Infinite (Strange and Beautiful, Book 1)

by Brittney Musick

  I always feel so out of place at home. Whenever I open my mouth, it feels almost like I can see the wheels turning in my family’s heads. They’re probably thinking, ”What is she going to start rambling about now?” I never feel that way with the Tylers. Perhaps I should start pushing again for them to adopt me.

  After the museum, we went to The Bean for dinner. It’s a great little coffeehouse, but they also have the best sandwiches. It’s so cozy. It was also poetry night. We got to hear a few people read. It was nice. I think those people are so brave to put themselves out there like that. I wish I could be that brave.

  The idea of reading some of my poetry out loud for other people to hear makes me feel so uncomfortable. Tegan always says the stuff I let her read is good, but, then again, she’s my best friend. She’s not going to tell me I suck when she knows it’s something I’m already insecure about.

  There was this one girl who read a poem. Everyone else’s was okay, but hers was really sad, yet bold at the same time. It’s hard to describe, and I can’t remember all of the words either, so I won’t even try to relay it. I’d butcher it. But the gist of it was about putting up a fight, and not giving up or going back to the way things were even if she had to die.

  When people write things like that, it makes me wonder what happened to them. What would make them feel so strongly? The things I feel strongly about often seem so minuscule compared to the things other people have actually lived. Not that I necessarily want to live all of the pain other people have, but I’ve had such a good life I don’t really feel like I have the right to complain about a lot of stuff.

  I wish Skylar shared that philosophy. Any time something doesn’t go her way, she throws a fit and acts like the world is going to end. It’s very annoying, and it strikes me as odd that people like her are considered adults just because of their age. Maybe there should be a maturity test or something to determine adulthood. Of course, a lot of people would probably be considered children for the rest of their lives if they did that.

  -Silly-

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Even though I actually hated the song thanks to American Idol, “Bad Day” by Daniel Powter officially became the theme song of my life.

  Though I was able to blend in with the crowds often, my number of bad days had increased significantly since my registration on Mark Moses’ radar. On the days I wasn’t able to dodge him, he menaced me into handing over my lunch money. Even though Tegan was nice enough to share her food with me, it was hard to find my appetite.

  While having my money and appetite stolen and subsequently worrying and stressing out were not okay, I could deal with it. What I couldn’t deal with, though, was Mark Moses stealing my copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and ripping the binding and then, as if to add insult to injury, throwing it onto the water fountain and hitting the button to release the water, soaking the pages into an unsalvageable mess.

  I shed more tears than I cared to admit, and I also begged Mark to stop. While it was just a book to most people, it was so much more to me. It was memories and my childhood, and watching Mark demolish what was nothing more than a useless book to him felt like having a part of me destroyed.

  As I inspected the damage, determining it was beyond repair, Tegan tried to console me, but the sobs were unstoppable. I almost ditched Journalism to weep in the restroom, but Tegan dragged me to class, where Annabelle tried to talk to me about how my review was coming along. Most of her words didn’t register. I couldn’t stop wondering how I was supposed to think about writing a book review when all I could think about was watching that stupid, greasy haired, wide bottomed git tearing Order of the Phoenix from my hands and taunting me gleefully as he killed a piece of me.

  Rationally, I knew I could easily go out and buy a new copy of the book, but that wasn’t really the point. What gave him the right to take my things and ruin them? Who was he to steal people’s money and cause so much distress in their lives? What had I ever done to him? I didn’t know him, and he sure as hell didn’t know me. We just crossed each other’s paths by some terrible chance, and he’d done nothing but try to make my life miserable ever since. This was where I wanted to throw a temper tantrum, like I would have when I was two, and scream ‘that’s not fair!’ I sincerely doubted that that would have changed things, but I had no other way to channel the hatred I felt toward Mark Moses. There was a part of me that wished him a slow and painful death, and it scared me to feel so horribly toward another person because that was not who I was.

