Until It Hurts to Stop

  I look down at my jeans. Raleigh always said my knees were too knobby, so I hide them as much as possible. But maybe hiking has built up my leg muscles?

  Or maybe Sylvie’s only being nice.

  She scrolls through her messages again, frowning. “Wendy didn’t text me yesterday, either.”

  But my mind is on the party, on trying to prepare for it any way I can. “What do you know about Vanessa?”

  “She’s on a couple of committees with me—she organized the bake sale. And she helps me out with math sometimes.” Sylvie starts typing. “I’m going to see if I can get ahold of Wendy.”

  I was hoping to hear something juicier about Vanessa— anything to indicate she’s less than perfect. Even just an embarrassing nickname. But Sylvie isn’t much of a gossip, even if she knew anything scandalous about Vanessa.

  I chew on the sweet white end of a grass stem, thinking about Vanessa and her invitation, while Sylvie tries to reach Wendy.

  The game breaks up. After Nick and Luis suck down water from the fountain, they join us. Even though I didn’t watch much of the game or track the score, I can tell they won by all the strutting and grinning. “Good rebounding, Luis,” Sylvie says.

  “ Somebody has to get the rebounds.” Luis pokes an elbow into Nick.

  “Hey, I don’t need to get that close to the basket to make a shot.”

  “The only reason you take all those outside shots is that you can’t make a layup.”

  “The reason I take all those outside shots is that I make them.”

  And on they go, their bickering even louder and happier than usual because they were both on the winning team. I used to hate this kind of back-and-forth; it seemed nasty to me. And perhaps there is an edge to it, some real competition between them, but now I think this is the way Nick and Luis show how tight they are—maybe the only way they can show it.

  Sylvie says good-bye. I get in the car with the guys, the air thick with testosterone. They take apart the winning plays, analyzing how they broke down the other team’s defenses. If they could bring this much insight to the actions and motives of world leaders, they’d have lifetime jobs in the State Department. They talk basketball nonstop until we drop off Luis.

  I get in the front seat. “Can you maybe forget about the game for a minute?”

  Nick laughs. “I can try, but I’m not promising anything.”

  “Guess who wants to see you at her party Friday night.”

  “Tilman?”

  Mrs. Tilman is the school principal. “Ha. No, Vanessa Webb.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Do you know her? She invited both of us, but it was obvious you were the main attraction.”

  “We had the same English class last year.” Nick pauses, taking a sharp corner. “Do you want to go?”

  “Not really.”

  “It could be fun.”

  I suck in my breath. “Are you saying you want to go?” “I don’t know. Maybe. Why not?”

  “It’s not exactly our crowd.”

  He laughs again. “We have a crowd?”

  “Well, no—that’s my point.”

  We go to Nick’s house and slog through our homework, taking turns at his computer. I get it first while he showers off his basketball sweat. Afterward, we lie on his bed together, watching TV. I’m careful to leave several inches of space between us, preserving our just-friends pact.

  During one of the commercials, I bring up the question that’s been bothering me since our ride home. “Why do you want to go to Vanessa’s party?”

  It’s easier to ask those kinds of questions when you’re both staring at something besides each other.

  “How come you don’t want to?” he asks after a long pause.

  “It’ll be so crowded. And you know I don’t like to drink.”

  “You don’t have to,” he says. “I won’t be drinking much, either, since I’ll be driving.”

  “I still don’t see why you want to go. You’re not usually that big on—how shall I say this—people.” Other than me, Nick’s social circle consists mainly of guys who have one thing in common: they play basketball. Not that they don’t party. But a few beers after a game is a lot different from being invited, several days in advance, to go to someone’s house. I’m trying to picture Nick, in his boots and holey jeans, stomping into Vanessa’s tree-shaded, columned house.

  “I want to get out for a change.” He taps the mattress. “Come on, we’ll both go. And if you stay over here that night, we can drive out to Crystal first thing Saturday.”

  “I could stay over without going to the party.”

