by Nancy N. Rue
Okay. I really was losing it.
I hobbled through the family room, still clueless, and almost dropped my crutches when I found Mom in the kitchen, dressed in sweats, staring into a cup of coffee. She never got up this early.
“You okay?” I said.
“Are you?”
The Frenemy put her pointy fingers around my neck.
“You cried out in your sleep last night,” she said. “Was it the pain?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Ohmigosh, as Kara would say. Was I ever going to be able to stop lying?
“I feel like your dad has handled all of this,” Mom said. “I’m out of the loop, and I’m not happy with that.” She ran a hand through her bed head. “What can I do for you, Cass?”
I fought back a new onslaught of tears. “You could take me to school right now,” I said. “I have to get there early.”
“I’ll get my keys,” she said.
All the way there, I battled the urge to completely spill it all, tell her everything. She might pull over to the side of the road and put her arms around me and take it all away. She might.
Or she might tell me I had done the stupidest thing a person could do and I was going to have to handle it on my own.
The truth was I didn’t know what she would do. She was right. She was out of the loop of my life, and she had been for a long time.
“I’m going to be there Friday,” she said when we pulled up to the front of the school.
“Friday?” I said.
“For your surgery. I’ve already told them at the station. And I’ll be with you for as long as you need me to be.” She stretched her arm to the back of my seat, like she wanted to touch me and didn’t know if she could. I guessed I was out of her loop too. “Between now and then, just—anything you need, Cass. I mean that.”
“Okay,” I said. And then I clattered out of the car before I could confess everything. I didn’t have to, I told myself. I was going to convince Coach Deetz. This was one loop she didn’t have to be in.
*
It didn’t do me any good to arrive at school at the crack of dawn. I couldn’t find Coach Deetz anywhere, and nobody I asked knew where he was. I told the Frenemy—silently—to get off me, that there was nothing to worry about. I still had six hours before he reported to Mr. LaSalle.
My new plan was to ask Mr. Josephson for a pass to go see him as soon as I finished the quiz on the first five chapters of The Scarlet Letter. But I wasn’t even halfway through the questions when the pass came to me.
“You’re wanted in the office, Miss Brewster,” Mr. J said as he dropped it on my desk.
Somebody said, “Busted.” I would have decked him if I hadn’t been almost paralyzed in fear. The hallway grew longer and narrower as I hobbled down it, and yet it wasn’t long enough. I was there before I could wrap my mind around any explanation other than that Coach Deetz had broken his promise.
I’d never been so shaken that my teeth chattered, but they were clattering together loud enough for the secretary who showed me into Mr. LaSalle’s office to hear them. But they stopped—everything in me stopped—when I passed through the door.
Coach Deetz was there—and Mr. LaSalle and my parents. Mom was still in her sweats, hair still shaped by her pillow. Dad was dressed, but a dot of shaving cream clung to the hairs at the bottom of his left sideburn. Obviously no one had told him.
But they’d told him everything else. It was all firing from his eyes.
“Have a seat, Cassidy,” Mr. LaSalle said.
I collapsed into a chair next to Coach Deetz. He looked back at me from his forward fold over his thighs.
How could he even look at me?
“You promised me you would tell your parents,” he said.
“You promised you’d give me twenty-four hours,” I said, somehow.
“He was doing that.” From under his buzz cut, Mr. LaSalle frowned briefly at Coach before he turned back to me. “I got a tip from a concerned student and confronted Coach Deetz. He couldn’t deny that he had the results from the drug tests.”
Why not? I wanted to say. But I knew. Not everybody was a liar like me. Not even the person who had told Mr. LaSalle. The only other person who knew.
I started to cry.
“All right,” my father said. “Who told what to whom isn’t the issue here, Cassidy.”
I shook my head. I was still sobbing.
“Cass.”
My head turned, all by itself. Dad wasn’t pointing his face at me. He was searching mine as if for once he hadn’t already reached a verdict before I even spoke. Too bad I was hurting too much to appreciate it.
“Coach Deetz says you didn’t know you were taking steroids.”
I heard Mr. LaSalle grunt.
“Assumed innocent before proven guilty,” Dad said. He was giving him the pointy face. “Cass—who gave you this stuff?”
“Gretchen,” I said. Because now that Kara had betrayed me, nothing else really mattered. Kara was my real sister—and now I could never trust her again. My shoulders shook with the pain.
“Our Gretchen?” Mom said.
“Who’s Gretchen?” Mr. LaSalle said.
A discussion went on around me, but I couldn’t make out a word. All I could hear was Kara: “Why can’t I just say it to your parents? … You got in trouble for keeping stuff from them already. I don’t get why you’re doing it again This new Cassidy? I don’t even think I like her.”
Mr. LaSalle’s voice forced its way in. “All of this is beside the point. She took a performance-enhancing drug and she’s out.”
“What do you mean, she’s ‘out’?” Dad said.
Mr. LaSalle leveled his chilly gaze at me. “The school policy is clear. It’s actually the county policy: Any student found using illegal drugs is banned from participating in the athletic program.”
“For how long?” Dad said.
“Permanently.”
“Isn’t that rather harsh?” my mother said.
