A Sense of the Infinite

by Hilary T. Smith

  Noe had started to wear a tiny gold cross on a fine chain. You could barely make out its glimmer around her neck. She carried around a thick book called Foucault’s Pendulum and a pink travel mug with GAILER COLLEGE embossed on the side.

  Margot Dilforth had shocked everyone by making out with another girl at a St. Patrick’s Day party. Now they were walking around the halls arm in arm. I had never seen Margot Dilforth looking radiant before. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. Now she glowed.

  At lunch, I went to the nutritionist’s office, knocked, and walked in. He was knitting a green-and-white dog sweater and had a new audiobook playing. I saw the CD case on his desk: Entering Mist.

  The way to Master Tung’s house was up the twelve-peaked mountain . . .

  Bob didn’t bother to scramble for the stop button. He set his knitting down, leaned forward, and gently clicked the player off.

  “Annabeth,” he said. “What a surprise.”

  I tossed a small blue notebook onto his desk and plunked myself onto the creaky plastic chair.

  “I was thinking we could start over,” I said.

  He picked up the notebook and flipped through it. As he read through the columns, he began to sit up straighter. When he looked back at me, there was something like confidence in his face. He cleared his throat and adjusted the collar on his shirt.

  “So, Annabeth. How long have you had trouble eating?” he said.

  106

  I WASN’T TRYING TO STARVE MYSELF. I was just too sad to eat.

  Bob said that happened sometimes, when people got stressed.

  He said the main thing was learning to feel good again.

  “What would make you feel good?” he said.

  I didn’t have an answer for that, so mostly we ate Cheez-Its and listened to Entering Mist.

  107

  I STARTED GOING BY BOB’S OFFICE now and then when I got hungry. He kept a cardboard box full of trail mix packets outside the door. I felt like a bird visiting a bird feeder throughout the winter. I started making detours to go past the box throughout the day. Sometimes I was afraid it would be empty, but it never was. I tore into the packets as I hurried away, and inhaled the nuts and seeds so fast I couldn’t taste them.

  108

  ONE DAY, STEVEN CAUGHT ME PAWING through the trail mix box. I jerked away guiltily. We were the only two people in the hall.

  “Annabeth,” he said, and I bolted like a deer, unable to make myself look back.

  After that, there were sometimes chocolate éclairs in the box, and sometimes chili garlic peanuts, and sometimes neatly wrapped bowls of spinach-mushroom ravioli.

  Somehow, I was always able to eat the things that came from Steven, as if the charm of friendship was the one thing powerful enough to overcome the curse of the Stone King.

  109

  SPRING BREAK WAS COMING UP. STEVEN was going to Connecticut with his mom to visit his dying grandpa. In Art, I made a PEE SISTERS badge for him and sewed it into the sleeve of his sweater, just above the wrist. When he saw what I had done, he got to work on a badge for me. When we walked out, we both had neon-green hearts hidden under our cuffs. Before splitting up at the end of the hall, I gave him a big hug.

  “Take good care of your grandpa,” I said, before slipping away.

  110

  THE LAST TIME I HUNG OUT in Bob’s office before the break, we got to the part in Entering Mist where Wu goes to stay with a band of forest monks who rely on magical tree energy to stay alive. The tree energy is called “nwiffer,” and the monks absorb it by being somewhere green.

  When we got to that part in the audiobook, I blurted, “I used to be like that.”

  “Like what?” said Bob.

  “Full of nwiffer.”

  As I said it, I remembered a time before the monster. The feeling started in my toes and spread upward, a pale green leaping. I remembered the hush of wind in the treetops, and the striking red of Mom’s hat against the leaves. I remembered gazing at the mirror in my vain moments, so pleased with myself. So certain of my own valor. So certain.

  Bob said that my task for spring break was to get some nwiffer, and if I happened to eat more that would be a bonus.

  I spent the week walking all the old trails, letting the green feeling spread from my toes to my ankles to my knees. I sat by the river and listened to the water until my body seemed to disappear in the sound. I thought about everything that had happened that year, from the first morning of school, to the moment Oliver and I began to kiss in the orchid house, to the abortion, to the gym meet, and everything in between. As the memories rose to my mind, they seemed to flow through me and disappear with each new swirl in the river. Maybe this was what life was, just this: one big ripple. I could live with that. I could let it go on and on.

  In the evenings, Mom and I pored over the course catalog that Northern had sent, and talked on the phone with Ava and Pauline. Mom was thinking about going back to school to be a paramedic; one day her own fat envelope came in the mail, and we pored over that instead.

  111

  ON THE FIRST DAY BACK FROM spring break, Steven came to Art wearing a crown of daisies in his hair, and a chain of tiny bells around his ankle that he’d found on the street.

  “I just want to be springtime,” he said to me. “Don’t you?”

  He seemed floatier than usual, not quite okay. He wouldn’t answer my questions about his grandpa. Finally, I dragged him to the bathroom and sat him down on the edge of the sink.

  “Steven,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he sang, and then he dropped his head onto my shoulder and began to weep.

  112

  SPRING BREAK HAD BEEN A DISASTER.

