“Cassie!” What the heck has gotten into her? I thought she’d be happy for me now that I have a boyfriend. I expected teasing, lots of elbow nudging, jokes about my dad meeting him. Instead, I have the two of them staring each other down in front of the library. If there’s some sort of jealousy, well, she could walk down the hallway and find at least ten willing suitors. She’s never been hard up for guys wanting to date her. “He saved your life.”
“I know that!” she snaps, and her voice cracks. “Did I ask him? Did I get on the phone and say, ‘Hey, Marcos, you wanna be the hero today?’ He was there at the right time and in the right place, but that doesn’t mean I have to trust him.”
“Aren’t you glad he did?”
My question dangles in the air. All of Cassie’s fire vanishes. Her rod-straight back slouches and she drops her eyes to the floor.
“Yes,” she says quietly. “That doesn’t mean it’s not as hard as fucking hell to get up every morning. Sometimes I think it’s harder now.”
“Why?” I step closer to her, expecting her arm to loop around me.
She keeps it pressed to her side. “Before, I could keep it all in. Now everybody knows. They all look at me differently. Even you.”
“No, I don’t,” I say. Sure, ever since the three of us visited Cass at her house, it’s been a little bumpy. That’s friendship, though. We find a way to navigate everything together. We always do.
“Especially you,” Cassie replies. “God, the way you look at me. It’s like you think if you turn your head, I’m going to jump off something. You look at me like I’m broken.”
My stomach drops. “I don’t think that. Not at all.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want to talk about my feelings all day. I don’t want to hear about your life secondhand. I just want you to be my best friend. Can’t you do that?”
For someone who railed on Marcos for using his fists, she might as well have punched me. It would have hurt less.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I’VE LEARNED ONE thing from Cassie. At the front desk, I sign myself out with a shaking hand. Sports event, I write as my excuse.
I text my dad as I walk outside into the blinding sunlight. Matt has another college coach visiting, and he wants Emery and me to come in early. She’s picking me up. I’m done with the message by the time I reach the traffic light.
My legs know where they’re going before the rest of me does.
I follow Main Street and step over the cracks in the cement. The stores are already decked with garlands and red ribbons for Christmas. There’s almost no one on the sidewalk, just a few women with strollers, several migrant workers by the bus stop, and me. I pass the sign for Pine Needle Street and instead cut through the alley behind Pav’s and onto Ocean Avenue. Around here, all roads lead to the ocean.
It’s too long of a walk; my scar tissue lets me know with each crack. Too cold.
I continue anyway as the stiff winds of the bay slap my hair against my face like sails. It’s a hissing wind, a little nasty, promising worse to come if you proceed. The bay sparkles so brightly under the sunlight that I shield my eyes. The waves are whipped into tiny whitecaps that will surely be swells on the ocean side. The bridge stretches in front of me, steel and concrete arching up so high that I can’t see down the other side until I reach the apex.
Nowhere to go but up.
My quadriceps clench with every increasingly steep step. Cassie and I walked up here in the summers before Cass had her license and when we were too cool to ask our parents to drive us. “This sucks,” she’d say in cadence to her footfalls. This. Sucks. Still didn’t stop us. We’d get honked at, and she’d throw up her middle finger. “What if we know them, Cass?” I’d say, giggling at her audacity.
Halfway up, I’m already out of breath. As though I’m climbing a direct road to it, the sun’s so bright that I feel a headache coming. I take heavy gulps of the salt air. A seagull swoops overhead, lands lightly on the railing, and then flies off.
Beneath it, the bridge makes room for boats and beach parties at its base and girls slipping into the water in November, not intending to come out.
When I finally reach the top, an American flag flaps against the railing. My cheeks burn from the exertion and the sharp wind. I force myself to lean over and look straight down. Maybe I can figure this out.
Because you can’t know until you’ve been there.
Below me, the deep-turquoise water churns. She could have jumped from up here, right at the heart of the arch. She could have ended it easily.
Instead, she chose the more difficult way, letting herself get cold until she couldn’t feel anything. The car still hummed in the background in case she decided to run out and sprint back in, peeling out of the parking lot like death was chasing her.
I follow the bridge down to the tiny strip of sand where the bonfire was. It’s the kind of place that’s abandoned in the early morning, save the early-riser fisherman or a boy with a metal detector who was up before school that day and went looking to see what people had left behind.
Under the bridge, the tide churns around the concrete supports. I listen to the steady lapping against the pillars. Bits of ash and bottle tops still rest on the shoreline, out of reach of high tide. Out in the water, plastic soda rings, the kind that you see in anti-pollution ads wrapped around cute turtles, bob along meaninglessly.
When Richard became scuba certified, Mom wouldn’t let him dive here. She said you had to know the tides here to a T because they shift so quickly under the bridge. It was a fact I didn’t expect Mom to know. That’s how Cassie intended to go. Down, down. Maybe this bridge is one arching tombstone.
If I yell under the bridge, will it echo? Or will it be silenced by concrete?
Was there a moment when she wanted to turn back before the cold took her, but she couldn’t move? How could the girl who gets bored so easily sit for so long in these currents, waiting for the dark?
I watch the water until I have the urge to wade in. Put my face down, spread my arms, and float. See how it feels. Watching the water, it doesn’t feel so unreasonable. It doesn’t matter that we’re in November. The water is probably warmer than the air. Mom said that, too. Mom and her nautical knowledge. What was it like, Cass? How did it feel to start losing yourself? Were you scared? Did you want it to hurry and be done with already?