  I normally wasn’t vindictive, but if I could have thought of something to do to retaliate against Mark Moses, I probably would have. Although, not being devious was probably a good thing. If I were to try to get back at Mark Moses, I could only imagine the ways it could go wrong. Then where would I be? Probably in the same hospital room Parker McGarvey stayed in.

  The only bright side of my terrible Wednesday was I was saved from going to Miss Barkley’s class. All through Journalism, between fretting about Mark Moses and my damaged book, I kept dreading the idea of sitting through English Composition for the last hour and a half of the day and trying to concentrate on whatever Miss Barkley planned to teach. If she called on me, I knew without a doubt I wouldn’t have any of the answers. My stomach was all tied up in knots thinking about it, so when a voice came over the intercom, when the bell was supposed to ring, and instructed everyone to take his or her things to his or her lockers and then go to the auditorium, I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Everyone murmured about how we must be having a motivational speaker or something, so, of course, Tegan brought along a pen and small notepad so we could write notes back and forth if it was something really boring.

  In the auditorium, I spotted Mark Moses being reprimanded by one of the teachers and then led off to the other side of the room and forced to sit by said teacher. Another wave of anger (and also relief) washed over me. At least he wouldn’t be causing trouble for the time being.

  Tegan and I found a couple of empty seats towards the middle of the left side row. We waded our way down the aisle, and as we sat the principal stepped up to the podium to introduce our speaker, Maggie Rogers.

  As soon as she started talking, it was clear the lecture would be about drugs. The gist of it was she started smoking weed and drinking at the age of fourteen. She graduated quickly to harder drugs, trying several different things, and became hooked on cocaine.

  “My world quickly spun completely out of control,” she explained. “I’d wake up and have no idea where I was or how I even got there. Sometimes I’d wake up next to a stranger; other times I’d sleep with guys, who I knew were carrying, in exchange for my next fix.”

  I was somewhat surprised she was allowed to talk about these details. Most of the time the lectures were meant to scare everyone straight but were just so lame because it all came out as a bunch of vague warnings about how it would screw up your life.

  “My wake up call came when I was seventeen,” Maggie explained. “I was at, yet another, party, partying hard as always, but I was so coked up, and then someone offered me heroine. I thought ‘hey, why not?’ Next thing I know I’m waking up in the hospital, and being told that not only did I almost die of an overdose, I’m also pregnant.”

  She said she had no idea who the father was, and the doctors weren’t sure if the baby would be okay.

  It was kind of baffling to think about someone my age becoming a drug addict. In only three years, she went from being a normal teenager to almost dying. On top of that, she was a parent by the age of eighteen.

  It seemed so surreal. I’d never even smoked a cigarette. I’d never even been tempted, probably because the whole, “say no to drugs” thing stuck with me from being a star pupil in D.A.R.E. Of course, I’d never really been around any kind of drugs. Sure, my parents drank on occasion, but they didn’t keep alcohol in the house, and, as far as I knew, they never got drunk.

  I knew Luke had been drunk before. Some of his
friends dropped him off on our front porch one night after a party. He threw up on the welcome mat before he passed out in the doorway. It was terribly disgusting because he actually passed out in the puke. Our parents were livid. Luke was grounded for a month and hadn’t ever come home drunk since, or if he had, he just hadn’t been caught.

  Skylar, on the other hand, was slyer than Luke. I knew she smoked. Sometimes she’d do it in the car on the way to school, which I hated because she wasn’t at all considerate about it. She smoked Marlboro Reds like Jackson, and, even though I wasn’t particularly fond of smoking, I had to admit that Jackson looked a hellava a lot sexier smoking than Skylar. Although, I suspected she used smoking as a way to curb her appetite because she’d smoke more when she was on a diet.

  I also knew that Skylar did more than just smoke. Her curfew was later on the weekends, and our parents weren’t the type to stay up and make sure she got home. One particular occasion, she came home after Mom and Dad were already in bed. I just happened to be awake and down in the kitchen when she got home. Stevie was with her, and Skylar was acting really funny.

