After that, we’d speak often on the phone, maybe even a few times a week, a strange friendship, rarely face-to-face in the beginning. There wasn’t, in our middle school lives, another way for us to spend time together. And while at first we talked mostly about Cassie—how she didn’t seem really to know herself, and how Delia had too much influence over her, and how she was turning, heliotropically, to the dark sun of the party crowd in a way that dismayed Peter, who so passionately wanted to be her savior—over time we talked about other things too: the pressures he felt from his parents (his dad was an engineer at Henkel and his mom had a general law practice in Newburyport, “nothing fancy,” he said, but for her to be a lawyer was fancy enough, and put him in the subset of kids at school in which I also found myself, of whom things were expected), or the school gossip (what parties there’d been, although he went to them and mostly I didn’t, and what funny or shocking or predictable things people had done, or how drunk or high they’d been), or funny observations about teachers or kids at school. He had a sense of humor and noticed things—that Monsieur Favreau, the Canadian French teacher who coached hockey too, sounded like a quacking duck when he made announcements on the PA; or that when nobody took down the popped balloons in the gym after the winter dance, their rubber corpses dangled like brightly colored condoms for a week; or that the smell in the cafeteria on chili days was oddly like the whiff he got when bagging the family Labrador’s steaming turds. He made me laugh; I made him laugh; and yes, Cassie was between us, our friendship’s reason for being, but she came to seem less the entire point of it as winter turned to spring.
She wasn’t coming back to him either. That became clear. She acted out at parties that winter, drinking and flirting and slipping into dark corners with other guys. That’s what Peter told me; but when I asked her about it—“be careful,” I warned, nannyish but sincere—she told me that she knew what she was doing, that she never had more than couple of drinks. (“Think about it, Juju,” she said. “My mom picks me up from every single party. If I was blitzed don’t you think she’d know right away? She’s a nurse, for fuck’s sake.”) She assured me she didn’t get high; she said she’d never done more than make out with guys, though she did admit that there were several of them, and they were always in eighth grade and sometimes even in ninth.
I wanted to believe her; but Peter told me other things, and he had no reason to make them up. Looking back, I wonder if she told me what she wanted to be the truth; but I still can’t square it all with Bev and Anders Shute, who would have dressed her as a Mennonite if they’d been able but who never stopped her going to parties in the first place. Did they only pretend to pay attention, when really they were too wrapped up in each other? Or did Bev have mixed motives—my mother always says that “people are contradictory”—and even while Bev ramped up her own religious devotion, she secretly, even unconsciously, loved that Cassie was a cool kid, behaving in ways Bev would only have dreamed of, accepted by people who, in Bev’s day, would have shunned her?
Or was Cassie just turning into a very good liar, with her sweet little-girl face, those big eyes, and that pure, pristine near-white hair dazzling the grown-ups into believing what she wanted them to? When she told me that she was fine, that she was in control, that she knew her limits, I believed her. Sitting across from her in the cafeteria, with its prison lights and its bad smells, I believed her. Only later, talking to Peter, I wondered, and doubted, and frankly disbelieved.
I defended her though. People started to say things, to assume things, to repeat them. Jouncing along on the bus on the way to a speech tournament, when the first cherry blossoms were out like girls in prom dresses, and the rain on the highway made a slick slurping sound beneath the tires, Jodie asked me if it was true that Cassie had been in the boys’ locker room after school, doing things.
“Doing what things?”
“You know. Things. A bunch of guys from the boys’ lacrosse team were there, and so was Cassie. Those kind of things.”
“That’s crap, Jodie.” My hands trembled in my lap. “I can’t believe you’d even repeat that kind of garbage. What if it was you?”
“It would never be me.”
“You don’t know that. People have it in for Cassie. They’re jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“Because she’s popular with guys. Because she’s cool.”
“Do you really think Cassie’s cool?” Jodie was halfway between pissed-off and pitying. “Nobody thinks your friend is cool. Just sad and fucked up, really. The only reason she still talks to you is because you’re the last person to believe she’s cool. The big question is, why are you still talking to her?”
I CALLED CASSIE that night. Her cell phone was off, so I tried the landline, something I hadn’t done in a long time. It was a surprise when Anders Shute answered—somehow all this time he hadn’t remained real to me: upon hearing his quiet, smooth voice, I was stunned concretely to realize that all these months he’d been present in that house, in Cassie’s house, every night at the dinner table and every morning fussing with the radio, his stray pubic hairs tangled in the drain, the vestige of his scent in her mother’s bedroom.
“I’m afraid Cassie can’t come to the phone,” he said.
“It’s Julia,” I said. “Do you know when she’ll be home?”
“She’s home,” he said. “But she can’t come to the phone just now.”
“I see,” I said, in a way that made clear that I didn’t.
“It’s a family rule,” he explained. “Cassie needs to finish her homework before she socializes.”
I left him my number, although she knew it. A family rule? What did that mean? He wasn’t family.
Cassie didn’t call me back that night, and when we spoke about the rumor at school she was defensive and furious. She even seemed a little scared. “That’s gross, Juju. I can’t believe you’d even ask me that.”
“I’m not asking if you did it, I’m telling you what people are saying.”
“Even to repeat it to me is like saying it’s true.”
“I’m not repeating it to anyone else here, am I? I’m telling you, is all.”
She shook her head. “Whose side are you on?”
“Are there sides?”
“Friends don’t talk shit about their friends.”
“I didn’t. I told them it was bullshit. But I thought you needed to know what’s going around.”
She changed the subject. We talked instead about how hard she was finding math class, and whether she should get some tutoring help. She showed me a photo in Seventeen of a two-hundred-dollar leather backpack that she wanted for her birthday and knew she wouldn’t get.
“If only my dad were around,” she said, “he’d get it for me.”
I remembered Shute’s voice on the phone the night before, acting like he was her father. “I bet you miss him.”
“Baby you have no idea,” she said in a theatrical voice, and flipped through the magazine to a feature about One Direction. “Which one’s for you?” she asked. “Harry Styles is definitely hot, but I feel like he’s the most obvious choice, don’t you? Like, he’s the default setting.”
Later I tried to have a repeat of the One Direction conversation with my mother, who always wanted to try to seem younger than she was. She went along with it for about five minutes and then fake-screamed and pretended to tear her hair out. “The inanity!” she shrieked. “I can’t bear the inanity!”
“What do you want to talk about then?”
“How about the presidential race, and the fact that we’re going to elect our nation’s leader—either the same one or a new one—in about six months? How about we talk about that, instead of One Direction?”
“Do we have to?”
“It matters, sweetie. We have to.” She then made me listen to a political program on the radio, and over dinner with my father, we discussed it, like having social studies class at home. I was surly and annoyed, but I did it.