A Sense of the Infinite Read Free Page A

anyone what happened until almost eight months. She must have felt like there was this monster growing inside her and it was too late to stop it.”
    Ava was studying my face for a reaction. I kept it carefully blank, a skill I had learned from other encounters in Ava’s room. Monster , I thought to myself, feeling the shape of the word settle into me, feeling it quietly reconfigure every cell in my body, like hitting the translate command by accident and seeing all the writing on your screen suddenly and incontrovertibly turn to Japanese.
    “You don’t believe me, do you,” said Ava.
    I shook my head.
    “Or you do believe me, and you don’t want to show it.”
    I’d kept still. There was no wriggling out of Ava’s grasp onceshe started in on you. She preempted every escape, called you on every strategy. She was astonishingly good at reading people, which is part of what made her so terrifying: Ava always knew what you were thinking.
    “You should try to find him someday,” Ava had said. “I would if I were you. I’d get my friends together and go to his house and beat the shit out of him.”
    I swallowed hard. I’d never thrown a real punch, let alone beat anyone up.
    “You should probably get tested,” Ava continued. “Who knows what kind of diseases he had?”
    Monster , my brain was still thinking. Monster .
    “Are you crying?” Ava said.
    I focused my eyes on the Satan poster on Ava’s wall. Satan had a black goatee and piercing yellow eyes. He was ripped, too. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Hades. “No,” I’d said.
    Ava took my chin in her hands and looked straight into my eyes. Her irises were purple from contact lenses. It was like staring into the eyes of a sea snake.
    “You’re lucky,” Ava said. “It takes some people a lifetime to figure out how fucked up the world is, and you got to find out at thirteen.”
    From the kitchen, Mom had called us. “A- va , Anna- beth , time for ca- ake .”
    Ava let go of my face. My chin hurt where her fingers had held it. “Don’t tell them I told you,” she said. “Promise.”
    “I promise,” I said.
    Just then, Nan opened the door. She peered into the room in her Nannish way, her pants dusted with icing sugar. The scent of cake wafted in the open door, along with the sounds of the adults in the living room.
    “Ava, Annabeth, we are ready for you to come out.”
    “Okay, Nanna,” said Ava with an angelic smile. She hopped off the bed, suddenly bouncy.
    I went to the bathroom and stared into the mirror, wondering how I’d managed to go thirteen years without noticing.

6
    MOM AND NAN HADN’T TOLD ME for another week.
    At my friend Hailey’s pool party, I’d sat on the edge in a sweater and jeans and wouldn’t swim. If I got into the water, people would see my monster-body and they would know.
    At lunch, I couldn’t eat. If I ate, the monster would be eating, too, and if it grew any bigger it would crowd out the only part of me that was still good.
    Shopping with Mom, all I could feel was the shame and horror throbbing out from me in a tortured halo. Up until that point, I’d had no filter. Now, for the first time, I grew watchful. I pulled my hands up into the sleeves of my sweatshirt and strained to hear double meanings in everything Mom said.
    “What’s up, Annabean?” Mom asked. “You’re never this quiet.”
    “Just daydreaming,” I said and twitched my mouth into a smile.
    Finally, the night arrived. Nan came over and they cooked my favorite dinner, and instead of playing Scrabble like we normally did, they sat me down on the couch to talk, as if I were a cancer patient about to go in for a frightening surgery.
    “Annabeth,” said Mom, “your grandma and I need to talk to you about something that you might find pretty upsetting.”
    I sat very still. If I made a sound too early, they would know that I knew. So I killed the howl that was struggling to escape me, wrung its neck like a rabbit, and dropped it as far down as it would