Until It Hurts to Stop

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  Nick plunks a spoon and a glass in front of me, and sits down with his own glass. Iced tea slops over the brim and puddles on the table.

  I search for something to say, while he rubs his glass with his thumb. There’s something comforting about the familiarity of his hands, his ragged nails and the dirt in the creases of his knuckles.

  “So when’s our next hike?” I say, scooping sugar into my glass. We might as well get back to the woods as soon as possible. Back to our old snake-fighting, mountain-climbing selves.

  “I don’t know.”

  Since when has Nick ever hesitated about getting out onto the trail? I sip my tea, bitter and sweet swirling together in my mouth. “If you don’t want to hike with me anymore—” I begin, though it’s like stabbing myself in the throat to say it.

  “That’s not it. It’s just—I was thinking about another mountain. A harder one. Is that something you’d want to do?” A glance at me, the slightest flash when our eyes meet.

  “Harder than Eagle? That’ll be a long day.” Especially if we’re still off-kilter like this, our gears not quite back in sync.

  “Yeah, I know. Mountains take a lot out of you, but that’s kind of the point, right?” He talks to his drink, one hand wrapped around the dripping glass. “You have the summit to work for, and you put everything into the hike. . . .”

  I get what he’s saying. A climb will sand off the remaining sharp edges between us, will give us a place to focus all our energy. “Which mountain?” I ask.

  “Crystal.”

  It’s the one pictured on his bedroom wall, with the summit as cold and sharp as a fang. “That’s in the Cinnamon Range, isn’t it?”

  “Yep. What do you say, Maggie?”

  “I say okay.”

  He clinks his glass against mine, more tea slopping onto the table.

  I do want to climb. I feel the same hunger, the same upward momentum, that he does.

  But I have another longing to drag around with me, too. Because even though I’m relieved that he’s giving me exactly what I asked for—he’s treating me like a friend again—I still want more.

  eleven

  When I get home, my mother’s in bed. Her nursing shifts throw off her whole schedule, and she’s often asleep when the rest of us are awake. My father’s heading down into the basement workshop. “Want to join me?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say, and follow him.

  The workshop is mostly my dad’s place (his “happy place,” Mom and I joke); he built my desk and bookcase, as well as our kitchen table. But I love it, too: the clean smell of fresh wood shavings, the silkiness of sanded boards. I’ve built a few things myself, like the wobbly end table in our front hall, where we keep stray batteries and stacks of junk mail. My first project was an oversized “jewelry box” I made for Mom’s Christmas present one year, which I inexplicably painted purple with orange flowers. She uses it to hold gloves, scarves, and umbrellas, since not even a royal family would have enough bling to fill a jewelry box that size. (At twelve, I had an underdeveloped sense of proportion and scale.) (And no eye for color.) I’ve since made better boxes that we’ve given to relatives, but my earliest attempts are too crude to inflict on anyone else.

  I’ve actually been making my father a box for his birthday, which is coming up, but I can’t work on it in front of him. Tonight, Dad plans his next job, sketching a bench my grandmother wants. While he mutters to himself, figuring height and width and depth, calculating the wood he’ll need, I sort nails and screws. When we’re between projects, I try to restore order to the shop. Sorting hardware is soothing, mindless work.

  “How’s the grid?” I ask him. I used to ask him this when I was little, when I thought of the grid almost as a living, breathing creature that he tended. I pictured the energy network as something that my father personally kept going, with the strange result that I’d often think of him whenever I flipped a switch or saw black wires sharp against a blue sky. Even though I know now that the system’s a little more complicated than that, and involves more people than just my dad, “How’s the grid?” has become our stock question, the equivalent of, “How are you doing?”

  “It’s still going,” he says, which is our stock answer. He happens to be wearing a company T-shirt today: dark blue, with mid-regional POWER blazing across the front of it, in letters resembling a lightning bolt. He’s offered to get me one, too (they’re free), but I wouldn’t be able to wear it. It would feel too bold somehow. Nick and I even have a joke about the logo: the word POWER is three times as big as Mid-Regional, and we sometimes say, “Are you feeling Mid-Regional POWERful today?”

