Infinity (4 page)

‘Here,’ Clarke said, handing over the deck of cards she was holding. ‘It’s your deal.’

Clarke had been my best friend since we were six years old. There were tons of kids in our neighbourhood, but for some reason
most of them were in their teens, like my sisters, or four and below, a result of the baby boom a couple of years previously.
When Clarke’s family moved from Washington, D.C., our moms met at a community-watch meeting. As soon as they realized we were
the same age, they put us together, and we’d stayed that way ever since.

Clarke had been born in China, and the Reynoldses had adopted her when she was six months old. We were the same height, but
that was about all we had in common. I was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, a typical Greene, while she had the darkest, shiniest
hair I’d ever seen and eyes so brown they were almost black. While I was timid and too eager to please, Clarke was more serious,
her tone, personality and appearance all measured and thoughtful. I’d been modelling since before I could even remember, following
my sisters before me; Clarke was a total tomboy, the best soccer player on our block, not to mention a whiz at cards, especially
gin rummy, at which she’d been beating me all summer.

‘Can I have a sip of your drink?’ Clarke asked me. Then she sneezed. ‘It’s hot out here.’

I nodded, reaching down to get it for her. Clarke
had bad allergies year-round, but in summer they hit fever pitch. She was usually either stuffed up, dripping, or blowing
from April to October, and no amount of shots or pills seemed to work. I’d long ago grown used to her adenoidal voice, as
well as the omnipresent pack of Kleenex in her pocket or hand.

There was an organized hierarchy to the seating at our pool: the lifeguards got the picnic tables near the snack bar, while
the moms and little kids stuck by the shallow end and the baby (i.e., pee) pool. Clarke and I preferred the half shaded area
behind the kiddie slides, while the more popular high-school guys – like Chris Pennington, three years older than me and hands-down
the most gorgeous guy in our neighbourhood and, I thought then, possibly the world – hung out by the high dive. The prime
spot was the stretch of chairs between the snack bar and lap lane, which was usually taken by the most popular high-school
girls. This was
where my oldest sister, Kirsten, was stretched out in a chaise, wearing a hot-pink bikini and fanning herself with a
Glamour
magazine.

Once I dealt out our cards, I was surprised to see the girl in orange walk over to where Kirsten was sitting, taking the chair
next to her. Molly Clayton, Kirsten’s best friend, who was on her other side, nudged her, then nodded at the girl. Kirsten
looked up and over, then shrugged and lay back down, throwing her arm over her face.

‘Annabel?’ Clarke had already picked up her cards and was impatient to start beating me. ‘It’s your draw.’

‘Oh,’ I said, turning back to face her. ‘Right.’

The next afternoon, the girl was back, this time in a silver bathing suit. When I got there, she was already set up in the
same chair my sister had been in the day before, her towel spread out, bottled water beside her, magazine in her lap. Clarke
was at a tennis lesson, so I was alone when Kirsten and
her friends arrived about an hour later. They came in loud as always, their shoes thwacking down the pavement. When they reached
their usual spot and saw the girl sitting there, they slowed, then looked at one another. Molly Clayton looked annoyed, but
Kirsten just moved about four chairs down and set up camp as always.

For the next few days, I watched as the new girl kept up her stubborn efforts to infiltrate my sister’s group. What began
as just taking a chair escalated, by day three, to following them to the snack bar. The next afternoon, she got in the water
seconds after they did, staying just about a foot down the wall as they bobbed and talked, splashing one another. By the weekend,
she was trailing behind them constantly, a living shadow.

It had to be annoying. I’d seen Molly shoot her a couple of nasty looks, and even Kirsten had asked her to back up, please,
when she’d got a little too close in the deep end. But the girl didn’t seem to
care. If anything, she just stepped up her efforts more, as if it didn’t matter what they were saying as long as they were
talking to her, period.

‘So,’ my mother said one night at dinner, ‘I heard a new family’s moved in to the Daughtrys’ house, over on Sycamore.’

‘The Daughtrys moved?’ my father asked.

My mother nodded. ‘Back in June. To Toledo. Remember?’

My father thought for a second. ‘Right,’ he said finally, nodding. ‘Toledo.’

