Or Not

by Brian Mandabach

  She wanted to come sign me out, but I told her not to bother. She said she and Dad were making some calls to see if they can’t work things out, but I told her not to bother.

  “Darling, this will all work out for the best—”

  Really? I thought. How nice.

  “I know it sounds absurd now, but in the end, you’ll see. We’ll get some things sorted out tonight, and then you’ve got a wonderful trip starting tomorrow. I’ll see you after school, okay?”

  I managed to avoid everyone the rest of the day. At lunch I went to the library and pretended to read. Ms. Price walked right by me, but Ms. Tayebnejad was happy to see me and reminded me that if I wanted to read and eat, I was welcome to bring my lunch into her office. I said I wasn’t hungry.

  In reading, Liz said she heard I wasn’t leaving. I told her the same thing I’d told DJ.

  “DJ was looking for you at lunch,” she said. “He feels bad for you, but I think he’s glad you’re still going to be around.”

  “That’s sweet,” I said.

  “Expect him to call you.”

  “I’m going to visit my brother in Oregon,” I told her. “But I’ll be back on Wednesday. Would you tell him?”

  Mom had canceled her afternoon lesson and was waiting for me when I got home, ready to talk. Nothing to talk about, I said, since it was all over. She said there were some other options that she and Dad wanted to talk to me about, but I said no. No options. She assured me that there were and that we would talk about them.

  I went upstairs to lie down.

  I remember my first angry days writing to you, Di, and the hopeful days. I am on my little balcony in the twilight, looking over the houses and up the hill at the tops of the pines. A loud and filthy car goes by. It grows dark, and a planet, who cares what, is somehow able to shine through. It will be nice to go to Oregon and see Ally and Sean. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll be at the Pacific Ocean—or I think about myself thinking that, and I write it, and I continue to think how it should be nice, but I feel more like going to the cabin. To my tipi. Alone. Up there, the stars begin to twinkle as the wind blows puffs of yellow aspen leaves down on the ground to rot. Coyotes yip and yammer stupidly. Viciously. Hungrily. Anthropomorphically. Whatever.

  Dad came home, and we all had dinner and a talk. The first thing we had to talk about was my intentional failing of the CSAP test. They had to know why and how, and then they had to tell me why I shouldn’t have.

  “First of all,” said Mom, “you’ve hurt yourself badly. You felt the tests were of no consequence, but it was rash to act on that feeling. And second, for your school, it really is a slap in the face.”

  “Why? It’s my test, my score. What does it have to do with them?”

  “You know they’re judged by your scores. That’s why they focus so much on prepping you—if you do poorly, they look bad.”

  “Maybe they are bad.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you, Cassie,” she said. “I am trying to say that you hurt these people by your actions.”

  “Good,” I said. “Fuck them.”

  “Cassie!”

  “It’s okay, Deb, she’s pissed off,” said Dad. “Good for her, let it out. You and I both know she’s right—these tests are bullshit. I admit that I’ve always loved her being so brilliant at them, but the tests are not important. The education is. And somebody needs to be saying that. If it hurts them, well, maybe that’s not good. But if it causes them to think about what they’re doing, then maybe that is good.”

  “I don’t know,” said Mom. “Wouldn’t it be better revenge to do well on the test but understand its irrelevance? Or do well, but write letters of protest to the board, the governor, the papers? As a high-scoring student, you’d have so much more authority. Just look at the door that was open—”

  “Don’t you think I know that now?” I said. “Don’t you think I wish I had kept on being a good little girl and done exactly what I was supposed to do? ‘Do your best. Use the test as an opportunity to show what you know. Blah blah blah, blah-blah, blah-blah.’”

  We sat silently for a moment until Dad spoke.

  “If you could, would you do it differently?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Yes. But part of me wouldn’t—just because this shows even more, because of consequences, how messed up these tests are. They don’t care about me … ”

  “They just want a good score,” said Dad.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “But that’s not how we feel,” said Mom. “You made a decision. Now you have to live with it and learn from it, and maybe you’ll learn more from having sabotaged the test than you would’ve from acing it.”

  “So what am I supposed to learn?”

  “What do you think?” As usual, Dad turned the question back on me. And I was so sick of it.

  “That it doesn’t matter. That I’m an idiot. That I’m sick of learning lessons. That I’m fucking fucked.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Mom. “Angry at yourself, angry at the world. I didn’t mean that there’s an instant moral here—just add water and stir. All I meant was that, in time—weeks, months, years—you will know you are the better for all this.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  Next they wanted to talk about options, and I tried to humor them, but it got so tiresome. Option A is that I stick it out for the rest of the year. Option B, they continue to try to get me into high school, presenting a case to the principal there and to the district administration. C would be some special program in another middle school. D is private school. Guess what? They all have pros and cons. Fascinating.

  They already had an appointment with the deputy superintendent.

  Ridiculous. I just want to be done with it. So the grand plan fell apart—my own fault, yes, but major tragedy? I don’t think so. How would the cliquified kids in high school—half of whom have little brothers and sisters at Tabor—have reacted to me, coming in the middle of the semester? Who knows how it would have worked out. I might have been miserable, probably would have been. What’s clear is that I am weary of plans and trying. I don’t want the options. I just need to go back into my den and lick my wounds and gather my strength. Or not.

