FROM THE SPRING of seventh grade to the fall of ninth grade is a long time. A lot happens. Some things happen fast, like a car accident or a heart attack; other things happen slowly, like the disintegration of a friendship or a marriage, or like cancer, and you don’t even know they’re happening, really, until the crisis comes, by which time it’s too late.
With someone you’ve always known and have loved without thinking, there’s the strangeness of knowing everything and nothing about them at the same time. At school, sometimes, we’d chat in the hallway or the cafeteria, and Cassie would make a certain face, or use a certain word, or run her hand through her hair a certain way, and I’d know exactly what she was feeling, and it would all still be there between us: you couldn’t take away our whole lives. But our friendship was, at the same time, like a city you hadn’t visited in a long time, where you know the streets by heart but the shops and restaurants have changed, so you can find your way from the church to the town square, no problem, but you don’t know where to get ice cream or a decent sandwich.
Cassie and the Evil Morsel were close, all that time. They went to parties together at the weekends in the eighth grade. On Instagram, you could see they were at high school parties, and Peter—with whom I still spoke and texted and whom I saw regularly, even though he was at the high school campus in Royston—said when he saw them, after Homecoming or on Bonfire Night or the midwinter formal, the girls were always together, laughing loudly and cracking jokes about booze and weed. If they weren’t partying, they wanted you to believe they were.
I couldn’t figure how Bev allowed it. Maybe she was simply distracted by love. One time my family was out for Chinese at the Lotus Garden, a Sunday night, when Bev and Anders Shute came in for dinner. They stopped by our table and my mother asked them about Cassie, and Bev said she’d wanted to stay home and do her homework. I thought that was strange—she needed to eat dinner too, right? I figured that Bev and Anders Shute were happy to be together, and Cassie was happy to be without them. It seemed lonely, for a kid. Then it occurred to me she might not be alone, and that even if she was, she probably wasn’t doing homework. I was in all honors classes and I didn’t have that much homework. “The devil makes work for idle hands,” Bev used to say when we were little, whenever she gave us chores to do. At that point it seemed as though the devil might be paying more heed to Cassie than Bev was.
What I didn’t know until later—though I might have surmised it—was how tempestuous things had grown at the Burnes house. My father heard from Mr. Aucoin when he came in for his six-month cleaning, that one night well after dark he came across Cassie walking up the verge of Route 29 toward town, away from home. He stopped and told her to get into the car and he’d take her home, my father said that Mr. Aucoin said, and Cassie said, very politely, “No, thank you. I’m going to a friend’s house,” and Mr. Aucoin said, “Well, if that’s the case, at this hour your mother should take you there. You can’t wander along the highway. So get in, and I’ll take you home.” And she again demurred, and he said, “Cassie Burnes, I am not leaving until you get into the car. But if you would rather, I’ll call 911 and Officer Callaghan can take you home in the cruiser instead.” And then she got in the car, my father said Mr. Aucoin said, and he took her home.