“Me too,” Cassie says, closing her eyes, simultaneously enjoying and feeling uncomfortable with the contact—both the eyes and the caress. Not because of anything sexy—she’s just not used to being touched.
Ally plants another quick kiss on her head and gets up.
“Night,” she says. “Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
As she leaves, it occurs to Cassie that Ally is the first person outside her family who has ever kissed her, the first person with whom she’s ever exchanged the phrase, “I love you.” Even if they did leave out the “I.” It seems cruel that they’re so far away. Cassie knows Ally would counsel her to accept the bitter as well as the sweet, but it’s hard.
She tries to read, but Nancy Drew doesn’t hold her attention. Cassie’s mind seems to drift out the window to the cold surf, and she imagines or dreams that high school is out there, in the mist beyond the shore, on an island—or is it an underwater mountain? Sean is a teacher there, and so is Dad, but where is Ally? Cassie searches, but finds only her mother, who leads a string quartet in crazy modern melodies, each player sawing high and low, out of time and out of tune, and the audience has pale skin and green eyes like lamps, “Like Gollum,” she thinks, and opens her eyes.
The room is dark—Ally must have come in and turned out the light.
Cassie stands at the window. Stars hang over the sea and the lights of boats move below them. She shudders and dives back into bed.
In the morning, Cassie awakes as foggy and rainy-feeling as the day. Her head aches, coffee doesn’t help, and she is sad, but she doesn’t know why. Sitting on the window couch, sipping a second cup, she can’t see through the misted glass, let alone through the fog to where the ocean breaks against the beach.
The others go to town to look for something to do. Cassie tries to read, settling on a book she finds on the shelf—Zen poetry and calligraphy. Ally goofs around with her sketchbook, builds a fire, and makes them a pot of tea. They pile pillows by the fire. Cassie keeps looking up at the windows out onto the drive, looking for Sean.
Finally, he calls. He’s not going to make it until tomorrow morning. But it will be early—he promises that, whether he sleeps or not, he’ll be there to wake her up on Sunday. He misses her, he’s sorry, it’s just that this paper is killing him.
What’s another day? Cassie thinks.
“It’s the old Sullivan straight-A syndrome,” she tells Ally.
“Maybe so,” she says. “Hey, let’s get out of here and take a walk. What’s a little rain?”
They go out into a fine shower and follow a path through coastal pines with water gathering in every bunch of needles, drops forming and hanging on each downward point. Cassie can’t find her bearings in the rain and fog away from the ocean’s roar, and she becomes even more disoriented when the mist lifts to reveal the ebb-tide, mud-flat bay, deserted but for a solitary heron in silhouette.
She feels fog-heavy and numb. The headache is worse, her brain a dull roar against the surf as they climb a dune and walk the beach up toward the house. She wants to stay close to the water, to the firm sand, but Ally doesn’t want to miss the house in the fog, and they follow the edge of the dunes. She lags behind, and Ally falls back, puts a cool hand to Cassie’s face, and says something to her. She pulls her gently by her hand, and the sand is wet from the rain, but dry beneath and soft, and Cassie’s legs feel dream-heavy as they walk the last of the sand and climb the steps to the house.
Ally tells her to take off her wet clothes and get in bed. She returns with water and hot tea and presses three ibuprofens into her hand.
“This is a total PMS headache, isn’t it?”
Cassie shrugs.
“You need to feed it.”
“No food.”
“Okay, not yet, but drink this, take those.”
Cassie nods.
“No. Now.”
Cassie takes a sip of water, pops the tablets into her mouth and swallows.
“Good girl. Now drink some tea, rest a little, I’ll be back.”
She returns with a big soy-shake—icy with frozen fruit, just like Cassie taught her to make last summer—and lays a towel-wrapped bag of ice across Cassie’s forehead. Maybe it’s the protein, maybe it’s the ice, but soon the weight and the roar inside her head relent a little. Like the crash of the surf after shutting a window, it’s still there, but not all-consuming. She drifts off to sleep, and it’s about the same when she awakes—bearable.
