Several nods bob around the table. “Cool, cool,” says Dimitri, taking a tremendous gulp of milk.
Juliana’s eyebrows spike up enough so that I know Cassie didn’t text her.
I win. In some feeble way.
“MISS!” A NURSE calls. I’m already past. I’m the girl racing her best friend down to the shoreline.
When I round the corner, Mrs. Hopeswell has her back to me as she leans against the wall. “Alan?” she calls.
I slow to a stop. My breathing is too loud for this corridor.
She turns around and gives me a ghost of a smile. “Oh, Savannah.” Based on the wrinkles in her green blouse and the disarray of her hair, she probably slept on a hospital chair. “How are you, honey?” She’s Cassie with dark hair, a little shorter and a little plumper, with the same luminous eyes that pin you in place.
What’s the appropriate response?
Luckily, she doesn’t wait for my reply. “She’s awake.” Her fingers circle each other without taking hold. “She’s looking forward to seeing you.”
Did Cassie tell her about our meeting with Mr. Riley? Did he leave a message on their voicemail, wanting to meet with her parents? Were those conversations about focusing on “viable career paths” so bad that she believed her parents would rather not see her again?
“Savs?” Cass calls from the room.
I expected wires and machines. Vestiges of salt water and purple-blue skin from hypothermia. Instead, Cass sits cross-legged on top of the blanket with a Chinese checkers board, hair in a simple ponytail. Her cheeks are egg white.
When she smiles, I extend my arms for a hug, for once being the initiator of such affection. I probably won’t let go. The nurses will have to wrench me away. She’s okay. She’s okay.
She’s cool under my arms, hugging me back without the usual vigor. “I’m sorry,” she says. Her eyes are glassy. I’ve never seen Cassie cry. Not when the kids used to tease her for being so tall, not when she dated Toby Mickelson in eighth grade and he dumped her before the Moving Up Dance. “It’s just…it’s been a bad time.”
I settle in next to her. “It’ll get better from here.” Unbidden, my mind flips back to You wouldn’t be able to handle it. Cassie meant that about El Pueblo, sure, but was it also a code for her? What about Juliana–what does she know?
She musters up a shaky smile. “So what’s everyone saying about me? Did anyone cry? I will bet the three dollars in my wallet that Jacki cried.”
I wonder if her mother listens at the door. What have their conversations been like? What about with the doctors–is Cassie steering around them, too?
Whatever she’s been hiding, I want her to feel like she can tell me. “So how are you…” Doing? Feeling? What are you supposed to say when your best friend– laughing, scheming, singing to silly songs on the radio–tries to kill herself?
She nods like I’ve filled in the blanks. “They put me in the psychiatric emergency room and let me tell you, it’s some wild shit in there. Like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Don’t give me that look, Savs, I did read it.”
The last thing on my mind is her schoolwork. Instead, I’m seeing her walk into the water, shivering but not turning back. Her engine rumbling, puffs of smoke coughing out of the tailpipe. The final line to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem we’d studied last year, scribbled in her loopy cursive and left on the passenger seat.
“Police officers are stationed down the hall, just in case. There was a lady who was yelling the entire time I was there. Makes you reconsider the whole living thing.” She half-smiles. “Kidding. I don’t want to end up back there, that’s for sure.”
We fall quiet, listening to the clink of marbles against the checkers board. Roll in, roll out. No method to the way she’s placing them, yet she doesn’t seem to mind.
“What happened that morning?” I say finally.
Cassie coughs as though she hasn’t heard me. “I’m thinking about going into filmmaking. Art direction, cinematography, special effects. What do you think? You could write the screenplays.”
I turn to her, disturbing the precarious balance of the marbles. She swoops over to catch them, fingers shaking. “You know you can talk to me, right?”
“Yep.” She rolls the marbles around in her palm. “Lately I’ve seen so many images, and all of them are moving.” That half smile again. “Could be the drugs talking.” She returns them to their hollowed spots on the board. Tap. Tap. “I think I should consider film school instead of art school. My dad seems to halfway approve, though he probably just feels bad.”
Is this the way she talks to her doctors, leading them down detours until they get lost and give up? Even I’m having a hard time keeping up.
Do better.
I failed to follow when it mattered most. If I can piece together the answers now, I won’t lose track of her again.
“Why did you leave the car running?”
The slightest flush of pink blooms in her pale cheeks. “In case I changed my mind.”
She wasn’t set on it. I cling to that. She wanted a way back.
When one of the marbles slips loose, the ping of glass against metal resonates in the near-empty room.
“If I had died,” she says, looking at me frankly for the first time, “you would have spoken at the funeral, right? None of those other assholes making up bullshit about how much I meant to them.”
“Of course,” I say automatically. Always Late Nick, all the summer friends who held Cassie’s attention by the bonfire–they’re not here. They don’t matter; they never have. “Why did you call me that night?”
“I don’t remember.” She lines up the marbles on the board. “But I knew you wouldn’t answer.”