  On his second day in Connecticut, Noe had chatted him, saying all this stuff about how concerned she and Darla were about Steven going off to NYU, and encouraging him to stay closer to home.

  “Concerned why?” I said.

  “I’m depressed,” he said. “Remember? If Noe’s not there to monitor me, I could tumble into a downward spiral and end up like my uncle.”

  “What’s wrong with your uncle?”

  “He’s a writer. He smokes pot. He wears pretty shoes.”

  “He sounds cool.”

  “He is.”

  After an hour and a half of discussing Steven’s “depression,” she’d finally gotten to the point: she’d gone for a walk with Senior Leader Alex and discovered the true meaning of romance.

  Steven took out his phone and showed me the chat transcript. I cringed, skimming the long exchange.

  we haven’t really been together since new years, Noe had said.

  what do you mean? Steven had said.

  what about the valentines ball?

  and that day we played chess in the library?

  and all the notes?

  you spent half the valentines thing at margot and dominic’s table

  i hardly even saw you

  and we haven’t kissed since rhiannon’s party

  we’ve hardly had lunch together since last semester

  i figured we’d reverted

  ?!?!?!

  “reverted”

  ?

  i thought it was mutual

  i didn’t think it needed some big discussion

  we said “i love you.”

  you don’t revert from “i love you” without a big discussion

  that’s what “i love you” means

  Steven’s tears and snot were soaking into my sweater. The daisies in his hair were getting crushed, the white petals curling in. I pulled the vial of lavender oil out of my pocket and quietly anointed him on the wrists, forehead, and heart, thinking that the mysterious thing about love is that you don’t have to know what you’re doing in order to do it exactly right.

  113

  I THOUGHT THAT STEVEN WOULD BE shattered by the sight of Noe and Alex holding hands in the hall and studying together in the library. Already, the gym birds were chirping abou
t them like they were the Couple of the Year. Every minute I wasn’t beside Steven, I was worrying about him. But after a few days, he actually seemed happier. There was a spring in his step, and a freshness to the way he clicked open his pencil box to draw. At lunch, he dragged me to a table where Win from my drama class was sitting.

  “You two should be friends,” he said. “Win, Annabeth. Annabeth, Win. You should do your one-act play together.”

  Win and I exchanged glances and mutually rolled our eyes as if to say, Crazy old Steven McNeil.

  “I’m serious,” said Steven. “You’re perfect for each other. You’re both insanely smart, you both love trees. You should write a play together. I demand it.”

  “What is this, Steven, your last will and testament?” joked Win.

  He said nothing, but put one of his hands on Win’s and one on mine and piled the hands together.

  “Be friends,” he said. “Sit together at lunch.”

  The cafeteria rattled around us. Sun poured through the window, the weak sun of almost-spring, slung low in the treetops. All I knew was I was happy to see Steven okay.

  For the next few days, Steven glowed brighter than ever. He shined his shoes. They glowed too. They looked like Magic 8 Balls. When we passed each other in the hall, he would slip his arm through mine and twirl me around. Or he would be singing a Gershwin song, and he would smile and widen his eyes at me without breaking pace. He didn’t seem like a boy who had just had his heart broken. He seemed like a boy in love. After he’d cried on my shoulder in the bathroom, I’d started to plan a whole consoling afternoon. I had an idea that we would skip art class and drink gin and smoke cigars and ride the SkyTram over the river. That seemed like a good post-breakup thing to do, a good distraction.

  But Steven didn’t seem like he needed distraction. His resilience threw me off. I didn’t know how to broach the subject of the breakup with him.

  At our newly founded lunch table, he seemed almost manic, piling up the salt and pepper shakers into towers twenty shakers tall. He talked incessantly, comic prattle about books and teachers and food and theater and the tutor his parents had hired to stop him from failing math. He didn’t mention Noe at all. It was like he had forgotten her, or was immune to her.

  I couldn’t imagine being immune to Noe.

  Even now, several weeks after the incident, I still winced when I passed her in the hall. I still felt a stab in my heart when my eyes fell on one of the ten thousand tokens of her that cluttered my desk and my bedroom walls, or when I overheard other girls making plans to go to Paris, or open funny restaurants together, or get matching tattoos on the day after graduation. It felt like a certain key bone in my skeletal system had been deleted, and I was still learning how to walk without it.

  Or maybe I’d been limping all along, and this was just what it felt like to find my stride.

  114

  WIN AND I STARTED SMILING AT each other in the halls, as if we had a shared joke and that joke was the ridiculousness that was Steven. It felt good to have another person to smile at in the hall; with Steven, that made two. I liked it. It wasn’t much, but it anchored me. I started looking forward to it. I started preparing funny expressions for when I passed Win. She started making goofy faces at me, too.

  It sort of became our thing. Goofy faces, no words.

  Steven caught us doing it once.

  “You two,” he said, and he sounded pleased.

  I didn’t suspect a thing.

  I really didn’t suspect a thing.

