Until It Hurts to Stop (2 page)

Bio is my last class of the day. The teacher, Mr. Thornhart, is discombobulated because the guys in the back of the room have been throwing around stray worm parts during the dissection labs. And so he’s decided to reshuffle the lab partners, pairing up everyone himself. He’s like some deranged matchmaker who hasn’t bothered to find out our most basic traits, except which of us are more likely than others to use worm parts as projectiles.

“Margaret Camden and Adriana Lippold.” He taps the table where we’re supposed to sit.
Adriana and I both freeze. Then she takes her seat, keeping her eyes on the lab bench.
“Margaret? Did you hear me?” Thornhart asks.
I consider not moving. I would rather stick my hand in a toaster than work with the girl who was Raleigh Barringer’s best friend back in junior high—and still is, for all I know. I may be a year older today, but the world seems to be doing its best to stuff me back into eighth grade.
Thornhart’s already moving on, announcing the next happy couple. I grab my books and edge into the seat next to Adriana, not looking at her.
“I can’t believe he put us together,” she mutters.
I grunt.
“You don’t have to act like it’s such a burden to you, though,” she goes on. “I’m sure I can find my way around a worm as well as you can.”
I tighten my fingers around my pen.
What does she mean by that? “As well as you can,” in that vinegar voice of hers?
I raise an eyebrow at her and let her interpret that any way she wants.
We take turns at the microscope, exchanging the slides we’ve already viewed for the ones we haven’t, silence thick between us. I sneak glances at Adriana, trying to gauge the danger. She has plucked her eyebrows in a high, arched shape, so they swoop across her forehead like bird wings. Her lipstick is pale pink—an innocent, harmless color.
But that pale-pink mouth is the same one that sneered at me back in junior high, that said I was ugly, that any boy would puke rather than touch me. It’s the same mouth that laughed when Raleigh Barringer said I should hang myself, because nobody wanted me at school where I could turn the stomachs of normal people.
Adriana and I say nothing to each other now. The glass slides scrape the benchtop as we pass them back and forth. And I wonder if Thornhart has any clue what a spectacularly bad idea it was to put us together.

three

After school, Luis Morales and I sit in Nick’s car, waiting for Nick to start the engine. This takes a while, because Nick is plowing through layers of dirty clothes and empty cracker boxes on the floor to find a half-full bag of chocolate chip cookies he remembers stashing there at some point. I slip my hand into my pocket and stroke the sleek surface of my new knife, wishing it had a cookie locator—maybe in between the screwdriver and the nail file. All I want is to get off school grounds, to put as much distance as possible between Raleigh Barringer and myself. “Nick, it’s a ten-minute ride. You can’t drop us off first and
then
hunt for your cookies?”

“Hey, I want some cookies, too,” Luis says.
“What the hell is this?” Nick holds up a shard of plastic. “You sure it wasn’t holding the car together?” Luis says, laughing.

Nick tosses it onto the backseat next to me, and follows it with a hat I don’t remember ever seeing him wearing. I hope there are no jockstraps buried in the mess.

The car doesn’t smell nearly as bad as you might expect, given how much junk is piled in here. I suppose everything’s been here so long, it has all dried out. Like the petrified French fry on the floor at my feet. (At least I’m pretty sure it’s a French fry.)

“I’d like to get out of here before it’s time to climb Eagle,”

I say.
“Climb Eagle?” Luis asks. “What do you want to do that for?”
“For fun,” Nick says. We would invite Luis to hike with us—have invited him, in fact—but Luis would rather stick needles in his eyes. He doesn’t see the point of trekking out into the woods, where there isn’t even a store or a coffee shop or any music. The vacant lot near school is enough of a wilderness for him.
“Found ’em!” Nick pulls out a crumpled bag and peers inside. “Yeah, still some left.” He holds out the bag. “You first, Maggie. Since it’s your birthday and all.”
“It’s your birthday?” Luis says. “Hey, happy birthday, Maggie. How old are you?”
“Seventeen.” I hand back the bag. “Now Nick can’t keep bragging that he’s older than I am.”
“I’ll always be older than you.”
“By only four months!”
He laughs. “And way more mature.”
“Yeah, you’re very old and wise. You’re practically sprouting gray hair.”
Nick finally starts the car, his mouth full of cookies. I pull out my
Guide to Northeastern Trails
, which I sometimes read during study halls. The pages call up hikes I’ve done with Nick—and before that, with him and Perry. The thunder of White Horse Falls, where Nick and I crept over mossy stones, closer and closer to the spray, until the mist soaked our faces and shirts. The sunset over Cannon Lake, the sky turning rose and orange and then purpling into night. The stars we saw on a December’s moonlight hike with Perry, like ice crystals frozen in a blue-black sky. I breathe in, half expecting to smell that wintry air, pure and sweet with the cold, but instead I get the stale heat of a closed car in September. I flip past these familiar hikes to the section on Eagle Mountain.

