Until It Hurts to Stop (6 page)

Now I take refuge on the couch again. Only this time, I’m not miserable. This time, I’m thinking,
So this is what it feels like to get what you want.

Mom and I eat dinner alone, since Dad’s working late at the power company. The storm must’ve caused outages somewhere; bad weather usually earns him overtime. When I was little, and he talked about the endless demands of “the grid,” I pictured it as a huge beast—like a lion, incredibly powerful and always hungry.

We microwave a couple of trays of food and eat in the living room. PBS has a special on, featuring famous moments from all the old movies Mom loves.

During the pledge-drive break, she mutes the TV. “I need your college list, Maggie,” she reminds me.
We’ve been talking about this list a lot lately. Mom wants us to visit schools this year, so I’ll be ready to apply early in my senior year. She’s been planning my college education since I popped out of the womb. Not that I mind, on one level. Whenever I go with Sylvie to visit Wendy at the university, I revel in the library, the giant bookstore, the wide yards where people sit reading or arguing about things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. And though there are plenty of beer cans strewn around, college seems like a place where it’s okay to admit you have a brain.
I’ve already decided that I want to live away from home, and that I want someplace strong in math and science, but where I can also take music as an elective. Maybe a big school, where one small clique can’t rule the campus.
But that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Wanting to go to college isn’t the same as filtering the flood of information, figuring it all out, reading about the majors and degrees and activities and requirements, making the choices. If I could snap my fingers and be transported to the right school, it would be one thing, but what if I choose wrong? What if I pick the wrong major and realize I hate what I’m studying, or discover that the professors are boring and out of touch, or learn that there are no jobs in the field? What if I end up at a place ruled by people like Raleigh and Adriana? What if the school is too big and I just feel lost?
Not that I can explain this to my mother, who never has trouble with any new situation herself—such as the block’s yard sale, for which she became the committee chair after one meeting. Or the church volunteer program, which led to her being named “Helping Hand of the Year,” complete with walldominating plaque of appreciation.
“I’m working on it,” I tell her.
“Don’t put it off too long. We want to get our schedule set up.” The show comes back on, and Mom punches up the volume.
The next segment they’re showing is Great Movie Kisses.
Actors and actresses hurl themselves at one another: clinging arms, open mouths. Bare pecs, bulging biceps, delicate female throats and shoulders. Men bend over their partners; the women arch backward. A couple rolls in the ocean surf. We’re subjected to one lip-lock after another, every one of them throwing me back to that moment when Nick’s mouth met mine. I feel that kiss again, taste it.
Fortunately, Mom is looking at the screen, not at me, or she might ask why all the blood is migrating to my face.
As soon as the TV couples stop making out, I jump up. “Guess I’ll go upstairs.”
“Already? It’s early.”
“Yeah, I’ll read for a while.”
Safe in my room, I check my messages, sure there will be one from Nick. I can’t wait to read it.
But there are none.

In junior high, Raleigh and Adriana used to tell me, “No boys will ever go out with you. Nobody could ever like you.” Always laughing, shrieking. Whenever I hear girls laugh high and loud like that, it still makes me shudder.

And it’s their voices I hear now, looking at my empty message box, as the hopeful excitement I’ve carried all afternoon starts to sour.

What if he doesn’t—that is, if he isn’t—
He might be cringing with regret right now. Worrying that I’ll see today as the start of something when it was a momentary impulse, nothing to take seriously. High from the success of climbing the mountain, carried away for a minute . . . we were jostling and bumping each other and he thought
What if
and then he went with it, but that doesn’t mean he wanted anything more. . . .
I’ve heard girls talk in the restroom, the locker room, the cafeteria. “I thought we had a great time, and then he never called again.” “I thought he liked me, but he only wanted to talk about Cindy.” “He said he would text me, but he didn’t.” “We spent the
whole party
making out, and then he goes, ‘Oh, it was just one of those things.’” “He said he didn’t know I would take it so seriously.” “He said it was no big deal.” “He didn’t answer my messages.” “I never heard from him.” “It ruined our whole friendship. Now he doesn’t even talk to me.”
This is what I was afraid of; this is what I should’ve remembered. This is what I didn’t want to risk.
But it isn’t as if Nick and I just met or randomly hooked up at a party. We’ve known each other for years. We’ve spent hours together on the trails.
He has waited without complaint for me to identify trailside mushrooms. He’s listened to me ramble about gills and boletes and spores. When we share trail mix, he eats all the raisins because I won’t touch them—he must’ve eaten thousands of extra raisins on my account. He gave me the knife I wanted. He climbed a mountain with me.
And in his room this afternoon, I didn’t pin him to the wall. He didn’t trip and accidentally plant his lips on my face. He knew what he was doing—and seemed to like it. As much as I could tell, having almost zero experience with guys.
So maybe something new really is starting between us.
(His tongue against my skin, his tongue in my mouth.)
But then—why the silence now?

