But then Bessie barked, down in the darkest subcorridor of what Cassie and I had named the Isolation Ward. Rudy broke into what was, for him I guess, a run, a sort of lumbering wheezy haste, and I ran on ahead of him, able now at least to see dark spots in the flooring and avoid twisting my ankle.
Room 7, one with no gold or crimson blooms of mold on the walls, and with, still, a blackened sink, dry as dust. Our room. Chicken-wire glass at the high windows; a metal door half off its hinges, as if someone had thought to steal it, and renounced. Bessie stood guard over a blue down form curled against one wall, a ski-jacket blob with stick limbs and a limp tangle of white-blond hair. Bessie alternately stamped her paws excitedly, wagging her tail and barking, and ran forward to try to lick—literally lick—Cassie into shape. Cassie, neither fully conscious nor unconscious, had battened her arms over her face. She writhed and moaned—“No, no, no,” was all I got—more intensely when Bessie’s tongue slurped at her. “No, no, no.”
I took in the plastic jug of Smirnoff, largely empty, and the yellow Wheat Thins box knocked on its side, its wax bag half spilled out. A two-liter Diet Coke bottle, lid off, half full. There was her backpack too, almost empty, a deflated sack, and next to it, a couple of orange prescription pill bottles, their big white caps bright wheels on the dirty tiles. I stood in the doorway, just looking, as Rudy huffed up behind me. I didn’t say anything.
“No, no, no,” Cassie moaned.
“Fuck me,” Rudy breathed in my ear, like he’d thought it was all a story too, and now couldn’t believe what he saw. But Bessie, although not entirely calm (she was justifiably excited; she’d won the game) knew that the prize was human and the consequences real. Once Rudy stood beside me, Bessie stopped barking: still stamping and wagging, she turned her head to look at Rudy, then back at Cassie, then back to Rudy again. He was clearly supposed to tell her what to do next.
“Good girl, Bessie,” he managed; and “Sit,” which, tremblingly, she did. “Fuck me. Fuck me,” he kept whispering. He handed me the flashlight, which I turned off—excessive now. We didn’t need it to see Cassie lying there in the corner. He fumbled for his cell phone, and punched the number.
Only slowly did I become aware of the reek around us, of vomit and the other too. A sort of olfactory complement to Rudy’s, in a way. Cassie wasn’t dead by any means; but not for want of trying.
Rudy, wincing from the stench, stepped forward and tried gently to rouse her, tenderly shaking her shoulder. Another muffled rebuff. She wouldn’t lift her arms away from her face. I imagined her eyes were closed, but we couldn’t tell. Her famous hair lay snarled around her in the dust. My back against the wall, as far from her as I could be and still be in the room, I slid to the floor and waited, my knees to my chest. Lord, it was cold in that room—even though there was still glass at the window. I noticed that: she’d chosen a room where the window was still shut, where the wind could be kept out. I didn’t say a thing. When Rudy and Bessie left to go meet the medics down at the driveway, I didn’t move. It was full daylight by then. I watched her down jacket rise and fall with her breath. She snored a little. As far as I knew, she didn’t even know I was there.
The ambulance men finally appeared, a ruckus in the stairwell and along the corridor, all clanking stretcher and jaunty banter, and I thought then she would stir; but even though they spoke to her directly and asked her questions, she didn’t speak.
“She’s awake all right,” the bearded one observed, pulling unsuccessfully at the arm clamped across her head. “She may not want to be, but she is.”
“What a fucking mess,” said the other one. And, to me, “Give us a hand and pack up this shit?” He gestured to the bottles and the bag.
“You’re the friend, eh?” asked the bearded one as I knelt down to follow instructions, putting the pill bottles and the crackers into the backpack, casting around for the lid to the Coke bottle.
“That’s right,” said Rudy from the doorway, where he stood smoking a cigarette, perhaps to mask the smell. “If not for this one, we’d be none the wiser. Police thought she was gone to New York, or up north, or something.”
The surly medic shook his head, intent on strapping Cassie, now willfully rigid all over, to the stretcher. “Fucking mess,” he said again.
“Good for you.” The other guy tilted his head at me. “You probably saved her life.”
But then there was a moment, while they fussed around her body, while Rudy, exhausted, smoked with his eyes all but closed and stroked Bessie’s now-quiet head, scratching her gently behind the ears, a moment when I was alone in watching Cassie properly—her head I mean. She moved the defending arms, just slightly, so that I could glimpse her eyes glittering behind them, as if from within a cave: open, alert, they turned on me with a rage I hadn’t known in all our years, a rage essentially murderous. I could swear her lips moved, that she spoke to me—silently, I mean, she mouthed the words,just three of them: Fuck you, traitor. I could swear that’s what she said.
BY MID-JUNE, they were gone. When ninth grade drew to a close, so too did the familiar shape of my life up to that point: whatever lay ahead, I had to accept that my friendship with Cassie—my defining friendship—was truly finished. Through that first summer and fall, I clung to Peter and he to me: Cassie did, in that sense, give me what I wanted. I got to have Peter as my boyfriend for over six months, six whole months in which we reassured ourselves that each of us had acted for the best, for Cassie’s best; and that we were the only two—obviously—who had truly known and understood her.