Until It Hurts to Stop

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  I am sick of Raleigh. So very, very sick.

  I’ve.

  Had.

  Enough.

  Dry-mouthed, I say, “You should watch where you’re going.”

  Her eyebrows rise. “What did you say to me?”

  I stand, scraping up the determination that took me to the summit of Crystal. No matter what happens now, it’s not going to happen with me crouched below her in groveling position. “I said, you should watch where you’re going.”

  With a roll of her eyes, she turns away. “You’re the one who should watch out.”

  All the pain she has caused me concentrates in my gut, crystallizes in this moment. I take a step after her, boiling.

  “Excuse me?” I bellow. “What was that?”

  I’m thinking—if I’m thinking at all—Enough. I can’t go back to being the girl Raleigh kicks around.

  She whirls around. “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  “I’ll talk to you any way I want. Do you think you own me?”

  “Own you?! What are you talking about? You got in my way and tripped me, and I snapped at you. Get over it.”

  Rage swells inside me until I think my eyeballs are going to pop out. The top of my skull threatens to shoot toward the ceiling.

  Raleigh.

  It’s her fault I don’t fit in. She’s the reason I can’t relate to anyone like a normal person. She’s why I screw up all my relationships. Because of her, I never learned how to be anything but a victim.

  If she hadn’t been around, I would’ve learned how to relate to people. How to respond to Nick when he first kissed me. How to listen to Sylvie. How to have friends and be a friend.

  “I’m sick of you,” I snarl. “The way you scream at me. I’m sick of you kicking me, and texting about me, and calling me names, and telling me I should kill myself. Don’t you ever say a word about me again!”

  The halls are mostly empty by now, and my voice bounces off the lockers, echoing. A few kids on their way to sports practice or detention pause and turn their heads.

  She gapes at me. And then she says, her voice dripping icicles, “Grow up, Maggie. You’re talking about things that happened years ago. What are you, stuck in junior high?”

  If I’ve ever had any fantasy that I could squash Raleigh, make her sorry, it’s dissolving now. Because that sentence is the worst. It penetrates like acid, right to my bones. “What are you, stuck in junior high?”

  Yes. Yes, I am.

  I think I always will be.

  twenty-nine

  Time stops.

  A few people have gathered. Some of Raleigh’s friends are waiting for her. Vanessa, who had turned away after talking to Raleigh, has now turned back, watching us. I know who she’s rooting for. But—I have to hold back a gulp—Nick has joined her. And Luis.

  About a dozen people watch us, like the rings of spectators that used to form in seventh and eighth grades whenever Raleigh would torment me.

  And then I remember I’m not completely helpless against her. I do have one weapon, thanks to Adriana.

  “Junior high?” I begin. “You wouldn’t have even made it out of junior high, if . . .”

  Her eyes flash; she tenses. The others bend forward a little. I catch Nick’s eye. Of everyone watching, he’s the only one who knows what I’m talking about.

  The words are in my mouth, ready. I want to crack Raleigh’s smooth, contemptuous, superior face, with its veneer of world travel and Italian chic. I want to see her crumble. It’s a black tide in me, and I remember this surge of energy so well from junior high, because I had it every day back then.

  Stuck in junior high.

  Stuck.

  It occurs to me that this is the first real exchange I’ve had with Raleigh since she got back. For more than a month now, I’ve worried about her plotting against me, picking up where she left off. But the truth is that she’s barely wasted a thought on me.

  I’m the one who’s been carrying the whole burden of seventh and eighth grades.

  Raleigh waits, her eyes narrowing, but I don’t say what I’d planned to. I don’t bring up her eighth-grade crimes, her suffering at the hands of Scott Brewer.

  It’s old news.

  It’s pathetic.

  It will never give me back what I’ve lost.

  All I say is, “Go to hell, Raleigh.”

  She sneers. “Great comeback.” She turns and stalks off with her friends while I stand there, willing my legs to keep holding me up.

  I stare at my backpack, my open locker, a pen that fell from my bag when Raleigh tripped over me. I don’t know what to do with any of them. I sit on the floor. I pick up the pen, put it down, pick up the backpack.

  I start to unzip the pocket where I usually keep my knife, wanting to squeeze it. I need something to remind me I’m not the little girl Raleigh once picked on and stomped all over. I’ve climbed Crystal Mountain.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Luis stands over me. I’m still sitting with my back pressed against the lockers. I look up, but I can’t find my voice.

  “What was that about?” he says.

  I shake my head and stagger to my feet.

  Pen inside pack. Forget about zipping it. Hold pack. Close locker.

  “You okay, Maggie?” Luis asks.

  Nick is here, too, now, hovering silently. Vanessa’s gone. I don’t know where she went.

  There’s a strange buzzing in my head. I have to get home, home to the couch or the piano or the wood shop or my bed. Somewhere safe. Somewhere that is not here.

  “Come on,” Luis says, taking my backpack.

  Apparently, they are giving me a ride.

  I stumble out to the parking lot with them. I’m made of glass. I might crack into pieces before I can make it to the car.

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” I ask Luis.

