I DIDN’T SPEAK TO or see Cassie until after school started, ninth grade, back in downtown Royston in the high school building we’d walked past and played around for so many years. Although she hadn’t grown much—she was probably 5'2", and still so thin—the proportions of her face had changed. Her nose was broader, her forehead higher, the arc of her cheekbones more deliberate. She had an adult face, one that looked as though it should be on a woman of six feet, not on a doll-sized person. No longer scrappy-looking, as I’d always known her, she’d become beautiful. Beautiful in a way that revealed my fancy haircut as a hoax, because with Cassie there was nothing to embellish or distract from her features. Her hair hung down, eternally fine and pale, below her shoulders; and either she’d become so expert with the makeup that she knew how to apply it invisibly, or she’d renounced it altogether. Her skin, lightly freckled, was like cream sprinkled with cinnamon. Her perfection made the gap between her teeth look like the handiwork of a marketer who, aware that perfection repels, had arranged, cannily, for this one alluring flaw.
Her expression too had changed. She looked like an adult, yes, but a melancholy adult, as though great burdens had fallen upon her in the months since last we’d met. Her eyes, always saucy and impish, were wary now, withholding. She was oddly friendly on the first day, and ran across the forecourt outside school to throw her arms around me. “Juju!” she cried out, “I’ve missed you!”
I couldn’t relax in her embrace. Jodie told me at recess that the Vosul family had moved up to Maine—that foolish mother had got some job in Portland—and so Delia was gone.
“So you’re telling me that Cassie is suddenly short of friends.”
“Could be.”
CASSIE AND I had lunch a few times in the cafeteria, with other kids around. She hung around with the same crowd as in the previous couple of years—the Evil Morsel’s crowd, sans Morsel—but without her closest friend, Cassie didn’t belong in the same way. I’d always thought of her as a renegade, not a leader but an independent spirit; but watching Cassie that fall, I had a different sense: that she was small and distressed and fierce in her distress—that the devil-may-care act was a response to her powerlessness, a “better jump than get pushed” bravado. She was beautiful now, but she was also more clearly a wound, a wound trying hard to look like something else.
She came to my house, one afternoon in late September. From the high school we could just walk; it wasn’t planned. As we lugged our backpacks through town, she phoned Anders—she called him Anders now—and told him not to pick her up; she’d make her own way home. His voice down the line sounded petulant, higher than I’d remembered. He dogged her a bit, about homework and getting dinner ready, but he didn’t yell or anything. When she hung up she made an exasperated sound in her throat. “Asshole.”
“How’s it going, with that?” I asked, with an effort at bland concern.
“Don’t patronize me, Juju.”
“I wasn’t.”
“It’s okay, I get it. As my mom and Shute say, the world separates the wheat from the chaff. It’s from the Bible. They’ve already given up on me.”
“Don’t be crazy.”
“You think so? My mom says I’ll never amount to anything, and Anders—well, he’d do anything he could to stop me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
“I love you, Juju—you’re so cute. If I was trying to tell you something, I’d tell it to you. No, just stating the facts.”
“We’ve got our whole lives.”
“Have you seen what that looks like in this town? Clipping hair at the Mane Event? Working the line at Henkel?”
“We’re both going to get out. You don’t have to get far from here to see that the world is huge and full of crazy shit.”
“Correction: we’ll both get out, but I’ve got to make my own way. I’ve got to make a plan.” She took a deep breath, and the words came in a rush like steam from a kettle. “Do you even know what I did this summer? Summer school in math. Babysitting for the Callaghans and the Justices—that obnoxious little kid Jackson, still in diapers, having tantrums in public where he lies down and waves his arms and legs like a bug and screams for his mom. Fucking awful. That, and watching Modern Family on demand, trying to make sure the a-hole didn’t catch me, because if you can believe it, he disapproves! You went off to your fancy camp and to Maine with your parents, and it was like I was in prison for three months. I couldn’t wait for school to start—me, Cassie Burnes, can you believe it? I couldn’t wait to get out of the house.”
At that point we reached my place. My mother was bringing groceries in from the car, so we helped her. She made a fuss of Cassie and how happy she was to see her (“We’ve missed you, you know,” she said emphatically, trying to look meaningfully into Cassie’s eyes) and how she hoped we’d see more of her now that we were in town at the high school.
“Wander over anytime,” my mother said. “Consider us a second home.”
“Sure thing. Thanks, Carole.”
We clattered up the stairs to my room at speed, as if we were having fun, making a familiar percussive thunder unheard in the house for years.
“Careful, girls.” I could hear from my mother’s voice that she was smiling.
What did we talk about? Peter, maybe a bit. Other kids at school, teachers. We watched videos on YouTube—pop music and rap, but also comedy shorts like Eddie Izzard, Key and Peele, superficial stuff, a few laughs, but nothing between us that mattered. Then my mother called up to say she was heading out to pick something up and did Cassie want a ride home, and that was that.
If my mother thought it would be the first visit of many, she was mistaken. Cassie was friendly enough at school, as if I didn’t have ice shards in my heart, as if I couldn’t possibly; but she must have sensed something. Either that or she chose to keep a distance. I would not, could not, make a significant overture. My pride depended on this. She would have needed to make the effort, enough to be openly vulnerable; she would have had to risk my revenge. I like to think I wouldn’t have rebuffed her, but it’s possible that I would have. It’s possible that I would have felt the need to exercise the power if I’d had it. But she didn’t grant me the opportunity.
“She’s so plastic,” I complained to Peter, who also spoke to her only at school. “Like she’s a cyborg. The real girl who was my friend all those years has gone over to the dark side.”
Peter sighed. “She’s got problems.”
“How do we know?” I knew he was right, but still.
“The very fact that she doesn’t want us to see. You don’t hide if you don’t need to. It’s like a planet: you know it has to be round, but you only see a crescent, or half a circle. So you infer that part of it is in shadow. Then you have to figure out what’s in the shadow, and what causes it.”
“But what if there’s just no there there?”
“That’s crap, Juju.” It was.
“Anders Shute,” I said.
“What about Anders Shute?”
“Anders Shute is the shadow.” We talked about this. “Though maybe,” I offered, “the person she really hates is Bev; only that’s not allowable, so Anders is the scapegoat.”
“Maybe. It seems more complicated than that.”
“You don’t think he’s doing anything bad, do you?”
“How do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why would you even suggest that?”
“That shit happens, you know.”
Peter frowned. “Did she say something?”
“Not exactly.”
“You’ve got to be careful, Juju. You can’t go saying—even thinking—stuff like that. It’s dangerous.”
“Okay. But what if he’s dangerous? What if he’s the Dark Thing?”
“What?”
“What if she needs our help to fight him?”
“She’d have to ask for help, you know? Short of that, we’d be stirring up trouble where maybe there isn’t any.”