“That’s because I have Noe now. I really think she cured me. My mood journal has been all tens since June seventeenth.”
I sighed. In my head, I was saying good-bye to the Campus Outdoors Club, and the national park, and the long drive with the pit stop at Smoothie Town, and the dorm room with the Gulört rug and the goldfish bowl. The form was in my backpack, with Gailer College penciled into the appropriate field.
“Are you sure you’re not anemic?” said Steven. “I think Noe’s anemic. What if you guys ate grain-fed beef? It’s almost the same as grain.”
I wondered if Steven knew about Noe’s emergency-puking thing. The other day, she’d done it for the first time in a long while. The first time that I knew of, anyway. “Did you eat that soup?” she’d said. “Did you know it had chicken broth? Why do they call it Potato Vegetable if what they really mean is Potatoes in Torture Juice?”
“Where are you going for campus visits?” I asked Steven to change the subject.
“NYU,” he said.
“Aren’t you going to miss Noe?”
“Oh, terribly. It’s going to be great. We’ll pine for each other all week, and have dazzling weekends of ecstatic reunion. I’m going to get us a family membership to the Museum of Modern Art.”
I put my head on the desk and tried not to wail.
At lunch, the tables were littered with plastic orange bracelets that the Gailer College people had left behind, and coupons for free admission to the River Rats game. Whoever had printed them had done the punctuation wrong: RIVER RAT’S. I stuffed a coupon into the bottom of my backpack.
I probably wouldn’t have joined the Campus Outdoor Club anyway.
After all, Noe hated camping.
29
AT HOME, MOM FROWNED AT THE form she had to sign but said nothing. We went to Nan’s house for dinner, watched a Masterpiece show, and played a few rounds of Scrabble. I thought I was off the hook, but on the drive home the words Mom had been suppressing since the afternoon bubbled out of her.
“Are you sure, Annabeth? You should visit Northern. You can stay in Ava’s dorm.”
“What’s wrong with Gailer College?” I said.
Outside the car window, glowy lights of strip malls. We drove past the fortune-teller and the factory outlet mall and the Flying Saucer restaurant where you can get eggs and toast for $2.99. Mom turned the radio down.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with Noe, does it?” Mom said.
The Flying Saucer restaurant was a tinny movie prop in the rearview mirror. It really is shaped like a flying saucer; you can pretend to be an alien looking out at the town while you are eating your breakfast.
“No,” I said. “Noe has nothing to do with it. I don’t get what’s wrong with Gailer College.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Gailer,” said Mom. My cousin Max was going there, so she had to be a little careful with what she said. “I just want to make sure you’re not passing up Northern because of Noe.”
“It’s a good school,” I said stoutly. “I’ll save so much money living at home.”
“You know Nan’s offered to pay for housing.”
“Well, this way she won’t have to.”
We drove in silence for a moment or two.
“I thought Noe was going to apply to Northern,” Mom said for the second time since we’d gotten in the car.
“I already told you. The gym coach pretty much begged her to go to Gailer. He’s going to get her a scholarship and everything.”
“That’s great for her, but what about you?”
I made an irritated sound, like What are you even talking about?
“You let Noe lead the way in so many areas. I see you doing it. And I see you retreating from things you love because she’s not interested in them.”
My head was starting to ache. “I don’t retreat from things,” I said.
“You used to be my happy nature girl, and now you’re talking about going to school in a shopping mall. Frankly, I think you’d hate Gailer College, and I think you know you’d hate it, but you’re too—stuck—on Noe to do what you really want.”
“I’m not stuck,” I said. My voice was getting shrill.
“You don’t seem to have any other friends, you haven’t been out with any boys since Jonathan Wellsey in ninth grade, and—”
“What do you know?” I screeched. “What do you even know?”
That got her attention. “You are seeing a boy?”
“No,” I said, but it was too late. She’d detected something in my tone.
“Annabeth, is there something you’re not telling me? If there is a boy, I want to meet him.”
I stiffened my face. “There isn’t a boy.”
That only made it worse. I could see her mentally working through the possibilities. She says there’s no boyfriend, and yet—
Mom swung her eyes off the road to look at me. “Are you having sex?” she squawked.
“None of your business,” I said, but there was no way to stop the blush that leaped to my cheeks.
“If you are, I want to know.”
“I said, none of your business.”
That last statement, I shouted. She glanced at me a second time before glaring back at the road.
“Something’s really going on with you, isn’t it, Annabeth,” she muttered.
“I didn’t ask you to have me,” I said.
30
IN THE HOUSE, MOM SLAMMED AROUND the kitchen making herself a plate of food, which she carried upstairs to her room. I shook some cereal into a bowl, but when I went to get the milk I realized we were out. I grabbed my wallet.
“I’m going to the corner store,” I shouted up the stairs. “We’re out of milk.”
The latter sentence came out bursting with accusation, as if all that was wrong in my life came down to her failure to feed me. I made sure to slam the door on my way out of the house.
When I left the convenience store with the milk jug under my arm, the blue of twilight had deepened into ink. The street was quiet. The porch lights were on and I could see TVs through the curtains of houses.
I walked past the liquor store and past the big drugstore where a weary attendant in a rust-colored apron was slamming the shopping carts into one another and shoving them into their metal corrals for the night.
I thought of Noe and Steven with hearts sewn into their clothes, and brought my wrist to my mouth and bit it.
I thought of the photograph of my mother holding me up while I leaned over the railing to reach for the mist that rose from the waterfall, anchoring herself to the concrete while I strained toward the rushing water.
A breeze fluttered up my shirt. My feet were sore and sweaty inside my running shoes.
Stop looking at me like that, I said inside my head, although I couldn’t say exactly who I was saying it to.
31
THAT NIGHT I COULDN’T FALL ASLEEP. I kept stewing and stewing, carrying on the argument with Mom inside my head. It wasn’t fair, that happy-nature-girl comment.
All I could think about was the time I was thirteen. I had just discovered the box full of Mom’s old wilderness books in our basement and read How to Survive in the Woods cover to cover, and now I was ready for adventure. I imagined myself tromping through the forest, victorious, stoic, hardy, capable. I imagined myself walking from my back door all the way to the North Pole.
It was a day or two after eighth-grade graduation, and the summer hadn’t yet turned bad. I’d dragged Mom’s old tent out of the basement, and the curious, musty sleeping bag and camping mat. In my room, I packed a sweater, a hat, extra socks, and the rechargeable flashlight Mom made me keep plugged into the wall in case of a power outage.