Snap, went the camera. Snap, snap.
The music stopped. I swept my hands up, nodded tersely at the table of adjudicators, and walked off the floor, my face burning. I could feel Noe’s eyes on the back of my head the whole way.
As I pushed through the changing room door, the next girl’s routine was already starting. I glanced back and saw her land her first handstand, the confident way her arms swept through the air. There were moves, I realized, sequences in life you had to learn. A certain dance unlocked a certain door: a friendship, a romance, a progression from one level of things to the next. And while everyone else sailed through the steps, the best I could do was desperately ape them.
In the changing room, I was a girl with ten thousand reasons to hate herself. I sank onto the clammy wooden bench and held my face in my hands, feeling the reasons swarm over me like flies and cover me whole.
88
ON THE BUS RIDE HOME, NOE wouldn’t even look at me. I hunched against the window. A hundred times, I tried to catch her eye—It wasn’t my fault, I swear, she asked me, I didn’t tell her—but Noe turned her face away. When we got to the school, Steven and Darla were waiting for Noe in the parking lot. They got out of Darla’s huge car and waved. There was no nonawkward way of leaving the parking lot without saying hello to Steven, so I tromped behind Noe all the way to their car.
“How’d it go, honey?” Darla sang, sweeping Noe into her arms like a long-lost daughter. “DiMaggio’s or Casa Italia? Your choice.”
Just like that, Noe was Ms. Shiny-Brite again. “You’re taking me out for dinner?” she squealed. “You guys are too sweet. Let’s do DiMaggio’s, I love their gnocchi.”
I guess it was safe to eat again, provided Noe didn’t need to do any double handsprings within the next three hours.
“Are you coming?” said Steven.
“I’m pretty wiped,” I said.
“Please please please?”
“No thanks,” I said glumly. “You guys have fun.”
I said good-bye and walked away before Steven could wheedle me into coming. My muscles ached and I was hungry.
On the walk home, I kept scanning the sidewalks and the branches of the bare trees, as if I’d lost a precious necklace that might be wedged in a crack or snagged on a twig. I remembered the mixture of fear and certainty I’d felt when I confronted Noe in the bathroom, like a fantasy novel heroine uttering magic words to break a spell.
But that was where the analogy stopped. If I’d finally said the magic words, why had the treasure disappeared?
89
WHEN I GOT HOME, MOM COULD tell something was wrong.
“How was the gym meet?” she said.
“Fine.”
“Win any ribbons?”
“A stupid photographer took my picture.”
“Wow,” said Mom mildly. “You’re going to be famous.”
I peeled off my hat and scarf and threw them onto the coatrack. My winter coat was heavy and damp. I slithered out of it and dumped it onto a hook. The kitchen was warm and moist with cooking beans, a smell that was suddenly comforting. I leaned against the counter with my arms crossed, trembling with humiliation at the way Noe had stalked ahead of me to where Darla and Steven were waiting without even acknowledging that I was there.
“What are you cooking?” I said.
“Vegetarian chili.”
“It smells good.”
“Thanks.”
“Can I chop something?”
“How about some onions?”
She made room for me at the counter. I took an onion from the wooden bowl and peeled off the papery yellow skin. Mom was using the good knife, so I poked around in the drawer until I found one that was almost as sharp.
“Do you want to invite Noe over for dinner?” Mom said.
“She went to a restaurant with her boyfriend and his mom.”
“Aha,” said Mom. “I was wondering why she’d been so scarce around here. I haven’t seen her in months.”
We peeled and chopped. It had been a long time, I realized, since I’d confided in Mom about anything. The last time was when my seventh-grade best friend, Emily Lincoln, had two birthday parties, a boring one with me and Carly Ocean and Eliza Grinette, and a fun one with her cool friends where there was dancing and making out and somebody brought a beer. I couldn’t believe I’d been assigned to the “boring friend” category, lumped in with Carly Ocean. Mom had taken me on a walk in the woods and listened to me wail, and afterward we’d picked up Nan and gone out for French fries at Dick’s Chips and everything had started to feel okay. Ever since Ava told me about Scott, I’d stopped unpouring myself to Mom, like my problems were silly compared to what she’d been through. Like I owed it to her to be perfect so she wouldn’t have any more reasons to regret me.
Now the knife I was holding blurred before my eyes. I set it down.
“I thought we were going to be friends forever,” I burst. “I care about her so much. But it’s like we’re not communicating anymore.”
“You’re still pretty disappointed about the roommate thing, aren’t you?” said Mom.
“Not as much since I visited Ava,” I said. “But yeah. It’s like she decided to become this whole different person, but I’m not allowed to become a different person too.”
“People are like trees,” said Mom. “They need one kind of food when they’re seedlings, and a different kind of food once they’ve been growing for a few years. Maybe you and Noe needed each other in ninth grade in a way you don’t need each other now.”
I imagined myself as a scrawny sapling, the fertilizer of Noe slowly being withdrawn, the wooden stakes pulled up.
“You and Pauline stayed friends,” I said.
“Pauline and I didn’t become friends until we were in college.”
“Really?”
She smoothed the hair off my forehead, a gesture I hadn’t allowed her to do in years. “Annabeth, honey, life keeps on changing. You don’t get one chance at friendship, or one chance at love. Things die. Things grow. It’s hard to see that when you’ve only been around for seventeen years, and you’ve only ever had one of everything, but it’s true.”
“I just wish we could do it without turning into enemies.”
“Well,” Mom sighed. “That’s the hard part.”
We picked up our knives and started chopping again, and soon it was time to eat.
90
I HAD HOPED THAT NOE WOULD come around. But the next day in English, she sat down and opened her book without so much as a glance in my direction.
Are you still mad? I wrote on a piece of paper I slipped onto her desk. She pushed it back without looking at it.
For the rest of class, I felt as queasy as the time my cousin Max dared me to swallow a raw egg. When the bell rang, Noe picked up her backpack and stalked out. I dawdled, putting away my notebook and pens, the raw egg feeling creeping from my stomach to my throat.
I left a note in Noe’s locker—Talk to me!—and hurried away. In the hallway, Mr. Beek was making Jamie Appleton pick up every single piece of trash from a garbage bin somebody had knocked over. Outside the window and across the street, the Burger King was advertising Double Bacon Cheeseburgers. I thought I glimpsed the nutritionist coming out the door, but it could have been some other big, sad person with their head bent over a paper bag.