  Dad and I don’t say anything more, but we don’t need to. Like Nick and me, my dad doesn’t talk much. My mother, on the other hand, could have a three-hour conversation with herself.

  Yet when I was in junior high, Dad was the one who noticed something was wrong, who asked if everything was okay at school. Sometimes I wish I’d told him the whole truth about Raleigh and Adriana and the others. I said that kids were picking on me, but when he told me to ignore them, I didn’t want to admit how bad it was. Parents are the people who brag to the world when you’ve mastered toilet training and the alphabet. Who wants them hearing you’re a loser? Who wants to tell your parents that all the kids at school say you’re ugly, that you stink, that everyone hates you? What if your parents squint at you when they hear that, and say, “Well, Margaret, you do smell a little, and you could stand to comb your hair more often. . . .”

  After all, Mom is always saying, “Maggie, your hair is all knots.” And, “That shirt is so baggy on you. Why don’t we get you something a little neater?” And, “Nick is a nice boy, but you can’t rely on one person all the time. You need to widen your circle of friends.”

  She thinks that all I have to do is wear the right clothes and smile at a few people in the cafeteria. Then they’ll cluster around me, begging for my friendship, and nominate me prom queen. “Just say hello, and you’ll make friends.” It works for her; I’ve seen her leave weddings or interchurch picnics with a dozen new phone numbers even when we walked into the event hardly knowing anyone. But people don’t respond to me the same way.

  At school, people like Troy Truehalt and Darci Esposito look right through me. Their eyes don’t even register me. Once Troy pushed past me in the lunch line—not aggressively, but as if I were a curtain he had to brush aside to reach his destination. I wonder how I look to them. Like wallpaper? Like a mannequin? Or am I completely invisible—do they not see anything there? I can’t possibly look like a real person to them.

  But at least being invisible is better than being a target. What would Dad say if he knew I’m facing that old danger again? If I told him that Raleigh’s back? I think of her slithering through Sylvie’s kitchen. She didn’t say much to me this morning, but her power has always been in her timing. She has always known how to strike at my weakest moments, how to make me wait for her to attack.

  That waiting. I’d forgotten about it, but now it comes back to me: that feeling of never being able to exhale. Trying to watch all sides of me at once. Listening in the halls, my ears tuned for Raleigh’s voice.

  Naturally, she wouldn’t do anything in Sylvie’s house, right in front of Sylvie. I should’ve realized that earlier. And she’s probably still getting used to being back in town. She wears that Italian trip like a velvet cape. But sooner or later, she’ll slip it off and bring out the razors.

  What if I could stand up to her this time?

  I picture her cowering, as she was in my dream the other morning. Responding to one of those special Raleigh-brand insults that always hit my most vulnerable spots; giving it right back to her.

  Are you still in love with yourself, Raleigh? Good thing, because nobody else is.

  If only I had the nerve.

  I drop one last nail in a jar and step away from the bench. Dad shuffles through his wood collection, estimating what he might be able to use and what he might need to bu
y. As I’m heading back up the stairs, he pulls out one old board with a knot and a crack in it.

  “Look at that,” he says, his fingers tracing the pattern of the grain.

  “You can’t use that for anything, can you?”

  “Probably not. But I keep thinking I’ll find something to do with it. I hate to throw it away.”

  “It’s a shame.”

  “It’s a beautiful piece,” he says, and I think he might actually like it because of the knot and the split.

  Sunday nights are the worst: scrambling to finish the last of my homework, dreading Monday. And now, on top of that, there’s the weird tension between Nick and me.

  Thinking of Nick reminds me of what he said about Crystal Mountain. I dig out my guidebook and look it up.

  perhaps the most difficult day hike in the cinnamon range.

