Infinity (3 page)

Behind us was a guy with his daughter, who looked to be about eight. She had a big stuffed lion under her arm and was gripping
her dad’s hand, staring up at the Ferris wheel as it moved lazily above us.

‘Now, honey,’ the man said, squatting down beside her, ‘you don’t have to go on it if you don’t want to.’

‘I want to,’ she said firmly, switching the lion to the other arm.

‘Because it might be scary.’

‘I want to,’ she repeated.

‘Okay,’ he said, in the kind of voice that was usually accompanied by a shrug. As if he doubted this, her conviction. But
as I watched her face, the careful way she studied the ride as it came to a stop, I envied her for knowing exactly what she
wanted. But it was easy when you’re little, I figured. Not so many choices.

We got on the ride, and as Anthony pulled the safety bar towards us I craned my neck round, watching to see if the little
girl would get into the next seat. She did, without hesitation, planting her lion next to her and laying her hands in her
lap, as if she was only getting on a bus, or sitting in a chair, the world to remain always solid beneath her.

As we started moving, Anthony wrapped both his hands round mine and kissed my neck. I closed my eyes as we moved up, higher
and higher, our seat rocking slightly. The Ferris wheel was higher than I’d thought and, staring down, everything seemed to
shrink to a pinpoint. I could see the steeple from the
church on my corner in the distance, beyond that the lights from the football fields. From up high, everything seemed closer
together than it actually was, as if the further away you got, the more the world you knew folded in to comfort itself.

Anthony was sliding his hands on to my stomach, moving one to the small of my back, one down my waistband, murmuring in my
ear. We were still rising, higher and higher, and someone was screaming a few cars down, but I told myself it wasn’t that
little girl, not her. In my mind, I saw her solid face, her absolute determination, and refused to believe it would be so
easy to sway her.

We were at the very top when I looked down and felt dizzy. Anthony was pressing against me, his fingers digging, hardly caring
that this was not the place, not the time, so determined was he to win whatever it was he wanted so badly, that seemed so
ideal, at least as long as it shrank back from his grasp. All those nights at the beach, when I’d pushed him
away, I hadn’t known exactly why, just that it hadn’t felt right. But as my view from high up narrowed, I realized that my
relationship with Anthony had done the same, going from a wide endless horizon of possibilities to one pinpoint of a destination.
I wanted to have choices, to know that I could, at any moment, still take the long way home. Sure, there was a quick way to
anywhere. But sometimes, when you took the shortcut, you missed the view.

‘I love you,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘I want you.’

But it wasn’t enough, this time. Maybe later it would have been, but as I pushed him away, I knew that time would never come.
Winning might not have been everything, but Anthony was tired of losing at this game. If he couldn’t have me, he’d find an
easier prize.

The ride hadn’t even come to a full stop when he pushed the safety bar away from us. It rattled, loudly, and sent a ripple
of force through my metal seat, an echo I felt in my bones. Then he stomped down the
stairs to the sideshows, pushing past all the people lined up for the next ride while I climbed out slowly, taking my time,
telling myself to pay attention to how the earth felt beneath me and not take it for granted any more.

I’d driven, and Anthony was gone, lost in the crowd of sticky wrappers and screaming children and all the voices of the game
workers, their coaxing and wheedling like a swarm of bees hovering. When I finally got to my car, it seemed like everyone
was leaving at once, a long snaky trail of brake lights leading out to the main road.

I pulled up behind a pickup truck and then sat there, moving forward in tiny increments, watching the traffic light up ahead
drop from red to green, then climb to red again. Even though I’d only been driving for a couple of weeks it already felt more
natural. Things that before I’d had to think about consciously, like switching gears and working the
clutch, now happened automatically, as if that part of my mind was handling it, making those decisions for me. Maybe that
was all it took, in the end, was the time to let the new soak in. To stand in the face of change and size it up, acquaint
yourself, before jumping in. It was all the pressure that was so hard, those little nudges forward, poke poke poke. If you
just backed off, and let it come to you, it would.