  He gives me a strange look. As if to say, Why wouldn’t I? I’ve always thought of Luis more as Nick’s friend than mine. I’ve assumed he wouldn’t talk to me if we weren’t thrown together

  232

  in Nick’s car every day. But here he is carrying my backpack, patting my arm, guiding me to the car as if I’m a hundred and fifty years old.

  I get in the backseat.

  “How’re you doing, Maggie?” Luis asks.

  I always thought that confronting Raleigh would be my

  triumph. She would collapse, sobbing and pleading. She would learn how horrible it was to take what she’d dished out.

  But I’m—empty. And of course, it didn’t turn out the way I planned. Raleigh is still Raleigh.

  “You want to talk about it?” Nick says, speaking to me for the first time this afternoon.

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  They accept my silence, all the way to Luis’s house.

  Luis pats my shoulder when I take his place in the front seat. I say thanks and settle in beside Nick.

  I have no idea what to say. Automatically, my hand seeks the knife in my backpack, to squeeze the cool metal, but it’s not there.

  My stomach lurches.

  I search every inch of the pouch, and then I try to remember the last time I saw it. I’m sure I had it with me on the mountain, but it’s definitely not here.

  “What are you looking for?” Nick asks.

  “My knife. I think I lost it.” It hasn’t even been two months since he bought it for me. I can’t look him in the face.

  But all he says is, “Oh.”

  “I can’t believe I lost it! I must’ve dropped it on Crystal.”

  “It’s okay. You can borrow mine, like you used to.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  We drive in silence for another minute before he says, “What’s the matter? I thought you’d be happy you got a chance to stand up to Raleigh.”

  “A lot of good it did me. She still tore me apart.” I turn my head to the window, though nothing that flashes by registers.

  “No, she didn�
��t.” He laughs softly. “Nobody ever talks back to her. Did you see the look on her face?”

  I sigh. Now that Raleigh and I have escalated to screaming at each other, is it going to be open warfare with her again? We Hate Maggie, the high school version? “I’m so tired of being scared.”

  “Uh—you, scared? I’ve seen you face rattlesnakes and windstorms.”

  Those are easy things, compared to dealing with people. I would rather face the worst a mountain can throw at me than spend five minutes with Raleigh Barringer.

  “Do you remember that day you first showed me your mushroom book?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “That was the first time I thought, ‘Damn, this girl is something.’ I mean, I knew you weren’t going to poison anyone. But you had this whole world of your own, you knew all this stuff, and it was obvious those other girls were wrong about you.”

  “That’s what you thought?” I say. “That they were wrong?”

  “Well, yeah. And you’re still like that. You don’t copy the other girls at school. You have your own life.”

  I’m trying to digest this view of myself when he says, “I wish I could do that with my dad. Tell him to go to hell, even if it’s just in my own mind.”

  “Your dad?! Nick, we talked about this. He judges you by how much biochemistry you know. Which is crazy.”

  “Not just biochemistry,” he says. “History, and math, and—”

  “Oh, Nick. Stop it.”

  He adjusts the side mirror, pushing the knob to move it toward the car, then pushing it back.

  “Your dad’s a miserable person. He’s got plenty of faults of his own. You heard him in the lab—he made a mistake right in front of us and wouldn’t admit it.” I wish Nick would look at me. “So how can you believe anything he says about you?”

  Nick laughs, but not as if he really thinks anything is funny. I want to shake him. Just because his father acts like Nick isn’t good enough, why does he buy into that? Why does he let someone else’s opinion rule him that way? He ought to know—

  Oh.

  The truth breaks over me like a wave. I know what he’s thinking because I’ve fed it to myself. If I weren’t so quiet and skinny and strange, Raleigh and Adriana wouldn’t pick on me. If I wore the right clothes, I would fit in. If I knew the right thing to say. If I liked the things everyone else likes, instead of weird things like mushrooms. If I didn’t study so much. If I wore makeup, if I knew their songs . . .

  I don’t always believe that, but a lot of the time I do. I fall into it without even realizing it.

  After all this time, my life still revolves around being Raleigh Barringer’s victim. I carry her voice in my head. Even if I had dragged out her dirty laundry today, drawn a few drops of blood, gotten a few moments of revenge, it wouldn’t have mattered. Raleigh isn’t the problem anymore.

  The problem is that I haven’t moved on.

  Which isn’t to say that she has nothing to answer for. She, and Adriana, and Lissa Carpenter, and Ethan Crannick, and all the rest—they were wrong. And maybe their consciences bother them, the way Adriana’s did in lab today. Maybe they’ll be on the receiving end someday, or they’ll look back and cringe at what they did.

  Or maybe not. It isn’t a question of conquering them, or getting their approval. It isn’t about revenge or apologies—it isn’t about them at all, their power, their opinions. Either way, what they did wasn’t my fault, and I don’t have to wait any longer for my life to start.

  Stuck in fear, stuck in junior high.

  Nick pulls up in front of my house, but I don’t get out, and he doesn’t rush me. We have more to settle between us. He shifts into park.

  “What happened to Vanessa?” I ask. “I saw you together in the hall before we left school. . . .”