  I don’t even want to go to Oregon. I was excited, it was going to be a little break before I moved on to my next phase, but now …

  I guess it’s better than going back to school on Monday. At least I’ll have a couple of days to get my shit together.

  I told them I was going upstairs to pack and then to bed. Early start and all that. Better throw some things in a bag.

  All ready to go now, but I don’t think I can sleep. I’ll put on a record and drag my sleeping bag out onto my balcony. My headphones will stretch out there and I’ll lie back and look at the dim stars in the city sky. Or maybe I’ll jump.

  Undated, inserted after my Oregon trip …

  Since I am sticking around the good old middle school, I decided to write my triumvirate story for writing club. It’s about my Oregon trip, but I played around with time (like having Ally tell me about her high school idea in Oregon instead of on the phone). I left some things out, too, and added other stuff (like the Three Sisters peaks, which I couldn’t actually see from the plane. Mount Hood, though, was awesome).

  So here it is—part fact, part fiction: Part One

  Three Sisters

  Prelude: The Myth of the Sisters

  There might be a story about the Three Sisters Volcanoes that nobody knows anymore or that nobody thought to tell—that the mountains were once three human girls, and before that, they were one. Inside her mother, she was entire, of a piece, one little ball of cells. They say her mother was a drunk or a Christian housewife or a career woman, depending on who tells the story.

  Everyone agr
ees, though, that as mother dreamed her, and father’s voice called through the walls of the womb, she separated. Maybe it was because the mother alternately dreamed her not there and there again; maybe because the pull of her love was so strong. But as a defense against non-being, she split herself and slipped through the barriers of dimension. And two of her went to live in other worlds. So, you see, she was not like triplets who have different souls and different fates, but only look the same—this girl was one, split into three.

  Being incomplete was agony, and while different things happened to the sisters, each thing arose from identical causes and proceeded to the same end. Of course, they didn’t know they were the same—each lived in a different dimension—but each sister cursed her fate and took her own life.

  And the Great Mystery took pity on her and made her into three volcanoes, the Three Sisters, that would always be close enough to know each other and to know that, though rain fell and snow melted and lava flowed on each a little differently than the others, each essence was the same, each existence was the same, and they would be comforted. Others say that the gods heard her curse and granted it—she would ever be worn down by the wind and the rain and the great Gravity of her mother who would then push new life up through her, and so each would exist, separate and the same, until the world was unmade.

  Sister I

  Cassie looks up from her journal when the co-pilot announces the Three Sisters, a trio of volcanoes they’re passing on their approach to Portland. From hazy green forests striped with clear-cuts, the volcanoes protrude—round and gentle peaks, snow-covered and mammalian, so different from the jagged uplifts back in Colorado.

  At fourteen, this is her first time flying alone—meeting her brother and his girlfriend for a long weekend on the Oregon Coast. She gazes out on the great peaks and smiles to think of her smug teachers and their irritation at her missing school for a couple of days.

  Hauling her duffel through the terminal, she sees Ally waiting outside security—typical Ally in a T-shirt and long Indian skirt and big grin.

  She hugs Cassie, duffel and all, and says, “Wow! You look beautiful.” Like everybody, she has to run her hands over Cassie’s newly shorn head. “I love it. New clothes, too? Sean’s outside circling with the rest of the crew. Did you check anything?”

  “No, this is it. Rest of the what crew?” Cassie had thought it would be just the three of them, like old times last summer at the cabin.

  “When they heard we were going down to my uncle’s place, they begged to come along. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, I just thought … I wasn’t expecting—”

  “Don’t worry,” says Ally, putting an arm around Cassie’s shoulder. “We’re still sisters of the paint—it’s only three tagalongs: Bill and Katie, and Jack.”

  “Okay, that’s cool.” It’s not. “Friends of yours are friends of mine and all that.” They negotiate through the crowd. “The more the merrier,” she adds.

  Ally laughs. “When you start to talk in clichés I know I’m in trouble. But really, you’ll love them. Bill and Katie don’t pay any attention to anybody but themselves and will probably disappear into a bedroom for the whole weekend. Jack will entertain and annoy. Sean is the strong and silent type—but I guess you know him.”

  The air outside is soft and humid, and city smells lie heavily within it—exhaust, cigarette smoke, and something that smells to Cassie like the combined scent of people: food and breath and skin. She feels strange here in this different and humid air.

  A gargantuan SUV, a Klondike or something, pulls up to the curb, and brother Sean opens the door.

  “Welcome to the throng,” he says, pulling Cassie close. “Nice head.”

  “Thanks, bro.” By the way he says “throng” she guesses that he’s not ecstatic about the extra people either.

  “I’m Jack,” says the driver. “Heard all about you, Mama Cass, and I dig you real good already.” He didn’t wait for a greeting on her part. “Hop in and let’s ball this shiny black steel jackhammer down to the coast.”

