Until It Hurts to Stop (7 page)

“Do you want to talk about it?” Sylvie asks now, wiping the brownie pans dry.
“No, thanks.” And so Sylvie goes on to tell me about some problem she’s having with her girlfriend. Only I don’t really hear her because all I can hear is Raleigh’s voice, the threat in it: “Good-bye. Maggie.”

ten

By the time I get home from Sylvie’s house, in the pit of the afternoon, I still haven’t heard anything from Nick. It’s rare for us to go a whole day without talking; now I
know
he’s avoiding me.

I can’t live with my guts knotted up this way. If this is what it’s like for us to try being more than friends—this tension, this uncertainty, this teetering on the verge of losing everything—then I don’t need it. I’d rather stick with the friendship we already have.

Obviously, kissing was a huge mistake. Whatever attraction I thought there was—either it was only on my side, or maybe he felt it for a minute but then had second thoughts. Maybe he was just curious. After all, I am the only girl he spends much time with. But it’s clear by now that we’re going nowhere.

How could I forget Raleigh’s words about how I make guys gag? How could I forget that no guy ever showed the slightest interest in me before Carl Gurney’s “kiss-and-run,” and then it was almost three years before anyone kissed me again?

Time to undo, to backspace.
If we can.
I send Nick a message:
can we please forget it ever hap
-
pened
?
can we stay friends
?
Then I spend forty-five minutes pounding away at the piano, making the walls ring with stormy Beethoven.

Finally, Nick’s reply comes in. When my phone chirps, I grab it and stare at the screen, the notes still echoing in the air around me.

yes
.
good idea
.
And I exhale completely, for the first time in twenty-four hours.

I ride my bike over to Nick’s and find him shooting baskets in his driveway. The asphalt is gooey with the heat, yet he’s pounding up and down, taking shots as if the NBA championship is on the line.

I drop my bike and stand on the strip of grass that borders the driveway. Bending forward, I flip my hair up, to give my neck some air. Nick keeps dribbling and I don’t interrupt, even though I think basketball is the most boring game on earth. Every minute of it that I’ve ever watched—every long, long minute—is out of loyalty to Nick, who would probably wither into a catatonic strip of jerky if he had to live without it. The hoop rattles and rings; I can tell he’s made the shot.

“Hey, Maggie,” he pants.
I come out from under my hair. “Ready for a break?” “In a minute.”
I watch him through a veil of stray hair wisps. Nick stops at an imaginary foul line, focusing not only with his eyes but with his hands, arms, head, toes pointing to the basket. He lets the ball fly, and it sinks through the net with a
thunk
. Then he turns to me, gasping, sweat splashing from his skin onto the tar.

“God, it’s hot out here,” he says.
“Oh, you noticed.”
“Just to the extent that my shoes are melting.”
He doesn’t quite meet my eyes. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I itch
inside
my skin. And here I thought the awkwardness would be over with.