“Harsh? It’s ridiculous!” Dad stood up and drove his index finger through the air at Mr. LaSalle. “You have a serious problem here, sir. First of all, you ran a medical test on our daughter without our permission. Secondly, you’ve basically convicted her without any kind of investigation.”
Mr. LaSalle waved a sheet of paper at him. “She tested at a ratio of five to one—normal is one to one. That means she was probably taking a dose a hundred times greater than anything used for treating a medical condition. This is all the ‘investigation’ we need.”
“You’re going to need more than that in court.”
“You want to file a lawsuit, be my guest—”
“Stop it—just stop!”
Shock seized the room as I shot to my feet—and then screamed as pain crumpled me to the ground. “Her knee!” my mom said.
But it wasn’t only my knee that cried out for help.
It was my broken heart.
CHAPTER SIX
Thank heaven for anesthesia. It almost blocked out the three most horrible days of my life.
I knew that the rest of Wednesday and all of Thursday happened. I just couldn’t remember what was in them. Friday passed in a nightmarish blur of needles and fear and pain. I woke up after the surgery crying. I remember saying, “No drugs! Don’t give me any drugs!”
“You won’t get through this without pain meds, Cassidy,” said a voice in the fog.
“Get away from me, Gretchen! Don’t touch me!”
“I don’t know who Gretchen is, honey,” the voice said. “But I’m glad I’m not her.”
I just wished I wasn’t me. That feeling grew as I emerged from the stupor and was moved to a tiny room to spend the day. There were no stuffed animals or flowers or giant cards from the team. No DVD of the game I’d missed the night before. My parents were my only visitors, except Pastor Varelli, who assured me God had a plan for my life, and Aaron, who came by to inform me that Gretchen was on suspension from med scho
ol, pending an investigation. He didn’t say, “Thanks to you,” but it was there on the stiff panel of his face. I had messed up again.
“What about the wedding?” I mumbled to him.
“Are you serious?” he said. “There isn’t going to be any wedding.”
“I know you didn’t break up with her over me,” I said.
“Well, at least you’re smart enough to figure that out. She called it off. She wants to get as far away from this situation as she possibly can.”
I wished I could do the same thing.
He left two minutes later without ever asking me how I was, and I couldn’t have told him anyway.
I was in and out of a strange twilight sleep most of the day. Every time I woke up, Dad was pacing around with the cell phone he wasn’t supposed to have on in the hospital. Once in a while I’d catch a word—“appeal”—“lawsuit”—and the occasional four-letter one that got a glare from my mother. She didn’t say a lot, except to ask me if I wanted ice chips or another pillow.
“I just want to go home,” I told her when she offered me a Popsicle.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
The nurse said we had to wait until Dr. Horton cleared me. He finally sailed into the room about the time the sun was starting to go down behind the Peak, and he was grinning as if he’d given me tickets to Disneyland.
“Everything went great,” he said. “I think we’ve given you the most stable knee possible. After physical therapy, I think you can get back on the court with a minimum risk of future damage.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” I muttered.
“Like I told you before, nine out of ten people have success with this—as long as they follow all our instructions.” He folded his arms. “That includes no more ‘supplements.’”
“We’re clear on that,” Mom said. “What do we need to know?”
He said the nurse would give us written instructions, including exercises I needed to do at home before I started physical therapy the next week. I closed my eyes and tried to drift off again. The only plan I had was to change to a school where nobody knew anything about me. I needed no special instructions to do that.
We didn’t get home until after dark. All the anesthesia had worn off, and the pain medication they gave me was wimpy in comparison. Every time I went from sitting to standing, the agony rushed to my knee and filled it up until I was sure it was going to explode. Nurse Voice had been right. I wasn’t going to get through this without meds.
Mom bustled around like Nurse Fidget, propping up my ankle above my heart and icing my knee down for twenty minutes every hour and telling me about the exercises we were going to start tomorrow. I uh-huh-ed my way through most of that because I didn’t have the energy to tell her I had no intention of rehabilitating. I didn’t actually say much of anything— until she sat on the edge of my bed when I said I wanted to go to sleep and told me Kara had called. Again. Because she couldn’t get me on my cell phone.
“Would you just tell her I can’t talk?” I said.
“Why don’t you text her?” Mom said. “I’m pretty sure you could’ve done that under general anesthesia.”
She attempted a smile, but it didn’t make it all the way to her eyes. They seemed cloudy and sad.
“You two have been friends for a long time,” she said. “What did you used to call each other? BFFs?”
“Yeah. When we were ten.” I closed my eyes.
“I think you could use a friend right now, Cass. And from what I know of Kara, you could have committed manslaughter and she would still be there for you.”
Yeah. Except for the one thing nobody knew: that Kara was the one who had committed manslaughter, and I was her victim.
“I’m really tired,” I said.
“I bet you are. Get some sleep. I’ll be right outside if you need me.”
My eyes came open. “Right outside?”
“I set up a cot in the hall.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“Yeah, I do,” she said.
I was sure that was one of the many reasons why, after she left, I cried myself to sleep.
*
“How’s the swelling?” Mom said from the other side of the shower curtain.
