But when Cassie arrived, her near-white hair dripping on her shoulders from the short distance between the Honda and the house, her white bandaged paw aloft, I was preoccupied instead with whether we should bake banana bread or chocolate-chip cookies, whether we should watch a comedy or an action movie, and whether, later, we’d weave friendship bracelets or write a play.
The next Monday morning early, we had a call from Marj, who managed in her way to make tenderness seem businesslike, and who said she’d thought it over and knew how sorry we must be about what happened, and would Cassie and I like to come back for the rest of the month to help out with the cats—only ever the cats, mind you—because that might give everyone a chance to feel better about the whole sad story. She’d called Bev and Cassie first, I discovered later, and Bev had already said yes, which made it easy, even necessary, for my mother to say yes also. So on Monday afternoon, that very day, we were back in our smocks in the stinky, chilled cat room at the animal shelter, up to our gloved elbows in turd-filled litter and swooning over the kittens, Xena and Electra, we would take home.
FROM THERE, the last stretch of the summer unspooled like thread off a bobbin. We kept meaning to return one more time to the Bonnybrook, but there was always a reason not to. Cassie’s dressing came off, her hand scarred but fully functioning. We returned to the Saghafis’ pool with its synthetic blue water as if the quarry had never called to us, had never been. We made plans for the fall; we went back-to-school shopping; we slept sanely in our beds, and got on with things.
Only months later, we heard that the property had been sold on, that the developers who’d bought it were lobbying at the State House in Boston to build condos around the original mansion. We heard too that the new people had properly sealed the perimeter with barbed-wire fence, including on the trail through the woods from the quarry.
Then, and for all sorts of reasons, our Bonnybrook days, our shared dream, came to seem like something that might never really have happened. And once Cassie and I came unstuck, neither of us had anyone to remind us it was true.
PART TWO
MY MOTHER assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later, for reasons more or less identifiable; everyone loses a best friend at some point. Not in the “she moved to Tucson” sense, but in the sense that “we grew apart.”
I, who pride myself on seeing things, can’t even now properly sort out what happened. Cassie had her version, though she never told it to me, and when, much later, I asked her outright (“What happened to us?” is how I put it, which seemed more neutral than I felt) she looked at me a long time—a look I’d describe as “hurt,” though I was the one who’d been wronged, surely?—and shook her head slightly. When I gave her a chance to explain, that was the best she could do.
Seventh grade is difficult for most. My parents said it was the time of life they’d least like to live again, which wasn’t helpful, as I had no choice but to live it. But seventh grade is differently difficult for each person. For Zach Filkins, it was difficult because they didn’t have a middle school math class challenging enough for him and he had to go over to the high school to join the advanced freshmen. On the other hand, Zach wasn’t interested in going to the middle school prom, so didn’t ask anyone, and didn’t have to contemplate the possibility of rejection. Whereas Brent O’Connor—a nice guy, but in seventh grade he still didn’t break five feet—had to brave the humiliation of being turned down for the dance by three girls, one of whom was me (I was already 5'6"—it was impossible). Then there was the slightly different challenge of being Alicia Homans, the fourth girl he asked, who knew it, but who accepted cheerfully and held her head as high as if she’d been his first choice.
There are the social struggles, and the agonies and embarrassments of puberty (I won’t forget the mixture of triumph and pity I felt when Bridget Mulvaney flounced down the corridor tossing her famous auburn curls, with a period stain the size of a saucer on her purple gypsy skirt), and the weight of the world that falls upon each of us in varying degrees, as we finally relinquish childhood’s clouds of glory to live, ever after, in our earthly realm.
In seventh grade, Jude Robben lived up to his name and was arrested for shoplifting a camera from Walmart. Andrew Dray got a caution from his law-enforcement uncle for weed smoking and small-time dealing. Rumor had it that Stacey Bilic gave blow jobs to half a dozen guys in one night at Tessa Rubin’s party in late May of that year, and the struggle for Stacey was that it didn’t matter whether the rumor was true. There was no point loudly denying it, because that meant no more as a truth or a falsehood than did the original story: in seventh grade, we moved suddenly into a world of adult actions and of adult conjecture.
It was also a world of adult consciousness, with all the strangeness that implies. Like: my mother’s story about Cassie and me is that our paths, always destined to diverge, simply took their natural course. It was a given, for example, that I’d eventually go to college. Because my parents assumed I would, but also because I wanted to, because I was good at school and proud of it and couldn’t imagine not going on to more school after school. Even when I’d dreamed of being a pop star, I imagined going to NYU or UCLA in between performances.
But Cassie’s mother hadn’t gone to college for the pleasure of learning. She’d studied nursing only later, in her midtwenties, right before she had Cassie. She’d left school at eighteen and worked as a waitress, and then in the hat and glove department at Macy’s, apparently—which always surprised me, because I thought of department-store staff as tidy and elegant.