When I finally made it to the light, I hit my indicator, signalling the left turn that would lead me around the shopping mall
and through two neighbourhoods before depositing me neatly on to my own road. It was the way I’d always gone, up until now,
but this time I didn’t feel that burning burst of shame in it, knowing I was taking the easy way out. I just remembered the
view from up high, the way all the roads led to each other eventually. It didn’t matter which route you took, as long as you
got home.

I was thinking this as I moved up to the solid green of the light. That burst of freedom in realizing
that my choice was okay. But even so, at the last minute, I turned my wheel to the right, surprising even myself, and shifted
into second as the roundabout came up into my sight. It was crowded with carnival traffic, cars whizzing past: I could see
it, as if I was still up high, the absolute geometry of that perfect circle. This was normally the moment I was dumb scared,
hands shaking, but this time I only pressed further, closer, pressing my shoulders back against the seat as if taking the
scariest, and most exhilarating of rides.

As I got nearer, I glanced in my rear-view mirror, and saw the Ferris wheel. It was far behind me, brightly lit, and looked
small enough to slide on my finger and keep there. Another circle, representing a kind of infinity that I was only beginning
to understand. So when I looked back at the road, easing myself closer to the roundabout traffic, I sealed that image in my
mind as I merged in, holding my breath, and felt myself fall into the rhythm of the cars around
me. I turned the wheel, leaning into the first curve, feeling that rush of accomplishment and speed as we all moved away from
the centre, further and further out. It was happening so fast, but I was there, right there, alive, wanting this moment to
be like brass rings and Ferris wheels and all the circulars of this life and others, never ending.

I taped the commercial back in April, before anything had happened, and promptly forgot about it. A few weeks ago, it had
started running and, suddenly, I was everywhere.

On the rows of screens hanging over the ellipticals at the gym. On the monitor they have at the post office that’s supposed
to distract you from how long you’ve been waiting in line. And now here, on the TV in my room, as I sat at the edge of my
bed, fingers clenched into my palms, trying to make myself get up and leave.

‘It’s that time of year again …’

I stared at myself on the screen as I was five months earlier, looking for any difference, some visible proof of what had
happened to me. First, though, I was struck by the sheer oddness of seeing myself without benefit of a mirror or photograph.
I had never got used to it, even after all this time.

‘Football games,’ I watched myself say. I was wearing a baby-blue cheerleader uniform, hair pulled back tight into a ponytail,
and clutching a huge megaphone, the kind nobody ever used any more, emblazoned with a K.

‘Study hall.’ Cut to me in a serious plaid skirt and brown cropped sweater, which I remembered feeling itchy and so wrong
to be wearing just as it was getting warm, finally.

‘And, of course, social life.’ I leaned in, staring at the me on-screen, now outfitted in jeans and a glittery tee and seated
on a bench, turning to speak this line while a group of other girls chattered silently behind me.

The director, fresh-faced and just out of film school, had explained to me the concept of this, his creation. ‘The girl who
has everything,’ he’d said, moving his hands in a tight, circular motion, as if that were all it took to encompass something
so vast, not to mention vague. Clearly, it meant having a megaphone, some smarts and a big group of friends. Now, I might
have dwelled on the explicit irony of this last one, but the on-screen me was already moving on.

‘It’s all happening this year,’ I said. Now I was in a pink gown, a sash reading
HOMECOMING QUEEN
stretched across my midsection as a boy in a tux stepped up beside me, extending his arm. I took it, giving him a wide smile.
He was a sophomore at the local university and mostly kept to himself at the shooting, although later, as I was leaving, he’d
asked for my number. How had I forgotten that?

‘The best times,’ the me on-screen was saying now. ‘The best memories. And you’ll find the right
clothes for them all at Kopf’s Department Store.’

The camera moved in, closer, closer, until all you could see was my face, the rest dropping away. This had been before that
night, before everything that had happened with Sophie, before this long, lonely summer of secrets and silence. I was a mess,
but this girl – she was fine. You could tell in the way she stared out at me and the world so confidently as she opened her
mouth to speak again.

