Until It Hurts to Stop

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  “Here’s an extra-large. Do you think Nick might want it?”

  I want to say, “I have no idea what Nick wants,” but rather than get into that, I go with, “Maybe. I’ll see.”

  She tosses both shirts at me and eyes the papers in my hand. “What’s all that?”

  “You said to get involved in activities. So this is what I picked.”

  She shuffles through them. “Maggie, this isn’t a school club.”

  “It’s still an activity I can put on my college applications. Besides, I want to do it.”

  She reads the forms, a frown puckering her face. And then she looks up at me. I can feel her eyes tracing my windblown hair, sweatshirt with frayed collar, dusty jeans. In spite of her telling me to socialize more, I have just come from another hike alone with Nick. This conservation group will also mean running off to the woods. It’s not any of the activities she suggested: drama club, newspaper. I’m not exactly doing this her way.

  I can almost hear the questions coming, the instructions to redo this or do it differently. Like my college-visit list all over again. But something—the thrill of climbing Crystal at last? The nerve it took to kiss Nick?—straightens my spine. We stare at each other a minute.

  “Where’s a pen?” she says.

  “What?”

  She leaves the box of clothes and hunts in the kitchen drawer until she finds a pen. She signs all the forms, her enthusiasm rising with each one. “This is wonderful, Maggie,” she says. “You’ll get to meet new people. It looks like fun.”

  “Hard work, too.”

  “Well, yes, but you seem to like doing things with your hands. Piano, and woodworking, and so forth . . . I’m sure you can do it. They say here they’ll train you.”

  I wasn’t sure she would be excited about an idea she didn’t come up with herself. And I’m even more grateful for her support after hearing Dr. Cleary tell Nick that he’s brain damaged and stupider than a cockroach.

  “I’ll need you or Dad to drive me over to this park and pick me up,” I say. “Maybe when I get to know people, there’ll be someone to carpool with. And Dad said he’ll start teaching me to drive this fall. But for now—”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. One of us will be free, I’m sure.”

  Well. Maybe if she’s underestimated me, I’ve underestimated her, too.

  I go upstairs and reread the list of equipment, savoring each item the way I savor the names of mushrooms.

  The thought of starting something new with people I’ve never met scares me, but excitement peeks out from under a layer of nervousness. We’ll be in the woods, with the scent of pine and the chatter of birds and the silent sturdiness of trees.

  This program is the kind of thing Nick would probably like to do as well, but I can’t bring myself to send him the information. I don’t know where we stand with each other right now.

  I start writing him several messages, but erase each one before I can finish.

  In Nick’s car Monday morning, we don’t say much, but that’s not unusual. Nick wakes up enough to operate the car. Conversation is an extra effort that Luis and I have learned not to expect at this hour.

  “Heard you climbed another mountain,” Luis says to me. I can’t completely squash the glow that comes with saying, “Yes,” even though Nick stays silent while I sketch for Luis, in a few sentences, the danger of the ledges, the force of the wind at the Crystal summit.

  Between second and third periods, I’m at my locker when Vanessa comes up behind me.

  “Bitch,” she says, and I jump.

  “What?” I say over my shoulder.

  “You, Margaret Camden, are a bitch,” she repeats. Slowly, clearly. Tasting each letter. “I can’t believe how two-faced you are.”

  “What’s your problem?” I cannot get the sleeves of my coat to fit in the locker. They keep snagging on the door catch, so I leave them alone and turn to face Vanessa.

  “My problem? You’re the one with a problem. I told you I wanted to make up with Nick. I even asked you to help me. And instead, you threw yourself at him?”

  “I didn’t throw—”

  “You’ve been friends with Nick for years, but it’s not until he’s with me that you suddenly get this uncontrollable urge for him? Come on.”

  I struggle to stand my ground, not to shrink into the locker behind me. I grip the open door, and its metal edge bites into my hand. “It wasn’t sudden,” I begin, but she cuts me off.

  “He asked you if he should call me. And instead of telling him, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what she wants,’ you tried to get him for yourself. It’s disgusting. You went behind my back—acting so innocent with me, while the whole time you were planning to go after Nick.”