“Look, Maggie.” He scoops the ball from the ground and straightens up. “I wanted to tell you . . . I’m sorry.”
“Um, you don’t have to do that.” I doubt he can tell I’m blushing, because I was probably already lobster-colored from the ride over here. “It just—happened. And it’s over now.”
He rolls the ball around between his palms. I want to touch his hands, quiet that restless movement, get him to relax. Get us both to relax, if that’s possible. But I don’t know how he would take that.
It’s safer not to touch.
It’s better to talk about practical matters.
“I forgot to take some of my stuff home yesterday,” I say. “I came to pick it up. And I brought your shirt back.” I wave it at him.
“Oh, right.” He bounces the ball once, twice. “You want some iced tea while you’re here?”
“Yeah, okay.”
I follow him inside, where he drops the ball into its usual spot beside the door, on top of a pile of grocery bags, boots, and umbrellas. He opens the refrigerator.
Sitting at the table where I’ve sat so many times makes me think we really will be able to return to the way things were. I know this kitchen as well as I know my own. The clean dishes piled in the drainer; the scarred cutting board where Perry often chops vegetables for stir-fry; the broken blender and the only-used-once bread maker shoved in a corner. The town map on the wall. The burn on the counter where Nick once set down a red-hot pan.
Nick plunks a spoon and a glass in front of me, and sits down with his own glass. Iced tea slops over the brim and puddles on the table.
I search for something to say, while he rubs his glass with his thumb. There’s something comforting about the familiarity of his hands, his ragged nails and the dirt in the creases of his knuckles.
“So when’s our next hike?” I say, scooping sugar into my glass. We might as well get back to the woods as soon as possible. Back to our old snake-fighting, mountain-climbing selves.
“I don’t know.”
Since when has Nick ever hesitated about getting out onto the trail? I sip my tea, bitter and sweet swirling together in my mouth. “If you don’t want to hike with me anymore—” I begin, though it’s like stabbing myself in the throat to say it.
“That’s not it. It’s just—I was thinking about another mountain. A harder one. Is that something you’d want to do?” A glance at me, the slightest flash when our eyes meet.
“Harder than Eagle? That’ll be a long day.” Especially if we’re still off-kilter like this, our gears not quite back in sync.
“Yeah, I know. Mountains take a lot out of you, but that’s kind of the point, right?” He talks to his drink, one hand wrapped around the dripping glass. “You have the summit to work for, and you put everything into the hike. . . .”
I get what he’s saying. A climb will sand off the remaining sharp edges between us, will give us a place to focus all our energy. “Which mountain?” I ask.
“Crystal.”
It’s the one pictured on his bedroom wall, with the summit as cold and sharp as a fang. “That’s in the Cinnamon Range, isn’t it?”
“Yep. What do you say, Maggie?”
“I say okay.”
He clinks his glass against mine, more tea slopping onto the table.
I do want to climb. I feel the same hunger, the same upward momentum, that he does.
But I have another longing to drag around with me, too. Because even though I’m relieved that he’s giving me exactly what I asked for—he’s treating me like a friend again—I still want more.

eleven

When I get home, my mother’s in bed. Her nursing shifts throw off her whole schedule, and she’s often asleep when the rest of us are awake. My father’s heading down into the basement workshop. “Want to join me?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, and follow him.

The workshop is mostly my dad’s place (his “happy place,” Mom and I joke); he built my desk and bookcase, as well as our kitchen table. But I love it, too: the clean smell of fresh wood shavings, the silkiness of sanded boards. I’ve built a few things myself, like the wobbly end table in our front hall, where we keep stray batteries and stacks of junk mail. My first project was an oversized “jewelry box” I made for Mom’s Christmas present one year, which I inexplicably painted purple with orange flowers. She uses it to hold gloves, scarves, and umbrellas, since not even a royal family would have enough bling to fill a jewelry box that size. (At twelve, I had an underdeveloped sense of proportion and scale.) (And no eye for color.) I’ve since made better boxes that we’ve given to relatives, but my earliest attempts are too crude to inflict on anyone else.

I’ve actually been making my father a box for his birthday, which is coming up, but I can’t work on it in front of him. Tonight, Dad plans his next job, sketching a bench my grandmother wants. While he mutters to himself, figuring height and width and depth, calculating the wood he’ll need, I sort nails and screws. When we’re between projects, I try to restore order to the shop. Sorting hardware is soothing, mindless work.

“How’s the grid?” I ask him. I used to ask him this when I was little, when I thought of the grid almost as a living, breathing creature that he tended. I pictured the energy network as something that my father personally kept going, with the strange result that I’d often think of him whenever I flipped a switch or saw black wires sharp against a blue sky. Even though I know now that the system’s a little more complicated than that, and involves more people than just my dad, “How’s the grid?” has become our stock question, the equivalent of, “How are you doing?”

“It’s still going,” he says, which is our stock answer. He happens to be wearing a company T-shirt today: dark blue, with mid-regional POWER blazing across the front of it, in letters resembling a lightning bolt. He’s offered to get me one, too (they’re free), but I wouldn’t be able to wear it. It would feel too bold somehow. Nick and I even have a joke about the logo: the word
POWER
is three times as big as
Mid-Regional
, and we sometimes say, “Are you feeling Mid-Regional POWERful today?”

Dad and I don’t say anything more, but we don’t need to. Like Nick and me, my dad doesn’t talk much. My mother, on the other hand, could have a three-hour conversation with herself.

