Our next rest stop had a mini grocery. I circled around the aisles, picking things up, inspecting them, and mentally disqualifying them. Everything was too expensive: two dollars for a flimsy little Oats ’n Honey bar that wouldn’t fill me up, a dollar twenty-five for a waxy, red, poisonous-looking apple, three dollars for something called a Yogurt Parfait, which was a plastic cup with white stuff at the bottom, then purplish jelly, then some oaty stuff that was supposed to be granola but surely couldn’t be. I could hear Noe’s voice inside my head, reading the ingredients lists out loud. Gelatin, delicious. Chocolate milk? You might as well drink a cup of corn syrup.
I circled for ten minutes, deliberating, half swooning under the too-bright fluorescent lights. All around me, people were grabbing things off the racks and buying them, filling paper cups with soft drinks from the machines against one wall, retrieving sunburned-looking hot dogs from the heated glass display case on the counter. I had that terrible feeling like in musical chairs, when the music stops and everyone else has gone for their chair and you run around the circle in a panic and you just can’t find one.
Finally I spied some discount cinnamon rolls, on special two for ninety-nine cents.
Two cinnamon rolls for ninety-nine cents. It sounded pretty Special to me. It wouldn’t pass the Noe test, but I was getting desperate. I took them back to the bus and ate them one after the other, unpeeling the sticky spirals until I got to the nutty place at the middle. When I was finished my hands were covered in sugar goo. I crumpled up the plastic wrap they had come in and tucked it into the seat pocket in front of me. The bus rumbled and bounced over the highway. A few minutes later I was not feeling good.
“Excuse me,” I said to the woman sitting next to me. “I have to get out.”
She grunted and moved her legs grudgingly. I clambered over them and staggered down the aisle to the very back of the bus, where there was a tiny bathroom. Before the flimsy door shut behind me, two very Special cinnamon buns had curdled into poison inside me.
I am a skinny person. There is not room in my stomach for so much burning slop. But still it came surging up my throat, retch retch retch, until I was dizzy, seeing spots, and had to grab at the grubby stall walls for balance.
I rinsed my mouth at the dirty sink. I was pretty sure the whole bus had heard me heaving. Back in my row, the woman who was sitting next to me had changed seats—so much the better.
I sat down carefully and took a sip of water from the bottle Mom had made me bring. I felt so nauseous from the shuddering and the cinnamon buns and from the thought, urgent and terrifying, that things at the clinic would not work out (the river would rise! the horse would stumble! a log would fall across the road!) and I would be stuck with a drooling, screaming Oliver-baby I did not want and could not love. I stuck my earbuds into my ears and played The Velvet Underground, but I kept thinking about everything that could go wrong.
I must have looked like I was crying or something. An old woman bundled up in a bright pink snowsuit moved herself across the aisle to sit beside me.
“Where are you headed, honey?”
I grappled with the earbuds, collected myself, and smiled at her. “Maple Bay.”
“Is that home?”
I shook my head. “I’m supposed to go on a tour of Northern University.”
“You look too young to be going to university.”
“I’m seventeen.”
“Where’s home for you?”
I named my town.
“Oh, I love it there. The Botanical Gardens.”
The old lady had violet eye shadow and violet nail polish to match. I imagined her house. It would have an upright piano and a basket full of magazines and a mischievous poodle that barked at the mailman.
“You’ve been to the Gardens?” I said. “I work at the ice-cream shop in the summer.”
“You do?” she said. “How lovely.”
The bus rolled over a pothole. I felt my throat rise, and made a grab for the paper barf bag in the seat pocket. The old lady patted my shoulder sympathetically.
“Was that you throwing up in the bathroom?” she said.
I cringed. “Sorry,” I said. “I know it’s gross.”
“Would you like a ginger pill? I get sick on buses too.”
She dug a small bottle out of her purse and held it out to me. I shook my head. “It won’t help.”
“It’s good for all kinds of motion sickness.”
“It’s not that kind of sickness,” I said. “It’ll be over soon.”
I don’t know why I said it like that, so obvious. I guess I was hoping the old lady would turn out to be a magic spirit friend who would give me wise advice and send me off with a talisman, an eagle feather or a mantra to repeat in my darkest hour. Everyone deserves a second chance, honey cakes. Be strong.
Rumble rumble rumble, went the bus. The old lady dug in her purse again and pulled out a religious tract. In a high, quavering voice she began to read out loud.
“Lord, drive out the forces of Satan—”
I popped up from my seat, grabbed my backpack, and fled to the back of the bus.
“Was that old lady reading Scripture at you?” said the heavily mascaraed twentysomething girl I wedged myself next to. She was wearing a ripped black T-shirt and had a backpack shaped like a teddy bear.
I nodded.
She popped her gum. “Crazy bitch.”
52
THERE WERE TREES OUTSIDE THE WINDOW now. I wondered when that had happened. They were standing thick and dense on either side of the road. The bus began to climb a hill, and suddenly the trees dropped away to reveal a view of low mountains with forests stretching as far as I could see. My breath stopped, and I craned my neck to see better, as if I could get closer to that view, climb into it and have it belong to me.
So this is what Mom was talking about, I thought. This is what she wanted me to feel. A tug of belonging. A sense of the infinite.
I put my head against the window and sobbed.
53
WHEN THE BUS GOT INTO MAPLE Bay, Ava was waiting for me at the station. She was wearing a green velvet coat and an orange knitted cap. Her hair was dyed blue and her eyes were their regular color. When I walked up to her with my bag, she pulled me into a hug whose ferocity surprised me.
“Your mom is going to kill me,” she said.
54
AVA’S DORM WAS ACTUALLY AN OLD brick house on the west side of campus. It had six bedrooms, a kitchen, and a wood-paneled study room like the library in Clue. The kitchen had a bookshelf built into the wall. I looked at the books while Ava made tea. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Waiting for Godot, 50 Short Plays, The Actor Prepares. I watched the self-assured way Ava moved around the kitchen, pawing through the cupboard for clean mugs and retrieving a crusty jar of honey from some hiding place under the counter.
“Besides certain dickheads in Alaska,” said Ava, “how’s life?”
“Fine,” I said. “Mom’s good. Nan’s good. I’m on the gymnastics team.”
Even though Ava had reformed, I still felt shy around her. The fact that she was a Good Witch now instead of a Bad Witch hardly mattered; any way you sliced it, change was still uncomfortable.
“Where’s your friend?” said Ava. “When I saw you in the summer, your mom said you guys were planning to drive up here together.”
“She’s touring Gailer College.”
Ava made an I knew it face. “She seemed like the Gailer type.”