  “No, it’s not like that. I—”

  “Nick and I talked it out during first period. So don’t even try to lie anymore. I know who you really are now.” She storms away, and I sink against the row of lockers.

  I hate having people mad at me.

  Things never turn out well when people are mad at me.

  The words bitch and disgusting ring in my ears—words Raleigh and Adriana used against me. For a minute, I’m back in junior high: My ears tuned to every whisper. My eyes scanning the hall. Holding my breath every time I turn a corner. I can’t stand living with razors in my stomach, always wondering what’s coming next. I can’t go through that again.

  But worse than anything, this time, is that Nick might be part of it.

  Does he hate me, too, now that he’s talked with Vanessa? She obviously believes I plotted this whole thing. When the truth is I’ve just been bumbling around, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, never believing I have the power to hurt anyone—not weak, ugly, clumsy me. But if she thinks this was a scheme, it means Nick either couldn’t convince her that it wasn’t—or he believes it now, too.

  I sit on the floor and text him. I don’t know when he’ll get this since he rarely checks his phone before lunch, but I’m desperate to reach him any way I can. i need to talk to you.

  Then I text Sylvie. When she doesn’t beep me back right away, I text her again. need to talk, urgent!

  I keep my eyes down and hurry to study hall, knowing that to risk eye contact with anyone is to ask for disaster.

  In study hall I take out my mushroom guide and bend over it, determined not to look at anyone else, not to leave myself open.

  I don’t know why I thought I could get away with this, that I could steal some happiness.

  What is Vanessa going to do now? Try to keep me from Nick, obviously, but—will she stop there? Or will it be like junior high all over? Vanessa knows a lot of people. Her parties are famous. People look up to her. They would follow her if she wanted to rally them.

  Not this again please God not this again not this . . .

  Enough. I’m reading about mushrooms. Carmine coral. Indigo lactarius. Collared earthstar. I shield my face between my hands and whisper the names, roll them around on my tongue, trying to drown out the panicked voice in my head. Trying to fill the gaping space left by Nick.

  I flip to the poisonous, powerful ones again: the haymaker’s mushroom, red-mouth bolete, deadly galerina. And the one I see as the queen of the killers: the destroying angel. That is the one nobody messes with, ever.

  twenty-eight

  I’m alert in the halls and the bathrooms, but nobody comes after me. Not yet.

  When it’s time for lunch, I don’t go into the cafeteria. I can’t face Nick and Vanessa by myself.

  Instead, I find the room where Sylvie is at a club meeting. I stand outside the door, signaling frantically until she sees me and slips out.

  “What is it?” she says. She closes the classroom door, and we walk a few steps away from it.

  I blurt out the story, ending with, “And now Nick and Vanessa hate me. What am I going to do?”

  She rubs one eye and stares at the lockers across the hall. “I don’t know, Maggie.”

  “I can’t g
o into that cafeteria alone. Would anyone mind if I sat in your meeting? I won’t say anything. I’ll sit in the back. Or maybe we could go somewhere else and talk?”

  Her eyes return to my face. “You mean, you want me to listen to you.” Her voice is sharper than usual, her face harder.

  “I guess so.” I don’t understand what’s wrong. Sylvie has an endless capacity to listen, a bottomless well of patience. But now she looks—tired. Puffy-eyed. As if she’s been up all night.

  “You ask me to listen a lot,” she says. “And I do. But lately, you don’t listen much to me. You don’t even know what I’m going through right now.”

  “What? What are you going through?”

  “Wendy and I broke up this weekend.”

  “Oh . . . Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you never gave me room to tell you. This has been coming for a while. I told you Wendy was acting distant, and I told you I was worried—” Her voice breaks. “But you didn’t hear me. All you ever talk about is your own problems. God, you’re so needy, Maggie!” She closes her eyes and presses her palms against the lids. “My eyes are killing me. I was up crying all night and—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be talking to you this way. I should try to find a nicer way to say it. But I’m just—sick and tired and—I have no energy to deal with you right now.”