  At first, she was laughing and acting silly, but then she started freaking out, crying and covering her face like she was hiding from something. It scared me so much that I wanted to get our parents, but Stevie begged me not to and pleaded with me to help her get Skylar upstairs.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I whispered, surely wide-eyed and pale.

  “She’s just having a bad trip,” Stevie muttered. “She’ll be okay once she sleeps it off.”

  It wasn’t until I was a few years older that I understood that she had been on acid. Thankfully, she never came home acting like that again, but there were a few times when Stevie woke me up by throwing rocks at my window and told me to come down and help her get a very loopy, drunk Skylar up to her room.

  While I didn’t like the drinking anymore than the bad trip, I could at least handle it better. I wished Skylar wouldn’t drink or do drugs at all, but I was grateful that she had Stevie looking out for her. I’d like to think that if I were ever, God forbid, stupid enough to end up as incapacitated as Skylar, Tegan would do the same for me.

  Hearing Maggie’s story made me worry for my sister, and, not for the first time, I wished that our parents would catch her coming home drunk some night. I wouldn’t have to face her wrath if I ever had to rat her out, and maybe she’d finally stop.

  Maggie ended her story with how she went to a rehabilitation center to get sobered up. The baby was, thankfully, healthy and free of any birth defects the doctors had worried about. She missed her high school graduation but was able to get her GED. She was now in her last year of college and planned to be a social worker, and she spoke at schools to warn people against making the same mistakes she had because “things could have turned out much differently” if she hadn’t made it to the hospital when she did.

  Even though her speech wasn’t the bore fest like many others, she had to end with the usual spiel. “If you know someone who is using drugs and is in need of help, please trying talking to them, or if you already have and need assistance, please talk to an adult. Your parents, his or her parents or the school counselor. I know that no one wants to be a nark, but speaking up could save a life. Wouldn’t you rather have a friend that’s angry and alive than no friend at all?”

  As heartfelt as her words seemed, my mind made the snide remark that I’d need a map just to find the counselor’s office. Of course, that was assuming the map would actually help, so directionally challenged was I. Sadly, there were still times when I found myself lost in the labyrinth of hallways.

  Once we were dismissed, everyone headed for his or her locker. We only had about five minutes before the final bell rang, so no one was in a huge hurry. Tegan and I waded through the crowd and said goodbye at my locker. She had horseback riding lessons after school. She’d invited me to come along, but I still had to work on my review for the newspaper. Class had been a total waste due to my distraction at Mark Moses’ destruction, so I thought I’d better stay home and get to work on it before Annabelle changed her mind and revoked her offer and reassigned the article to someone else.

  I threw my schoolbooks into my bag carelessly. I was certain teachers had no comprehension of just how much those things weighed. Maybe one or two of them wouldn’t be so bad, but together it felt as if my bag weighed at least twenty pounds. For someone Luke’s size, that wouldn’t be too bad, but I was sure I was going to have serious back problems as an adult. I hoped my future husband had good health insurance, but, according to Dad, that was hard to come by.

  Before I shut my locker door, I glanced at myself in the mirror that Tegan insisted I have even if only it was just for her benefit. I had avoided my reflection before going to the assembly, but I checked now to see if it was still obvious I’d spent a solid twenty minutes crying in the restroom during lunch. My eyes were still just a little puffy and red, but my skin, at least, wasn’t blotchy, and my nose wasn’t red and runny.

  This was one occasion in which I hoped Skylar wouldn’t notice anything odd. I didn’t feel like explaining, but that, of course, would mean she’d care, and I doubted she would. She’d probably say something like, “It’s just a stupid Harry Potter book anyway. Don’t be a baby.”

  After all, Skylar seemed to have absolutely no regard for literature. If it had been a Green Day CD, I’d probably be able to win her sympathy.

