First, Anders Shute spent more and more time at their house. Thank God for the hospital, she said, because sometimes he’d stay away several days at a stretch, on account of his rotation schedule. But then, in the New Year . . . It was after she’d really broken up with Peter Oundle—not just pretended to, for her mother’s sake. I only understood much later, from him, and to my profound surprise, that their breakup was over a big argument they’d had where he’d told her she needed to confront Bev and tell her it couldn’t work with Anders Shute, that his presence made Cassie miserable; and Cassie told Peter to mind his own fucking business, that she’d seen her mom sad and lonely all her life—all Cassie’s life, that is—and that Bev had made a thousand sacrifices for Cassie over the years, hadn’t thought of being loved by a man on account of Cassie, and had given up hope of it; and that she, Cassie, wasn’t going to be the reason her mother ended up unhappy all over again.
It was the opposite of what I would’ve expected, but it made sense too. Cassie and Bev were like tree trunks grown together. She depended on her mother, and vice versa, and she couldn’t possibly be happy if she felt responsible for her mother’s unhappiness. But what about her own?
Anyway, Cassie broke up with Peter, saying that he wanted too much from her. He said he got it, sort of: it wasn’t like she liked someone else. It was about her and Bev, really: her mom believed that Cassie and Peter had broken up at Halloween. It’s tiring to lie and to pretend your boyfriend isn’t someone special, when not only your mother but also this other random guy is watching your every move.
Peter was badly hurt—he told me so, and even months later he would have got back together with her in a minute, if she’d wanted. “I’ve liked her for ages,” he confided. “Remember last summer, when you guys were walking past our basketball game, and Beckett yelled something rude? I knew you’d laugh it off, but I could tell she was pissed. And I came after you guys because I wanted her to know it wasn’t me.”
“You wanted her to like you.”
“Yeah.”
He felt a lot—he feels a lot—Peter, even though he didn’t want people to see it. He wanted to be cool, and emotion wasn’t; but he couldn’t help feeling. That all seemed so clear to me—it was part of what I’d always loved about him. You could say, in a way, that I loved how much he loved Cassie: I just wished it were me instead. And she? I don’t think she knew it for love, not then. She wasn’t earnest in that same way. She was, somehow, a little cold inside—actually cool. It was the right word. It was part of what both Peter and I loved about her.
As for Cassie’s other friendships, needless to say, Bev didn’t like the Evil Morsel any more than I did, though I’d like to think that at least some of her reasons were different. But it meant Cassie didn’t talk much about school at home, or vice versa. She segregated these two sections of her life, lived two lives. She kept lipstick and eyeliner and jeans with holes in them in her locker along with makeup-remover pads, and she took to dressing a second time before the first bell and a third time after the last one. From what little Cassie conveyed to me, Delia thought it was funny. I might have found it funny too if we’d still been close, but when I told Jodie, she rolled her pristine, un-made-up hazel eyes and whispered, “Doesn’t that just strike you as so sad? I mean, almost pathetic? Like, why doesn’t she feel okay being who she is, instead of putting on a disguise, like a costume, every morning?”
“What if she feels like the person she is at home is the one in disguise, though? And like she’s not allowed to be her real self when she’s there?”
Jodie shook her head. “That’s just sad, you know?”
In the New Year, maybe late February or so—after Valentine’s Day, and maybe it was even decided then, in the course of an evening Bev and Anders Shute spent canoodling over lo mein and a tiki candle at the Lotus Garden on Route 29, while Cassie sat at home with Electra on her lap, watching reruns of Friends and texting with Delia—Dr. Anders Shute formally moved into the picturesque white Cape with its skirt of fence.
Cassie said that they’d sat her down and explained that they were married in the eyes of God. They’d prayed about it together, Bev and Anders Shute told her—they sat on the sofa holding hands while they talked, Cassie said, and they finished each other’s sentences—and God had blessed them as man and wife. If they weren’t yet married in a courthouse, Anders Shute said, it was only because of her, because of Cassie: they didn’t want to complicate things legally until Cassie was comfortable. This, Anders Shute made clear, was Bev’s wish. But they would henceforth be a Family—Cassie said they both kept saying the word as if it had a capital letter—and Anders Shute said she must think of him as her Father (again, a capital letter); and that sentence, Cassie said, Bev made no move to finish for him. But when he said it, Cassie saw that Bev couldn’t look at her, but looked instead down at her lap. “Because she knew,” Cassie said, “that it was fat fucking chance. Like anyone but my real dad could ever, ever be my father.”
Dr. Anders Shute abandoned his apartment in Haverhill, put his furniture in storage (with the exception of a few inexplicable artifacts: a signed Red Sox baseball in a satin-lined box; a garish and not-small painting of a sunset in Maine involving boulders, seascape, and great swathes of pink and purple, all in an ornate gilded frame; and a large orange-and-yellow blown-glass display bowl that looked so much like a wedding gift that you wanted to ask him whether he had, in fact, been married) and arrived, according to Cassie, on a Sunday afternoon, with three large suitcases and a box of books, in his silver-green Honda Civic that matched Bev’s crimson one, only it was a newer model. In bulk, his clothes, Cassie said, smelled like the health-food store, that particular vitamin stink that seeps from the pill bottles and makes you want to gag. She was also perturbed to find that he—like she herself—used Clairol Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner on his lank locks, and blue Listerine mouthwash for his gums.
“Just the idea of him in our bathroom grosses me out,” she told me one early spring lunchtime in the cafeteria. Under the fluorescent light, her eyes were red-rimmed and her nostrils too—she had a more powerful white-rabbit aspect than usual.
“But do you still think he’s so . . .”
“Of course.” She turned to her french fries, swiping a couple at a time through their glob of ketchup. “But mostly, an asshole.”
“Asshole. Oh no. How so?”
“You know how he’d never been to church, I think, before joining Mom’s Bible study class? Well, it’s like he’s now the most Christian of all.” She shook her head. “Is he trying to impress Mom? Does he really believe this shit? Or is it some calculated way to control us—to control me?”
“Like how?”
“Like, there’s the clothes and makeup thing—”
I looked at her black concert T-shirt and her torn jeans, her raccoon eyes and purple lipstick. “You seem to be dodging that bullet pretty well so far.”
“So far, yeah, but you have no idea. They check my closet. They ‘confiscated’ three skirts for being ‘too short.’ He told her my party heels were too high. I had to take down some of my posters—like the Supernatural one, because he said it wasn’t ‘appropriate,’ because there are demons on the show.”
“Or is it because the actors are too hot?”
“Maybe that too. But suddenly they want to know every YouTube video I watch, every website I visit, every book I read, every song I listen to . . .”
“And that’s him? Or your mom too?”
“It’s both of them. But it’s coming from him.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”