This Is All Your Fault, Cassie Parker
Page 17
“I waited to get my skates,” I say.
“I don’t know if I remember how to put them on.”
“I’ll make Leelu show you if you can’t,” I tease her, automatic. “But probably it’s like riding a bike.”
Cassie looks out at the kids already skating. “Where is she, anyway? I thought she’d come say hi to me.”
“With her little girlfriends.” I look with Cassie for my sister’s peachy shirt in the crowd of kids on the rink floor, but instead of finding her, I see someone else I recognize.
“Oh no” comes out of my mouth before I can stop myself.
“What?”
“I don’t know if you want to know.”
She shrinks and grips my arm instinctively.
“No, it’s not any of them,” I assure her, both of us knowing exactly who.
“Who then?”
But I don’t have to say, because Cory skates right in front of us alongside his friend Jeannette.
Cassie’s face is a mix of things: horror, and delight. Uncertainty, too. Maybe jealousy, though I don’t know her real feelings about him anymore. Or if she ever found out about that awful joke Kendra and Izzy were playing on her, whatever it was.
“So should we?” I indicate the rink.
Cassie’s eyes are still worried. “Maybe we should get some fries or something?”
I say okay, and we clomp together to the neon-lit snack bar, with its checkerboard floor and groovy pleather booths. When Cassie orders her Sprite, I can’t help smiling.
She catches my expression. “What?”
“Oh, I—I don’t know.” It’s not what I should start with: how I soaked Kendra in the mall. Not yet, anyway. “Why don’t you want to see Cory?”
I can tell she’s blushing, even with blue light glowing off her cheeks. “It’s a long story.”
I shrug. “I can listen.”
So we sit in a curvy little booth, sharing sweet potato fries, and then a basket of tempura green beans, relaying snippets of summer. Cassie tells me the horror story of Izzy’s brother’s phone, and how Kendra used it to send her messages she thought were from Cory. I tell her about seeing Cheyenne at the thrift store, and how nice she was to me, which then leads to my describing—without shyness or hesitation—the interesting changes in my wardrobe. Cassie actually seems curious, and narrates an afternoon when she, Lana, and their grandparents went to an art festival, and purposefully picked out the strangest pieces as potential Christmas presents for each other. After that I describe the water war at Aja’s party, and plummeting from Teamer Cliff, which means then I backtrack into the long story of writing camp, and who Sanders is.
“Oh—” I interrupt myself halfway, because now that we’re talking more easily, there is one big thing she should finally know. “Get this: Dad and Jennifer are getting married.”
Cassie’s brown-black eyes at first go wide, but then her whole face scrunches in concern. “Oh, Fiona. That’s terrible.”
It sends a pang pulsing through my rib cage. Dad and Jennifer’s engagement is the one thing that I still can’t make into something good yet, and I know it may be a while before I do. Cassie’s sympathetic face now reminds me just how much I could’ve used this side of her—the listening side—more than once this summer.
“I should apologize,” she says, serious.
It’s so sudden, I’m not sure how to look at her, quite.
“For turning my back on you,” she goes on. “I did it, I guess, because I was mad.” She picks at the uneaten shards of our sweet potato fries, but doesn’t eat any. “And hurt by what you wrote about me. In, you know, your diary.”
We’re still not looking at each other, but I nod.
“Maybe a little curious too,” she goes on, “to see what it was like, being in their group. But . . . I should have talked to you.”
It’s surreal, hearing all this. How familiar it sounds.
“I should have talked to you, too,” I feel brave enough to say. There’s no hesitation in my voice, but the gap of her silent surprise gives me even more courage. “I wasn’t always honest with you, and it probably felt awful, hearing my inner thoughts from somebody like Kendra, instead of me. Especially when I was so mean sometimes. The things I said in there, they weren’t true, exactly.” After all this time, I still don’t know what Cassie heard, or how she feels about it now, but I know she deserves an apology. “Or, at least, they weren’t the whole truth. I just thought—I don’t even know what I thought. I guess I didn’t believe you’d listen if I didn’t always agree with you. That you’d get mad, or it would mean something about our friendship. Which wasn’t fair to you, and made things come out worse than they were. I don’t know, really.”
After a second, she clears her throat. “You’re right, I probably would’ve gotten mad. At least a little. Lana says I have a bad temper.”
“You just feel things and take action, that’s all.”
“Yeah, but maybe I should think about things more sometimes.” She’s quiet a moment. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, actually. And one thing I think is that we have a lot to talk about.”
“I know we do,” I agree.
“One thing I missed?” she says.
I still can’t meet her eyes. “Yeah?”
“Never being able to admit it when things were bad.”
I shake my head to show I’m not sure what she means.
“With Kendra . . .” She stares at the skaters moving under the blurry green lights beyond us. “I had to pretend I was okay with everything, even when I hated it. Gates Morrill and Billy Keegan, for example? They did the most revolting things at lunch. