Paper Airplanes

by Monica Alexander

  “She and Scott wanted to know if we wanted to see a movie tonight.”

  It was one of those incredibly rare nights that all four of us had off. So far in the three weeks that Cassie and I had been dating, it had only happened one other time. That night we’d all gone into Chicago for dinner since Scott had wanted to do something nice for Marley.

  I was shocked that she was still dating him. I still wasn’t her biggest fan, since we didn’t have a lot in common, but I saw how she treated Scott, and Cassie loved her, so I was trying to see what they saw. And she was kind of growing on me.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said absently as I saw Cassie get off my bed out of the corner of my eye.

  She meandered over to my closet. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but I as long as she wasn’t coming over to rub my shoulders like she’d done two hours earlier, which had resulted in her distracting me with other things for the next thirty minutes, I was fine. I had two problems left, and then she could distract me all she wanted.

  “I have to stop by the restaurant to get my paycheck. Marley said Scott’s picking her up at six, so we can all go together.”

  “Okay,” I said, wanting to punch my fist in the air. I’d finished my problem, and I was fairly certain the answer was right. I checked in the back of the book just to be sure, and my assumption was confirmed. One down, one to go.

  “I love beanies,” Cassie said, reaching for the black one I kept at the top of my closet. “I had this gray one from The Gap that I wore all winter. I loved it, but it was sort of destroyed when the bullet lasered part of my scalp off.”

  I looked back at her as she rolled her eyes, and I cringed at her vivid description of that night. I knew she was doing it to minimize how it made her feel, but even her forced flippancy made me cringe. Practically every time I closed my eyes I saw the look in the gunman’s eyes as he aimed and pulled the trigger. And only the fact that his aim was off meant that I was still alive.

  From the time I’d hit the ground, the whole night had been a confusing mess of sounds and feelings and emotions and blurry sights. I thought of the girl who’d been lying on the ground close to me. Her face white as a sheet, blood covering half of her face from her boyfriend who’d lay on top of her lifeless, her straight blond hair was matted with more blood. There was just so much blood.

  And the gunshots. Again and again and again. Bodies dropping to the floor. Those were the sounds playing on a never ending loop in my mind. From my vantage point, I saw it all. I saw at least four people get gunned down in cold blood for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I’d started to shake uncontrollably at one point, my body giving in to the loss of blood and shock it was going through, and I just closed my eyes. The last thing I remembered seeing was the girl with the blond hair, her eyes closed and so lifeless. I saw later on the news that she’d died. They’d showed her picture. I recognized her straight blond hair and pale skin. Her name was Jeni Saunders. She’d been a junior.

  I was the last person she’d talked to before she died. She was the last person I thought I’d talk to before I died. Lying there on the grimy floor, there was no way I ever thought I’d make it out alive. No way.

  I’d watched the coverage from that night for days after it happened as I was recovering in the hospital, stuck in a city where I didn’t live. Ten days I’d spent there, healing and getting my strength back. Ten days before they’d let me come home. Ten days spent seeing the names of the victims again and again and again.

  I’d seen Cassie’s name and her picture back then. I’d known then that she’d been a part of the same terror as me, but I hadn’t thought much about her at the time. I didn’t know her like I did now. Now I found myself wondering where she’d been in the dining hall. How far into the shooting had she been hit? Marley had been behind the cash register, but Cassie had never told me where she’d been. I didn’t even know the name of her boyfriend that had been killed that night. She’d never told me, and I didn’t have the heart to ask.

  For all that we’d talked about the shooting, we never got into specifics. I knew she’d been shot in the head, and she knew I’d been shot in the side. She’d seen my scar that day we went swimming, and I’d felt hers when I’d run my fingers through her hair, but we never talked details. I didn’t want to, she couldn’t remember, and I had yet to talk to Marley about it, even though we sort of had this weird unspoken connection. Of course it was a connection I didn’t want.