  Her mouth puckers, as if she might cry again, but I can’t see her eyes. Only the backs of her hands.

  “Sylvie—”

  “Leave me alone.” Her voice is drained, flat. She doesn’t move her hands.

  “But I—”

  “Please.”

  “Okay,” I say, backing up. “Okay,” I repeat, hoping she’ll relent and put down her hands and tell me to come back, we can cry on each other’s shoulders, we’re still friends. That I’m not alone in the world.

  But she doesn’t.

  I head blindly toward my locker. My stomach rumbles, and I think maybe I can get some peanut-butter crackers or something out of one of the vending machines, to make it through the afternoon. I’m not used to skipping lunch, and even though my life is falling apart around me, my practical stomach goes on wanting food, goes on about the business of keeping me alive. I don’t know whether to find that comforting and hopeful, or horrifyingly selfish.

  Vanessa—and now Sylvie—would vote for selfish, I’m sure. I touch the necklace Sylvie gave me, as if its stone and metal could ensure that our friendship is still real, still solid. But I can’t ignore the truth of what she said to me. It’s as if I’ve had binoculars trained on my own toes, watching only the tiny circle of earth around me, and she has swung them over to show me her world. It’s as if I haven’t realized until now that there is any other world. I’m so used to seeing myself as the outcast and everyone else as secure and perfect inside their circles of belonging, immune to hurt.

  Guilt and shame swirl around in my stomach. I feel small enough to crawl into the locker vents next to me. I try to absorb the fact that I’ve lost Nick and Sylvie in the same day, and that it’s all my fault. I can’t even grasp the enormity of this loss, this pain.

  As the bell rings to end lunch, I turn the corner into the last hall.

  Kids pour out of the cafeteria. I trip over my own feet as Nick and Vanessa emerge together.

  They walk down the hall with their backs to me. They’re not touching, but they are together, talking. Nick nods at something Vanessa says. They keep walking, away from me.

  I drag myself to French class, knowing Vanessa will be there. She bumps my chair on the way to her desk.

  Oh, that’s original , I say to myself. She should ask Raleigh Barringer for pointers on how to be truly ruthless. Bumping chairs is amateur stuff.

  And yet, she still gets to me. When I have to answer a question, I stammer, just because she’s in the room. I don’t usually make many mistakes, but under her acidic glare, I second-guess my pronunciation of every word. It’s not anything she does, it’s worrying about what she might do. A film of sweat covers my skin by the time my turn ends. I might as well be hauling myself up Crystal Mountain all over again.

  The teacher moves on to the next student, and I exhale. I can’t bring myself to meet Vanessa’s eyes.

  Bio is next, with Adriana.

  Perfect.

  I sit beside her as if she’s a shock-sensitive explosive that the

  slightest whisper might trigger. I can’t help wondering if she has noticed Vanessa’s new hatred of me, if she’ll be drawn to it the way she was drawn to Raleigh’s campaign. But Adriana simply lines up her colored pencils, ready to draw the cells we’ll be studying today.

  She uses the microscope first. “I think that’s in focus,” she says, and sits back to let me look. My shaking hand touches the knob, and everything blurs.

  “Oh, sorry,” I say, twisting the knobs, trying to refocus. I’m not sure which way to go, and the blurry white sea under the lens refuses to come clear.

  “Let me try,” Adriana says. She doesn’t snap at me, as I might have expected. On the other side of the room, somebody drops a notebook, and I jump.

  And then—I can’t believe it. Vanessa is in the hall, right outside the door, glaring at me. She holds a pass in one hand, so she’s legit, and she’s obviously in no hurry. Our teacher hasn’t seen her.

  “What’s with her?” Adriana asks, breaking away from the microscope for a minute.

  I force my eyes back to our bench. “I don’t know.”

  “She looks pissed.”

  “Well, she—thinks I tried to get between her and Nick.”

  I still feel Vanessa’s eyes burning into my neck, but when I sneak a glance, she’s gone. It doesn’t matter. She may not be standing there now, but I know I’ll see her again. And again— and again—

  Adriana frowns. “Didn’t they break up?”