I reach for my mushroom guide, which is usually a good distraction. But the guide is in my backpack—still at Nick’s house. No matter what I do tonight, my thoughts come back to Nick. I check my phone again. No messages.

There’s no reason I have to wait for him. I could make the call myself. But what would I say?
I could pretend nothing happened. “Kiss? What kiss? Now that you mention it, I
thought
I felt something on my lips.”
I could ask him what’s going on. “When you kissed me, did you mean it, or was it a friends-with-benefits type of thing?”
Or I could let anxiety take over. “Why haven’t you called me? You don’t think I’m too needy or anything, do you?”
I could pretend I only called to get my stuff back. “I thought if you weren’t busy, I could come pick up the things I forgot to take with me . . . not that there’s any special
reason
I was distracted when I left your house. . . .”
Then again, I could simply be honest: “Did you like it as much as I did?”
I’m starting to realize what’s at stake. If Nick and I veer down the wrong path now, we could wreck everything. We could end up not even being friends.
No more hiking. No more talking or texting with him. A break with Nick would leave me alone on the school bus, isolated at lunch. No more sitting around his kitchen or watching movies in his living room on rainy Sunday afternoons with our feet up on the coffee table. Worst of all would be losing the one person who loves being out in the woods as much as I do, loves the smell of damp bark and pine sap, the softness of moss and the crunch of fall leaves, the solid feel of rocks and dirt underfoot.
I carry my phone downstairs and sit at the piano bench, where I pound out “Nightwaves”—a piece my old piano teacher composed for me. He said he wrote it to showcase my fondness for the keys below middle C: the deeper, darker, stormier notes.
The “Nightwaves” roll over me. But I’m also keeping an ear open for the beep of my phone. Just in case Nick figures out this thing before I do, and calls to help me make sense of it.

nine

Sunday is hot and steamy, a throwback to midsummer. I ride my bike over to Sylvie’s, where she is making tray after tray of brownies for a bake sale to support the school activities fund. My skin sizzles when I walk into her kitchen.

