I don’t know how long it was, exactly, before Cassie became aware of Dr. Shute in the hallways of the church—mixing powdered mashed potatoes or frying sausages in the church kitchen, arranging the circle of puffed-seat folding chairs in the community hall before meeting. How long before she knew he was there at all, and how long before she realized that her mother made googly eyes at him and that he, even in his wanness, responded? And what does it tell you that I didn’t know until Thanksgiving, when Bev called up my mother to invite us all over to their house for turkey—which had never happened before, although they’d been a few times to our house, in quiet years, the two of them? And when my mother said thanks, but we had my grandparents and my father’s brother’s family coming to town, Bev said, well how about just for some pie and coffee then, even afterward, because there’s someone special I’d like you to meet. My mother agreed we’d stop by for pie, even though she said to me she knew we wouldn’t want any, seeing as Grandma Robinson’s specialty was pie—pecan, blueberry, strawberry-rhubarb—and we’d be stuffed to the gills by five o’clock.
I felt awkward—and that was before I knew about Dr. Shute. In all the years, my dad had never spent time at the Burneses’, and my mom only for a chat or a cup of tea when picking me up or dropping me off. Cassie and I didn’t hang out at all, by then—“Wait, and it will change,” my mother said; or else, “Growing pains! Growing pains!” as though once we’d all reached some full-size state, fully boobed and menstruating and hormonally rebalanced, Cassie and I would fall back into the rhythms of our friendship as if the Evil Morsel had never existed. We rarely sat together on the bus, and if my mother or Bev picked us up, we ran to the car from different ends of the school steps, and the grown-up kept conversation going on the ride home. I pointed this out and my mother seemed not quite to believe me; but she always had the radio on in the background, so there was never any real silence, and maybe she couldn’t tell how it was.
After school, Cassie was often with Peter and Delia and Delia’s boyfriend, Arturo, in the eighth grade like Peter, a double-date of cool kids cuddling against the wall; while I stood out on the steps with my backpack at my feet and my headphones on, listening to retro stuff, Adele or Duffy, looking out into the traffic, as if I were in a hurry. I had other friends, but I’d lost the friend I loved best, and had loved without thinking for as long as I could remember, and it seemed absolutely essential not to appear to care.
(Here’s another thing I couldn’t quite figure out: I was full-sized, as was Delia too. I didn’t flaunt them like she did, but I had boobs and hips, and by October I had my period too. Whereas Cassie still looked like a kid, tiny and all bones, her jeans from the kids’ department. I couldn’t fathom how Peter would choose her, would want to kiss her, over everybody else—over me. Was it her sexy gap-toothed mouth, or the sense that she might not say no to anything at all? But he wasn’t like that. And I knew her; I knew that part of her wanted someone else to say no for her, to rescue her from herself—and maybe that was what attracted him, smelling that need in her like an animal.)
Halloween, a day I’d always looked forward to, suddenly turned into an ordinary day, even a worse-than-ordinary day, because it held the memory of its specialness. We still decorated the front lawn—the muslin ghosts hanging from the maple branches, the fake spider webs over the holly bushes, the Styrofoam gravestones tucked into the piles of leaves—and my father still carved the pumpkins and put them out with candles in them. We still raided CVS for jumbo bags of mini Snickers and Starbursts and Tootsie Rolls. All those things were the same, but instead of racing through pizza with Cassie and burning my tongue on the melted cheese, then getting hyped and giggly dressing in my room, I sat at the kitchen table with my parents slowly eating pork chops, mashed potatoes, and apple sauce—“masticating” is the word that comes to mind—interrupted occasionally by the thump of feet on the front steps. I played my mother’s role, handing out candy to the little kids whose parents waited in the shadows on the front path. Like my mother always did, I asked in a falsely jolly voice, “What are you meant to be? A burglar! Great costume,” I’d lie. “You get an extra piece of candy for that.”
The Saghafi kids came as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and their costumes actually were impressive, made by their mother, involving repurposed baseball shirts and beanie hats and a great deal of wadding that can’t just have been cushions because it was too well distributed around their middles. They wore their father’s shoes, probably wadded also, so they looked as though they had clown feet. I gave a big thumbs-up to Mrs. Saghafi, who called, “Not going out this year, Julia?”
I shook my head in a mock dismay that was actually real: “All good things come to an end, right?” She laughed, and shook her head back.
As the evening wore on, I helped my father with the dishes and my mother took over the candy so I wouldn’t have to speak to the bigger kids, most of whom I knew. Inevitably, a posse from my own class turned up, including a girl named Reba from my field hockey team, who saw me lurking and called out, “Juju, you’re not out? Come on, come with us!” I put on an “I don’t care” face and came to the door.
“Naw,” I said, “I think I’m past it.”
“Don’t be so boring!” There was a chorus—not just Reba, but Brent and Joel and Suzanne, dressed as a bee, with translucent wings and an antennae hairband.
“I’m good, guys. Besides, no costume.”
At which point Brent, whose effort consisted of his dad’s sports jacket and a porkpie hat, said, “It doesn’t matter. Come without one.”
I laughed, but there were tears right behind. I waved my dish towel and turned my back. “Thanks anyway,” I said. “Have fun. See you in school.”
When she’d closed the door on them, my mother came through and pretended to be looking for The New Yorker, but for a moment she put her hand on my shoulder, without speaking; and that was when the tears came, just a couple. Luckily I had my back to her.
“I’m going up to do my homework,” I said. I’d done my homework already, and instead scrolled through Facebook, looking at the photos Cassie had already put up—in real time!—of the Evil Morsel’s party, of Mrs. Morsel holding up a tray of decorated cupcakes, and of Peter—handsome Peter, who ought to have been mine—with his left eye and some of his teeth blacked up, wearing an oversized Bruins jersey and wielding a whittled hockey stick dipped in red paint. Delia was dressed as a bunny, a Playboy sort of bunny—how could wholesome-looking Mrs. Vosul have allowed that?—and Cassie, in spite of her white bunny hair, was dressed as a cat, in a cumbersome black velour jumper complete with whiskers, ears, and a tail. I had to smile, because I could see in Cassie’s getup the over-vigilant hand of Bev, who would no more have let her daughter out in a Playboy-bunny outfit than gone out that way herself.
“Serious costume!” I commented. “Sewn by Bev?”
And Cassie texted me to say, “How well u know my mom. WTF, right? Pickup @ 9!!”
“School nite?”
“U know it”
“Sorry 4 u”