  115

  I HAD NO IDEA HOW WRAPPED around the rails Steven was about Noe until one afternoon in art class almost three weeks after he and Noe had broken up. He seemed miraculously intact. Like a friendly universe had granted him a reprieve. I’d seen him campaigning for Pee Sisters in the hall, accompanying this freshman named Kris to the boys’ bathroom, playing matchmaker like crazy. It wasn’t just me and Win. He spent lunch flitting around the cafeteria, introducing everybody he knew to someone they had to meet. It was like he wanted everyone he cared about to be provided for.

  That should have been a sign.

  116

  IN THE ART MORGUE THAT AFTERNOON, I was feeling better than I had in a long time. Mr. Lim had given my latest self-portrait a pass. Steven had drawn it for me one day at lunch, and it was pretty good.

  “What should I call it?” I’d said when he ripped it out of his sketchbook and passed it to me across the table. “Portrait of the Artist as a Cheater?”

  “The assignment said any medium,” Steven replied. “In this case, your medium happened to be me.”

  Steven was wearing a black suit and a black tie. His polished shoes shone under the table. I thought he was dressed that way for something in his drama class. Maybe he was doing a monologue or a one-act play.

  “Good morning, Annabeth,” he said.

  “Good morning, Steven.”

  “I’d like you to have this,” Steven said. He took out the small red mood journal the school counselor was making him carry around.

  “Why?” I said.

  I noticed he’d drawn a circle around his pinky finger in blue pen. I didn’t think anything of it. Steven was always writing stuff on his hands.

  “Annabeth Schultz,” said Steven. “It’s been a pleasure knowing you.”

  He pushed his chair out from the table and stood up.

  “Steven?” I said.

  He strode to the long counter where the art supplies were kept. Everyone else had their heads down, working on their paintings. Mr. Lim was marking midterms for his human kinetics class. There was a pleasant hum of industry to the art morgue. Outside the windows, cars were splashing by on the main road. The plastic board outside the Burger King said WHOPPERS 2 X $1.99 CENTS. The funeral parlor still had a Christmas wreath on its front door. I was thinking how sad it was that nobody had taken it down when I heard a thwack and Amy McDougall started to scream.

  117

  HE HAD CUT OFF HIS FINGER. His pinky finger. The one he used to link with Noe’s all the time. It shot across the classroom and landed near the recycle bins. If I wasn’t sitting right near them, I wouldn’t have heard the barely audible tap as it hit the floor.

  The art morgue was chaos. Ernestine’s ruled cutting surface had blossomed with comically perfect splatters of blood. Steven calmly produced a white handkerchief from his pocket, which he had apparently brought for the purpose, and pressed it to the bleeding stub. Amy McDougall was shrieking.

  Mr. Lim shouted at everyone who wasn’t Steven to leave the classroom. I pushed toward Steven, but Mr. Lim said, “Out!” and then the principal and security guard showed up and they started hustling everyone out of the classroom, too. On my way out, I ducked and fished Steven’s finger out from behind the recycle bins. It had landed in something sticky. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I wrapped it in a few tissues from one of the little packets Mom always stuck in my backpack during cold season and put it in my pocket.

  In the hall, everyone was milling around like at halftime during a hockey game.

  “Shit, did you see that?” people kept saying. Everyone was crowded around the tiny frosted window in the door, trying to see in. You could hear the principal and Mr. Lim’s voices, talking to Steven. After a minute, there was an ambulance siren outside. Before I could figure out what to do, Mr. Beek came stomping out of the room.

  “Get your butts to the library,” he roared.

  I hung back. I’ve never been good at talking to teachers, but with Steven’s finger in my pocket I figured it was pretty urgent.

  “Library,” he barked. “Move it along.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Move it along, Ms. Schultz,” he said. “Steven will be fine.”

  “Um,” I said. “But I need to give his—”

  The doors at the end of the hallway burst open and some ambulance people walked in. Mr. Beek clapped his hands.

  “Anyone NOT signed in at the library within the next ten se
conds will get to spend their next ten lunch periods in my office.”

  “I have his finger,” I said. “What should I do with it?”

  “Go to the library,” he said. “Mr. Ternary will give you instructions for the rest of the period.”

  “No, but—”

  I could tell he wasn’t listening. But what was I supposed to do? Everything was confusion. Everyone started rushing for the library and somehow I got pulled along. I had a vague idea I would tell the librarian about Steven’s finger, but the library was confusion too, with everyone crowding around the table to sign in. I sat in a chair by the newspapers and waited for the line to die down, but I started reading King Lear, and the bell was ringing for next period, and I had a midterm in that class and couldn’t be late, and somehow I forgot Steven’s finger until I was halfway home and put my hands in my pockets to warm them up and felt it there in its bundle of tissue.

  I ran the rest of the way home and called Steven’s house.

  Darla answered the phone.

  “It’s Annabeth,” I said. “I have Steven’s finger.”

  You would be surprised how good some people are at swearing.

  118

  IT TURNS OUT IT WAS TOO late to save Steven’s finger. I guess you’re supposed to put it on ice right away. By the time I called Steven’s house, the finger was gray and dead and waxy like a candle stub.

  To say that it felt weird to have Steven McNeil’s dismembered finger in my pocket would be the understatement of the year.

  I felt guilty about the finger. I could tell Steven’s parents were upset. They tried not to show it, but questions kept popping out.