A gem of the Porte Range. Although sections of the trail require scrambling, using hands as well as feet, no mountaineering equipment (ropes, axes) is necessary. Several areas of smooth rock are exceptionally steep and should not be attempted in wet weather. Knife-edge ridges and dizzying ledges may daunt the casual hiker, but the spectacular views are well worth the climb.

Knife-edge ridges and dizzying ledges. “Have you read this hike description, Nick?”
“Yeah. Sounds good, right?”
“It’s not going to rain this weekend, is it?” I snap my knife open and closed.

“Why?” Luis asks, eyeing my hands. “You gonna cut some body if it does?”
“Yeah, she’s gonna stab them with a two-inch blade,” Nick snorts.

I end up at Nick’s, where we often go if he doesn’t play basketball after school. He has a photo and a topographic map of a mountain called Crystal on his bedroom wall. I study the harsh gray rock of its summit, cold and barren as the moon. Surely Eagle will be gentler than that? Crystal’s in the Cinnamon Range, a couple of hours to our north, but Eagle’s in the Porte range, the smaller mountains to our south.

I flop onto the bed and stare at the ceiling. I have a choice of two pictures in my mind: the “exceptionally steep” slopes of Eagle, which I can only imagine, or Raleigh Barringer’s sneer. Terrific.

“Anything good up there?” Nick says, lying down beside me. “Um,” I say, wanting and not wanting to talk about Raleigh, to spill out the fear that’s been locked in my chest all afternoon. Instead, I ask, “You sure you want to climb a mountain?”

“Yeah. Don’t you?”
We’ve always craved new adventures, always driven each other.
Let’s hike farther. Let’s try this hike in winter. Let’s do the loop 
and
the spur this time.
I like the power that comes from pushing myself harder than I thought I could . . . but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Nick either worries less than I do about failing, or else he hides it better.

