A Sense of the Infinite Read Free

receiving surgery from a boy I still considered basically a stranger. I knew they’d talked on the phone every day over the summer, and he’d even driven up to visit her at Camp Qualla Hoo Hoo, but because this had all taken place outside my sight, my brain still had Steven filedin the “abstraction” category and had not yet updated him to a living, breathing reality. What are you doing? I almost said when I saw Noe’s hoodie spread out on his lap. That’s mine. Noe’s boyfriends demonstrated a degree of devotion I still found incredible after more than three years of knowing her. Whether this trait was something Noe selected for or cultivated after the fact was a mystery I was still unraveling.
    I cracked open my soda and took a sip.
    “I didn’t even know we had a nutritionist,” Noe said.
    “They just got funding for him. Yippee.”
    “They can afford a nutritionist, but they can’t spring for new gym leotards?”
    “The idea is to fatten everybody up to the point that we fit in the saggy old ones.”
    Noe made a face. “Bad mental image,” she said. She picked up the rest of her bun and started throwing pieces of it at a crow that was eyeing us from the grass.
    I watched the way it hopped forward to snatch them.
    “Caw, caw,” Steven said.

5
    IT WAS WEIRD TO SEE ALL the new freshmen swarming around at the barbecue, talking and laughing as if they already owned the place.
    When I started high school, I was a total mess.
    After prolonged backroom deliberations, my mom and grandmother had determined that the summer before freshman year was a good time to inform me that I was half monster. My crazy cousin Ava caught wind of the plan and beat them to it.
    It was Ava’s birthday and I’d been charged with keeping her corralled in her room while the adults decorated the table and put the finishing touches on her cake. We sat on her bed,and she turned up the volume on the screaming music she kept playing twenty-four hours a day, her version of a white-noise machine.
    “How much has your mom told you about your dad?” she’d said.
    I blushed and shrugged. Ava and I used to play together when we were little, but when she started high school Ava changed. Now when we hung out, it felt like she was always pushing and pushing, trying to get a reaction. “Do you know what this is?” and she would show me a cut on her arm. Or she would name the creepiest boy at her school and tell me all the things she had done with him, or worse, say that he liked me and wanted to go out. I longed to be in the bright kitchen with Mom and Nan. I could hear them laughing, shouting at Uncle Dylan to find them some tape to wrap Ava’s present.
    “His name is Scott,” I said. “He went to Northern. They only slept together once. He was mean to Mom and she didn’t want him around me.”
    Mom had dropped out of college to have me. She was nineteen. I’d never met my dad, but I imagined him as the popular quarterback in a teen movie, the one who starts falling in love with the girl from the outdoors club, only to cave in to social pressure and publicly snub her in favor of the hot cheerleader. I knew lots of other kids whose parents weren’t together, so my lack of a father had never caused undue torment, although itwas true that Mom was the youngest parent at my school.
    “She didn’t sleep with him,” Ava said. “He raped her. They’re going to tell you before school starts. I heard them talking about it yesterday.”
    I dug my hands into Ava’s quilt. In the kitchen, laughter, banging cupboards, the finding of candles, the taking down of plates. Ava was a fan of dark secrets and skeletons in the closet. She had subjected me to some pretty disturbing stories over my lifetime, but this one beat them all.
    “Everyone was shocked when she decided to keep you,” Ava said. “She came this close to giving you up for adoption. My dad says the whole time she was pregnant, she hardly spoke at all. She wouldn’t even tell