Coming upstairs, she hears Ally and Jack talking, and she stops to listen:
“Do you think he’ll show tomorrow?” Jack says.
“For sure. I know he feels bad enough about missing his sister, but you know—”
“It’s gotta be hard on the dude—I wouldn’t be here, seeing us together. I shouldn’t have come myself maybe.”
“But I wanted you here—”
Cassie hears the sound of kissing. She slips back down the stairs to take in this new information.
So things end. And they end quickly. Just months ago, Ally and Sean were in love. Just minutes ago, she trusted Ally.
But Ally loves me, she thinks. That hasn’t changed. And I love her. We’re like sisters, better than sisters, sisters of the paint …
So why didn’t she tell me?
Cassie retreats to her room and stays there, feigning sickness while she runs over everything in her mind, feeling a gradual readjustment inside her until she actually feels clear and cool if not good. Ally brings her food, and she eats it slowly, savoring the aromas of torn basil leaves in coconut milk curry, the way the rice sops it all up, and the way the heat warms her face and brings a sweat.
She drifts off to sleep and awakens in darkness. The house is still. She slides the window open and imagines the tide receding, completing another cycle, again and again, over and over. The spinning earth circles the sun, and the still moon circles the planet, and the different masses pull on the fluid seas as everything changes.
Cassie sees the glimmer of redemption—or hope in cycles of renewal—as a false gleam of fairy lamps in the night. Then she smiles at how everything turns upon itself in paradox, for her image of falsity—the fairy lanterns—suddenly seems more true than the lamps of home, and it is the fairy stories that seem real.
To slip into the forbidden realm is the goal, to slide into the deathless lands below this world. Who could blame the girl in “Goblin Market”—what was her name? Laura? Who could blame her for pining and dying when she returned to mortal lands after tasting the fruit of Faerie?
Yet who could blame her sister for kissing her with antidote-juiced lips? The sister didn’t know: saving is losing. Better to slip away because it’s all the same in the end.
Raised hopes, failed expectations. Love and trust fading like the inconstant moon.
Too much bitter, Cassie concludes, and too little sweet.
She will not go back. She will not walk the halls amid stares. She will not groom herself for their eyes anymore. She will not go back and try again.
She will not follow the will-o’-the-wisp—wisp-the-o’-will the follow not will she.
Cassie has always felt the lines blur between poetry and story and life. Tonight, they’re one. “A permanent solution to a temporary problem,” she hears in her mind, and the voice of her classmate sounds like Frost’s New England fence-mender, a stone savage who will not look behind the wisdom of his father’s saying. Poe speaks to her too: “This fever called living is over at last.” For the problem is living and it is terminal—or is it temporary only because it is terminal?
As she walks down the steps to the sea, Cassie wishes her hair were still long. She likes the Ophelia image of long hair in the water, but best not to think of that. The sea won’t do pretty things to her. Poor Sean coming tomorrow and finding her gone. Poor Mom and Dad.
“Death,” whisper the waves, to her as they did to Whitman, but there is no night-bird here to sing and no moon, only cold sand and wind blowing breaks in the clouds to reveal stars. “Come,” whispers the sea, receding back into itself.
Cassie wades down into the falling wash of water, into the pause between the big surges when minor waves break across the receding spill. She remembers playing on the beach in Mexico, waiting for the big ones to come to carry her to shore, but this time it’s the other direction.
Before the big one breaks, she dives under its crest, hitting the cold water—it’s as yielding as rock, but she penetrates nonetheless. She fights to hold her air, pulling hard against underwater current, eyes closed, mouth closed against the salt. She bursts out, takes air, and not stopping to let the cold take her, not yet, she starts a strong crawl at the surface. She swims into the waves, rising with them, then dropping down, swallowing water and coughing, swimming hard until she’s tired and rolls onto her back.
