91
THE NEXT MORNING, STEVEN PESTERED ME all through Art. “Noe won’t tell me what happened. Should I be afraid?”
“It’s not about you,” I said. “She’s mad at me.”
“Why?”
Steven’s cheeks were always red in the winter, like apples in snow.
“Have you figured out her food thing yet?” I said.
“I have suspicions,” Steven said. “I’ve been badgering her. With reason, it appears?”
I put my head on the table. I couldn’t even summon the energy to moan. Deep inside me, the place where Noe lived was aching and aching.
“You’re going to think I’m a horrible friend,” I said.
“Why?” said Steven. “Did you trick her into eating foie gras?”
“I caught her throwing up. And I told her she should stop. And then Ms. Bomtrauer asked me if I’d seen Noe doing it, and I was too surprised to lie.”
“That doesn’t make you a horrible friend,” said Steven.
“But I’ve known for four years. And it was the first time I said anything.”
“I’ll talk to her,” Steven said.
“You shouldn’t,” I said. “It will only make things worse.”
The classroom smelled like paint, and paint remover. I wondered how many hours were left until graduation.
92
I DIDN’T WANT TO GO TO gymnastics practice, but I was afraid that flaking would make Noe even madder. Ms. Bomtrauer led us through a warm-up and started us on our usual rotation around the beam, bars, vault, and floor. I tried to act normal, but it felt like Noe was watching me the whole time.
“Toes,” shouted Noe from across the gym, and I yelped, “Sorry,” landing my pivot leap flat on my feet.
I tried to laugh it off—maximum-security gymnast and all that—but my face flooded with heat.
“You’re so curled up,” Noe said irritably. “Shoulders back.”
“They don’t go that far back,” I said.
When Noe was like this, I couldn’t meet her eyes. If I was ink, she was bleach. It burned to look at her, to see my own leaky blackness reflected in her expression, when all I wanted was for things to be tidy and clear. I worked on my pivot leap for the rest of practice, pointing my toes until they ached, forcing my shoulders into shapes that would never, ever look like the gentle ripple they were supposed to.
There was something strange in the air. Everyone was acting weird. I felt the other girls’ eyes prickling on me as I teetered up and down the balance beam. At first I wrote it off to the drama of the gym meet. Annabeth told Ms. Bomtrauer that Sphinx Lacoeur brainwashed Noe and it isn’t even true.
But as practice went on, the prickling got worse and worse. People were definitely looking at me. I saw them out of the corner of my eye. The queasy feeling came back. I moved from the beam to the uneven bars, trying to ignore it, but it only got stronger and stronger. I stopped mid-spin and dropped down from the bars, clutching my stomach as if to indicate that I had a cramp. As I limped toward the water fountain, I could feel the eyes of the entire team on me and hear whispers throughout the gym. I realized with a sickening tightness in my stomach that they had been told something. By the time I had made it the three hundred feet to the door, I knew.
I picked up my gym bag. Someone had scrawled babykiller on the side in permanent marker.
I pushed through the heavy doors and into the yellow hallway.
I wanted to crawl into a tunnel made of dirt and stones and stay there until everyone I knew had grown old and died and there wasn’t anyone left to look at me like that anymore.
93
THE WALK BACK TO MY HOUSE: rattled and uncomprehending, close to tears.
Overhead, yellow leaves flapped in the treetops. A crow cawed. I bent mid-stride and scooped up a piece of gravel from the road and put it in my mouth and sucked until the top of my mouth had turned to blood.
94
THE NEXT MORNING, I PACKED MY backpack slowly, deliberately, as if packing for a desert island. Peanuts, fresh water, textbooks, pens. How to Survive. I still hadn’t read the poem Loren had sent me, or written back to his email. I printed the poem, folded it in half, and stuck it between the chapters on shelter and navigation. Something told me I was going to have lots of time to read for the rest of the year.
I combed my hair and brushed my teeth.
“Your gym coach called,” Mom said when I went downstairs. “Were you sick yesterday?”
She was wearing her No Frills uniform, a yellow apron over a white blouse. For a second, I considered playing the get-out-of-school card. But the truth was, I was feeling abundantly healthy. And I knew that to hide now would only make things worse.
“Sick of gymnastics,” I said. “You were right. It’s been horrible. Noe’s on my case all the time and everyone cares too much about their stupid hair and makeup and I just want to kick something.”
The fridge hummed. Mom picked up her purse. “Just make sure to get that deposit back for the leotard,” she sighed.
95
IF YOU COME TO MY SCHOOL in late January, you will inevitably wonder why the building hasn’t been condemned as a health hazard.
The classrooms in which the heaters work are warm and damp, like incubators for mold.
The classrooms in which the heaters don’t work are so cold you can’t hold a pencil.
The couches in the back corner of the library are polka-dotted with gum and tobacco juice and the crusty stains of bodily fluids that will not be cleaned off until next fall.
The floors are covered in a brown layer of slush that nobody ever mops up. You can literally slide to your classes.
All these conditions serve to make the students bored and aggressive and prone to gossip.
Sometimes it feels like nobody gets out of here without a broken bone or two.
96
THE FIRST DAY WITHOUT NOE WAS THE hardest. For the most part, I avoided eye contact with anyone in our year, and kept my ears firmly plugged with earbuds at all times during which it wouldn’t earn me a detention to do so. I started Kingdom of Stones again from the beginning. It was comforting to hear about Rae as a young villager again, before she has any of her harrowing adventures. I wished I could go back to Book One of my own life, when all was good and peaceful in Riddlespoon and the Stone King hadn’t yet sown his death-seeds through the land.
My campaign of avoidance wasn’t entirely successful.
Margot Dilforth: “Is it true that you’re pregnant?”
Me: “No.”
Margot Dilforth: “That’s what everyone’s saying.”
Something about her reminded me of a goat. In Kingdom of Stones, she would be Penny-foo, the annoying milkmaid. I remembered what Margot was like in middle school, an earnest girl with long braids. Always at the edge of things, trying to buy her way into the center by impressing people with scandalous information.
Margot Dilforth: “Are you and Oliver getting married?”
Me: “Not that I know of.”
Margot Dilforth (scratching her long, freckly nose): “I heard you are.”
Steven was away on a theater trip that day. In Art, I had to sit alone. I wanted to call him, but suddenly our little triangle had gotten very messy. Steven was wrong. It wasn’t as simple as being friends instead of friends-by-association. He was dating the association, and right now, the association hated my guts.