  “Yeah, pretty much, but . . .”

  “What does she think, she owns him forever? She needs to get over it.” Adriana adjusts the focus. “There. Try that.”

  I do, this time keeping my hands at my sides. I can see the cells now, and I fumble for my pencil.

  “Besides, everyone knows you and Nick have always been like that.” I don’t look away from the cells, but I imagine she’s twining her fingers together. “In fact, until he started going with Vanessa, I kind of thought he was your boyfriend.”

  I can’t believe she’s taking my side in this. “He wasn’t. We never—” But of course, we did. “I mean, something did happen between us before Vanessa was around, but—well, it’s complicated. And now it looks like they’re getting back together. But she’s mad at me.”

  “She’ll get over it. If she’s smart, she’ll concentrate on her own life instead of worrying about you. Attacking other people—it’s kind of pathetic when you think about it.”

  I lift my chin, startled. Astonished she could say that, considering she spent junior high shadowing Raleigh in her mission to crush me. Adriana’s face flushes, and she doesn’t quite meet my eyes. “I mean, sometimes people get carried away,” she says. “They don’t think about what they’re doing.”

  “Is that how it is?”

  “Yeah. Whether it’s revenge, like with Vanessa, or whether it just seems fun. Sometimes people don’t get how mean it is until they look back at it later.”

  Adriana and I have never talked about the horrible things she said to me in junior high, the things Raleigh did that she laughed at, copied, joined in on. I’ve been too embarrassed to bring it up—what am I going to say, Remember how you humiliated me?—but this is the first time I’ve realized she might be embarrassed.

  I doubt she will ever apologize to me. But suddenly I’m remembering Adriana as she was in junior high. Her mouth stretched with laughter, her eyes gleaming—yes, I remember that. But I also remember her tagging after Raleigh, hurrying to match Raleigh’s pace. The doubt in Adriana’s eyes as the two of them leaned against the wall. Her too-loud fake laughter. Even then, as socially incompetent as I was, I sen
sed the falseness in Adriana’s act. Sometimes it was too thin, and the light shone right through it.

  Not that she was some helpless pawn. She didn’t have a gun pointed at her head. She made choices, and she picked Raleigh for a friend. There were plenty of times when her giggles at my expense were as spontaneous as Raleigh’s. But I’ve never thought until now that she might regret any of it—that maybe some of those giggles have left a sour aftertaste.

  Adriana takes her turn at the microscope. I try to make my cell pictures look more like cells and less like squashed octopi. But my mind is a tangle: Vanessa, Adriana, me. None of us perfect, none of us completely sure of ourselves.

  At last, this day is over. I’m in front of my locker, trying to fit all my books into my pack, when Raleigh Barringer laughs somewhere down the hall. Her screech runs through me, triggering every nerve. My head jerks up to track her position.

  Oh no. She’s talking to Vanessa.

  I bow my head and crouch over my pack, fumbling with the zipper. A Raleigh-Vanessa alliance would finish me off. That’s all I need: Vanessa’s anger joined with Raleigh’s viciousness.

  Tears gather in my throat, but I swallow them down. I didn’t cry in the halls of junior high. I’m not going to break now.

  My pack refuses to close. I pull the fabric tighter, yank on the zipper, anxious to escape. Why do zippers always stick when you have somewhere to go?

  Suddenly, I realize that I don’t even know how I’m getting home. I haven’t seen Nick since this morning, before he and Vanessa had their talk. He never answered my text.

  The knot in my throat hardens, a crushing pressure. I can’t take any more of this. I’ll suffocate or else I’ll—

  Whack! Something smacks my back, and a shadow swoops overhead. Instinctively, I duck even lower.

  Raleigh Barringer hops on one leg, adjusting her balance. It’s clear she has just tripped over me.

  “What the hell?!” she says. “God, Maggie, what are you doing in the middle of the hall?”

  Sure, blame me, I think. Even though I’m not in the middle of the hall at all, but right in front of the lockers. If I were any farther over, I’d be inside them. Which would probably be just fine with her.