When she does, she feels the shivers come in a violent shake. A cramp hits her below the belly too, as if it’s her period finally coming on. She imagines her blood trailing into the salt water, bringing the sharks. Another shake hits, she begins to feel warm inside, her mind dulls, and she wonders if she will bleed after death—is there blood after death, sweet shark-calling blood? And she hopes the sharks will come and make a neat job of it so there is nothing left: no bloated corpse washing on the beach, nothing for Dad to look at and say, “Yes, that’s her,” nothing to burn or to bury, just nourishment for the good sharks with their dull eyes and delicate gill-covers, nothing to fossilize but a molecule of her bone’s calcium in a shark’s tooth—calcium so hard bought, so fought for in supplements and fortified soy-milk. Oh, to let that fight go, to let the calcium go back into the sea where it all came from—barely a trace that she has ever lived.
Journal Eight
10 October
A bit wiped out from staying up writing last night, or a bit depressed from doing away with fictional Cassie. Or maybe, after the exhilaration of writing, I don’t want to face the tiresomeness of life …
But life’s okay now. Maybe it’s good, even. I’m about to go to writing club, I’ll see DJ—I’m actually having fun for a change, but there’s one little thing that’s still trying to take me down, that’s pulling me away from shore. I’ve been trying, by fictionalizing and revising my story, to deal with (or to avoid) one simple truth:
Ally is gone.
She’s more than just a thousand miles away now—she’s out of my life. And no matter how I work it out in my stories, it’s still not fiction: I’ve lost the sister I never had.
After school:
Luckily, I’d read my story last week, so I didn’t have to today. I like Sister II better than number one, but I didn’t want to read it. I did give a copy to Griffin, though. Kel read his today—three short slasher stories that were on the yucky side.
Sinclair isn’t going to let me get away with skipping out to the library anymore in reading. He wanted me to switch groups, but I talked him into letting me be a group of one. I’m reading Frankenstein, which was a birthday gift from Ally.
The good news is that DJ managed to bring his language grade up to a C, so he thinks Mommy is going to let him go to the movie Friday. I hope so. It would be nice to have a little something to look forward to.
Dinner was just me and Dad. I’m not sure we’re going to make it to the cabin this weekend. He has to work on Friday, and Mom is busy, busy, busy. If we do go, I want to invite DJ, but there’s no way his mommy would let him. Probably not even for a day.
Just called Quill. DJ can go to the movie! Those guys live a few blocks north and west, up by the park, and are going to meet us downtown.
I don’t know what to do with myself. I love the language, but Frankenstein is moving a bit slow. Victor Frankenstein is going on about the ardent ardor that brought about his ruin.
I guess staying up half the night working (ardently) on Sister II has made me tired. Yet I’m not ready to sleep because I’m all hyper (if you can be hyper and tired at the same time). And happy, too, now that I know DJ’s coming tomorrow. Outside, there’s a fall chill in the air, and I long to be out walking in it.
I wish I were on a grand quest to discover the pole like Mary Shelley’s explorer. Is that where A. A. Milne got the idea for Christopher Robin and Pooh’s “expotition”? I feel more like a bear of very little brain than a grand explorer. Maybe I’ll read a little of the silly old bear, that should lull me off to sleep.
Some hours later, just as the night was beginning to steal away, Pooh awoke with a sinking feeling: he was hungry.
11 October
Liz and I got to the theater first, bought tickets, and went inside. She wanted to sit up front, but I talked her into the back row. We sat next to each other, and when the guys got there, Quill sat next to Liz, and DJ squeezed in front of us to sit by me. He put his arm around me as soon as the lights went down, and I slid down and snuggled against his shoulder. I fell right into a nice, comfortable feeling—even though it wasn’t really that comfortable with the armrest/drink holder between us.
By the end of the previews, I was hating that armrest. I wanted to be next to him. I sat up a little bit and put my arm around him, but that didn’t work. Then Liz reached between us and lifted the armrest and slid it back between the seat backs.