  “True. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

  Well, if he’s determined to go, I’m not going to sit home preparing for my solitary future of having tea parties for my ten cats. I don’t want him to leave me completely behind while he tries out the junior-class party scene. “No, I’ll come with you,” I say. “Someone has to keep you out of trouble.”

  “Good.” He shifts on the bed beside me, and I can hear him breathing. He picks up the remote, because a commercial has come on. Nick refuses to watch two minutes of advertising if he can use that time to click through fifty other channels instead.

  “Nick,” I say, keeping my voice light, “people don’t actually die from watching commercials.”

  “You mean nobody’s died yet.”

  My eyes stray from the flashing screen to the map and photo on the wall: the jagged tooth of the Crystal Mountain summit, higher and sharper than that of Eagle. On Crystal, we’ll be alone together—back to our old selves, our old bond, the special world we’ve created with and for each other. If only I can get through this party first.

  thirteen

  After school on Thursday, Nick and Luis play another basketball game while I do homework in the grass near the court. The guys play hard, shoving and laughing, pivoting, faking one another out. Nick and Luis revel in it, pushing for every edge, striving to get the ball exactly where they want it even if they end up bruised. I still prefer hiking, where there’s nothing to fight, and there’s only the trail to test yourself against.

  Along with the occasional snake and rainstorm.

  As the fall sports teams finish their practices, the football players, cross-country runners, and soccer players straggle back toward the building. The guys on the basketball court end their game. They cluster around the water fountain, jostling and joking, and I gather my books.

  Raleigh Barringer pauses at the fountain on her way back from the soccer field, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. The guys move aside for her; I wish I knew why. If I got up for a drink, they’d tell me to get in line.

  After drinking, she straightens and says to Luis, “Nice shorts, Morales.” Luis likes bright colors—today it’s electric orange.

  He grins and turns his back to her. Over his shoulder, he says, “Enjoy the view. It’s not the shorts that count; it’s what’s in the shorts that counts.”

  Everyone laughs, including Raleigh, who says, “Will you be showing us that next?”

  “If you insist.” He reaches for his waistband.

  Half the guys groan or say, “No! Don’t take ’em off!” while the other half hoot and urge him on. “Give the people what they want!”

  Luis pulls his waistband down maybe an inch while he watches Raleigh, both of them laughing, him daring her to tell him to stop. But she crosses her arms and stands her ground, and even taps her foot with mock impatience.

  “Nobody needs to see that.” Nick elbows Luis. “Come on, you want a ride home or not?”

  “Aw, Nick, there you go, spoiling all the fun,” Raleigh says.

  My nerves prickle at the sound of his name in her voice. Nick and Luis didn’t go to our junior high. How has she learned everyone’s names so quickly?

  “That’s my job,” Nick says.

  “You got that right,” Luis says.

  “Just for that, you can ride on the roof,” Nick tells him.

/>   When they pass Raleigh, she says, “See you later,” in a way that makes it sound like a real promise, instead of the throwaway line it usually is.

  As Nick and Luis come toward me, the other guys cluster around her. “Say something in Italian, Raleigh.”

  She obliges, syllables rolling off her tongue like music.

  “What’s that mean?” They hang on her words, tantalized. She draws them toward her like fish on a line.

  And then she snaps the line, laughing.

  “It means, ‘I want to buy some cheese.’” With that, she waves at them and walks away.

  I wait until after we’ve dropped off Luis to ask Nick, “How do you know Raleigh?”

  “She’s in my gym class.”

  I fight not to ask, because I know it sounds paranoid, but I can’t stop myself. “Do you talk to her a lot?”

  “No.” He stops for a light. “Maggie, she’s no threat to you. Junior high’s over.”

  “That’s what I thought . . . until she showed up here.” It’s bad enough to see her in the halls, in the cafeteria. But it’s worse to see her at Sylvie’s, or to watch her flirt with Luis and Nick at the water fountain. It’s like she’s infiltrating my circle, small as it is. Is that her plan—to cut me off from my friends, the way a wolf cuts a weak deer from the herd?