‘I also heard,’ my mom continued, passing the bowl of pasta she was holding to Whitney, who immediately passed it on to me,
‘that they have a daughter your age, Annabel. I think I saw her the other day when I was over at Margie’s.’

‘Really,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘She has dark hair, a bit taller than you. Maybe you’ve seen her around the neighbourhood.’

I thought for a second. ‘I don’t know –’

‘That’s who that is!’ Kirsten said suddenly. She put down her fork with a clank. ‘The stalker from the pool. Oh my God, I
knew
she had to be way younger than us.’

‘Hold on.’ Now my father was paying attention. ‘There’s a stalker at the pool?’

‘I
hope
not,’ my mother said, in her worried voice.

‘She’s not a stalker, really,’ Kirsten said. ‘She’s just this girl who’s been hanging around us. It’s so creepy. She, like,
sits beside us, and follows us around, and doesn’t talk, and she’s always listening to what we’re saying. I’ve told her to
get lost, but she just ignores me. God! I can’t believe she’s only
twelve
. That makes it even sicker.’

‘So dramatic,’ Whitney muttered, spearing a piece of lettuce with her fork.

She was right, of course. Kirsten was our resident drama queen. Her emotions were always at full throttle, as was her mouth;
she never stopped talking,
even if she were well aware you weren’t listening to her. In contrast, Whitney was the silent type, which meant the few words
she uttered always carried that much more meaning.

‘Kirsten,’ my mother said now, ‘be nice.’

‘Mom, I’ve tried that. But, if you saw her, you’d understand. It’s strange.’

My mother took a sip of her wine. ‘Moving to a new place is difficult, you know. Maybe she doesn’t know how to make friends
–’

‘She obviously doesn’t,’ Kirsten told her.

‘– which means that it might be your job to meet her halfway,’ my mother finished.

‘She’s
twelve
,’ Kirsten said, as if this was on par with being diseased, or on fire.

‘So is your sister,’ my father pointed out.

Kirsten picked up her fork and pointed it at him. ‘Exactly,’ she said.

Beside me, Whitney snorted. But my mom, of course, was already turning her attention on me.
‘Well, Annabel,’ she said, ‘maybe you could make an effort, if you do see her. To say hello or something.’

I didn’t tell my mother I’d already met this new girl, mostly because she would have been horrified she’d been so rude to
me. Not that this would have changed her expectations for my behaviour. My mother was famously polite, and expected the same
of us, regardless of the circumstances. Our whole lives were supposed to be the high road. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Maybe I will.’

‘Good girl,’ she said. And that, I hoped, was that.

The next afternoon, though, when Clarke and I got to the pool, Kirsten was already there, lying out with Molly on one side
and the new girl on the other. I tried to ignore this as we got settled in our spot, but eventually I glanced over to see
Kirsten watching me. When she got up a moment later, shooting me a look, then headed towards the snack bar, the new girl immediately
following her, I knew what I had to do.

‘I’ll back in a second,’ I told Clarke, who was reading a Stephen King novel and blowing her nose.

‘Okay,’ she said.

I got up, then started round by the high dive, crossing my arms over my chest as I passed Chris Pennington. He was lying on
a beach chair, a towel over his eyes, while a couple of his buddies wrestled on the pool deck. Now, instead of sneaking glances
at him – which, other than swimming and getting beaten at cards, was my main activity at the pool that summer – I’d get bitched
out again, all because my mother was insistent we be raised as the best of Good Samaritans. Great.

I could have told Kirsten about my previous run-in with this girl, but I knew better. Unlike me, she did not shy away from
confrontation – if anything, she sped towards it, before overtaking it completely. She was the family powder keg, and I had
lost track of the number of times I’d stood off to the side, cringing and blushing, while she made her various
displeasures clear to salespeople, other drivers or various ex-boyfriends. I loved her, but the truth was, she made me nervous.

Whitney, in contrast, was a silent fumer. She’d never tell you when she was mad. You just knew, by the expression on her face,
the steely narrowing of her eyes, the heavy, enunciated sighs that could be so belittling that words, any words, seemed preferable
to them. When she and Kirsten fought which, with two years between them, was fairly often – it always seemed at first like
a one-sided argument, since all you could hear was Kirsten endlessly listing accusations and slights. Pay more attention,
though, and you’d notice Whitney’s stony, heavy silences, as well as the rebuttals she offered, few as they were, that always
cut to the point much more harshly than Kirsten’s swirling, whirly commentaries.

