“Love u Juju,” she wrote back. Enough for me to feel consoled, as though we were suddenly okay, and my mother might be proven right after all.
That wasn’t the only time she was sweet to me. There wasn’t anything angry or cruel about our drifting, not for her. More like I was an old pair of shoes and she had a couple of fancy new pairs; she didn’t think to wear the old ones, but wouldn’t have thrown them away. With the Morsel that fall, Cassie moved at speed into a different world, more grown-up than mine, one where she put on different faces for different people. Maybe I made her feel trapped, like she’d outgrown me. But from my side, it was like I knew her too well, I saw her too clearly, when she no longer wanted to be known: she wanted to try out a new role, and didn’t want to be reminded that it was fake.
I hoped our family visit at Thanksgiving might bring us back together. In the car with her mother one afternoon, I asked whether Peter would be coming too.
“Peter?” Bev looked at us in the rearview mirror. “Why would he come?”
“I don’t know—I just thought—”
“Cassie, is there anything I should know?”
“ ’Course not, Mom.” Cassie used what my mother called “tone.”
Bev looked again in the rearview, directly at me. “Cassie’s embarrassed, I know, because she wants to be popular. Believe me, I know how it is to be a teenager.” I knew Cassie’s mother had never had to worry about being cool. “Did you not tell her, Cassie?”
“My mother decided,” she began—but Bev, steely but bright, interrupted her.
“No, sweetie. We decided. We had a long conversation and we decided.”
“We decided that I’m too young to have a boyfriend.”
“Not too young to have friends who are boys,” Bev clarified, “but too young for exclusive relationships.”
“So I told Peter that.”
“So now they’re simply friends, not special friends.” Bev wore a tight smile. “Isn’t that right, sweetie?”
Cassie didn’t say anything.
“And that’s much more appropriate,” Bev concluded. “It means that they can be friends forever, which they’ll both be glad about in time.”
Later, I texted Cassie to ask what had happened.
“Whisker smudge Halloween” she texted back. “Bad scene omw home” And then, “Fuck her.” Which wasn’t something she would have said easily in earlier times. Cassie and her mother had always been a team, the two of them, and they took care of each other. Cassie made jokes about her mother’s outfits, or about how her mother would refuse dessert at our house and eat half a tub of Ben & Jerry’s when she got home (“Chunky Monkey for the chunky monkey,” Cassie would say), but nobody else had ever been allowed to do it. You weren’t supposed to laugh too much when Cassie did it, though you were supposed to laugh a little—there was a balance you were expected to find, and I’d long ago figured it out. But the balance had changed. Now there was Peter; now there was the Evil Morsel; now there was Anders Shute. Bev and Cassie weren’t on their own anymore; they weren’t necessarily a team.
Which became all the more apparent when we stopped by their house on Thanksgiving—my parents and me, although my father had tried at the last minute to stay home with the cousins. My mother had said, “Rich, you can’t possibly bag out. What kind of message does that send? That only the sisterhood can be bothered!” Which both annoyed him and made him laugh.
We’d had twenty-four hours of my father’s family by then: my grandfather in headphones on the sofa, conducting an orchestra only he could hear, while the eight-year-old twins, Brad and Joe, Mike and Eileen’s youngest, chased each other noisily around him. My grandmother spent a great deal of time in the kitchen, “helping.” She added seasonings to my mother’s sauces; she rearranged the flower arrangements; she polished the special-occasion silverware as if my mother hadn’t spent the previous Sunday doing it. Nana Robinson was never still or quiet. She loved to talk, she loved to laugh; she loved a party and a crowd.
“If only she loved to listen,” my mother would whisper, only then to apologize. We adored Nana; it was just difficult having her as a houseguest. Grandpa too adored her, but he found it difficult sometimes having her as a wife—hence the headphones: expensive Bose noise-cancelling ones that removed him, immediately and entirely, to an encompassing aural universe of his own choosing. He was a lover of Satie and Debussy, of limpid, private music; Nana was more like Wagner.
As for Mike and Eileen and their four children: the twins essentially counted as a single, lunatic kid. Jake, the eldest, was like Grandpa in his retreat. Lanky, seventeen, with big glasses that enlarged his dark eyes and a rash of little red spots on his porcelain-white forehead, he wasn’t doomed to be a gamer; he was one by choice. He could actually have been—and would soon thereafter become—fairly handsome. He didn’t have a speech impediment or halitosis. His dark hair was curly, his full-lipped mouth kind of sexy. But that fall he spent most of their visit in the attic guest room, plugged into an alternative game world—“Like a cockroach,” his mother joked. “Only comes out when the lights are off.”
Their sister, Una, was closest to me in age—ten that fall, in fifth grade. She’d always admired me; imitation is the highest form of flattery, as my mother says. When I loved Harry Potter, she copied me. When I wore Doc Martens, she wanted a pair. When I got bangs in the fifth grade, we sent the cousins my school photo, and the next time we saw her, she had bangs that brushed the top of her glasses. But that year, the distance between fifth grade and seventh grade seemed unbridgeably huge, and looking at her bright eyes behind their thick glasses and at the pink baubles in her hair, at her flat little Gumby body that could still easily perform backflips and cartwheels, that had no lumps or odorous emanations or secretions to mask—it was like looking back across a rough channel to a shore upon which you’d never again set foot. So I’d been mostly avoiding Una, and her eager conversation about books or shows or movies or pop stars. I wanted to say to her, Can’t you see I’m contaminated? Can’t you see the grown-up dirt all over me?