“Duh,” she said, and we laughed.
I slinked back down and took DJ’s hand. We sat like that for a while, just watching the movie, holding hands. Thankfully, he didn’t try to grope around with his right arm, but he did take his left hand from mine and rest it on my leg, half on my shorts and half on my bare thigh. I put my hand on his, but together they weighed a hundred pounds, and his palm was sweaty. That wasn’t pleasant, but I started running my fingertips lightly up and down his wrist and arm, and then he did the same on my thigh, which was very nice.
I was only half paying attention to the movie, and finally I turned, reached, and kissed him. We kissed on and off for the rest of the movie. We would do some short ones, some long ones, and then just sit back and rest for a while until one of us leaned in and started it again.
What surprised me was that Liz and Quill were doing pretty much the same thing! During one of our rest periods, she leaned over and whispered to me, “Good movie, huh?” and we both burst into a fit of giggling. Then I whispered to her, “What’s going on over there? You never told me you liked Quill.”
“Just sort of happened,” she said.
When the credits rolled around, the lights came up a little, and DJ and I sat still, holding hands. Then the lights came up all the way.
“Excellent flick,” Liz said.
“What’s next, gang?” said Quill.
“Ice cream?” I said.
“But you don’t eat ice cream,” said DJ.
“They’ve got sorbet—that’s vegan.”
“You’re such a Moby,” said Quill.
“I think we have to go,” said DJ. His mommy was letting him walk home, but he was getting nervous about being late. So we skipped ice cream and started walking.
Luckily, outside the theater, we saw the downtown shuttle coming.
“Stop that bus,” yelled Liz. “Exercise sucks!” And we followed as she sprinted after it.
The bus let us off at the college in just a couple of minutes. From there, I led us over to the bike trail that runs along a little creek, up into the pines, and over toward school and our neighborhood. It was a bit of a detour, but we had saved a lot of time by catching the bus.
On the way over, I remembered a hideout in the pines that Sean showed me when we were playing “The Last Good Country.”
“Do you guys want me to show you a secret place up in the pines?” I said. “It’s not really out of the way—it
won’t make you late, Gimli.”
“The stout dwarf fears not his mother’s wrath,” said Quill.
“Yes, he does,” said Liz. “Or he ought to.”
“It’s cool, we’re not late yet.”
“Okay, but you have to swear that you’ll never tell anyone or take anyone there.”
“And what shall we swear by?” said DJ.
“Let’s seal it with a kiss,” said Liz.
I looked at DJ. “We’ll swear by the precious.”
“Yess, Gollum,” he said. “By the preciouss, we swearss by the preciouss.”
“The what?”
“The ring, teenaged fluff-ball,” said Quill. “We’ll swear by ‘One ring to rule them all.’”
“‘One ring to find them,’” I continued the verse.
“‘One ring to bring them all,’” said DJ.
“‘And in the darkness bind them,’” said Quill.
“‘In the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows lie,’” we finished in unison.
“You guys are creeping me out,” said Liz. “Let’s just promise, Cassie. We’ll never, ever, ever tell.”
“Or go there with anyone else or let anyone follow you.”
“Swear to God and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye, no crosses count. Now come on, or Gimli’s gonna be late.”
We cut off the trail and followed the creek, trickling below huge willows in autumn yellow. In a hundred yards we were below a steep bank, and I found the spot where erosion had left a gap beneath the chain-link fence. We scrambled up and under, Liz complaining, “This is exercise, and exercise is work, and work sucks,” and then we were in the pines.
Up higher, the ground leveled off and there was a clearing, edged by the ruins of an old stone foundation. Ponderosa pines stood tall and thick around us, screening us from the path above and the neighborhood across the creek. Pine needles blanketed the ground.
“Wow,” said DJ. “How’d you find this place?”
“My brother and I used to play up here.”
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