I look closer.
All right, there were the little things. Tiny jabs at my outfits and out-of-control hair that didn’t stop after I asked her to. There was the way she stuck to my side at birthday parties and avoided my gymnastics friends, although they tried to talk to her. How she wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day if she found out I was going over to someone else’s house. By the next morning, though, everything was healed. She’d braid my hair on the bus, cheer me on at competitions, spend hours in my bedroom making bracelets.
Then Cassie began taking the photos, and with each passing year, the colors become crisper, the focus stronger. As the photos progress, we grow taller (at least, she does), my braces come off, we figure out how to put on make-up. There’s Cassie tugging me by the hand to the shore. I remember the gray sky, the warning clouds promising thunder. We were fifteen, old enough to venture to the beach ourselves. Cassie wanted to swim, and the fear in my eyes is palpable.
“There’s lightning,” I’d said right after her camera clicked.
“Not yet,” she’d said.
Her grip was strong, but I yanked free. “No.”
For a moment she’d looked at me like she didn’t know me. Like she was disappointed in me.
I’d held my breath. I didn’t often say no to Cassie, but I swore that rumble in the distance wasn’t a truck in the parking lot.
Then she’d set the camera down on the towel. Her hair billowed in the gusts of wind. “Whatever,” she’d said. “Be boring by yourself.” Then she’d walked off into the hissing surf without a look back.
Later, as we raced home through the pouring rain, I’d been the one who apologized. I couldn’t stand the heaviness in my chest from her refusing to speak to me. Why she gave me the photo, I have no idea. But the next time she came over, she wanted to know why it wasn’t up like all the other ones.
She’s strong-willed. I know that. She knows what she wants and she’s not afraid to grasp it, even if the way she holds on makes it hard to breathe. I’d take that over the stifling silence of her being angry with me.
Funny, I don’t feel that incessant tug from Marcos or Emery. Instead, I feel it from within me: a natural desire to be around them, to laugh, to listen. It’s an easiness I’m not used to.
I turn back to the photos. Of course my relationship with Cassie is different; we’ve known each other for so much longer. We have a history.
A non-Cassie photo: the sunset over silhouetted trees when I went camping the summer before freshman year with my parents. I’d texted Cassie whenever I found service in the woods. Can we talk? I’m dying. So many mosquitos.
Cassie was evasive: Busy. Maybe later, she’d texted.
I texted her as soon as we left the campground for the world of WiFi and full cell service. No response. I called and she didn’t answer.
The next day, she wrote back: Finally dumped Chris. The worst.
Who’s Chris?
The guy from Galway Beach. I told you.
No, you didn’t.
Asking her in person elicited even less of a response. “It was nothing,” she’d said with a shrug.
There’s the two of us smiling in my front yard before junior prom. She wanted to go to a party after. I was too tired, went home, and didn’t hear from her until the next afternoon. What happened? She wouldn’t say. Another shrug, a smile that said you’d know if you were there. She stepped around me then, and she did it again today.
The same person who held me together through all of my injuries, through Regionals, through Richard’s deployments, is the one pushing me away now. As much as I want to believe it’s the depression speaking, not the Cassie I’ve known forever, I can’t ignore the feeling that there’s something more that I haven’t seen. That I haven’t allowed myself to see.
Push and pull. Ebb and flow. Which one is she? I stare at the photos until my vision blurs, and only then do I see the answer.
She’s both.
This is Cassie. This is who she has always been, long before she walked out of her car with the engine running and slipped into the water under the bridge.
I don’t know how to feel about that.
I WAKE UP Sunday morning ready to puke.
I move quietly in the bathroom so as to not wake up my parents. I’ve kept the details of the competition purposefully vague (that is, they know I’m attending one eventually and nothing more) because I want as few witnesses as possible. I tug on the deep-blue-and-silver leotard and smooth out the glittery mesh sleeves. Already it feels itchy. Strangely, it’s reassuring that the feeling hasn’t changed.
My eyes are puffy, exhausted, and the only kind of competition I look ready for is a sleeping one. I flip my hair over and stick it under the cold running water, then go about the business of spraying almost an entire can of hairspray and unloading a full pack of bobby pins on it. Monica would be proud. She’d go through a pack a meet. For a moment I consider texting a picture to all of my original teammates.
Instead, I have a joint text from Nicola and Erica. GOOD LUCK TODAY! WE LOVE YOU! They competed in last night’s session, and if the online results are any predictor of the future, South Ocean will be well represented in the awards long after Emery and I graduate.
The steps creak as I move downstairs. I rummage through the kitchen and settle on a banana and a handful of cereal. I can’t eat, though, so I sit on the couch and commence waiting for Emery.
There’s a soft thunk on the door, followed by a car rolling down the street. Probably the newspaper delivery.
When I open the door and step into the cool dawn air, there’s an envelope addressed to me in meticulous block letters.