  Wonderful.

  Well, you can’t accuse Nick of not aiming high enough. I read about the hazards: narrow ledges, unstable rocks, and steep drop-offs. Also snakes and bears. “What, no man-eating tigers?” I mutter to myself.

  I spend some time in an online forum for local hikers, looking at the thread for Crystal Mountain.

  “those ledges!” one person has written. Another chimes in: “forget the ledges; remember the rocks?” Which draws half a dozen replies, saying, “oh, those ROCKS!”

  I scroll down.

  “that summit slope will give you vertigo.” “it’s not the height, it’s the steepness.” “no, it’s the height AND the steepness!” “the rocks on the lower part are what wear you out.” “i never wanted to see another rock after crystal.” “a couple of people died there back in 2000.” “no, someone did die, but it was because he went off-trail and fell.” “i heard it wasn’t even a fall, it was a heart attack.” “some guy did fall, but he only broke a few bones.” “they should put cables up near the summit.” “no, because if they put up cables, then people who don’t belong there will think they can do it.”

  People who don’t belong there. I hope they’re not talking about me.

  twelve

  I’m still terrorizing myself with the hiking-forum posts on the dangers of Crystal Mountain when my phone beeps with a message.

  I expect it to be Nick or Sylvie, but it’s Adriana, with a question about the bio homework. I reread her message, searching for hidden attacks, but I can’t find any dangerous subtext in

  did we have to read all of chap 4 or just as far as p. 115? I reply: page 115. btw, where did you get my number? from sylvie. hope you don’t mind. thanks for the info!

  Sylvie. Naturally. She would have no reason not to give out my number. And if she’d asked me first—what would I have said? How could I explain why I don’t trust Adriana, without going into all the junior high drama?

  I return to the Crystal Mountain descriptions, immersing myself in tales of broken legs, wild animals, and loose rocks hurtling down slopes. For all the hazards lurking there, I’d still rather take my chances on the trail than in the school halls. I

  text Nick: reading about how dangerous this mountain is. you have a strange idea of fun.

  He answers: so you want to back out?

  I remember how it felt to stand on top of Eagle after fighting the rain and my own doubts, after pushing myself higher than I’d ever gone before. I remember the hug Nick and I shared at the top. And most of all, the energy that surged through me. The way I felt that I belonged there.

  I answer Nick: no.

  that’s what i thought.

  In Monday’s French class, the teacher tells us to pair up for a conversation exercise. Vanessa Webb swings her chair over to my desk, even though she usually works with the girl on her other side. “Bonjour, Marguerite,” she says.

  “ Bonjour.” I don’t know why she’s chosen me today, but I’m not going to question it. At least I don’t have to go through those anxious moments while everyone else couples up, wondering who will be left over.

  Our assignment is to have an extremely artificial conversation about how we celebrate holidays. The book suggests that we say things like, “And your family, does it travel to the beach in the summer? There are many fine beaches.”

  Vanessa and I trade a few dull, clunky observations about summer vacations. I’m wishing I knew the word for “fireworks,” instead of calling them “fire in the sky,” when she slips off topic. Still in French, she asks me, “Nick Cleary is your friend, right?”

  “ Oui,” I answer, startled, but relieved to stop straining for small talk about the Fourth of July.

  She switches to English. “I thought so. I saw you two sitting together at lunch.” She hesitates, running a sculpted fingernail along the spine of her French book. “Just friends?”

  That question makes me swallow, sends alarm signals all the way out to my fingertips. Good question, Vanessa. But I simply say, “That’s right.”

  She smiles. “Well, I’m having a party Friday night. The two of you should come. I live on the corner of Ridgway and Main. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes.” I’ve seen her house; it dominates that corner, with its white columns and vast sweep of lawn. “But I don’t know if we can make it. We’re getting up early on Saturday to hike.”

  “You don’t have to stay late. Just come for a little while. Any time after eight, all right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “On the Fourth of July we have a picnic with much good food,” she says in French, and her shift back into the assignment makes me blink.