One open, one closed. It was no wonder that the first image that came to mind when I thought of either of my sisters was a
door. With Kirsten, it was
the front one to our house, through which she was always coming in or out, usually in mid-sentence, a gaggle of friends trailing
behind her. Whitney’s was the one to her bedroom, which she preferred to keep shut between her and the rest of us, always.

As for me, I fell somewhere between my sisters and their strong personalities, the very personification of the vast grey area
that separated them. I was not bold and outspoken, or silent and calculating. I had no idea how anyone would describe me,
or what would come to mind at the sound of my name. I was just Annabel.

My mother, conflict-averse herself, hated it when my sisters fought. ‘Why can’t you just be
nice
?’ she’d plead with them. They might have rolled their eyes, but a message sank in with me: that being nice was the ideal,
the one place where people didn’t get loud or so quiet they could scare you. If you could just be nice, then you wouldn’t
have to worry about arguments at all. But being nice wasn’t as easy as it
seemed, especially when the rest of the world could be so mean.

By the time I got to the snack bar, Kirsten had disappeared (of course), but the girl was still there, waiting for the guy
behind the counter to ring up her candy bar.
Oh well
, I thought, as I walked up to her.
Here goes nothing
.

‘Hi,’ I said. She just looked at me, her expression unreadable. ‘Um, I’m Annabel. You just moved here, right?’

She didn’t say anything for what seemed like a really long while, during which time Kirsten walked out of the ladies’ room
behind her. She stopped when she saw us talking.

‘I,’ I continued, now even more uncomfortable, ‘I, um, think we’re in the same grade.’

The girl reached up, pushing her sunglasses further up her nose. ‘So?’ she said, in that same sharp, snide voice as the first
time she’d addressed me.

‘I just thought,’ I said, ‘that since, you know, we’re the same age, you might want to hang out. Or something.’

Another pause. Then the girl said, as if clarifying, ‘You want me to hang out. With you.’

She made it sound so ridiculous I immediately began backtracking. ‘I mean, you don’t have to,’ I told her. ‘It was just –’

‘No,’ she cut me off flatly. Then she tilted her head back and laughed. ‘No
way
.’

The thing is, if it had just been me there, that would have been it. I would have turned round, face flushed, and gone back
to Clarke, game over. But it wasn’t just me.

‘Hold on,’ Kirsten said, her voice loud. ‘What did you just say?’

The girl turned round. When she saw my sister, her eyes widened. ‘What?’ she said, and I couldn’t help but notice how different
this, the first word she’d ever said to me, sounded as she said it now.

‘I said,’ Kirsten repeated, her own voice sharp, ‘what did you just say to her?’

Uh-oh
, I thought.

‘Nothing,’ the girl replied. ‘I just –’

‘That’s my sister,’ Kirsten said, pointing at me, ‘and you were just a total bitch to her.’

By this point, I was already both cringing and blushing. Kirsten, however, put her hand on her hip, which meant she was just
getting started.

‘I wasn’t a bitch,’ the girl said, taking off her sunglasses. ‘I only –’

‘You were, and you know it,’ Kirsten said, cutting her off. ‘So you can stop denying it. And stop following me around too,
okay? You’re creeping me out. Come on, Annabel.’

I was frozen to the spot, just looking at the girl’s face. Without her sunglasses, her expression stricken, she suddenly
looked
twelve, just staring at us as Kirsten grabbed my wrist, tugging me back to where she and her friends were sitting.

‘Unbelievable,’ she kept saying, and, as I looked across the pool, I could see Clarke watching me, confused, as Kirsten pulled
me down onto her chair. Molly sat up, blinking, reaching up to catch the untied straps of her bikini.

‘What happened?’ she asked, and, as Kirsten began to tell her, I glanced back towards the snack bar, but the girl was gone.
Then I saw her, through the fence behind me, walking across the parking lot, barefoot, her head ducked down. She’d left all
her stuff on the chair beside me – a towel, her shoes, a bag with a magazine and wallet, a pink hairbrush. I kept waiting
for her to realize this and turn back for it. She didn’t.