  I remembered her boyfriend, Aiden Keller, though, after Cassie had told me what happened to him. I’d practically memorized the names of all fourteen victims after seeing the coverage over and over. They showed Jeni’s picture on TV a lot too. She’d been active in student government and homecoming. She was well-liked and had a promising future ahead of her. That future was taken away in an instant. Her picture was shown right before they showed the guy who’d fallen on top of her, the one who’d died instantly from a gunshot wound to the head. His name was Will Stephens. He’d been a senior, just months away from graduating.

  The names of the fourteen people who’d died that night would be forever burned into my brain. I’d never forget them. Fourteen undeserving people had lost their lives, and I was almost one of them. I had no idea why I’d lived, but I was determined to not let my second chance at life go to waste. And I felt like I was finally doing that with Cassie. What she’d said to me the day of the bomb scare had stuck with me. She was right. I’d been afraid for too long. I’d made excuses and put other people first so I didn’t have to take chances. I’d held myself back from truly living, but I was going to change that. I wasn’t going to let Cassie down. I wasn’t going to let myself down.

  Cassie smiled at me coyly as she slid my beanie over her long blond curls, tucking her hair underneath it. “How do I look?”

  Suddenly it was like the world had stopped turning and someone had punched me square in the gut. I actually felt like physically recoiling. All I could do was stare at her.

  I knew in an instant that I’d been wrong. For months I’d been wrong. How could I have not recognized her? How had I not have known? How had I been friends with her for weeks, studying for chem, getting coffee after class and laughing while her brown eyes danced before mine. How could I have kissed her for the past three weeks, made love to her, let her fall asleep in my arms and not known? How could I have fallen in love with her and not put the pieces together. Had I just not wanted to see what was right in front of me?

  I’d looked into those brown eyes before. I’d kept her calm. I’d kept her alive.

  I knew in that moment it wasn’t Jeni who’d been lying on the floor of the dining hall next to me. It had been Cassie. All this time it had been Cassie. Her hair had been tucked under a gray beanie, but blond tendrils had escaped after she’d been shot – long, straight, blond tendrils. I’d only ever seen her with curly hair, so I never even though her hair could be straight. Of course I wasn’t an idiot. I knew girls could do that, but in all the time I’d hung out with Cassie, her hair was always curly.

  And there had been a lot of blood. Her face had been half covered with a mix of her blood running down her cheek, the head wound practically gushing, and her boyfriend’s blood spilling from where he lay dead on top of her, preventing her from moving. I remembered that. She was trapped. She’d tried to get up, but I’d told her to stay still, to be quiet.

  Then I’d kept my eyes locked on her, the look on her face one of confusion and then terror and then finally understanding. She’d been my lifeline, what had grounded me, and quite honestly what had kept me alive since it felt like I had a partner to get through the terror. If I looked at her and she looked back at me, we’d keep each other strong. That had been my logic.

  But how could I not have recognized her? I’d sat next to her for a year in English senior year. I knew her profile like the back of my hand. Had I just not wanted to admit it was her, that the one person I had to reach out to when it felt like my life was on the
brink was a girl I hated? Had I not wanted to admit that I’d saved her life and she saved mine?

  But I loved her now. She was the girl I saw myself with forever, and until now I had no recollection that it had been her that night. Yes, things had been confusing, and I was probably in and out of consciousness, but I’d looked at her. I’d talked to her. She’d watched me with terror in her eyes that night, and I hadn’t even thought. I’d just acted, doing whatever I could to keep her safe, to keep her alive, because it was all I could do.

  In truth, I’d probably been trying to save my own life, but I’d saved hers in the process. When she’d started trying to move her boyfriend off of her, she’d started to panic that she was trapped. Had the gunman heard her scream or even move, he would have killed her. And I would have tried to stop him. Then he would have killed me.

  But I had saved her. I’d kept her quiet, told her to play dead, and she’d lived. The girl next to me hadn’t died like I thought she had all these months. She’d lived, and now she was standing in my bedroom.

  “What? Does it not look good?” Cassie asked, frowning at me as she tugged the beanie off of her head.

