell in love with Noe and it seemed like everything was going to be okay.”