75
THAT CHRISTMAS, THE WATERFALL FROZE for the first time in two hundred years. The whole town came out to peer at it: a palace of ice, intricate and spired and still, so terribly still, where we had only ever seen it tumble and churn. I went with Mom and Nan and Aunt Monique to huddle by the iron railing and take turns saying how we’d never, ever, ever, seen a thing like that before.
At Nan’s house, presents. We ate the gingerbread my cousin Max had baked, and Uncle Dylan plunked out “We Three Kings” on the old piano. Ava had stayed in Maple Bay to volunteer at a women’s shelter over Christmas. She called, and Uncle Dylan passed the phone around, but it was hard to talk with everybody there. Then Aunt Monique’s parents came over, Max and Ava’s other grandparents, the ones who were horrified that Mom didn’t give me up for adoption, and still acted stiff and uncomfortable around me, although they tried to be nice. They said hello and asked me about school, but I could tell I made them nervous, and we all excused ourselves from the conversation as fast as we could.
I wondered what Scott was doing, and what my other grandparents were doing, the ones I’d never met. I sat on the edge of Nan’s plaid couch and fussed with the fireplace, adding logs and blowing on the coals and moving things around.
“Annabeth,” called Mom. “It’s your turn for charades.”
The card I pulled was Star Wars. Star: a finger pointing at the sky. Wars: an imaginary gun firing willy-nilly.
“Sky shooter!” everyone shouted. “Battle sky!”
I was glad when the whole thing was over.
76
A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER I packed my backpack, told Mom I was going to Noe’s, and walked two miles to the station to catch a bus to a suburb of a suburb of a suburb of a big city an hour and a half east. I didn’t trust myself to drive, and what if the Honda broke down along the way? My hands trembled in my lap. The highway flashed past outside the window, miles and miles of dreary asphalt, the warehouses and factory stores annihilating the landscape. I spread my notebook open on my knees and wrote letter after ink-smeared letter. You’re a bastard, I wrote, a horrible bastard. I hope you die. I signed the final one Leslie’s daughter, folded it up, and put it in the outside pocket of my coat.
When I got off the bus, it was twilight. I walked another two miles, following the directions I’d written on a piece of paper. The house was at the end of a wide, curving street with lots of landscaping. As I approached, my breath got ragged and short. I gripped the rock in my pocket—somehow, the sword of my fantasies had failed to materialize—and felt its coldness and hardness rise through my skin to surround me like a shield.
Hey, I would shout. Do you know who I am?
Smash! Blood and brains! Moaning pleas for forgiveness!
A car pulled into the driveway of the house as I was walking past it. A man got out. Tall, thin. Handsome. As he walked to his front door, he gave me a neighborly wave.
“Beautiful night,” he said.
Finish him. “Yeah,” I said, and kept walking.
He went into his house. I walked faster. The trees on his street were covered in frost. It made them shimmer in the moonlight like something out of a dream.
When I came to the end of the block I stopped on the sidewalk. Cold air knifed into my lungs with every breath. There were frozen candy bar wrappers in the gutter that reminded me of the first day of school. Frozen ghosts with nowhere left to go. A truck drove past that reminded me of Mom’s: rusty tailpipe, rattly bed. I hesitated a moment longer, the rock damp and jagged against my palm, then turned around and walked quickly and deliberately back to Scott’s house. His curtains were closed. The car in his driveway was new, glossy. A nice suburban car. A nice suburban house. There were strings of Christmas lights wrapped around his front bushes, the bulbs glowing greenly through the snow.
I could have stared at the house all night: wondering, watching, gathering anger like fistfuls of cotton fluff. But then a light turned on upstairs. It startled me. Reminded me where I was.
I threw the rock at his front window and heard it shatter.
I wished I could have saved a piece of the glass, but I was running hard hard hard until the lights of the main road, and I didn’t even think about getting a souvenir until it was too late.
77
I CAUGHT THE NEXT BUS BACK to my town and hugged my backpack against me the whole way. My ears were ringing. Adrenaline made my arms and legs both rigid and loose, like I was either going to harden into a statue or melt into a puddle.
I didn’t know why I had gone there. I didn’t know why I had thrown the rock.
The December moon was cold and brittle.
The heater vents blew stale breath at my head.
The bus was half an hour from my town when I reached into my pocket and realized the letter had fallen out.
78
WHEN THE BUS PULLED INTO THE station there was a scurrying thing in my stomach like a hamster was trapped inside there. What if he found the letter? What if he called the police?
That would be rich. Scott calling the police.
My hands were sweaty and slick inside my mittens. I crouched in the parking lot and dug a handful of gravel out from under the snow and put it in my mouth. It tasted like exhaust. In How to Survive in the Woods, Wilda McClure says that sucking on stones can stave off hunger and thirst, but only for a little while. I should have walked to Scott’s house, I thought to myself. I should have trekked for days with only stones to suck on, ground them in my teeth until they were sharp as daggers, then walked right up to him and spat them in his face.
I wasn’t ready to go home yet, so I walked around the old cemetery that’s across the street from the bus station, sucking on my mouthful of gravel and wondering what it would be like to die of starvation. The headstones were sunk deep in the snow. Some of them had frozen flowers piled on top of them. I imagined myself as a zombie-wraith, haunting this town. The old revulsion was seeping up from inside me, like a clogged bathtub drain I shouldn’t have disturbed.
I couldn’t be like Noe or Steven, I thought to myself. I would never be warm like that, or happy like that, or so certain of my place in the world, so entitled. I thought of them under the trees at the park, dappled light on the backs of their sweaters.
My phone rang. I tensed, my mind swinging irrationally to the thought that it was Scott (how would he have my number?) or the police. But when I looked at the tiny screen, it was Ava. I spat out my mouthful of gravel and pressed the yes button with a mittened finger.
“Hey, chickie,” Ava said.
It was weird to be talking to Ava in the snowy cemetery, at midnight. I sank against a tree and pressed the cold phone against my ear.
“Hey, Ava.”
“How are you?”
How was I? I scuffed my boots at the snow. It was hard to switch from being deep in my head to talking on the phone, to vocalizing. Words felt clunky and crude, like using wooden blocks to communicate. How could I explain these things to another human using wooden blocks? Build a tower? Juggle them?
The night had been beautiful. Icicles glittered on the trees. The sky was clear and star-studded over the rooftops, and muted window light glowed on the snow. What did it mean that the world could be beautiful and also contain horrible things?
“I’m fine,” I said.
Fine? Was that the best I could do? I wondered if everyone walked around with a muzzle that filtered out all but the most banal of statements, leaving all that was rough, contradictory, or confusing to collect inside them until there was almost no room left to file it. I broke Scott’s window, I wanted myself to want to say. But something in me butted up to stop any such gesture of intimacy. Even with Ava. Maybe especially with Ava.