“How have you not passed out?” I ask.
“I know.” She fans her plum-colored face. Bits of melting chocolate cling to the ends of her hair. “One more panful, and I can shut the oven off.”
I help her cut the cooler trays into squares and wrap them for sale. “You’re lucky you didn’t get here earlier,” she says. “I was pretending I was on my own baking show. I must’ve been delirious from the heat.”
“Tell the audience, Ms. Summerlin, how you get these brownies so square?” I say, turning a spatula into a microphone.
Sylvie bats her eyes. “The secret is to cut them with
straight lines
.”
“That’s ingenious,” I say, still in character.
“I know. That’s how I got my own cooking show.” She laughs and pushes away the spatula. “How was your big mountain-climbing adventure? I’ve been dying to hear. Or did you have to turn back because of the rain?”
I smile at the memory of Nick and me climbing through the downpour. “Oh no, we didn’t turn around. We made it to the top.”
“Congratulations!” She slides the last tray into the oven.
“Something weird happened afterward, though.”
“Weird? What do you mean?”
The plastic wrap sticks to my fingers. “We were in Nick’s room, and he—kissed me.”
“That’s perfect!”
“But we’ve always been just friends.”
She pours us glasses of ice water, and we press them to our faces for a minute. “It’s great. You guys would make a cute couple.”
I groan. “You did not just say ‘cute couple.’”
She laughs. “Sorry. Watching you together lately—I thought maybe you liked him that way.”
If Sylvie has noticed this, then has Nick? Blood rushes to my face, the last thing I need in this broiling kitchen. “Well, I don’t know . . . but either way, I don’t think we’re ‘cute.’”
“You’d be good together. You do like him, don’t you?”
I’m blushing so hard that we could probably just bake the brownies on my face. “I guess.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that since it happened, I haven’t heard a word from him. He hasn’t called; he hasn’t texted. I think he’s avoiding me.”
She frowns and tests one of the trays to see if it’s cool enough yet. “Why don’t you call him?”
“Because I don’t want to hear him stammer and try to come up with some lame excuse. . . . I mean, I could live without that humiliation.”
“I can’t see Nick doing that. Especially not with you.”
“So why hasn’t he called?”
She lifts her shoulders in a shrug. “Maybe he’s been busy. You should ask him, Maggie. We could sit around guessing and try looking in a crystal ball, but it would be simpler just to talk to him.”
I have my mouth open to tell her why this is impossible, when a tap on the open door interrupts us. When I see who’s standing there, my jaw locks; my blood freezes. This room may be a hundred and ten degrees, but Raleigh Barringer is an ice storm.
“I came to pick up the brownies,” Raleigh tells Sylvie, dangling her car keys from one sharp-nailed finger. Her eyes glide over me without changing expression, as if I’m one of the appliances. Stove, refrigerator, Maggie.
“Come on in. Raleigh, do you know Maggie?”
“We went to the same junior high,” I say, my face a mask of ice.
“Oh, right, I think you told me that.” Sylvie turns away to pack the wrapped brownies in a box.
I stand at the counter, moving nothing but my eyes, watching Raleigh. She merely nods in my direction. I concentrate on breathing in and out, making no sudden moves. I might as well be facing the rattlesnake all over again.
Raleigh rests one hip against the counter. Despite the temperature, her white tank top is dry. Her face is smooth, no makeup disintegrating in the heat. “I’m glad you made brownies, Sylvie. So far everyone else has made cupcakes.”
“You want one of these before I wrap up the last batch?”
“No, thanks. If I ate everything I picked up today, I’d weigh twelve hundred pounds.”
As if Raleigh has to worry. She’s as lean as a stick of gum.
“I love your shoes,” Sylvie says.
Raleigh extends her foot and studies her leather sandal. “I got them in Italy.”
She always did know how to put an outfit together. Next to her I’m grubby, rumpled. “Thrift-store chic” without the chic. I flash back to seventh grade, to the whispers and giggles. Raleigh’s voice breaking out above the snickers: “I can’t
believe
she’s wearing that. Does she pull her clothes out of a Dumpster?” Her voice rising: “What do you call that color, Maggie? Moldy liver?” And, as the next wave of laughter ebbed, her voice as penetrating as a needle but high, pseudosweet: “Hey, Maggie, you could be a fashion model! You could show us what homeless people are wearing this season.”
I grab chocolate-coated pans and pile them in the sink. Sylvie chats with Raleigh, occasionally throwing a question my way to pull me in to the conversation, but I stick to one-word answers. I have to give Raleigh as little as possible: nothing to work with, nothing she can dig her nails into.
I’m up to my elbows in dishwater when Raleigh picks up the boxes and moves toward the door. “See you, Sylvie. I’m off to Vanessa Webb’s. I hope to God she made something besides cupcakes.”
Sylvie chuckles, opening the door for her. “Well, Vanessa organized this whole thing. She should know better than anyone how many cupcakes we have.”
Raleigh turns toward the sink and, for the first time, looks straight at me. I hold myself up by sheer force of will, my insides shriveling with fear, while she says, “Good-bye. Maggie.” A full beat between the words, every syllable clear and precise.
“Good-bye.” I keep my voice steady for that one word, while under the soapy water I grip a spatula with a force that could crush coal into diamonds.

“I get the feeling you and Raleigh weren’t the best of friends,”

Sylvie says when we’re alone again.
“No.”
Sylvie didn’t know me in junior high. I met her last fall, the

first week of sophomore year, when she walked up to me (as she walked up to practically everyone) saying, “Hi, I’m Sylvie Summerlin. I’m new here.” I wondered then how she could
do
that, walk up to people as if she had a right to, never expecting anyone to sneer at her or push her away. And they didn’t— sneer or push her away, that is. Sylvie has the magic of making people like her. While if I ask someone in the cafeteria to pass me a ketchup packet, they sigh and roll their eyes as if I’ve asked them for a lung.

I’ve never told her what the Raleigh Years were like for me— partly because I hate reliving them, and partly because I want to have at least one friend who doesn’t see me through that lens, who doesn’t know what a loser I was. It’s bad enough that Nick knows, that everyone who went to my junior high knows.