Cassandra: And they all fall down

by Julie Hodgson

  “But, Mom, he’s so–”

  “Cassandra, our only priority is keeping you safe. We need some time to think about the best course of action here.”

  Just a few days ago, Cassandra would have snapped back at her mother, but she wasn’t feeling aggressive; she was still buzzing on the greatest moment of her life – the moment she had kissed Braydon Taylor – and nothing could burst her bubble. “I guess I’ll leave you to talk, then,” she told them, and when she stood up, she wondered if she might actually float up to her room with no effort whatsoever.

  The following morning, as she left the house for school, Cassandra’s dad called her into the living room. Her mother had already left for work. Cassandra didn’t sit because she was running late and knew Bindi would be outside waiting for her, but she was keen to hear the verdict.

  “Well?”

  “Your mom wants to have Braydon Taylor over for dinner after school tonight. She’s a pretty good judge of character.”

  Cassandra broke into a smile. She knew just how charming Braydon was. There was no way on the planet they wouldn’t fall in love with him. “Thanks, Dad!” she yelped and put her arms around him as if she had already won him over.

  “No, Cass,” he said, holding her at arm’s length. “This is serious grown-up stuff we’re talking about. We have lived our lives in the shadow of … well …” he couldn’t bring himself to label his daughter’s violence. “This will either be a chance to put all of it behind us. Or … Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” she beamed again and then skipped out to the front door.

  “And your mother wants to talk to you about … er … precautions, young lady.”

  Cassandra pretended she didn’t hear that and ran out to see Bindi, who was waiting for her as loyally as ever. Today she was wearing her ‘Meat is Murder’ T-shirt, but even this didn’t affect Cassandra’s smile.

  “Wow! You’re looking much better today,” Bindi told her.

  “I’m feeling it,” Cassandra answered and told her friend everything that had happened, omitting not a single detail.

  Bindi’s face showed caution as she listened, but her smile steadily grew as she was infected by Cassandra’s enthusiasm, and by the end, she looked genuinely happy for her friend. Just days ago, she had been as skeptical and protective as Cassandra’s parents. Now she saw how happy he was making Cassandra, she had completely changed her mind. If Bindi could do a total 360, then Cassandra was certain that her parents could do the same. There was not a person in the world who couldn’t fall in love with Braydon Taylor.

  Braydon arrived at Cassandra’s again at 6.00 p.m. Only this time he wasn’t taking Cassandra out, but exposing himself to an evening of scrutiny and examination.

  “I’ll get it!” Cassandra called out and ran down the stairs to the door, the smell of meatloaf wafting through the dining room. When she opened the front door, she saw him standing there with a small bunch of flowers in his hand. He looked much smarter than he had on their first date and had tried to brush his hair to the side although it was too short to stay there. “Flowers!” Cassandra beamed.

  “They’re for your mother,” he said apologetically. “I thought I’d try making a good impression. I brought something else for you.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  He beckoned her towards him and planted a soft, delicate kiss on her lips. There was no feeling quite like it and Cassandra flushed red. It seemed somehow wrong to have Braydon and the feelings he invoked in the same room as her parents, but she had to get through tonight if she was going to be allowed to see him at all.

  Cassandra lead him by the hand to the dining room, but he pulled back. “Is your dad packin’?” he asked, only half joking.

  “Don’t be a dope. They’re both going to love you. Come on.” She pulled him again, and they were soon in the dining room, where Cassandra’s dad was sitting behind a newspaper and paid the arrivals absolutely no attention. Ellen rushed in with a meatloaf.

  “Sit down, both of you. John put that away. We’re ready to eat.” She dashed out again and came back with a bowl of potatoes in one hand and salad in the other.

  “Mom, Braydon brought you these,” Cassandra said and prompted Braydon to give her the flowers.

  “They’re lovely,” she said with very little feeling and dashed them into the kitchen. She spent no time at all out there, and it was doubtful that she even got them into water.

  “This is lovely Mrs. Jones,” Braydon said as he tasted the meatloaf.

  “Yeah, it’s good, Mom. Thanks.”

  They ate without conversation and then, with no warning whatsoever, John said his first words of the evening. “So, why do you want to date my daughter?” he asked with absolutely no humor in his voice and fixed his eyes authoritatively on Braydon. Cassandra had never seen him like this and wondered if he would behave like this whether it was Braydon Taylor or not. It was, after all, the first guy she had ever brought home.

  “Well, sir,” Braydon began, in a tone that was respectful without completely recoiling to the older man’s power. “I have never met anyone quite like your daughter. She’s kind, compassionate, clever, and she really makes me laugh.” He paused to consider what he was saying and looked clean into John’s eyes when he continued. “I know it’s probably not what you were expecting to hear, and it sounds corny, but she makes everything better. Food tastes better when she’s around, music sounds better, the world smells sweeter. I know I sound soppy, but I’ve never felt this way about anyone before, and all I want to do is protect Cassandra and keep her safe. You have my word that if you allow me to date Cassandra I will never do anything to hurt her and I will spend every minute of every day devising ways to keep her happy.”

