Or Not

by Brian Mandabach

  “First, you’ve got to convince your parents,” says Ally.

  “That should be easy. Won’t they love to think of their brilliant daughter skipping a grade?”

  “I don’t know—sometimes they don’t like you to move so fast.”

  “But they have to. This is the only way I can survive.”

  “Good work, Jack,” says Ally when they return to the beach house. “Looks like you unloaded all the food. And the beer.” She pulls one from the fridge. “What’s for din?”

  “Totally V-jin pasta and salad. Mama Cass, never fear—the ever sensitive Jack is here.”

  Cassie is feeling better and decides to mess with him. She examines the ingredients spread out on the counter. “I can’t eat any of this, Jackie Chan.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t you know that V-jins” —she duplicates his mispronunciation— “don’t eat any animal foods? Obviously they don’t teach any biology at that school of yours. Or could you have forgotten that BEES are ANIMALS! HELLO-O!” She starts picking up items and dropping them back on the counter. “These lettuces are coated with bee’s wax, the olive trees they use for this oil are pollinated by domestic bees—”

  Jack looks thrown—it’s got to sound stupid, but vegans are known nut cases, so could she be serious? She takes the beer from his hands.

  “This looks okay.” She takes a large gallolop, then lurches to spit it in the sink. “Yerch! I’m poisoned! It’s goat piss.”

  “Okay, gimme the beer. I was drinking that. Goddamn kid! Here I make a nice meal for you, and this is the thanks I get? Outta my kitchen! Out!”

  The house is amazing—not big and showy, just beautiful. The kitchen and all the bathrooms have floors of stone flecked with shiny mica and quartz. The big central room has skylights and a rough-cedar ceiling. Built-in couches line two walls adjacent to a huge fireplace fronted with the same rock as the floors. Scattered on the couches are hand-painted pillows—one side an abstracted fish or geometric design, the other a colorful face painted with exaggerated planes and angles. On the smooth, white walls, dull-toned paintings and drawings hang, and Cassie sees a few small watercolors by Ally—of the house, deck, and ocean. Windows cover the entire west wall, facing the sea toward which the sun is sinking.

  Cassie drags her duffel down to her bedroom, slides the window open to the cold and the sound of the sea, and unpacks into a couple of empty drawers.

  Then it’s time to make her promised phone call home. She takes the portable from the hall and lies back on the white, comforter-covered bunk. Mom picks up, asking about her trip, becoming less enthusiastic when she hears about Jack, Katie, and Bill.

  “Put your brother on, Cassie.”

  She gets Sean, and picks up a good idea of the conversation from listening to his responses:

  “She’s just too nice, I guess.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Yes.”

  “I know how old she is.”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  “It’s just very mellow. She went for a walk on the beach with Ally, I have this paper due Wednesday, so I’m working, and Jack is making dinner.”

  “They’re—napping, I think.”

  “Mom—”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Okay. Here she is.”

  Mom is in mother-bear mode, wants to know if Cassie is “comfortable” with how things have turned out. Cassie tells her that, though she was bummed at first, she’s okay with it now, she’s fine.

  Then she tells about Ally’s plan for her to skip up to high school and realizes, too late, that this was not good timing.

  “I’ve had just about enough of Ally’s bright ideas,” Mom says. “We’ll talk about this when you get home.”

  “But Mom, I’m not a little kid. Middle school is torture. Ally says that high school will be better, and I am fourteen.”

  “Just—” Mom says. “We’ll talk about this when you get home.”

  Cassie clams up. “Fine,” she says. Treat me like a dumb, teenage kid, I’ll act like one.

  “Have a good time, and we’ll talk to you soon.”

  Silence.

  “Bye now, sweetie. Be a good girl. Love you.”

  “Whatnever.” Click.

  She mopes on the bed until Jack starts ringing a big bell and shouting, “Everybody to the mess hall! Supper’s on!”

  First thing Sean does is take Cassie’s wine glass away.

  “Listen everybody—no booze for the kid.”

  “I thought one small glass would be okay,” Ally says. “Half a glass—”

  “No way. I’m under strict orders.”

  “Right,” says Jack. “No corrupting Baby Cass. Takes a village, peoples.”

  Cassie is silent through this and through most of dinner, though Ally gives her extra attention. She doesn’t eat much, observing the others, noticing how Bill and Katie sit close, and how Ally and Sean don’t. She figures that Sean is mad at her for bringing the others.

  Afterwards, they build a fire downstairs and get ready to watch DVDs. Ally tries to get Cassie involved, offering her the movie choice.

  “No ‘R’ ratings, though,” says Jack. “We have to protect our Baby Cass.”

  “It’s been a long day,” she says. “Bedtime for me.”

  “Hey,” says Jack. “Before you go, will you sing that song from The Sound of Music?

  The sun has gone, to bed and so must I-I,

  I’d love to stay, and taste my first champay-agne?”

  “Good—though you got the verses mixed up. But how about this one?

  I am fourteen barely past thirteen,

  pure as the driven snow—

  Puffers of kind who blow their own minds,

  think they’re clever, but I don’t know.

  “Excellent!”