  I had the very real urge to cross the room, kiss her and hold her, to tell her I loved her, because had she not lived through that night, she wouldn’t be in my life. She wouldn’t be my girlfriend, and she wouldn’t have made me as happy as I’d ever been. I wanted to tell her that’s she’d saved my life that night, but it was more than that. She’d saved my life when she’d come into it unexpectedly two months earlier. She was everything to me, and I almost hadn’t gotten the chance to even know her.

  How was I supposed to tell her what I’d just realized? How did you bring something like that up? It had been six months, and she had no real memories of that night. The only things that had come back to her had been the memories of sounds she’d hear on the Fourth of July, but since then, she hadn’t remembered anything else. Did I really want to be the reason she remembered? That night was terrifying, and I was trying my hardest to get over it. I knew if it were me, I’d love to have no recollection of what I went through.

  And because of that knowledge, I decided not to tell her. It wasn’t important. What was important was that I keep her happy and safe. She deserved that more than anything.

  So I crossed the room, grabbed the beanie from her hands, stuffed it over my head and grinned at her. “It looks better on me.”

  “I’ll say,” she said, sucking in a breath. “You look hot.”

  She stepped toward me, closing the distance between us and searing her lips to mine. We toppled down onto my bed, kissing and groping and pulling at each other’s clothes. Calculus was forgotten as all I wanted to do was wrap myself up in the sweetest thing I’d ever known and relish in the fact that the girl I loved was alive and happy and all mine. She was seriously my dream girl in every sense of the word.

  * * *

  I tried my best to shake what I was feeling after my startling revelation earlier in the day, but I couldn’t. I still couldn’t wrap my head around it as Cassie, Scott and I drove to Dawson’s in his car to pick up Marley. He insisted Cassie sit up front, so I was in the back while he talked a mile a minute about how he was going to apply to SAIC for the spring semester. I wasn’t sure if it was my badgering or Marley’s influence, but he was suddenly fixated on the idea, and I was glad.

  He switched gears halfway to the restaurant to talk about the graphic novel he wanted to write, and God help her, Cassie looked as enthralled as ever. As Scott’s ADD bounced all over the place as he tried to tell her the plot, she nodded and smiled and laughed and asked questions. His face was all lit up, and he was gesturing wildly as he answered her, then he thought of another piece of the plot he forgot to tell her, and interjected it into his diatribe, confusing her even further. But Cassie was humoring him. I could tell she was lost, but I loved her for acting like she was tracking everything he was saying.

  And I couldn’t help but find my girlfriend that much sexier when she talked about comic books. It was so hot in a really weird and twisted way, but it made me want to hug her and thank her for being alive, but of course that would just spark all sorts of questions I wasn’t about to answer.

  When we pulled into the parking lot, Cassie opened her car door. “I’ll be back. I’ll get my check and tell Mar that we’re here.”

  Then she leaned in through my open window and kissed me, long and hard. “Love you,” she whispered, and I smiled at her.

  “Love you more,” I told her, because I was feeling all sappy and gooey in that moment.

  “Dude, we have hot girlfriends,” Scott gushed to me as soon as Cassie was out of earshot, a wide smile lighting up his face. “I never thought I’d have a girlfriend let alone one as hot as Marley!”

  “You don’t give yourself nearly enough credit,” I told him as I watched Cassie walk into the restaurant. I turned around once she was inside.

  Scott shrugged, not believing me, but I didn’t think he cared since he was having sex with a girl who wouldn’t have looked twice at him in high school. And she thought he was hilarious. He was on top of the world.

  “I need to tell you something,” I said quickly, glancing behind me to make sure Cassie wasn’t on her way back.

  “What?” Scott asked, the happiness sliding right off of his face.

  He could tell something was up. I didn’t get all conspiratorial on a regular basis.

  “Listen, man, you can’t tell anyone. Okay? Not even Marley – especially not Marley.”

  Scott’s eyes narrowed. “What is it?” he asked skeptically, and I could tell he wasn’t sure he wanted to agree to stay silent. He hated secrets.