  As Cassandra listened, she felt her insides turning into that Braydon flavored goop again, that swirled and fizzed and felt better than any feeling she had ever had.

  “Braydon,” Cassandra’s dad said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pass the potatoes would you.”

  Braydon went home a few hours later, after telling them honestly about his home life, the schools he had been to, the things he was passionate about in his life, and his ambitions for the future. Cassandra stood at the front door with him for a few minutes, sharing a goodnight kiss and the moment the door was closed she ran back into the dining room.

  “Well?”

  She found her parents giggling with each other, cuddling, smiling, holding each other close.

  “Where’d you find a wet lettuce like him?” John laughed, and Ellen pushed him away by the shoulder.

  “Don’t listen to him, love,” she told Cassandra. “I think he’s lovely. Reminds me of someone else when he was younger.” She turned to John.

  “Get real. I wasn’t a soppy slice of cake like him.”

  “No? Never wrote me poetry then? Or sung outside my window. Cassandra, when your father met my parents, he was too nervous to speak most of the night. He would have melted into a puddle if my dad had spoken to him the way your dad did.”

  “So?” Cassandra said hopefully.

  Ellen and John both smiled at the same time.

  “So, I can see him?”

  “You can see him, but not every night and if your schoolwork starts to suffer then we’ll have to rethink it.”

  Cassandra then jumped up and down on the spot, hugged them both then ran off to her room to message Braydon the news. It was official. They were going to be together forever.

  Chapter Eleven

  The week that followed passed in the most perfect bliss and Cassandra couldn’t believe that life could be this good. She had always enjoyed life, and she had always been a little feminist in her assertion that she didn’t need a guy to complete her; now she had one, it was a different story altogether. Braydon had summed it up perfectly when he was talking to her father; the music sounded better, the food tasted better, but it was deeper than even this. Her fingertips were reading the w
orld differently; what was previously hard was now soft and full of give. Even the coloring of the world now seemed to come from a brighter palate. She had read literature on the subject about love – Mac had tortured them with a semester of love poetry – and now she finally understood what these authors and poets were attempting to commit to paper with their rambling verse. These poets were being held in the gentle fingertips of the same creature that now gently wrapped its warm, loving fingers around Cassandra, centuries apart. Now she understood it all. She had even begun to convince herself that what she experienced that night, when she walked out into the 4.00 a.m. darkness of Garden City, pursuing an imagined cry while her senses throbbed and thrashed, was connected to her developing love senses. It was the start of everything. It made no actual sense, but in place of a theory that explained what she felt that night, it was the best she had. However, the night before the race, she was forced to reconsider this assessment.

  She had been training all day long. She had been meaning to train half-heartedly, to show Coach Andrews that she might not be on greatest form, and prepare him for the possibility that she might not win the race. Instead, she flew around the track, and all he could talk about was the scouts; he was going to call all the scouts he knew that night because they couldn’t miss out seeing her in this kind of form. Cassandra knew she should have been happy; she was smashing her best every time she burst across the finish line, and she wasn’t even running at full capacity, but what did it all mean if she couldn’t go to Abby’s party? She had all the time in the world to be a runner; it was just one race in the many hundreds she would run; she only had one shot at making sweet sixteen memories, and this was all the more important now that Braydon was around. Having Braydon to share it all with was more than she could ever have dreamed of.

  She had spent most of the week with Braydon. But was determined not to ditch her friends, so she still walked to and from school with Bindi, who was still immersed in her refugee campaign and a personal campaign to get Mac to notice her, which Cassandra couldn’t help thinking was doomed, but she didn’t say as much. Bindi had supported her with Braydon; who was Cassandra now to judge who her best friend fell in love with – even if he was a teacher? She also managed to spend time with Leo. Cassandra was certain that he would now have a couple of boyfriends on the go, now that he had ditched Thomas and decided against pursuing Braydon, but he maintained his position on the subject of love and personal growth. He was going to stay single for a while, grow as a person, learn what love is all about, and then find the man of his dreams. This was what Cassandra was thinking about when she was snuggled up in her duvet that evening, about to fall asleep. How could a guy change so completely and so quickly? He had been polite and courteous all week; he hadn’t been bitching and judging; he had been quiet and reflective. It was only as she thought about it now that she realized something might be wrong with him, and it was with that thought that she fell asleep.

  She had expected to wake up at 7.00 a.m., ready to slip into her running shoes and train for a few hours before the dreaded meet. Instead, not more than three hours later, her eyelids flicked open, and she was wide awake. In fact, she had never been this wide awake in her life. A hand had reached inside of her and switched everything on full power, and now she was experiencing the world just as she had that first night, and she knew it was nothing to do with love. How could she have been so deluded? Something terrible or wonderful was happening to her body and love had distracted her from finding out what it was; love had given her a temporary reprieve, and now these feelings were back with a vengeance.