“Oh, absolutely,” I say. “I also want to whack myself on the head with a hammer.”
He laughs. “You’ll love it. Three or four hours of climbing straight up. You can start thinking now about how you’re going to thank me.”
I poke him in the stomach. He flinches but laughs again. When my hand moves in for another jab, he grabs my wrist. “Watch it,” he teases. I try to spring on top of him, but he holds me off easily. In fact, he’s still laughing while holding me up above him, which is downright insulting.
“I need to take karate or something,” I pant.
“I’ll teach you.”
Our voices drop as he lowers me closer to him. Our eyes are fixed on each other, watching for sudden moves.
“You don’t know karate,” I say.
“That could be a problem.”
Nick is one of the few people I can look in the face, but now there’s a new kind of danger between us, a charge that makes me want to squirm. I want to sink the rest of the way down on top of him, and at the same time I want to push away, to leap off the bed in embarrassment. I’ve lost track of what we were saying. Something about . . . karate?
His phone rings. “I should get that,” he says, not moving. “Yeah, you should.”
But it’s another moment before he rolls me off him and leans over to grab his phone. “Yeah,” he answers.
I can’t hear the words on the other end, but I hear the voice, rising and falling, flooding the phone. I would know who it is even if the ringtone hadn’t tipped me off—a snippet of Beethoven’s Seventh, one of Nick’s father’s favorite pieces. “Yeah,” Nick says, every minute or so. “Uh-huh. Yes.”
While I wait for him to finish, my eyes roam through the room. I’ve seen everything in here a thousand times before: the heaps of laundry on the chair and floor. The backpack and water bottles and the rest of his hiking gear in the corner. The faded blue-and-brown quilt beneath us, with a smear of dirt from when Nick forgets to take off his boots before he lies down.
I can’t help wondering what would’ve happened if the phone hadn’t rung. If we’d kept lying face-to-face, if the gap between us had narrowed to nothing.
I’ve only kissed one boy before, and it was about as romantic as flossing my teeth. On Christmas Eve in eighth grade, Carl Gurney kissed me in the church parking lot while our parents were busy talking. Since Carl didn’t go to my school, he didn’t know how much of an outcast I was, how I’d expected to be unkissed forever.
The whole thing was over before I realized what was happening. “Merry Christmas,” he gasped, before planting his rubbery lips on my mouth. A few days later, his family moved to South Africa. I thought maybe he’d kissed me
because
he was moving away—kind of a last chance, something he’d dared himself to do.
That’s my entire history of success with the opposite sex. So it’s hard to believe that Nick and I are on the verge of sudden passion.
“I haven’t thought about that yet,” Nick says into the phone. “No, Dad . . . that’s not realistic.”
If I’m going to lust after any guy, it should probably be Luis. He’s warm and open and not too hard for me to talk to. We both like music; he moves as if he always hears it playing inside his head. He has smooth skin, full lips, an easy smile.
But he’s
too
gorgeous, with a perfection that has no rough edges to grab on to. Nick is more average looking: dark hair, brown eyes. Neither ugly nor swooningly handsome. So tall that he sometimes doesn’t know what to do with his knees and elbows—though that’s mostly indoors. Outdoors, he’s always at home. On the trails or a basketball court, he fits.
“Dad, it’s not the money.  .  .  .” Nick taps the mattress. “I mean, it’s not
just
the money. . . .”
Not that I should be lusting after him, either. It could derail our whole friendship.
Looking for distraction, I reach over the side of the bed, dig through my backpack, and find my mushroom guide.
I’ve always found mushrooms more interesting than birds or insects or anything else we see on the trails. Maybe it’s the fact that some mushrooms are edible, and others can kill you— it’s that wild contrast, that sense of risk. There’s also the fact that mushrooms stand still long enough to let you identify them. Unlike, say, birds.
“It has nothing to do with Mom,” Nick says. “Don’t—” He stops abruptly, holds the phone away from him, and stares at it. “Oh, go ahead, take that call,” he says to the air. He clicks off the phone and drops it.
“That sounded like fun,” I say.
“Sometimes I wonder how a guy as smart as he is can keep pretending I have an Ivy League future.”
“Why do you think you don’t?”
“You’ve met me, right?” He takes the book from my hand, his fingers brushing my skin, and flips through the pages of the guide. I’ve shown him its mushrooms before: some edible, some poisonous. “Are there any in here that make parents see reality?” he says.
“There should be.” Unable to forget the worst part of my day—homing in on it the way you poke at a sore spot—I say, “And there should be one to send Raleigh Barringer back where she came from.”
“Yeah, I heard Sylvie mention her. I’ve seen her around. Is she one of the ones who—”
“Yes.”
Nick and I didn’t go to the same junior high, but our moms are nurses at the same hospital, and he met me during the Raleigh Years. He knows I used to daydream about feeding Raleigh toadstool stew.
“I know what you could use,” he says. He rests the mushroom guide on the bed, gets up, and pulls his backpack out of the corner of the room. He sets it beside the bed and opens the zippers. Its compartments gape, ready to be packed. “Just keep thinking about Saturday.”
It’s a sign, a promise. In spite of my doubts, I can’t wait to set my feet on the trail. Our eyes lock long enough for an awkward silence to build between us, and then we both look away. A thrill rises in me, part fear and part joy, sparked by that look, and the open pack on the floor, and the knife in my pocket.

four

After a birthday dinner with my parents (my favorite roast chicken; Mom singing loudly off-key after a single glass of wine; Dad carrying in the coconut cake he picked up at the bakery), I go up to my room and call Sylvie.

“Hey, Maggie—can you tell me why cotangents are important? Will I ever need to know this again?” She sighs. “I’m drowning in homework.”

“So am I, but I’m putting it off as long as possible.” “Well, I’m trying to get through this so I can go out with Wendy. I haven’t seen her in a week.”

Wendy is Sylvie’s girlfriend. She goes to Hollander University and is about a thousand times more sophisticated than I am. She never looks sloppy, even in sweats. She already knows three languages, thanks to her family’s globe-circling lifestyle, and is learning a fourth. She knows where to stay in Nairobi, how to navigate the streets and canals of Venice, what to eat in Buenos Aires, and what the exchange rate is in Mumbai. Once when Sylvie and I visited her dorm, she was lying there reading a book about the global causes of economic inequalities—and not for a class, either. Just because she wanted to.