  “Swear to me that you won’t tell,” I insisted, glancing behind me once more.

  “Is it bad?”

  “Dammit, Scott. Just swear, okay? I’m your best friend.”

  “Fine, I swear,” he said quickly.

  “It was Cassie – the girl on the floor of the dining hall, the one I talked to the night of the shooting, it was her,” I said quickly, the words tumbling out of my mouth.

  “Huh? I thought you said her name was Jeni.”

  I sighed and launched into what had happened that afternoon, hoping it might help me feel better to tell someone. I wasn’t sure if it did.

  “Ho-ly shit,” Scott breathed out when I was finished.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s huge, right?”

  “Are you going to tell Cass?”

  I shook my head. “Hell no. I don’t want her to know.”

  “That you saved her life?” he asked incredulously. “Why wouldn’t you want her to know that? You’re like a real life superhero.”

  I shot him a look that was just shy of rolling my eyes. “No, I’m not, and I’m also not looking for gratification. I’m afraid she’ll remember everything if I tell her, but this whole thing’s been kind of freaking me out all day. I just wonder if subconsciously I knew it was her all along and that’s why I fell for her.”

  He shrugged. “Who cares how you got here. You’re together now, and she loves you. Nothing else really matters. Hell, I know that if Marley hadn’t been through everything that she’s been through this year, she wouldn’t be interested in me, but because of all of it, she wanted a nice, safe, funny guy. That’s me. Things happen for a reason, and you just have to roll with them.”

  I gave him a funny look. “When did you get so wise?”

  He shrugged. “Always have been. You just never asked my opinion before since you’ve always had your shit together. What happened with Brooke and the shooting and Cassie have made you all wonky, so I figured I’d switch places and keep you sane for a while.”

  Damn, he was so right. Somewhere in the past six months I’d gotten lost, and it was no longer me standing up for Scott like it had been our whole lives. He’d been standing up for me, and I hadn’t even realized it.

  “Besides,” he said, and then he trailed off, his gaze shifting over my head to someth
ing behind the car. His eyes narrowed as a look of confusion spread across his face. “What the hell?”

  Following his gaze, I turned around to see Cassie talking to Andre Bolden in front of the restaurant. They were just talking, but I could see from the expression on her face that she was nervous, and I suddenly remembered her telling me how she’d tried to shove his head in a toilet and then had slapped him a few weeks back.

  It was then that Kyle and Brock came out of the restaurant and stopped short. They took flank positions on either side of Andre who was slowly backing Cassie up against the side of the building.

  In two seconds flat I was outside the car, and Scott was on my heels.

  As we approached I heard Brock say, “We were friends for ten years, and that’s how you treat Andre?”

  “Brock, I was drunk, okay,” Cassie said firmly, and I wasn’t sure if she could see around them to where we were standing. “I already told Andre I was sorry. Get over it.”

  Scott looked over at me, but I shook my head. I wanted to see how Cassie handled herself. I wasn’t going to interject if I didn’t need to, and she seemed to be holding her own.

  “It was a joke, Cass,” Kyle said. “We weren’t trying to be dicks back then. It was just for fun.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t think it was funny when I heard about it,” Cassie said firmly. “Scott’s my friend. He’s a good guy.”

  “He’s a loser,” Andre joked. “He was back then, and he is now.”

  I felt my hands close into fists at my sides, and I didn’t dare look over at Scott. I hated that he was hearing this, but it wasn’t like it was the first time. He wasn’t going to be taken by surprise that those guys weren’t his biggest fans.

  “You guys are assholes,” Cassie said matter-of-factly, not bothering to fight back. We all knew it wouldn’t do any good. “Scott’s a better guy than any of you, any day.”

  “He’s a tool,” Brock chimed in.

  Scott looked over at me, probably wanting to repeat the sucker-punch he’d landed on Brock’s face a few weeks back. I shook my head at him, telling him to hold off. There were three of them and two of us, and although I could hold my own, I wasn’t sure Scott could.