Until It Hurts to Stop

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  WHEN Y OU CAN’ T TRUST ANYONE , HOW CAN YOU EVER FEEL SAFE?

  In seventh grade, Maggie Camden was the class outcast. Every day, the other girls tripped her, pinched her, trapped her in the bathroom, told her she would be better off dead. Four years have passed since then, and Maggie’s tormentors seem to have moved on. The ringleader of them all, Raleigh Barringer, even moved out of town. But Maggie has never stopped watching for attacks, and every laugh still sounds like it’s at her expense. The only time Maggie feels at peace is when she’s hiking up in the mountains with her best friend, Nick. Lately, though, there’s a new sort of tension between the two of them—a tension both dangerous and delicious. But how can Maggie expect anything more out of Nick when all she’s ever been told is that she’s ugly, she’s pathetic, she’s unworthy of love? And how can she ever feel safe, now that Raleigh Barringer is suddenly—terrifyingly—back in town?

  Jennifer R. Hubbard (www.jenniferhubbard.com) lives and writes near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is a night person who believes that mornings were meant to be slept through, a chocolate lover, and a hiker. Her previous young adult novels are The Secret Year and Try Not to Breathe. She is on Twitter at @JennRHubbard.

  UNTIL IT HURTS TO STOP

  BY JENNIFER R. HUBBARD

  UNTIL IT

  HURTS

  TO STOP

  JENNIFER R. HUBBARD

  au t h o r o f the secret year a n d try not to breathe

  VIKING

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

  Copyright © Jennifer R. Hubbard, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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  Copyright © Jennifer R. Hubbard, 2013 All rights reserved

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data is available ISBN 978-0-670-78520-9

  one

  My friend Nick reaches across the cafeteria table and drops a knife into my hand. “Happy birthday, Maggie.”

  I turn the knife over in my hand. I have always wanted one of these. I’ve borrowed Nick’s often enough, out on the trails.

  I know I should hide it. It’s a Swiss army knife, not a weapon, but our school gets hysterical over nail clippers. They’d probably confiscate it and put me on some list of budding terrorists.

  Even so, I can’t resist stroking the smooth metal and snapping open the different tools: the nail file, the screwdriver, the tiny scissors. Best of all, I love the tiny scissors. Nobody else is near enough to see me handling this supposed instrument of danger, anyway. Nick’s legs sprawl into the space next to him, discouraging anyone from sitting too close.

  “Thank you.” I give the knife a last squeeze and slip it into my pocket. “It’ll be perfect for our next hike.” Nick’s stepfather, Perry, first brought us onto the trails when we were fourteen. Now that Perry’s knees are shot and Nick has a driver’s license, Nick and I hike alone.

  “About that,” Nick says, winding spaghetti around his fork. “I thought we could try your suggestion.”

  “What suggestion?”

  “To climb a mountain.”

  “What? When did I say that?”

  “When we were at Silver Creek.”

  “Oh, right.” We’d hiked in Silver Creek State Park a couple weeks ago, just before school started. After a hard slog through the park, with about a dozen stream crossings (balancing on stones, teetering on slippery logs), we’d finally reached a hilltop with a view of the Porte Range to our south. Glowing with success—or endorphins—I’d said, waving at the mountains, “I bet the view’s even better from up there.”

  “Now there’s an idea,” Nick had said.

  And I, who was normally afraid of—well, pretty much everything—had laughed with excitement. Nick and I have hiked some hills, but never any real mountains. Yet in that moment, I believed I could climb anything. As if, after years on the fringes of the world, I’d found the place I belonged.

  The mountains looked like home—some long-forgotten home—and they looked tough. Sharp-toothed, with a dangerous beauty. Gray and lilac and blue. They loomed on the horizon, silent and immense. Nick and I stared at them, their quiet power sinking into our bones, until mosquitoes and a race with the setting sun drove us back onto the Silver Creek trail. And I put mountains out of my mind.

  Until now.

  “I can’t believe you’re bringing that up,” I say. “I wasn’t serious.” Except maybe for a moment.

  “We could get serious about it,” Nick says. “How about Eagle Mountain?”

  “The one Perry climbed?”

  “Yeah.”

  Nick says it like he’s offering me my own private island and a vault full of gold. A picture of Perry grinning on Eagle’s summit hangs in the downstairs hall of their house. I tell myself it can’t have been too bad a climb if he was able to smile like that. Still— “I’m not sure I can make it up a mountain.”

  “I’m not sure I can either,” Nick says, “but let’s find out.”

  I rub a smear of mustard off the crust of my sandwich, turning over the idea in my mind. “This isn’t going to be like Mount Everest, is it? Where if you can’t make it, they leave you in the snow to die?”

  Nick laughs. “Eagle’s not even a mile high. But if it helps, Maggie—I promise I won’t leave you in the snow to die.”

  “How do you know I won’t leave you in the snow?”

  “Because I’ll have the car keys. Besides, there is no snow around here in September.”