  “That’s Bill and Katie in back,” says Ally as Sean settles her duffel behind two sleepy-looking hippies in the back. “They’re hard to tell apart at first.” Both wear tousled brown ponytails.

  “Hey, Cassie,” they say together.

  “Hi,” Cassie says.

  “Okay, my peoples,” says Jack. “All aboard the black rainbow bus to the beach.”

  Ally sits up front with Jack, and the two of them laugh and chat. Cassie can’t hear much over the music—some anonymous CD. Since Sean has a paper to write this weekend, he withdraws into a philosophy text. Bill and Katie sleep.

  Cassie has looked forward to this weekend for so long, and now it’s not going to be anything like she anticipated. But she tries to go with the flow, as Ally might say, gazing out the tinted windows, enjoying the newness of the landscapes: brambly roadsides, brown hills of grass and oak, vineyards and berry farms, and finally the coastal forest, impenetrable and dark as compared to the light, dry woods of Colorado. She rolls down her window to smell for the ocean. She almost can. Maybe. Or is it just the dense Oregon air?

  “Keep that away from her,” Sean says when Jack tries to pass the joint that he and Ally are smoking.

  “What about you, Cosmic?”

  “Working,” he says.

  “Herbie’s square,” says Jack, taking both hands off the wheel, one still holding the joint, to inscribe a square in the air. “How about the lovalicious love birds in the way-back?”

  “Crashed.”

  “Cool. More for the driver and his copacetic co-pilot. Dig this weed, baby.”

  “Enough for me,” Ally says and turns back to Cassie. “How you doing back there?”

  “Great.”

  “We’ll be there soon.”

  Cassie turns back to the window, and suddenly there it is—the Pacific, shining blue beyond the trees. Heavy Saturday beach traffic has them crawling through Lincoln City on the 101, then they pull into the golf-coursed, gated enclave that will be home for the weekend.

  Everybody piles out of the vehicle.

  “Follow me, Cassie,” Ally says, taking a decked walkway along the side of the house, down stairs past a Jacuzzi, down more stairs through beach grass, ending on a dune above the beach and the sea, shimmering blue under the westering sun. They run down toward the breakers.

  “Remember, everyone,” Ally turns to Jack and Sean close behind, and Bill and Katie lagging hand in hand. “NO SWIMMING. It’s hypothermia-cold with wicked rips and undertows. If you get washed in, you’re dead, so be aware at all times.”

  They reach the firm sand and line up as a wave crashes up to their knees, icy water washing the sand out from under their feet.

  “Back to the recesses of the mind,” says Sean. “I want to finish this paper.”

  “Here,” Ally gives him the key. “Anybody for a walk?”

  “Not for us,” says Katie.

  “I’m down,” says Jack. “Mama Cass?”

  “I guess so.”

  Ally takes her hand, and leads her up to the edge of the firm sand, where the tide has deposited a row of kelp with bits of wood and litter interspersed. “Make dinner, if you need a break from your activities!” Ally calls back. Jack falls in with them, and takes Cassie’s other hand. She breaks away and angles down toward the surf, where waves break cold around her legs, the sun warm on her left side.

  So this is how it is, Cassie thinks. I fly all the way out here just to be the kid who’s tagging along. She runs down into the lee of a receding wave, tiny bits of shell under her feet, then back up as the next one surges.

  Forget it—I will not mope—look at this! I don’t need Ally.

  But as she spins to take in the whole beach, she’s gratified to see Jack going the other direc
tion, while Ally is catching up to her. She turns away and keeps walking, ignoring her. But in a few paces, Ally runs to catch up, reaches her arm around Cassie’s shoulder, and slurps a loud kiss in her ear.

  “Yuck! You’re disgusting.”

  “I’m sorry, Cassie. I shouldn’t have let them come.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. This was supposed to be your trip, for your birthday, just for you. I promise I’m going to blow them off and hang out with you.”

  “You don’t have to do that—it’s just not what I expected.”

  They continue up the beach and it’s good again, the two of them sisters again. Cassie is not yet ready to talk about how horrible school has been, so she asks Ally about college.

  It’s going great, Ally tells her, but she isn’t in enough art classes this semester. She wishes she could skip ahead to the point where all her requirements are done and she can do the work she wants.

  “Which reminds me,” she says, “I have an idea for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Remember we were talking about how awful middle school is, but high school should be at least marginally better?”

  “Trouble is,” Cassie says, “how am I going to make it ’til I get there?” Ally doesn’t know the half of it—the obscene letters in her locker, the daily harassment.

  “That’s the idea. You don’t wait. You go to high school now.”

  “You can’t just—” she says, then pauses. “How could I do that?”

  “Well, you said you were old enough to be a grade ahead, right? Your birthday is just before the deadline. So skip the rest of eighth grade.”

  “Will they let me do that? They won’t let me do that,” Cassie says, but she wonders. Would it really be any better in high school?

  “They might. What have you got to lose? Look at yourself—you don’t belong in middle school.”

  They come up with a plan—talking to the GT lady at school, convincing Mom and Dad, going to the principal instead of the assistant, maybe even going straight to the high school.