  If anyone should understand, it’s Nick. Because our friendship started in the depths of the Raleigh Years.

  Nick went to Eastern District Junior High, and I went to West End. At first, we were just two kids whose mothers were friends. Back then, my mom had to work a lot of afternoon shifts and Phoebe didn’t, so I went to Nick’s house after school.

  We sometimes made halfhearted stabs at our homework, but mostly we raided the kitchen. One afternoon in seventh grade, I was eating cookies. They were chocolate mint cookies with a fudgy coating, and as I rolled that richness over my tongue I wondered how it could be so good while the rest of my life was so horrible. And I began to cry. I wasn’t sobbing outright, but I knew by the sudden salt in my mouth, and the way the kitchen blurred, that tears were creeping down my face.

  “What’s wrong?” Nick asked.

  I shook my head. Nick didn’t push, but he didn’t walk away from it, either. He could have shrugged it off or changed the subject. But he waited for me to tell him.

  “It’s those bitches at school,” I said at last, and rubbed the wetness off my face. I licked chocolate crumbs from my teeth.

  He’d probably already gathered that I was on the fringes at my school, but Nick didn’t worry about things like that, about popularity and the social pecking order. Even if we’d gone to the same school, he might not have seen everything that was happening. His other friends were boys, boys he played basketball with. Sometimes I was amazed at how the guys at school seemed to live in a totally different world from the girls. They didn’t know much about our fights and gossip, our alliances and broken friendships.

  “Raleigh Barringer and Adriana Lippold worst of all,” I said. “I wish they would die.”

  Nick played with a twist tie someone had left on the table, bending it, knotting it.

  “They never stop picking on me. They go after me in the hall, in the girls’ room, everywhere. They have a page about me online. They had another one before, and I complained to the host site and got it taken down, but they started up the same thing somewhere else. They make up lies about me. They tell me I’d be better off dead.”

  Nick twisted the tie into a corkscrew shape, a helix.

  “I’ve been reading about these poisonous mushrooms, and I keep imagining how I could sneak toadstools into their lunch and have them die in front of the whole school, their faces turning blue and their muscles cramping up—”

  The words spilled out. I seldom talked this way because people (especially adults) always acted so shocked, so disapproving, if I said anything angry. But Nick leaned forward.

  “Do poison mushrooms really turn your face blue?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “The book doesn’t say.” “But it tells you which ones are poison?”

  “Yeah. Well, not all of them. Some of them, people aren’t sure. And some people eat mushrooms that other people call poisonous.”

  He was still leaning forward, so I showed him the book. We paged through it, searching for all the fungi marked poisonous. Picturing the death throes of Raleigh and Adriana gave me a coziness in my stomach, even better than the cookies.

  Or that’s what I thought then. Now I think that what made me feel better was the fact that Nick listened to me, that he understood, that he didn’t tell me I was awful for thinking this way.

  “You know I’m not serious,” I told him, suddenly alarmed at how much I’d said, when the time came for me to go home. Would he tell his mother—or even worse, mine? Would he rat me out, get me expelled from school for threatening other students? “I wouldn’t really poison anyone.”

  “Yeah, I know that,” he said.

  My skin was damp with nervousness by then, my gut churning. Raleigh and Adriana told me a thousand times a day that they wanted me to die. They threatened to break my arms, burn me, and scar my skin. They told me I should kill myself. And yet when I fantasized about poisoning them, I felt guilty.

  The worst thing Raleigh and the other girls did was to plant that lump of coal inside me, the shame of believing I was the wrong one, wrong in every way. After all, there must be something wrong with me or why else would they be picking on me?

  But Nick never told anyone what I’d said. I didn’t know why he understood how I felt. I only knew that Nick did understand, and from then on he was not just the guy whose house I had to stay at while my mother worked. From then on, we were friends.

