“Scott was.”
A horrible silence. Evil spirits invoked. Moments later, the industrious clanging of pots and pans, as if to drive them away. Nan came out to the living room to say good-bye, and we talked for a few minutes, stupid stuff about school and gymnastics and the TV show I was watching. Mom stayed in the kitchen, putting away the rest of the cake.
Upstairs, later, I stepped onto the old pink scale in the bathroom. I was light as a feather but heavier, heavier, heavier than the sea.
34
I WOKE UP IN THE HOLE.
This happened sometimes.
The trapdoor swung open and there was nothing I could do.
Someone had sprayed fake snow on the windows at the Burger King. The funeral parlor had a wreath of bloodred holly on its door. The cafeteria at school was still hung with fake cobwebs. Due to budget cuts it was doubling as snow.
In Business Math I was a zombie.
In Art I stared at Steven’s pencil as it wound its way around the page.
In gymnastics I couldn’t stand the harsh fluorescent lights or the chirping voices of the girls who gossiped as they did their stretches and ran through their moves on the beam. Ms. Bomtrauer was on my case about my floor routine. I found myself clamping my teeth in irritation at every reminder to point my toes or lift my chin up when I finished a round-off.
“What are you doing?” Noe said, surprising me by the bench where our backpacks were piled.
“I’m taking a break,” I said.
“Bullshit,” said Noe. “Back to the mat.”
Her “team captain” mode was not without irony, but the briskness still grated. I wasn’t used to Noe treating me like another distractable girl who needed managing, instead of the best friend that I was. I followed her across the gym. On the floor, I went through my moves halfheartedly. Since overhearing Mom and Nan in the kitchen, I’d felt haunted and shaken. That morning at breakfast, Mom had pushed a bottle of vitamin pills at me.
“Nan wants you to take these,” she’d said.
The vitamin pill had stuck in my throat. It took three glasses of water to push it all the way down. All morning it seemed to dig inside me like a seed, thrusting little roots all through my stomach, sucking up my energy. By lunchtime, it felt like a vine had grown inside me, and an enormous black fruit, cold and bulbous, feeding off me to make itself grow.
As I planted my hands and thrust my legs into the air, I felt a spot of pain where the vitamin pill was still digging. Noe watched me, hands on perfectly rounded hips.
“Shoulders back,” Noe said. “Put some effort into it. And take that sweater off.”
“I’m cold.”
Did I look like him? The thought appalled me. A sweater wasn’t enough to hide under. A cave would be the best.
“You’re not going to be able to wear a sweater at our gym meets,” said Noe, “so you’d better get used to it.”
“They should insulate these things,” I grumbled.
After practice, I helped Noe push the beam and vault against the back wall and pile the mats into a neat stack. She chattered the whole time, analyzing this girl’s beam routine and that girl’s troubles with handstands.
“Alicia Morrow was driving me crazy. The girl couldn’t be any clumsier on vault if she was a pack mule.”
I half listened, making appropriate noises of shock, disapproval, and sympathy.
“Are you okay?” Noe said. “You’re so spacey today.”
“I’m just tired,” I said.
I wondered what it would be like to be a person who felt strong and even every day, who didn’t fall into these craters where everything was too bright.
Noe lifted the last mat onto the pile with a grunt. “You need to get that round-off nailed in time for the meet,” she said.
As we walked out of the gym, Noe continued her gym babble. Ms. Bomtrauer had ordered a new vault to replace the one that got damaged in the flood. Kaylee Ito couldn’t tell the difference between a split leap and a stag, despite constant coaching. Suddenly, everything about Noe seemed irritating to me. The way she cut her food into tiny pieces that were never allowed to touch. The way she bought new binders every year instead of reusing the old ones. The way she sucked up to teachers and coaches and choir directors, fawning over them and insisting that everyone around her do the same. The way she clucked over the gymnastics girls like a mother hen, braiding hair and correcting posture and secretly criticizing everyone behind their backs. The way she waited for Steven after class, claiming him like a child she was picking up from nursery school. The way she showered you with attention when it was convenient for her, only to withdraw it when you needed it the most.
Part of being in the hole was that things I normally didn’t mind became unbearable to me.
“Can we not talk about gymnastics?” I burst out.
“If you didn’t want to work, you shouldn’t have joined the team,” clucked Noe. “It’s not a social club.”
She was so serious since the Gym Expo, all discipline and commitment and sports nutrition and electrolytes. She’d started carrying around this textbook called The Science of Gymnastics that Sphinx had apparently recommended, and talking about majoring in kinesiology.
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s not about that.”
“Then what is it about?”
I had promised myself I would not bring it up, but the angst that was swarming inside me needed an outlet.
“I thought we were going to Northern together,” I exploded. “I thought we were going to be roommates.”
It was humiliating to say it out loud, like admitting to having some creepy disease. I could see my utter dependence on her showing through like a badly concealed case of acne. For the second time within the hour, I wished I could do the world a favor and crawl into a cave. That way everyone would be rid of me—Noe, my mom, maybe even myself.
“Tell me more,” said Noe in a reasonable voice.
I recognized this tactic from the last time I’d aired this kind of grievance. Noe’s strategy when it came to arguments was to let you rant and babble until you felt so shrill and hysterical you willingly retracted whatever charges you had brought against her. Still, I fell for it every time.
“We’ve been planning it forever. We even named our freaking goldfish. And then you come back from the gym thing and announce you’re going to Gailer, and you don’t even ask how I feel.”
We came to the bench in front of the flagpole but didn’t sit down. The wretchedness of last night was surging through me. Industrious clanging of pots and pans. I opened my mouth again. “I know you’re going to say that plans change and you never promised anything, but it’s more than that. Sometimes I feel like our friendship is this leaky boat, but nobody’s allowed to admit the boat is leaking. We just sit there with our feet getting wet, but I can’t say, Hey, my feet are wet, because you’ll throw me overboard.”
“Nobody’s throwing you overboard,” said Noe calmly. “You’re having a bad day.”
“I thought we were going to be roommates,” I said, my voice taking on a panicked edge as it hit me that I was going to have to room with a total stranger.
Noe put her hands on my shoulders. “Plans change, my dear. I didn’t know what I wanted back then.”
“You can do gymnastics at Northern, too,” I said.
“It’s not just gymnastics. I don’t want to go to a tiny school in the middle of nowhere. I don’t care about the hiking trails and the canoe club, or whatever. I want to be somewhere with shoe stores. We’re not married, Annabeth. You’re being insane.” Steven appeared fresh from the theater. “Ladies,” he said.
“Steveous!” Noe exclaimed and ran to embrace him, her laughter a pointed cue that the conversation was over.
I waited by the flagpole while they went through their several-times-daily ritual of kisses and whispers, a process that had grown considerably more elaborate since their declarations on Halloween night. Angry thoughts were still running through my head. I wondered what Steven would think if he knew what Noe had said about his best friend, Dominic, after they’d run into him at the Pita Pit: “Oh my God, Annabeth, it was horrible. He was, like, this creepy little mole person. He came and stood right by our table and said, ‘So, Noe, what are your intentions with Steven?’ in this annoying theater voice, and then Steven got all mad when I didn’t make room for him to sit with us.”