  She was out of bed in a shot and this time dressed in her jeans and a hoodie. The crinkled, scraping sound of the fabric on her flesh was painful to her ears and each step she took pounded up to her brain; every micro sensor in her body had been sharpened and cranked up to the max. The world was now a jumble of noise, color, stench, razor taste and combinations of the four. She ran down the stairs, to the kitchen, and opened the fridge; the creak of the door was fingernails down a blackboard, and the hum was a din that could drive a person insane. But the sight awaiting her was just the feast her senses craved, and she began to salivate with more force than ever before. She reached in for a fistful of cheese and rammed it into her mouth; nothing had ever tasted that good before; then there was bread and leftovers, some hot dogs and cake, and a giant carton of orange juice to glug. She could have stood there eating all night, but it wasn’t long before the fridge was completely empty.

  She closed the door and was in the near darkness of night once again, and then she heard it – a girl was crying. It wasn’t a loud sound, but it was torturous. Something terrible was happening to her, and this time Cassandra didn’t hesitate. She bounded over to the front hall, slipped on her sneakers, opened the door, and charged out into the deserted street. The crying dictating in which direction she should run, and she was soon at the end of the street and turning into the next. She ran hard and fast, in and out of the light of streetlamps, passed parked cars and sleeping houses, and then she stopped to listen once again to the crying. It was only now that she heard something she hadn’t noticed before. It wasn’t the sound of a single cry. There were at least two girls crying out for help, for her help. She took off again as quickly as she could and realized that she was now halfway to the horseshoe mall. This was where it was all happening, at the site where she had made so many happy memories with her friends. It was now the scene of a heinous crime, and she was too far away to help. What could she do anyway, even if she did get there in time? She had no idea, so rather than heading straight there, she took the next left where she knew she would find a phone booth. Hardly anyone used phone booths anymore, but she couldn’t be happier now that they still existed. She took the receiver off the hook and dialed 911. She didn’t know what she was going to say, but she had to give it a shot. They could get there faster than she could and even if they thought she was a crank, they were still obligated to check it out. As soon as she heard a voice on the other end of the phone, she shouted, “A couple of young girls are being attacked at the mall. You need to get there right away.” She then slammed the receiver down and sprinted away again. There was no time to lose, and she figured she had nothing to gain by explaining herself to the cops. She couldn’t even explain herself to herself. She now ran as hard as she could and was stunned by just how fast this was and how effortless she found such exertion. She felt the same as when she ran to the city, that she could run without end. Of course, she had been proven wrong in the city when her legs collapsed, but she had no plans to run for a whole day with no fuel right now. Her only intention was to reach the crying. After two more minutes of running, she heard the first siren in the distance, and then the sound of another rocketing in the direction of the mall. The moment she heard this, she stopped running and lurched forward, with her hands on her knees, breathing deeply although she was far from out of breath, she knew her run was at its end. Everything was shifting around her again, and she was beginning to feel normal. She took in a deep breath and tasted and smelled only the fresh midnight air; the ground under her feet was silent and solid again, and the assault on her ears had been completely withdrawn. More importantly, the crying had stopped. She hoped this meant that the police had got there in time and the attackers had been arrested. She hoped this meant it was all over, but she had no way of knowing. She debated walking to the mall and checking out the scene, but she was cold now, and tired and shaken up; she was a normal fifteen-year-old girl in the streets after dark, terrified by the unfamiliarity of the movements her own shadow. She eventually decided to make her way home as quickly as she could, and hoped that she could slip in without waking her parents.

  The following day, as planned, Cassandra awoke at 7.00 a.m., but the last thing she felt like was running. Her body ached as if she had already done a day’s training and she lay in bed wishing she were anybody else. She was then returned to the urgency of the night before, reached over to her bed
side table for her cell phone, sat up straight, and thumbed through to the local news page.

  Police are yet to reveal the identities of the two girls attacked at the mall last night, but they can reveal that they were tipped off by a local caller who prevented the attackers from inflicting the same violence visited upon previous victims. Police are eager to speak to the mystery caller or anyone with information regarding the identity of the masked attackers, who fled the scene of the crime and are still at large.

  “Still at large,” Cassandra mumbled. Yes, she had managed to at least limit the violence inflicted on these young women, but it had all been in vain; the pervert madmen doing this were still out there; the young women in town were still at risk. She had achieved nothing.

  Ellen shouted up the stairs to her daughter, “Cass!”

  “Coming, Mom, just getting ready.”

  “Where’s all our food gone?”

  “Erm … I’ll be down in a minute.” While Cassandra thought about how she was going to explain this, she changed into her training gear. She had no kind of explanation to give by the time she was dressed, so she ran downstairs and out the door before her mom could corner her. She ran only for fifteen minutes, because she was tired from the night before, and wondered if the gods had solved her Abby problem for her. Her legs felt so heavy that she stood no chance of winning the race; she would be going to the party, but losing the race.

  Those fifteen minutes gave her a chance to come up with an excuse for the food, that Bindi had knocked on the door late at night asking for contributions for the homeless, but this was so implausible that she didn’t dare try it. When she got in she simply told her mom that she had a midnight snack. Whether it was because it was the day of the race, or Ellen didn’t want to know the real truth, she didn’t pursue the issue.