  I want to focus completely on the Saturday hike. I need to gather myself for Crystal Mountain, not only because it’s a tough hike, but because it will be my first full day alone with Nick since we kissed. It will be the real test of whether we can be friends—still friends, just friends. I’d rather not have this party to worry about, blocking the entrance to my weekend like a spiked metal gate.

  And what does Vanessa want with Nick, anyway?

  Well, I can guess that.

  Vanessa and Nick. I can’t fit them together, even in my imagination. I don’t think they know each other that well. What could cool, polished Vanessa, with her immaculate clothes, see in Nick the hiker, Nick the basketball player? What could he see in her?

  But maybe I’m reading too much into this. Maybe she just wants a big crowd at her party, so she’s asking as many people as possible. (After all, she’s inviting me.)

  I don’t know. I can’t figure out people at all.

  After school, Nick and Luis get their basketball fix by playing an informal game with their teammates, because, apparently, that’s the only way they will all survive until the season starts in a couple of months. I decide to wait for them so I can get a ride, rather than face the unknown dangers of the bus.

  I lie in the grass near the court, thumbing through my mushroom guide. I know the names in this book by heart now, from false morels and liberty caps to parrot mushrooms and destroying angels. I can reel them off like a memorized poem. It fascinates me that my book labels certain mushrooms as poisonous while acknowledging that some people do eat them. The book speculates that the differences in mushroom toxicity may be due to the fact that mushrooms live off different materials in different places. They absorb what they live on.

  While I consider the line between food and poison, the game provides soothing background noise: the irregular beat of the guys’ feet as they run and pivot; the shuffling; the squeaking halts; the sudden thunder of the fast break.

  Sylvie flops down beside me. Her eyes follow the clump of boys who migrate back and forth between the two baskets like a pendulum. “Do you think they’d let me play?” she asks. She leans forward, and her leg muscles strain, as if she has to keep herself from jumping up and joining in. She’s on the girls’ team during the winter.

  “They’re in the middle of a game now. Grudge match, very serious, out for blood. But I bet they’d let you play another time if you came at the beginning.”

  “Maybe I would, if I didn’t have so many me
etings. I’d be at Spanish club now, but it got canceled at the last minute.”

  Her arrival has changed the air on court. Some of the guys run faster, make bolder grabs for the ball, deal out rougher fouls. It doesn’t matter that Sylvie prefers girls and they know it. She’s beautiful, she’s watching them, and they play harder. I, on the other hand, inspire them about as much as the concrete water fountain at the side of the court.

  In books and movies, popular girls are mean, but not Sylvie. She’s popular because she talks to everyone and volunteers for everything. She remembers names. She puts birthdays in her calendar and sends out personalized birthday messages. Yet she doesn’t do it for the sake of being popular. When Sylvie asks how you are, she wants to know. She genuinely cares about whether you got that role in the play, or how long you’ll have to wear the cast on your arm.

  “I don’t know how you keep up with everything,” I say. It would exhaust me to keep track of so many people.

  “Yeah, Wendy’s been complaining that we don’t have enough time together. Which is ironic, because the last three times I called her, she was busy.” Sylvie scrolls through her messages. “She hasn’t even texted me today.”

  “Listen, Sylvie—did you hear anything about a party at Vanessa Webb’s this weekend?”

  “On Friday? Yeah. I can’t go because that’s the night of my cousin’s wedding.” She looks up from her phone. “I got a new dress for it, but now I’m thinking it’s a mistake. It’s garnet, and it kind of washes me out.” She tilts her head and studies me. “It would look perfect on you, though, with your dark hair and eyes. Why don’t you wear brighter colors?”

  Because I’m just trying to get through high school without anyone noticing, I think. “I don’t know.”

  “The skirt would be the right length for you, too. If my legs were in as good shape as yours, I’d wear skirts all the time.”