Yet when I was in junior high, Dad was the one who noticed something was wrong, who asked if everything was okay at school. Sometimes I wish I’d told him the whole truth about Raleigh and Adriana and the others. I said that kids were picking on me, but when he told me to ignore them, I didn’t want to admit how bad it was. Parents are the people who brag to the world when you’ve mastered toilet training and the alphabet. Who wants
them
hearing you’re a loser? Who wants to tell your parents that all the kids at school say you’re ugly, that you stink, that everyone hates you? What if your parents squint at you when they hear that, and say, “Well, Margaret, you do smell a little, and you could stand to comb your hair more often. . . .”

After all, Mom is always saying, “Maggie, your hair is all knots.” And, “That shirt is so baggy on you. Why don’t we get you something a little neater?” And, “Nick is a nice boy, but you can’t rely on one person all the time. You need to widen your circle of friends.”

She thinks that all I have to do is wear the right clothes and smile at a few people in the cafeteria. Then they’ll cluster around me, begging for my friendship, and nominate me prom queen. “Just say hello, and you’ll make friends.” It works for her; I’ve seen her leave weddings or interchurch picnics with a dozen new phone numbers even when we walked into the event hardly knowing anyone. But people don’t respond to me the same way.

At school, people like Troy Truehalt and Darci Esposito look right through me. Their eyes don’t even register me. Once Troy pushed past me in the lunch line—not aggressively, but as if I were a curtain he had to brush aside to reach his destination. I wonder how I look to them. Like wallpaper? Like a mannequin? Or am I completely invisible—do they not see
anything
there? I can’t possibly look like a real person to them.

But at least being invisible is better than being a target. What would Dad say if he knew I’m facing that old danger again? If I told him that Raleigh’s back? I think of her slithering through Sylvie’s kitchen. She didn’t say much to me this morning, but her power has always been in her timing. She has always known how to strike at my weakest moments, how to make me wait for her to attack.
That waiting. I’d forgotten about it, but now it comes back to me: that feeling of never being able to exhale. Trying to watch all sides of me at once. Listening in the halls, my ears tuned for Raleigh’s voice.
Naturally, she wouldn’t do anything in Sylvie’s house, right in front of Sylvie. I should’ve realized that earlier. And she’s probably still getting used to being back in town. She wears that Italian trip like a velvet cape. But sooner or later, she’ll slip it off and bring out the razors.
What if I could stand up to her this time?
I picture her cowering, as she was in my dream the other morning. Responding to one of those special Raleigh-brand insults that always hit my most vulnerable spots; giving it right back to her.
Are you still in love with yourself, Raleigh? Good thing, because nobody else is.
If only I had the nerve.
I drop one last nail in a jar and step away from the bench. Dad shuffles through his wood collection, estimating what he might be able to use and what he might need to buy. As I’m heading back up the stairs, he pulls out one old board with a knot and a crack in it.
“Look at that,” he says, his fingers tracing the pattern of the grain.
“You can’t use that for anything, can you?”
“Probably not. But I keep thinking I’ll find something to do with it. I hate to throw it away.”
“It’s a shame.”
“It’s a beautiful piece,” he says, and I think he might actually like it
because
of the knot and the split.

Sunday nights are the worst: scrambling to finish the last of my homework, dreading Monday. And now, on top of that, there’s the weird tension between Nick and me.

Thinking of Nick reminds me of what he said about Crystal Mountain. I dig out my guidebook and look it up.
perhaps the most difficult day hike in the cinnamon range
.

Wonderful.
Well, you can’t accuse Nick of not aiming high enough. I read about the hazards: narrow ledges, unstable rocks, and steep drop-offs. Also snakes and bears. “What, no man-eating tigers?” I mutter to myself.
I spend some time in an online forum for local hikers, looking at the thread for Crystal Mountain.
“those ledges!” one person has written. Another chimes in: “forget the ledges; remember the rocks?” Which draws half a dozen replies, saying, “oh, those ROCKS!”
I scroll down.
“that summit slope will give you vertigo.” “it’s not the height, it’s the steepness.” “no, it’s the height AND the steepness!” “the rocks on the lower part are what wear you out.” “i never wanted to
see
another rock after crystal.” “a couple of people died there back in 2000.” “no, someone did die, but it was because he went off-trail and fell.” “i heard it wasn’t even a fall, it was a heart attack.” “some guy did fall, but he only broke a few bones.” “they should put cables up near the summit.” “no, because if they put up cables, then people who don’t belong there will think they can do it.”
People who don’t belong there.
I hope they’re not talking about me.