I believed her. You didn’t have to be a shrink to see he could get Bev to do almost anything he wanted. “What about the other thing?”
“What other thing?”
“Well, you thought . . . you said before, at Thanksgiving, that maybe he—” If she didn’t remember what she’d said, I shouldn’t remind her. It was good if she’d forgotten; it meant it wasn’t true.
“You mean that I thought he’d gone looking for me. That he’d found my mom because he wanted to get to me. That’s what you mean, right?”
I nodded. I didn’t understand why I felt embarrassed, but I did.
“Look,” she said, and because I knew her as well as I knew myself, I could tell she was both serious and sort of acting at the same time; she was “acting serious,” as if she were in an episode of Supernatural or something like it, a teen psychodrama that both was and wasn’t like life. “Look, I don’t exactly know what he’s trying to do. But he looks at me sometimes—I catch him looking at me through those little eyes—and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”
“But does he—”
“He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t say anything. Nothing I could point to and get him in trouble for. Nothing you’d know was wrong. But he’s just off, right? He’s started coming out with quotations from the Bible—‘from scripture,’ he calls it—and it always seems like he’s boning up, like he’s been memorizing this shit for homework—”
“Like what kind of stuff?”
“You know, ‘The works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness . . .’ or ‘Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy’—crazy, bullying stuff.”
“And your mom?”
“My mom is like . . . it’s like he’s literally sent by God. Like she never thought she could be so lucky.” Cassie looked down at the table and for a second there was no pretense, no mask on her face, and her expression was baffled and sad. She looked like the little kid she had been. “I don’t want to be the one to ruin it for her, you know? I can’t do that.”
I’d heard this already from Peter. But her despair felt real, as if it had a color and filled the air. It was ochre. Ochre and acrid.
“What can I do, Cass? What can I do to help?”
She switched back to her masked self, with a sharp bark of laughter. Mirthless. “Delia says I can come live at her place—how do you think that’ll go down?”
“Badly.” I was trying to pull her back to me, to get the real girl to return. “But your mom might not say no to me, to my mom, if you wanted to come live at our place for a while. I can easily ask—”
“That’s so sweet of you, Juju. You’ve always been the sweetest. But you know I couldn’t live at your house. That would never work.”
“Why not? We’ve got lots of room, and your mom knows us so well—”
“Trust me”—and she even put her hand on my forearm, as if the director of the TV episode had suggested the gesture, that it would demonstrate the right combination of condescension and fakery—“it just isn’t a good idea.”
My new friends, people like Jodie and Jensen, couldn’t fathom my loyalty to Cassie. There was some leeway when you’d been friends since nursery school. We all made exceptions in our judgment for things like that. But Cassie’s tone when she said I couldn’t help her—I saw, suddenly, that while I’d felt our friendship, though in a bumpy stretch, was still the most precious, she thought she could laugh at me to my face. If I’d been going around with my mother’s words in my head (“Wait and it will change!” . . . “Things look different depending on where you stand!”), she’d been going around with a distinct hierarchy in hers, in which she was Regina George from Mean Girls and I was Janis. Frankly, if she wanted to play that game, I could list a dozen ways in which I was her superior, from my grades to my parents’ house to my boobs to my morals. I wasn’t proud of my internal rant—I knew better than to speak these ugly thoughts aloud, even to my mother, but I had them. I wasn’t just hurt but I hated her a little too.
I discovered I could hate her a bit, and because I didn’t tell her so, because our friendship went along on this reduced, part-time scale that didn’t allow for arguments, there was no noticeable change in our relationship. She didn’t know my feelings had changed—and I assumed she couldn’t tell. I could also add to my list of superiorities the fact that I was more observant and sensitive than she, that I could tell when she was being fake but the reverse wasn’t apparently true.
That spring, I had a busy exterior life, between school and speech team; but I had a busy interior life too, listening to Cassie’s intimacies as if I were still her loving friend, while feeling like a spy, gathering data for a professional report.
That wasn’t why I became friends with Peter. He’d sought me out that winter after things between him and Cassie ended. We didn’t hang out at school—he was a jock, a track star, hot even when his hair was dark with sweat, and into math and science. But he called me one night in January, and invited me to meet up at the diner in Royston to talk about Cassie, because he said he was worried about her. That was when he told me about their breakup, how it had been her choice, but he secretly hoped they could work things out.