  So I don’t know how he can say that Raleigh isn’t a real threat to me. I open my mouth to argue with him, when his phone goes off. Beethoven’s Seventh rings out like a bad omen, a warning.

  Nick groans. “Will you get that? Tell him I’m driving.” He shoves the phone at me.

  “Why don’t you let it go to voice mail?”

  “He hates voice mail.”

  Only Nick’s father could try to deny a fact of life as ingrained as voice mail, but I answer the phone. “Hello?”

  “Who’s this?” Nick’s father booms.

  “It’s Maggie, Dr. Cleary. Nick’s driving right now.”

  “He couldn’t pull over? Never mind. Tell him I can’t take him to dinner tonight after all. My idiot post-doc screwed up a month’s worth of data, and I’m going to be working all night.”

  “Okay.”

  “But tell him to text me about how he’s doing in history. I want to know what’s going on there.”

  “I will.”

  “Good. Thank you, Margaret.” Dr. Cleary hangs up before I can say good-bye. Or anything else.

  I pass on the message to Nick, who says, “That breaks my heart, that I can’t spend the whole night getting grilled about my history grade.”

  “Aw, don’t worry, Nick. I can grill you about your history grade if you want.”

  “Sounds like a fun night.”

  “Seriously, though—if you want help, I could work with you. I got an A in Connard’s class last year.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  That night, when we’re going over the causes of the Great Depression at his kitchen table, I lean over to point out a date on the time line in his book. When he looks up from the page, we’re eye to eye, our faces close enough to kiss. He draws back, and as soon as he does, I do, too, so I’m not left leaning in toward him as if I expect something. We can barely look at each other for another half hour or so.

  And it’s like a slap, because before last weekend, that awkwardness was never there. As much as I wish he would’ve leaned in toward me just now, I would settle for his not springing away from me as if I’ve scalded him.

  He gets up to hunt for something to eat, and trips over some books he piled behind his chair, knocking them across the floor. He says, “Fo
r my next trick, I’ll use my athletic skill to scale Crystal Mountain.”

  We laugh, and I help him pick up the books, and we ease back into our old selves. Yet I wonder how many times we’re going to stumble over moments like these, how long it’s going to take to get all the way back to normal—if normal is even possible.

  fourteen

  Nick and I are on our way to Vanessa’s party. My nerves tighten when he turns onto Ridgway, the curving road leading to her house. I can tell that he has just showered—the dampness of his hair, the scent of soap—and it seems strange for the two of us to be out after dark, as clean as if it’s morning. I’m chewing a cinnamon candy because someone once told me it was better for your breath than mint, and my shoulders are cold. I shouldn’t have worn a shirt this thin, but I saw the same shirt on a girl at school, so I figured it would fit in at the party. If only Sylvie hadn’t been preoccupied with her cousin’s wedding tonight, I could’ve asked her what to wear. As it was, I texted her about forty times today.

  I spent the afternoon playing the darkest, most powerful piano pieces I could find, in the hope that it would give me confidence. When I was able to play my final song without a single mistake, I told myself it was a sign that the party would go all right. I’m trying to hold on to the music, but already it’s slipping away, drowned out by the growl of the car engine.

  Nick parks on the street behind a long line of cars. Every light in Vanessa’s house is on. My fingers go cold as we walk up to her front door. Music pulses behind that door, a faint thump I feel in my feet and deep inside my ears. I tell myself, “Fun, this is supposed to be fun,” in a desperate attempt to lighten up. But I can’t shake the feeling I’m walking into a trap, a prison.

  With this attitude, I ought to be the queen of the party. Funseeking people always flock to the girl wearing the grimace of endurance! If only I could channel Sylvie.

  Nick tries the door, and it’s unlocked. We step into a room smelling of sweat and beer, crammed with bodies. The music makes my fillings vibrate. Luis is already there, beer in hand, in a bright green shirt that reminds me of lime Popsicles. He hugs me while I decide it’s a good omen that he’s the first person I see. Maybe this won’t be so bad.