I wondered if Kaylee Ito had always hated me.
101
THAT NIGHT I WENT FOR A walk past the half-built houses near Lorian Woods, their harsh geometry softened by snow. I felt sorry for them. They looked hungry, hungry and dumb, like tourists who hadn’t come dressed for the weather. I walked into the woods and looked at the way the branches fractured the sky. I put my hand on a tree’s bark and felt a quiet current of friendship there.
Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to freeze in a snowbank. It sounded almost dreamy, almost pleasant.
“Annabeth’s wandered out and frozen,” they’d say. “It’s very sad.”
I walked to the edge of the woods and lay in a snowbank. I looked at the stars and remembered being younger.
Sometimes, Dad was the moon. Sometimes he was the man on the radio singing “Brown Eyed Girl.” Sometimes he was the truehearted woodsman in Little Red Riding Hood, about to stride in with his ax to claim me. On one too-fast hike with Mom, the snacks all gone and the winter sunlight waning, I let her get farther ahead of me than ever before. I’d left the trail and sat down under a tree, pulling my hood up and cinching my jacket more tightly around my waist and neck. Before long, I knew, he would come striding through the woods in tall leather boots and a green feathered cap (he was Robin Hood, sometimes) and carry me on his shoulders all the way to a sturdy log cabin with cookies on the table and a tiny orange kitten like the one in my fantasies that Mom would never let me have. Say hello to Stallion, Dad would say, pouring the purring animal into my arms (How did he know her name would be Stallion?). She’s yours.
Instead the sky had darkened and the temperature dropped. After several hours—five minutes, maybe—I heard Mom calling my name, and glimpsed her coming down the trail. In spite of myself I’d leaped up and shouted, “I’m here,” my five-year-old’s resolve wavering at the sight of her familiar sweater and hat. She scooped me up and hoisted me onto her back, and within a few minutes I was lulled to sleep by the steady up-down jostle of her stride. That night was pizza-and-ice-cream at Uncle Dylan’s house, and a turn on my cousin Max’s new computer game. They were always especially nice to me, Uncle Dylan and Aunt Monique and Nan and the cousins. By the time Mom put me to bed, I’d forgotten about the orange kitten for a while.
Overhead, the ice-encrusted branches rattled in the breeze, sending down a flurry of snow. For a long time now, there had been no benevolent moon-spirit watching over me, no radio-father singing “Brown Eyed Girl,” and the man in the forest was a smirking boy I must be prepared to fight hand-to-hand and, if necessary, kill.
How were you supposed to move on from something like that?
I lay in the snowbank and waited to sleep. Eventually I got up and walked back home.
What’s that Tom Waits song? “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me Today.”
The snowbank didn’t want me. There was no use fighting. I don’t believe everything I hear in songs, but when you lie in a snowbank for an hour without falling asleep, the message is pretty clear.
102
IN DRAMA, WE HAD A NEW teacher, Ms. Hoffstadter, who was on loan from some school in England. I guess teachers can go on exchange too. She wore bloodred pants and a white blouse, and earrings made of slender purple feathers. For the first couple of weeks she had us doing drama exercises, which were pretty okay because they were largely silent—pretend you are carrying a staggering weight on your back, pretend you are dragging your weight across the floor, pretend you are being crushed beneath it. I didn’t have to talk to anyone, just walk around in circles with these invisible torments. She had us memorize parts in a Lillian Hellman scene, then put on the scene without speaking.
“Words are the last layer,” she said. “The tip of the iceberg. Ninety-nine percent of theater takes place in the body.”
We pulled our invisible weights around, and moved them from shoulder to shoulder, and put them down and walked away and came back and picked them up exactly where we had left them. At the end of each class, Ms. Hoffstadter made us stack our weights neatly against one wall.
One day, I got so tired from dragging my weight around the gritty floor that I fainted. I don’t know how it happened. It was a gray day. I was cold all the way through. I had been cold for days. The cold was inside my skull. I couldn’t knock it out or melt it. That morning I’d taken a hot shower, but the cold was still there when I got out. My arms got all goose-bumpy under my sweater. You know when you put something in the oven but forget to turn it on, then you go to check it and it’s still frozen? My goose-bumpy arms were like that. Still frozen, even though I’d been inside the school building all day.
We were doing our usual warm-up with our invisible weights, and I felt like I was going to sneeze, and then I woke up with my cheek on the floor and seven or eight people standing over me. Ms. Hoffstadter dispatched a girl named Win to walk me to the nurse’s office. I hadn’t realized I had a fever. Win felt my forehead while we were walking down the hall.
I drank the burning juice the nurse gave me and sat in a chair with a fleece blanket that smelled like cupboard and waited for my mom to come.
She stroked my forehead on the car ride home. She had the radio on, some talk show with a scientist. I fell asleep but didn’t realize it, and the talk show kept going in my dream.
“Butterflies burrow underground in the winter,” the scientist was saying. “Their dens are often six feet deep.”
My brain pawed through these secret caches of butterflies like a hungry raccoon. Noe and I should go digging for them, said my dream-brain.
“Here we are, Annabean,” Mom was saying. She undid my seat belt for me, click.
She hadn’t called me Annabean in years. Maybe she called me that all the time, and I didn’t notice.
I lay on the couch and she tucked me in with blankets and gave me a candy for my throat. It burned a hole in my cheek. I spat it into a tissue. The clock on the DVD player said 10:11 a.m., which seemed too early to be taking a nap.
Mom was in the kitchen making tea. I fell asleep before the tab on the kettle clicked up.
103
I WAS SICK FOR FIVE DAYS, hot all the way through except when I stood up or moved, in which case the cold reasserted itself in queasy flashes. I wore a hat inside the house, and thick socks. When I was sleeping, I thought I was hiking. Every time I woke up, confusion: where were the snow and the pine trees? Then I’d fall asleep again—Ah, there they are. Sometimes I’d get up and chug half a box of orange juice and hurry back to the couch so I could be on my hike again. The hike made sense. The hike had clear parameters and a clear sense of momentum. The hike was all body. It had nothing to do with words. I wished I could turn all my problems into sacks of stones I only had to carry around, into mountains I only had to wear my legs out climbing. I was tired of trying to think my way through life, of having to explain and justify and make myself acceptable to the world. I wanted to lift, to drag, to climb, to smash, to bushwhack.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to have a lobotomy and finish my life as the Incredible Hulk, pure muscle. I could follow directions. I’d make a great firefighter, charging in with my hose. Maybe I should join the army. I wouldn’t have to decide what to wear, or what to eat, or who to say hi to or not say hi to in the hall. Uncle Dylan was always hassling Max to sign up. Maybe I’d ask him about it, next time we went over for dinner.
I fell in and out of these thoughts, in and out, in and out. I dreamed I had already joined the army, and had a narrow gray bed in a cell like a nun’s. I dreamed Noe and I were best friends.