  “She went home.” No clues in his voice.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you she wanted to get back together. I should have. It’s just—”

  “Yeah, you should have,” he says.

  “Are you going back to her?”

  He rubs the steering wheel. Rain begins to spot the windshield. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “What about us? Are we—okay?”

  “I don’t know that, either.” He moves the side mirror again. “If I get back together with Vanessa, she doesn’t want me spending time with you. She says she doesn’t trust us alone.”

  “She doesn’t trust me,” I say.

  He doesn’t argue.

  “What about you? Do you trust me?”

  “I don’t know.” He hesitates. “On the trails, I do. There’s nobody I trust more on a mountain.”

  My hand slips into the knife pocket again—but, of course, it’s still empty. “If you go back to her, we won’t be able to hike together again.”

  “I k now.”

  The pain seems to split my stomach, chest, throat. I can’t imagine this whole part of my life closing off. I can’t imagine him giving it up, either. “And that’s okay with you?”

  “Look,” he says, his eyes on the dashboard, not on me. “Maybe Vanessa and I don’t have as much in common, but things aren’t complicated with her. She says what she wants. With you, it’s like—I’m all over the place. I don’t know what you want. I’m not sure you know what you want.”

  What do I want?

  I want to be beautiful, happy, loved. I want to feel like I belong in this world. I want to feel like I’m good enough to have all that.

  Something rings a bell in my mind when I think that. Something about being good enough. Because hasn’t Nick just sat here and told me that he’s not good enough for his father?

  What happens if I believe—or even pretend to believe—that I’m good enough?

  What if I can finally say the right thing to Nick at the right time?

  I breathe in. “I meant what I told you on Crystal. What I want is to hike with you.” My voice squeaks, but I keep going. “And talk to you. And watch your stupid basketball games. And kiss you.” Waves of embarrassment wash over me, drenching me. I have to unzip my coat. “And it would be nice if I weren’t so afraid of saying that to you, and it would be nice if you felt the same way, but that’s basically what I want.”

  I can’t bear to be in the car another minute. I burst out of the passenger side, out into a gray drizzle. He says, “Maggie, wait,” but I don’t. I run to my house.

  The door is locked. Dad’s not home yet, and Mom must have an afternoon shift. I fumble with my key, and then Nick is there on the step with me.

  “Maggie.”

  “If you’re going to give a nice little speech about how you like me but just not that way, or how I had my chance the day we climbed Eagle but it’s too late now, or how you’ve decided Vanessa is your soul mate after all . . . that’s okay, we can skip it.” The key finally turns.

  He follows me in. As usual, the living room is as dark as a closet.

  “Do you want me to say anything here, or do you just want to keep doing all the talking yourself?” he asks.

  When I don’t answer, he puts his hands on my shoulders and turns me to face him. I can’t meet his eyes.

  “Maggie.” But instead of saying more, he wraps his arms around me.

  I bury my face in his shirt.

  “Your heart’s beating,” I say. Maybe the most senseless piece of conversation ever, but it’s all I can think of: the rhythm beneath my ear.

  “Good to know.”

  I lift my head up. He brushes his lips against mine as if I might break under his touch.

  “Don’t do this unless you mean it,” I say.

  He kisses me again. The kiss deepens, his mouth hot, his tongue meeting mine. We press into each other. He kisses me until the room is whirling, until it hurts to stop.

  thirty

  After my mother comes home and Nick leaves, I go upstairs to call Sylvie. I’ve texted her a couple of times this afternoon, telling her that I’m sorry, that I care about her, that I’m ready to listen. Bu
t I want to talk to her—and most of all, to give her a chance to speak.

  I’m prepared to leave another apology on her voice mail if she doesn’t take my call, but she picks up. “How are you doing?” I say.

  “Not great.”

  “Sylvie, I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you more about Wendy. You’re right; I haven’t been there for you. I knew you were having some trouble, but I figured everything would turn out okay for you. I should’ve—”

  “Why did you think that?”

  Because I always assume everything turns out okay for everyone but me. I don’t say this to Sylvie, but it’s a shock to realize this is exactly how I see the world. Which means I go around thinking, You’re fine. You’re not me, so you will get what you want. Only now am I starting to question this, to see how screwedup and untrue it is. “I guess because you’re always on top of things . . . but I’m sorry I didn’t take your problems seriously. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  “Of course. I know how much Wendy meant to you.”

  Sylvie sobs. Then she gathers herself enough to say, “She said it’s too hard trying to be with someone who’s still in high school. That she’s taking courses in government and politics and philosophy, while I’m still hung up on ‘baby’ things like the high school yearbook.”

  “That’s so unfair.”

  “She said she’s meeting so many new people and discovering so many new ideas that she doesn’t want to be ‘stuck’ with one person right now. She wants to travel. I’m not growing up fast enough for her, or something.”

  “Uck.”

  “And the worst thing is, she kept saying, ‘No offense,’ before everything. Like that made it better. Like it would hurt less just because she put those two words in front.”

  I listen, offering sympathy where I can. I have no magical advice but I realize, as she goes on, that this is the most I’ve let her say in a long time. Maybe that’s worth more than any philosophical speeches I could come up with. I listen until she’s talked out.