‘Make your new year the best one yet,’ she said, and I felt my breath catch, anticipating the next line, the last line, the
one that only this time was finally true. ‘It’s time to go back to school.’

The shot froze, the Kopf’s logo appearing beneath me. In moments, it would switch to a frozen waffle commercial or the latest
weather, this fifteen seconds folding seamlessly into another, but I didn’t wait for that. Instead, I picked up the remote,
turned myself off, and headed out of the door.

I’d had over three months to get ready to see Sophie. But when it happened, I still wasn’t ready.

I was in the parking lot before first bell, trying to muster up what it would take to get out and officially let the year
begin. As people streamed past, talking and laughing, en route to the courtyard, I kept working on all the maybes: maybe she
was over it now. Maybe something else had happened over the summer to replace our little drama. Maybe it was never as bad
as I thought it was. All of these were long shots, but still possibilities.

I sat there until the very last moment before finally drawing the keys out of the ignition. When I reached for the door handle,
turning to my window, she was right there.

For a second, we just stared at each other, and I instantly noticed the changes in her: her dark curly hair was shorter, her
earrings new. She was skinnier, if that were possible, and had done away with the thick eyeliner she’d taken to wearing the
previous
spring, replacing it with a more natural look, all bronzes and pinks. I wondered, in her first glance, what was different
in me.

Just as I thought this, Sophie opened her perfect mouth, narrowed her eyes at me and delivered the verdict I’d spent my summer
waiting for.

‘Bitch.’

The glass between us didn’t muffle the sound or the reaction of the people passing by. I saw a girl from my English class
the year before narrow her eyes, while another girl, a stranger, laughed out loud.

Sophie, though, remained expressionless as she turned her back, hiking her bag over one shoulder and starting down to the
courtyard. My face was flushed, and I could feel people staring. I wasn’t ready for this, but then I probably never would
be, and this year, like so much else, wouldn’t wait. I had no choice but to get out of my car, with everyone watching, and
begin it in earnest, alone. So I did.

I had first met Sophie four years earlier, at the beginning of the summer after sixth grade. I was at the neighbourhood pool,
standing in the snack-bar line with two damp dollar bills to buy a Coke, when I felt someone step up behind me. I turned my
head, and there was this girl, a total stranger, standing there in a skimpy orange bikini and matching thick platform flip-flops.
She had olive skin and thick, curly dark hair pulled up into a high ponytail, and was wearing black sunglasses and a bored,
impatient expression. In our neighbourhood, where everyone knew everyone, it was like she’d fallen out of the sky. I didn’t
mean to stare. But, apparently, I was.

‘What?’ she said to me. I could see myself reflected in the lenses of her glasses, small and out of perspective. ‘What are
you looking at?’

I felt my face flush, as it did any time anybody raised their voice at me. I was entirely too sensitive to tone, so much so
that even TV court shows could get me upset – I always had to change the channel
when the judge ripped into anyone. ‘Nothing,’ I said, and turned back round.

A moment later, the high-school guy working the snack bar waved me up with a tired look. While he poured my drink I could
feel the girl behind me, her presence like a weight, as I smoothed my two bills out flat on the glass beneath my fingers,
concentrating on getting out every single crease. After I paid, I walked away, studiously keeping my eyes on the pocked cement
of the walkway as I made my way back round the deep end to where my best friend, Clarke Reynolds, was waiting.

‘Whitney said to tell you she’s going home,’ she said, blowing her nose as I carefully put the Coke on the pavement beside
my chair. ‘I told her we could walk.’

‘Okay,’ I said. My sister Whitney had just got her licence, which meant that she had to drive me places. Getting home, however,
remained my own responsibility, whether from the pool, which was
walking distance, or the mall one town over, which wasn’t. Whitney was a loner, even then. Any space around her was her personal
space; just by existing, you were encroaching.

It was only after I sat down that I finally allowed myself to look again at the girl with the orange bikini. She had left
the snack bar and was standing across the pool from us, her towel over one arm, a drink in her other hand, surveying the layout
of benches and beach chairs.