I was propped up in the tub, leg sticking out, body soaking like a slab of ribs in barbecue sauce. I couldn’t take a shower for another twenty-four hours, and Mom had needed to run the bathwater, help me out of my pajamas, and hoist me onto and off of the toilet. It seemed sort of pointless that she’d drawn the curtain so I could have privacy.
“My ankle’s pretty big, I guess.” I couldn’t see my knee under the bandage they had it swathed in.
“They said that was normal with your bone bleeding where they—okay, sorry. No swelling in the calf, though, right?”
“No.”
“You go ahead and marinate as long as you want,” she said. “Then we’ll get started on your exercises.”
I felt myself stiffen. “I don’t really feel like it.”
“I’m sure you don’t. It’s probably going to hurt like a mother bear.” She gave a nervous little laugh I’d never heard come out of her. “That’s why God gave us pain medication.”
She left and I lowered myself as far into the water as I could without drowning. I had to try really hard not to consider that as an option.
*
Mom and Dad were both in the family room, which I winced my way through on the way to the kitchen. All I wanted was a glass of water, but Mom immediately started offering me a full menu. Dad, on the other hand, glowered as he pointed me to the couch and piled up the pillows.
“Not behind her knee,” Mom said, head already in the refrigerator. “They have to go under her heel.”
“That it?” he basically growled when I was settled in.
“Sure,” I said.
“Good.” He stood over me, hands jammed onto his hips. “Now what’s this I hear about you not wanting to do your PT?”
“My what?”
I knew he meant physical therapy. I just didn’t want to have this conversation.
“I’ve said this before, Cass. You’ve never been one to back away from anything. So what’s going on?”
He didn’t add, “And this better be good,” but it was there, filed tightly between the lines. He wasn’t going away. I might as well get this over with.
“I don’t see the point in doing physical therapy,” I said to my propped-up toes. “I’m never going to play basketball again, so—”
“Excuse me—what?”
“I’m through, okay? And I wanted to talk to you and Mom about this. I have to change schools. I can’t go back to Austin Bluffs.”
“You have got to be kidding me.” Dad bent at the waist, one hand on the back of the couch, the other on the edge next to my leg. The Frenemy erupted into a case of claustrophobia so bad I could feel the sickening sweat on my upper lip.
“You are not changing schools,” he said. “And you are not giving up basketball. For the love of the Lord, Cassidy—only five percent of high school athletes even play in college, but you’re on your way to a full scholarship, which only one percent of athletes get.”
“Not now!”
“The Lady Vols have had dozens of players with past injuries—”
“But none of them got caught using steroids, Dad. I’m done! It’s over!”
“Not without a fight. You are a Brewster, and that means—”
“I know what it means. It means I have to be perfect twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—and if I’m not, you’ll pick me apart until I am!”
“Trent—what in the world!” Mom cut in.
Dad ignored my mother in the doorway and bore down on me. My heart was slamming so hard I could barely breathe. “We have done nothing but support you in this, Cassidy. Maybe this is those drugs still messing with your mind because you went off cold turkey … whatever. You’re not giving up—you hear me?”
>
“What are you going to do? Stand over me like—like this?”
“If I have to—”
“Trent, stop.”
He straightened up and glared at my mother this time. I took that opportunity to haul myself off the couch and snatch up my crutches.
“We’re not done, Cassidy,” my father said.
I didn’t answer. I had to focus all my attention on not throwing up from pain and fear before I got to my room. I had never talked to my father like that. I didn’t know what he was going to do because I had. And the scariest part was, I didn’t care.
One thing I did know: it wasn’t the remains of the steroids that made me say all that. I knew, because I waited until I didn’t hear him tapping his loafers down the hall toward me before I lurched over to my bulletin board and attacked it.
One arm kept me propped up while I used the other to rip everything off: the MVP awards from tournaments that had exposed me to college recruiters, the certificates saying I’d completed every skills camp in Colorado, the photographs taken in locker rooms and at sleepovers and out on my driveway under the hoop. Kara’s smile beamed at me from almost every one of them—and they all came down, rip by sobbing rip, until I stood on one pitiful foot in a pile of my life.
One thought came crashing down on me as I looked at it. This was the first time since I was ten years old that I wasn’t on a team. The first time I couldn’t wonder, “How can I help Selena improve her shooting?” or “How can I get M.J. to stop panicking when she can’t see a receiver?” I didn’t even have the right to be at the sideline and cheer on the girls who meant everything to me—who were right now preparing for their third game in the state finals. I couldn’t even be there, because in one stupid moment in a coffee shop, I had gone from hero to zero.
With my free hand I reached down and threw the first thing I touched. My bag. Which was unzipped and which spilled its guts all over the floor. Gel pens. Markers. My half-read copy of the stupid Scarlet Letter. All the stuff that meant absolutely nothing to me anymore.
I smacked at the whole array with my crutch, and when I did, something leather peeked out from under the mess—the book I’d accidentally but-not-accidentally brought home from the Black Forest Coffee Haus. I would have hammered it now with the rubber tip if it hadn’t fallen open flat, looking as if I’d pressed the pages that way myself.