Cassie wasn’t especially good at school, and she didn’t like it enough to work at it, and by seventh grade this had consequences. We’d left the elementary for the middle school, up Route 29, not far from the animal shelter. For those of us from Royston, middle school was just two years, because Royston Elementary had a sixth grade; but a lot of the other kids from neighboring towns had already been there a year. The school building, gray concrete unlike our cozy old Victorian elementary school downtown, squatted in an enormous parking lot between two strip malls. Its Astroturf fields glowed curiously green in all seasons; but mostly we lived in the locker-lined, windowless hallways, all of us lumpy and greasy in the fluorescence. Kids from the other towns seemed bigger and older than the kids we knew. Whereas before school had felt like a cheerful dysfunctional family—we’d known most of our classmates all our lives—now it felt like a parade ground, a theater of strange performances. Suddenly, we didn’t share the same schedules, or teachers, or classrooms; scattered, we didn’t necessarily even arrive or leave together. Cassie and I were pushed apart by bureaucracy.
I got put in advanced math and advanced English and while the school didn’t technically have an advanced history class, Cassie and I were in different sections, and mysteriously she was in with the troublemakers like Stacey Bilic and Andrew Dray, while I was in with May Hwang and Zach Filkins and Angie Pitts, the daughter of Mr. Pitts, the high school AP history teacher. Cassie and I were together only for PE and orchestra, where she played the flute and I played the cello and we sat on opposite sides of the room anyhow.
That’s what my mother felt happened, and maybe partly she was right. But I blamed the new girl from two towns over, Delia Vosul, whom I quickly took to calling the Evil Morsel. At first Cassie laughed and we made fun of Delia together—she had orangey-blond blow-dried hair, bulging push-up bras and shiny lip gloss, and a way of glancing at boys out of the corner of her sleepy almond eye as if she were Sofía Vergara, starring in a TV show invisible to anyone but herself.
But Delia and Cassie had history and math and English together, and by the beginning of October they had “study dates,” which, as I said to my mom, seemed mostly to involve going to Rite Aid. Cassie tried to tell me that actually Delia was really nice—and funny, she said she was funny, when anyone could tell the girl had the sense of humor of a brick. Then it turned out that Delia liked to sing, that she too wanted to be a pop star, and planned to audition for the spring musical, though when she sang Adele in the cafeteria and Cassie, admiring, flashed her gap-toothed grin, her voice was thin and raspy and she sang flat and couldn’t tell. Mr. Montgomery, the music teacher, apparently couldn’t tell either, because he gave Delia the solo part in the chorus, which we were to perform at the holiday assembly in December. I probably shouldn’t have told Cassie that Montgomery only wanted to jump Delia’s bones; but I did. In the old days, Cassie would have agreed with me or at least she would have laughed; but in thrall to Delia, she just bit her lip and looked away.
So it wasn’t such a surprise when I asked Cassie what we should dress up as for Halloween, and she said she wasn’t going trick-or-treating, she was going to spend the evening watching horror movies at Delia’s house. I’d discover only later that this was actually a boy-girl party, complete with Truth or Dare and Spin the Bottle, involving older kids. It constituted the Evil Morsel’s successful bid for cool. And Cassie’s, for that matter, even though she’d always made fun of those things. There were, I found out, just ten kids: five girls and five boys, one of them Peter Oundle from the year above, whom Cassie started dating that very night and would ditch before Christmas, even though she knew I’d liked him for ages.
I COULDN’T HELP feeling she’d started going out with Peter Oundle just to hurt my feelings. She’d always said she couldn’t see the attraction. Maybe Delia the Evil had told her Oundle was desirable, and it wasn’t about me at all. Or maybe it was about how into her he was; because according to Cassie (though I couldn’t decide if I believed her), Peter confessed that he’d had a crush on her since we were all kids. Whatever her reason for saying yes when he asked if he could kiss her, it stung. We didn’t fight outright—I couldn’t risk it—but we became stiff with each other. We stepped through the looking glass into a world all of fake friendliness, where Cassie would give me a broad smile when she saw me—but not too big, do you see? Like the parody of her old smile; and I would smile too, although it felt like a grimace, and I was sure everyone around us, and Cassie most of all, could see the sham of it. But she wasn’t letting on; she would smile and smile and be a villain, and I, who felt like a Catholic light-up statuette of Mary with a bleeding heart, would stand there bleeding, invisibly bleeding out, holding my lunch tray with May Hwang at my elbow and a grin on my face.
She fell hard for the Evil Morsel. If I’d held my tongue, if I’d tried harder—not even to be friends with Delia, but maybe just uncritically to let Cassie be friends with her—maybe then? I’m not convinced, but maybe. As it was, I’d shown my hand from the beginning. I’d called the girl Evil Morsel, for God’s sake. There was no way back from that.
THAT SEPTEMBER Bev too fell in love. I didn’t know, at first. Strange, blowsy Bev, with her sweet-smelling honey hair and her flowy skirts, who seemed even further removed from romance than my own parents, as far gone into the realm of sexlessness as Nino Zeppala, the woodshop teacher with the leather vest and steampunk beard—Bev fell in love with a man at her Bible study group. Bev fell in love with Dr. Anders Shute.
Now of course I wonder whether they first met at the hospital in Haverhill when Cassie went to get her bandage off. I don’t recall Cassie saying that she’d seen Dr. Shute that late August day; but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Because it seemed a pretty big coincidence that he’d join the Bible study that fall, just out of the blue. Bev had been a part of it for years already then—Alpha Group potlucks and scripture analysis with Pastor Phil from their church, a part of Bev’s life that Cassie rolled her eyes over and wanted nothing to do with, always on Tuesday evenings at the same time as Cassie’s youth group, which Cassie tolerated because there were a couple of plausible-looking guys.