  The plan makes my mouth water, despite the prickling in my nerves. Sometimes the best hikes were when Perry, Nick, and I tested ourselves, like when we hiked farther than I thought I could, or faced extreme weather. I remember the sparkle of crusted snow on a subzero day, and the ice formations we saw at Hemlock Brook—pillars and palaces seen by nobody else, as the printless snow around us proved. Even though the air stung my throat, I managed to keep myself from freezing; I pushed myself out into a day when most people stayed home.

  Remembering the surge of power, the sense of belonging, that I felt at Hemlock Brook and at Silver Creek, I want to feel it again.

  “Okay,” I say. I wish I could flick open my knife to accept the challenge. “To the mountains!” I could cry, but you need to be brandishing a sword to carry that off—and possibly sitting on a horse. An Excalibur-type flourish might be too dramatic for my little blade, but I like the symbolism, and it would get a laugh out of Nick. I would do it if I didn’t have to worry about the teachers patrolling the lunchroom.

  “Saturday?”

  “Sure. But remember, nobody leaves anyone in the snow,” I say as my friend Sylvie takes the seat next to me.

  “Snow? What snow?” she asks, biting into a pear.

  “Never mind.�
� I touch the chain around my neck. “Listen, thank you for the necklace.”

  Sylvie slipped me her present in the hall after third period, since we don’t have any classes together. I’ve been wearing it ever since. It’s a necklace with a stone the same emerald color as peacock feathers.

  “Oh, do you like it? It’s malachite. I thought the color would be perfect for you.”

  “I love it.” While she returns to her pear, I say, “Why are you here? I thought you had a yearbook committee meeting. Or something.” I can never keep Sylvie’s committees, clubs, and teams straight. Her calendar is a blur of plans and appointments. We can barely get through a conversation without some reminder or incoming message beeping at her.

  “I did. And it went on forever. I wouldn’t even be getting this much to eat if this girl, Raleigh, hadn’t taken over.” Sylvie laughs. “It was her first meeting, but she practically ran the whole thing. Not that I’m complaining. Because otherwise, we’d still be there, debating whether to put the sports-team pictures before or after the student council pictures.”

  “Raleigh?” I repeat, my stomach beginning to burn. I know only one person with that name. “Raleigh Barringer? She’s back?”

  “‘Back’? Oh, right . . . She did say she used to live here. Before I moved in.”

  “She went to West End Junior High,” I say through numb lips. “With me.”

  Nick looks up from his spaghetti.

  “Well, she said her family’s been living in Italy for two years.” Sylvie scrolls through one of her endless to-do lists. “Nick, did you do the math homework yet?”

  While Sylvie eats and chats with Nick, my ears buzz. I swear I can taste stomach acid.

  Raleigh Barringer.

  I thought I would never see her again. I’d celebrated her move to Italy the way people cheer the toppling of maniacal dictators.

  And before I can recover from hearing her name again, I hear her voice, screeching somewhere behind me. Her laugh is a cold fingernail ripping my skin open, right down the back of my neck.

  It paralyzes me. For a minute all I can do is watch Nick slide bread over his sauce-covered plate. He keeps glancing at me, but I won’t meet his eyes. I have to be in mental lockdown, all my energy focused inward. Because otherwise the panic flashing through me might burst out, right in the middle of the cafeteria, for everyone to see.

  two

  At the end of lunch, I escape to the girls’ room, where I check under the stalls for feet. I pick the stall farthest from everyone else, double-check the bolt, and stand with my eyes closed. Raleigh Barringer. What the hell is she doing back here? And what is she going to do to me this time?

  Toilets flush; girls talk and laugh; faucets run. All of it echoes off the cold olive tile, ringing against my skull.

  I need to think, to get myself together. I might run into Raleigh in the hallway at any moment. If I’m really unlucky, I might meet her at the sinks in a few seconds. I have to know what to say, how to act.

  The bathroom door thumps hollowly, and I check to make sure all the feet have left. The emptying of the room means the bell’s about to ring.

  I’m out of time.

  I dash out the door and through the halls, ears tuned to what’s happening on all sides of me. But I never look at faces, never risk eye contact. I slip through the door of my French class as the bell sounds.

  In French, I sit next to Vanessa Webb. Today she’s in crisp white, which would make me look like a hepatitis case. (Sylvie says I should wear “jewel tones,” whatever those are.)

  Vanessa recites the day’s lesson, a story about a guy named Jean-Claude buying bread at the boulangerie. The people in our French book never do anything exciting like fight tigers or shoot white-water rapids. Although Vanessa reads with an actress’s animation and timing, half the class nods off. I play with my pen cap, which I’ve gnawed until it’s white and frayed around the edges. For the four thousandth time, I vow to stop chewing my pen cap.

  But I can’t even keep that resolution till the end of class. While Vanessa narrates Jean-Claude’s culinary adventures, my mind returns to Raleigh Barringer—definitely the worst birthday gift of all. And I find myself biting the plastic cap again, working it with my teeth.