  “Thank you,” she curtsies and coos, “Night-night, everyone!”

  She isn’t really tired at all, so after lying around listening to the sound of the movie bleeding through the surf, she takes a Nancy Drew from the shelf. It’s bad, but it occupies her mind.

  Ally comes in a little later and sits on the bed, wanting to know what’s eating her. “Sean told me about his conversation with your mom. Is that why you’re all hostile?”

  “She didn’t go for the skipping up to high school idea.”

  “Is that all? We’ll bring her around. I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think she trusts you anymore.”

  “Just ’cause we brought a couple of friends along? She’s not that uptight.”

  “Ally,” says Cassie. She fights to bring her gaze up. Ally is looking down, smoothing the comforter, then glancing up with a patient, expectant look. Acting just like Mom, Cassie thinks. Is that too weird? “Ally—I really am tired,” she falls back on the sort of fib that she’d use on Mom. “I just need to get some sleep. I’ll be okay.”

  “All right. I’m here if you need me.”

  Another few cliffhangers into Nancy Drew, and it’s Sean’s turn to come check on her.

  “Hey Littless,” he says. “I saw your light on.”

  “Hey, Nickie.”

  He looks at the book. “Into some heavy-duty literature?”

  “It’s poor,” she says. “But it’s entertaining. I never read any of these before.”

  “I’ll give you some of my Sartre. Being and Nothingness—that ought to put you to sleep.”

  “Sounds perfect—especially the nothingness part.”

  In the morning, Cassie awakes as foggy and rainy-feeling as the day. After the constant sun of Colorado, she thinks it’s
nice for the weather to mirror her mood for a change. But her head aches, and coffee doesn’t even make a dent in it. Sitting on the window couch, sipping a second cup, she can’t see through the misted glass and the fog outside to where the ocean, invisible, breaks against the beach.

  Sean spends the day hashing out a draft of his paper, while Jack and the hippie twins go to town to look for something to do. Cassie reads while Ally goofs around with her sketchbook. Rain showers down on the roof and streams down the windows. In the hall closet they find some slickers, rubber rain boots, and hats and go out for a walk.

  The rain diminishes to a fine shower as they stroll down the road to a path that runs away from the beach and disappears into coastal pines along the golf course. Cassie feels disoriented when they come to what seems like the ocean, but Ally explains that it’s the bay that reaches around the other side of the house. They follow the path along the bay—a gray openness as silent as the ocean is loud. The clouds lift and they see wide mud flats and tidal pools and the silhouette of a heron. Then the fog floats back in to cover all again.

  Cassie would like to tell Ally the latest from school, but she can’t bear to bring it up. She still feels as gray as the fog but doesn’t really mind. The fog covers it—her life at home—and through the fog she can just glimpse the hope of Ally’s plan, disappearing.

  Mom and Dad would never go for it, especially since she intentionally failed the big state exams last spring. The letter with the results will be coming any day now. And as for the high school, there’s no way they’ll take her. She thought she was pretty cool writing her stupid responses and carefully filling in the wrong answer bubble for every item. Whatnever. Transferring to high school seemed like such a cool idea yesterday, but she’s sure now that it’s not possible. And even if it were, would high school be any better?

  They walk. Ally talks of inconsequential things, pointing out berries by the trail, rain in pine needles, chattering about memories of their summertime in the mountains of Colorado.

  They come back to the road, cross over a dune, and drop down to the sandy shore, returning to the beach house by the seaward side, but just when Ally says they should look for the house up in the lifting fog, they see something beached in the ebb.

  It’s a young whale, dead.

  “Not too close, Cassie,” says Ally. “The waves can flip something like that right over on top of you.”

  The little whale’s eye is puckered and the side of its mouth gapes. A few small barnacles break the smoothness of its skin.

  “I’ve never seen a whale before,” says Cassie. “What happened?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Was it alive when it washed up?”

  “No, when they beach themselves, that’s different. This one was dead already. It just washed up like everything does.”

  Cassie begins to cry, and she’s not sure why. Not the young whale—beginning to rot in the surf, such a huge animal and just a baby, so much life not alive anymore, washing up like everything does—but partly that. And not herself—why would she cry for herself because the first whale she’d ever seen is dead?—but partly herself.

  The reason for crying would have to be everything that is and then is no more—everything. And the whale lies there in the mist that seems like her own head-space—as Ally might have put it—her head-space, foggy and cold, but with warm, alive things in it and green, wet things in it and loud surf in it that was moved by the power of the land and the moon and the sun and moved by itself, by its own mass.

  Ally puts an arm around her shoulder, and Cassie reaches with both of hers as sobs shake her. Ally holds her, raincoat to raincoat, and she cries, but it’s not a good cry, not a healing cry. Because she can’t feel any comfort, because she can’t breathe, because the sobs rip from her throat, hurting more and more, she turns away and approaches the whale. It slides up and down with the bigger waves now. The sea is taking it back.

  “Stop! Stay away from it.” Ally says at her back, but she wades out to it, up to her hips in the trough of a wave, and quickly, before Ally can pull her back, she hoists herself up onto the whale.