  As I was about to shut my locker door, I paused, catching the reflection of a tall, thin very delicious looking boy. I closed my locker and spun around, nearly jumping out of my skin because Jackson was standing right behind me. Talk about objects in the mirror being closer than they appeared.

  “Hi,” he smiled. I’d wondered since that first meeting if it all had just been a fluke, but his smile was definitely still breathtaking.

  “Hi,” I replied. I wondered what he was doing in my hallway, but before I could open my mouth to ask, or say something incredibly embarrassing, he spoke up.

  “I remembered talking to you about these,” he said, holding up a book in each hand. I looked at the cover, reading the title, of the book in his left hand. It was Looking For Alaska by John Green. In his right, he held An Abundance of Katherines, also by John Green. He stacked them one on top of the other and held them out for me to take. When I didn’t immediately reach for them, he said, “I said you could borrow them.”

  “Oh,” I smiled. I remembered the conversation clearly. I just hadn’t expected him to follow through. Pleased that he seemed to be sincere, I took the books. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “No problem,” he shrugged. “Just be careful. My sister got them for me for my birthday, Alaska last year and Katherines this year.”

  “Oh, right,” I nodded. I held the books to my chest, and I knew without a doubt I’d guard them with my life. There was no way Mark Moses—or anyone else for that matter—was getting his hands on these books. They’d have to kill me first. Of course, the thought Mark Moses might actually try to kill me, did cross my mind, but for Mr. Extremely-Deliciously-Kissable-Lips-Jackson-Whatever-His-Last-Name-Was, I was willing to go that far. “When was your birthday?” I asked as an afterthought, and also to keep myself from staring at his mouth like a lunatic.

  “My birthday was actually last Saturday, but my sister gave me Katherines early,” he explained.

  “Oh, happy belated birthday.” For a moment I wished I’d known, so I could have gotten him something, but then I realized that probably would have been weird since I really didn’t know him very well.

  “Thanks,” Jackson shrugged and smiled somewhat bashfully, as if talking about his birthday made him shy.

  I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable because I didn’t want him to go away, so I said the first thing that popped into my mind. “My birthday is Friday.”

  “Cool,” he grinned, and since I was so close up I noticed that his front bottom teeth were just a little bit crooked while the top ones appe
ared perfectly straight. I was wondering if he used to have braces as he asked, “How old? Sixteen?”

  I wanted to crawl into a hole and die as I corrected him. “Fifteen, actually.”

  “Ah.” His dark brows furrowed and he combed a hand absently through his already messy hair. When his hand came away, his blue-black hair stood up, seemingly defying gravity, for a moment before it flopped back down.

  “It’s not nearly as exciting as sixteen, I know, but I get to take driver’s education next summer.”

  “Well, that’s something to look forward to,” he nodded.

  “That’s what I keep telling myself,” I smiled. Then I glanced at his pale yellow t-shirt and noticed that there were five jars that each had the word ‘mayo’ across the center of each. It took me a moment, but then it clicked—Cinco de Mayo. I laughed a little, and then I glanced back up at Jackson’s face to see him frowning slightly, clearly confused. “Sorry.” I blushed, looking away and motioning to his shirt as I explained, “I just got the joke.”

  I kind of wanted to bang my head against the lockers, but then Jackson just shrugged and said, “It’s cool.”

  He looked amused, but as far as I could tell, he didn’t think I was a complete idiot. God bless his kind soul. He deserved an award. Every time I had an encounter with him, I’d managed to say something stupid, yet he hadn’t made fun of me. I silently wished he would be my future husband.

  “So, did you have a good birthday?” I finally asked, hoping to avert his attention away from my moment of stupidity.

  “Yeah, it was pretty good. Seventeen’s not as exciting as sixteen was,” he teased, not unkindly, “but at least there’s next year.”

  “Yeah, it’s another milestone,” I smiled. “Then it’s not exciting again until twenty-one, I’m sure.”