I froze, hot water blasting over my hands. “We are friends,” I said. “We talk all the time.”
“I talk all the time,” said Steven. “You demur.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m a private person.”
“A picket fence is private. You’re the freaking Berlin Wall.”
I blushed hard. I remembered the way Noe’s gym friends had badgered me at the restaurant, the night of the homecoming dance: Why are you so quiet? Why don’t you ever talk? I hadn’t managed to make a connection with them, and apparently I’d been kidding myself about making a connection with Steven.
“Don’t you think I’d talk if I could?” I said.
“Why can’t you?”
The bathroom tiles were flecked with shiny bits of copper. I’d never noticed that before. My hands were red and throbbing from being under the hot water for too long. I was thinking about Scott’s face in the camping trip photograph. Maybe I’d never be normal. Maybe I’d never have a real friend. Steven was right. Friendship was more than laughing at someone’s jokes. It was more like skinny-dipping: if you cheated and kept a piece of clothing on, you’d never experience the wonder of the water against your bare skin, or be a full participant in the trust that binds naked swimmers to one another.
“I’m not like you and Noe,” I said. “Sometimes I feel like everyone else has this thing that I’m missing.”
On thing, my hand moved to the place on my rib cage where my heart used to live. I drew it away quickly.
“Do you really believe that?” said Steven.
“If someone amputated your leg, would you believe that you still had it?” I said.
The bathroom door creaked open, and Kaylee and Rhiannon walked in with a few other girls. I busied myself with the paper towel dispenser.
“Hey, Kaylee, hey, Rhiannon,” I said.
“Hey, Anna—gross, what’s he doing in here?”
I glanced at Steven. “Pee Sisters Convention,” I sighed. “We were just leaving.”
On the way down the hall, Steven gave me a high five. “That was great,” he said.
“What was great?”
“We had a fight. You said things.”
He seemed to consider this a victory, but my shoulders slumped.
“I still haven’t told you about Northern,” I burst out. “And I’ve never made it . . . okay . . . for you to be anything other than a funny person in Art. You could be going through hell right now and I wouldn’t even know, because I’ve made it so clear that funny person in Art is the only part you’re allowed to play.”
We paused outside the cafeteria. The bulletin boards were cluttered with announcements for the winter talent show and the holiday concert and sign-ups for the annual ski trip.
“I suck,” I said. “It’s like I’m not even human. You’ve been trying so hard to be friends with me, and I haven’t been a friend to you.”
Steven could tell he’d triggered something bigger than he’d intended. He reached out and gently touched my sleeve. “The thing that’s actually wrong with you is probably tiny to nonexistent compared to the things you’ve made yourself believe are wrong with you. At least, that’s what Ricardo says.”
“What if the thing is big?” I said. “And it’s not in your imagination?”
The bell began to ring for fourth period. We turned from the cafeteria without going in and walked back down the hall. For once, the space between us was heavy and quiet instead of being filled with witty banter.
It felt strange, the heaviness and quiet. It scared me.
Some kinds of scary are better than others, I guess. When I sank into my desk for Media Studies, I felt like a swimmer come in from the sea.
74
DECEMBER WAS COLD AND WHITE AND blinding. The trees bent and creaked under the weight of the snow. I tried to get excited about exams and Secret Santas and all that stuff, but it was hard.
In Art, Mr. Lim called me up to his desk. “Ms. Schultz, you have a redo outstanding on your self-portrait.” At lunch, I filled a jar with rocks and left it in his office with a title card that said, RAW MATERIALS II: Portrait of the Artist as a Jar Full of Stones. It would make a nice diptych, I thought.
I got an email from Loren Wilder, my tour guide from Northern. Thought you might be interested in this poem by Wilda McClure. He signed the message with a smiley and his initials. I wondered how he had gotten my email address, then remembered it was on the form Mom had filled out to book the tour.
The poem was about wolves in a castle of wind. I tried to read it, but zoned out after a line or two.
I guess I wasn’t in the mood for poetry just then.
Noe was always busy studying with friends from her classes. In Art, Steven showed me the Christmas present he was making for her: a leotard with purple and silver feathers, which he was calling the Noe Suit. I told him about Ava and Pauline, and let him smell the bottle of lavender oil Ava had given me before the abortion. He wanted some on his wrists. I dabbed it on carefully.
“Who smells like perfume?” Noe said later as we walked down the hall.
I was feeling bad about putting off Bob for so long, so I stopped by his office with a list of vegetarian food requests for the cafeteria. He was in the sagging swivel chair studying for a nutritionist exam and listening to a program on NPR.
“What happened to Kingdom of Stones?” I said.
“I finished it. Do you want to borrow the CDs?”
I was going to say no, but changed my mind. “Sure.”
He rummaged around in the desk and handed me a five-disc box. “Don’t start listening before you’ve finished exams. The story is very addictive.”
“Okay,” I said.
On the last day of exams, Noe, Steven, and I went downtown to use up my pizza coupons. It turned out the pizzeria in question was a dingy joint beside the Anaconda Nite Club. The hairy-browed guy at the cash register looked at my coupons, flicked them back across the counter, and said, “Nice-a try, kids. These-a been expired for three years.”
“Trust a fake nutritionist,” Noe said as we trudged out.
“I thought it was weird that he had so many,” I said.
I told myself I was doing okay. I went skating at the rink and Christmas shopping at the mall and even to a party at Lindsay Harris’s house. I pulled the craft supply box out of the closet and made Noe a jeweled box for the talcum powder she put on her hands for uneven bars, and Steven a sparkly headband that said PEE SISTERS in purple sequins.
One day when I was cleaning my room, I found the postcards I’d bought at the Wilda McClure house. I took them downstairs and gave them to Mom.
“These are for you,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. She stuck them to the fridge with magnets. A forest, a lake, a beaver dam, a pair of snowshoes. They looked small and dumb on the fridge, doing nothing to conjure the wilderness I’d glimpsed from the bus window.
We had been careful with each other since Maple Bay. Overly polite. She took me to see a doctor to “check things out,” and on the way home we hardly spoke. I wanted to tell her about the journal I had found, but I knew it would only make her sad. Instead, I carried around the image of Scott’s face like a stone lodged in my throat.
I looked up his address on the internet. It wasn’t very hard, since I had his full name and the town.
It was strange to think of him having a house and a car and a whole normal life. It made me angry. It creeped me out.
I fantasized that I was on the canoe trip with Mom and Pauline and I came to Mom’s rescue. In some versions, I whacked him over the head with a paddle. In other versions I came running with a can of bear spray.
Sometimes in my dreams, I killed him over and over again, but he kept on getting up like a zombie and there was no way to make him die.