  Ally yells things at her as Cassie lays her face against the cold, dead bulk of it. Her diaphragm stops spasming, and she can breathe again as the waves rock her gently on the carcass of the whale, her burning temple teary and wet on the cool, dead creature.

  Journal Seven

  2 October

  I’m back.

  It seems like it’s been such a long time. Was it only Saturday morning that I got up early to catch my plane, depressed over the collapse of the Grand Plan, feeling like there wasn’t even any point in going?

  But the Three Sisters gave me the story idea I’d been looking for—even if I couldn’t see them—and as I hoped, the trip gave me lots of material. After adding and inventing, I was able to save plenty for the other two versions of the triumvirate. I finished up the story on the way home, scribbling away on the plane and staying up last night re-writing.

  Back at school today, I found myself the subject of libelous scribbling on the bathroom wall: “Cassie O’Sullivan is Osama’s ho.” Wonderful. And so original.

  I had a permanent marker in my locker, so I went to get it and covered the whole thing with a giant black heart.

  As I was checking the other stalls, I realized I was shaking a little. I’d hoped things would simmer down, now that I’m stuck here. Stay Cool, I told myself, out of habit, but I think I’m done with that.

  Oddly, the bathroom wall was the only insult of the day. Maybe it’s not going to be so bad.

  There was no Tolkien group, so I braved lunch to sit with DJ and everybody, who seemed happy to see me. I told them about my trip, and they were all jealous that I got to skip school. When DJ was getting some chips, Liz warned me to be nice to “our Gimli” because they didn’t want him hurt. I wasn’t sure I was ready for this kind of thing—exchange a couple of poems and tell him he can call me, and all of the sudden I was responsible for him. I don’t know why, but I answered this by asking her to come over after school and hang out, if she wasn’t doing anything.

  She wasn’t doing anything, so we walked home together. She lives just on the other side of the block, a few houses down the alley, but I noticed she didn’t stop at home to ask if she could come over. It had been so long since I invited someone “over to play” that I hadn’t been sure if I should call and ask Mom or not. I decided to ask her when we got there.

  Mom was surprised when she came out of her lesson to say hi, but pleased I think, though she gave Liz a curious once-over. Liz is almost as tall as I am, with dyed black hair and a bunch of earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. She’d taken off the hoodie that made her dress-code worthy, so she was wearing a ripped British flag shirt that showed off the black ball ring in her belly button.

  “Nice to meet you,” Mom said. “I’d better get back to my student. Have fun, girls.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Sullivan.” Liz turned on the manners. “Nice to meet you, too.”

  We went upstairs and she freaked out on my record collection. Of course, there wasn’t any Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn or English punk or Ramones. My new Nirvana saved us though, and we listened to that. I played some of the Worst of the Jefferson Airplane, too, which is one of my favorites. I have the speakers set up on opposite sides of the room, so you can really hear the stereo. Back in the sixties, I explained, stereo was a big deal, and Liz thought it was cool how they separated the instruments. She liked the heavier stuff, “Plastic Fantastic Lover” and “Ballad of You and Me and Ponielle,” but some of it was “too mellow.” I also played the first Mamas and the Papas.

  “That shit’s too hippie for me,” she said.

  Except for making friends with Ally, whom I don’t expect to be seeing in the future, I haven’t had a lot of girlfriend time lately. So I liked ha
ving Liz over, lying around my room, listening to music and talking. It’s strange, in a way, that we seemed to have less in common than Ally and I, who are half a decade apart in age. Still, there was school, and I told her about bombing my CSAP test last year.

  “That took balls, girl,” she said. “I don’t really care or try that hard or anything, but you fucked it up on purpose!”

  Then she wanted to know all about DJ, what I thought about him.

  I was guarded. I liked him, and said so.

  Did I want to go out with him?

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, “going out.” Isn’t that what kids had been saying since fourth grade, that they were “going out” when they didn’t actually go anywhere, or even see each other, just sent messages back and forth by their friends, or at the most, talked on the phone? And what does it mean now, in eighth grade? You text each other all the time? I wanted to see more of him, I liked being with him—

  “Do you like anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to fool around with him?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t want to talk about “fooling around.”

  “Come on, you do, you’re hot for him,” she teased. “I can tell.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You want to go out with him, too. Don’t worry, I’ll tell him.”

  “Don’t.”

  “He’s going to ask you. That’s why he wants to call you, you know that, right?”

  “That’s enough on that subject, I think. And don’t tell him anything. What he wants to know, he can ask me. I won’t tell him either, but he can at least ask.”

  Having a friend over messed up my writing/homework routine, so I took the night off—homework-wise, that is. My math for tomorrow is pretty much done anyway. I started working on the second Sister story—on the computer, believe it or not, just because it’s easier to revise that way.

  I’ll paste it into you when I’m done, Di. I’ve missed writing in you, though I do like fiction. I like being able to change stuff without reality butting in.

  In the middle of my writing, DJ called, and of course, Dad had to pick up the phone and tease me. We talked for a while, and I ended up telling him all about my Grand Plan, and even the whole history of my becoming what Quill calls Public Enemy Number One.