AFTER THANKSGIVING, Mr. Cartwright, who taught honors English, took me aside and asked if I’d like to join the speech team. It was prestigious: our middle school had been best or second-best in the state for six years running, winning awards and even competing in Washington, DC. It didn’t occur to me not to do it. I was launched into a schedule of after-school practices and tournaments and new people, and it wasn’t so easy to carpool with the Burneses. Often, my mother picked me up after dark, and I’d come out of school to see our blue Subaru wagon lonely in a corner of the lot with its headlights off, identifiable because my mother had the interior light on, and her reading glasses, and was lost in an issue of Harper’s or The New Yorker. The other parents kept the headlights on and the interior light off, listening to the radio maybe.
Jodie and Jensen were my new speech team friends. They came from Georgetown, sister and brother, a year apart, sandy, wiry, and strong on the team. Jensen, the elder, in eighth grade, did political speeches mostly, and the debate side of speech; whereas Jodie, who was in my English class, preferred inspirational stuff or monologues from plays, and was really an actress. In class, she was quiet, almost mousy, which was why I hadn’t noticed her earlier; but onstage she was transformed. Her version of the “I Have a Dream” speech made me cry.
Sometimes at the weekends when there wasn’t a tournament, Jodie and I would get together and practice our pieces, or do some homework, or hang out, checking out possible monologues on YouTube. We gossiped about our crushes—film and music stars, mostly, but sometimes guys on speech teams from other schools, glimpsed, competed against, romanticized. Sometimes with Jodie—and occasionally with Jodie and Jensen together—I’d find myself doing something I thought of distinctly as Cassie’s and mine, like baking banana bread, or browsing the stuffed animal collection at Bell’s. I’d catch my breath: did she still sleep with Hubert the pig? Did the Evil Morsel like to bake? But mostly, I was okay with seeing her sometimes at lunch—on Wednesdays, our lunch periods were the same, and Delia had a class, so Cassie and I would sit together then, especially after she broke up with Peter.
And on the Fridays when I didn’t have speech team, we’d get picked up together, usually by my mother. Cassie always said she had to get home, even though Bev wouldn’t be there for hours yet. We’d drop her at her house, a little girl on the doorstep of the little white house with the Encroaching Forest looming behind. It made me nervous—like something out of a scary movie, especially in winter when night came in fast. But Cassie didn’t seem bothered. When I asked if she got scared, ever, in that house alone, she raised a contemptuous eyebrow.
“We’re old enough to babysit, right? So I think I can babysit myself, don’t you?”
I wanted to point out that when you babysat, there was another person in the house with you, if only a little person who’d be no help in a crisis. But I knew she’d mock me. If she wasn’t scared—didn’t she watch CSI too? Or Criminal Minds?—then why would I make her scared? That would have been cruel.
But I did wonder what she did, on those afternoons—not just Fridays either, because on the days I had speech team, somebody else’s mother or father dropped her at her door. It seemed like a lot of time to be alone. When I was by myself—and I loved being in my room on my own, reading on my bed or listening to music and staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars that my father had stuck on the ceiling when I was small—I could hear my mother moving around the house, the creaky boards upstairs or the faint murmur of the radio from the kitchen, and then I could smell dinner: the onions in the pan, or the whiff of meat cooking or the delicious pastry scent of a baking tart. Even when I was alone, I liked to know that I wasn’t really entirely alone; but that wasn’t how it was for Cassie.
All those years we’d been friends, since forever, we’d used the same words and perhaps meant different things—sometimes slightly different, but other times radically dissimilar; and we’d never known it. As if I’d been holding an apple and thinking it was a tennis ball, all this time. Like “home”: to me, it meant our creaky old house with noisy forced-air heating and rattly windows, made small and familiar by the endless piles of magazines and folded laundry that my mother left around, by the classical music or the radio voices in the background, by the comings and goings of friends and relations, and the knowledge that even when my father was “at work,” I could open my window and throw a ball (or an apple), and practically hit him. Almost every day, my parents hugged me; and when I read in bed at night, one of them almost always came to give me a kiss before I turned out the light, a leftover from my early childhood of which I was still fond. “Home” was that feeling of falling asleep to the distant muffle of your parents’ conversation, a sound rising through the floorboards almost as a reverberation not just in your ears but in your body. It was a particular set of familiar smells—the orange-flower soap in the downstairs bathroom, or the tinge of old fire smoke in the living room even in summertime, when it rained—and patches of warm air near the vents, followed by a chill near the windows. It was the knowledge that someone was always nearby. And if not, then the Saghafis were right next door, and the whole of town, a constant little burble, right down the road. The Rite Aid, after all, stayed open till midnight. If I needed to run screaming into the street, someone would hear me.