I THOUGHT CASSIE would make a dramatic gesture to earn back our friendship. Instead, she recedes.
Marcos makes up a test during lunch on Tuesday, so I walk into the cafeteria and sit with Andreas and Dimitri. Although there’s an empty chair next to Andreas, Juliana takes the one next to me. She spends most of the period making fun of Andreas’s hyperactivity the way everyone does, but there’s a fondness I never noticed in her before. She speaks like an older sister to a pesky and loveable younger brother. Before the bell, she balls up her aluminum foil and says to me, “See you later,” the same way she says it to Andreas.
I follow her into the hallway, where Cassie lingers by her locker. “Want to go out to the fountain?” I hear Cassie say over the burst of sneakers on linoleum.
“Nah,” Juliana says. “I have a project to work on.”
Seeing her with her head tilted, her golden curls rolling across her shoulders, I can’t forget her face in the woods. Her vanishing footsteps. The resounding silence the rest of the day.
“Remember, you owe me a gymnastics lesson.” Andreas bounds up beside me. “Do I need to wear a leotard?”
“Nobody wants to see that, Dre,” Dimitri says.
“What? You know I’d look freakin’ fly.”
“That’s one word for it,” I say, grateful for the distraction.
“Am I too tall?” Dimitri asks. “Would I hit the ceiling? I might hit the ceiling.”
They banter back and forth and I feel her looking at me, but I don’t turn my head.
When I crashed from my knee injury, there was nothing waiting for me at the bottom. Just Cassie. She wants all of me, in specific, moldable ways. A girl who will follow her lead, say farewell to gymnastics, tell Marcos goodbye, and understand every emotion that she’s not sharing. I can't be that person. I don’t think anybody can be.
While I wanted her to help me escape everything I was afraid of, it’s been up to me to put my world back together all along. I had to figure out what was right for me, not what Cassie thought was best.
All of these years, I chose her. But she didn’t choose me.
THERE’S ANOTHER STEP I need to take. After school, I write to Coach Englehardt and Coach Barry to tell them that I qualified for States (leaving out the “barely”). I tell them that my next meet is in January. Dad had said, “We let you off easy last time, but we’re coming to this one, like it or not.”
Then I shut the laptop and go for a run.
The first snowflakes of the season brush against my eyelashes. As I approach the bay, I ball my fingers inside my sweatshirt sleeves for extra warmth. The wind pushes me back as I make my way up the bridge. I grit my teeth and run harder. Force myself to be faster, the way I would for the final tumbling pass of my floor routine. To run as quickly as I did through the woods, except this time without the urgency.
Despite the wind and the gentle swirl of snowflakes that land on the sand and vanish, the tide is calm. I can almost see why Cassie chose here. There’s something soothing in the infinity of the waves flowing endlessly to the horizon.
I take strength from the waves. I will not sink.
When I return home, flushed from the cold air, there are messages. D and I are coming 2 open gym tonight. GET READY, OLYMPICS! Andreas writes.
Can your boyfriend hook us up with free food at Pav’s after practice? Wrong that I’m already pondering my next meal? asks Emery.
Andreas’s high-fives every time we pass in the hallway, Juliana’s acknowledgment that I’m a human, Emery and I sweating our asses off in the gym and immediately refueling with burritos–it’s not the same without Cassie. None of it replaces her. It’s not 2 a.m. Slurpees and driving around for the sake of driving and teasing each other while listening to our favorite songs. It’s not the same as knowing each other since we were seven. I’m starting to believe that something different is good for me, though.
I’m about to reply to them when it happens:
Inbox: (1).
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“PULL AWAY FROM the curb,” the DMV employee says coolly.
I signal and obediently check the mirrors. Behind us are other cars with nervous aspiring drivers, their parents in the passenger seat. I’ve left Dad standing by the tree whose leaves were red and golden in October. Now they bloom verdant green in April. It’s taken until spring for my eighth road test. You could say that I’ve been preoccupied. Luckily, I’ve had some good instructors along the way.
I wait for the last-minute panic to kick in–the sweating palms, the doubt, the out-of-control thoughts. Instead, my mind is quiet.
The speedometer hovers at 36 in the 35. The man makes no comment. He gazes out the window as though we’re out for a nice afternoon drive.
I stop at the stop sign. And the next. And the next.
“Should I turn up here?” I say at the sixth intersection. I mean, this is getting excessive.
“Sure.”
Uh. “Which way?”
“Whichever.”
Unreal. Abso-freaking-lutely unreal. Who is this man?
He must have asked himself the same question. “Left,” he says, straightening up.
My left turn is dead on. Centered beautifully between the double yellow and the curb. I don’t know that I’ve ever turned so perfectly. I don’t know that anyone has ever turned so perfectly. I half expect the men standing outside of 7-Eleven to applaud. Can you get bonus points?
“Look, I don’t know what your life goals are,” the man says suddenly. “But make sure you never work for the state. Three-point turn here.”
I’m so startled that I hit the brakes too forcefully. With a hasty look in the side-view mirror, I roll to the left.
“You think that after twenty-two years, they wouldn’t screw you over,” the man says as I transition into reverse. “You never call in sick. Never take a damn personal day. Not one. And this is how they treat you. Like that plastic bag over there.”