  Bio is my last class of the day. The teacher, Mr. Thornhart, is discombobulated because the guys in the back of the room have been throwing around stray worm parts during the dissection labs. And so he’s decided to reshuffle the lab partners, pairing up everyone himself. He’s like some deranged matchmaker who hasn’t bothered to find out our most basic traits, except which of us are more likely than others to use worm parts as projectiles.

  “Margaret Camden and Adriana Lippold.” He taps the table where we’re supposed to sit.

  Adriana and I both freeze. Then she takes her seat, keeping her eyes on the lab bench.

  “Margaret? Did you hear me?” Thornhart asks.

  I consider not moving. I would rather stick my hand in a toaster than work with the girl who was Raleigh Barringer’s best friend back in junior high—and still is, for all I know. I may be a year older today, but the world seems to be doing its best to stuff me back into eighth grade.

  Thornhart’s already moving on, announcing the next happy couple. I grab my books and edge into the seat next to Adriana, not looking at her.

  “I can’t believe he put us together,” she mutters.

  I grunt.

  “You don’t have to act like it’s such a burden to you, though,” she goes on. “I’m sure I can find my way around a worm as well as you can.”

  I tighten my fingers around my pen. What does she mean by that? “As well as you can,” in that vinegar voice of hers? I raise an eyebrow at her and let her interpret that any way she wants.

  We take turns at the microscope, exchanging the slides we’ve already viewed for the ones we haven’t, silence thick between us. I sneak glances at Adriana, trying to gauge the danger. She has plucked her eyebrows in a high, arched shape, so they swoop across her forehead like bird wings. Her lipstick is pale pink—an innocent, harmless color.

  But that pale-pink mouth is the same one that sneered at me back in junior high, that said I was ugly, that any boy would puke rather than touch me. It’s the same mouth that laughed when Raleigh Barringer said I should hang myself, because nobody wanted me at school where I could turn the stomachs of normal people.

  Adriana and I say nothing to each other now. The glass slides scrape the benchtop as we pass them back and forth. And I wonder if Thornhart has any clue what a spectacularly bad idea it was to put us together.

  three

  After school, Luis Morales and I sit in Nick’s car, waiting for Nick to start the engine. This takes a while, because Nick is plowing through layers of dirty clothes and empty cracker boxes on the floor to find a half-full bag of chocolate chip cookies he remembers stashing there at some point. I slip my hand into my pocket and stroke the sleek surface of my new knife, wishing it had a cookie locator—maybe in between the screwdriver and the nail file. All I want is to get off school grounds, to put as much distance as possible between Raleigh Barringer and myself. “Nick, it’s a ten-minute ride. You can’t drop us off first and then hunt for your cookies?”

  “Hey, I want some cookies, too,” Luis says.

  “What the hell is this?” Nick holds up a shard of plastic. “You sure it wasn’t holding the car together?” Luis says, laughing.

  Nick tosses it onto the backseat next to me, and follows it with a hat I don’t remember ever seeing him wearing. I hope there are no jockstraps buried in the mess.

  The car doesn’t smell nearly as bad as you might expect, given how much junk is piled in here. I suppose everything’s been here so long, it has all dried out. Like the petrified French fry on the floor at my feet. (At least I’m pretty sure it’s a French fry.)

  “I’d like to get out of here before it’s time to climb Eagle,”

  I say.

  “Climb Eagle?” Luis asks. “Wh
at do you want to do that for?”

  “For fun,” Nick says. We would invite Luis to hike with us—have invited him, in fact—but Luis would rather stick needles in his eyes. He doesn’t see the point of trekking out into the woods, where there isn’t even a store or a coffee shop or any music. The vacant lot near school is enough of a wilderness for him.

  “Found ’em!” Nick pulls out a crumpled bag and peers inside. “Yeah, still some left.” He holds out the bag. “You first, Maggie. Since it’s your birthday and all.”

  “It’s your birthday?” Luis says. “Hey, happy birthday, Maggie. How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.” I hand back the bag. “Now Nick can’t keep bragging that he’s older than I am.”

  “I’ll always be older than you.”

  “By only four months!”

  He laughs. “And way more mature.”

  “Yeah, you’re very old and wise. You’re practically sprouting gray hair.”

  Nick finally starts the car, his mouth full of cookies. I pull out my Guide to Northeastern Trails, which I sometimes read during study halls. The pages call up hikes I’ve done with Nick—and before that, with him and Perry. The thunder of White Horse Falls, where Nick and I crept over mossy stones, closer and closer to the spray, until the mist soaked our faces and shirts. The sunset over Cannon Lake, the sky turning rose and orange and then purpling into night. The stars we saw on a December’s moonlight hike with Perry, like ice crystals frozen in a blue-black sky. I breathe in, half expecting to smell that wintry air, pure and sweet with the cold, but instead I get the stale heat of a closed car in September. I flip past these familiar hikes to the section on Eagle Mountain.

  A gem of the Porte Range. Although sections of the trail require scrambling, using hands as well as feet, no mountaineering equipment (ropes, axes) is necessary. Several areas of smooth rock are exceptionally steep and should not be attempted in wet weather. Knife-edge ridges and dizzying ledges may daunt the casual hiker, but the spectacular views are well worth the climb.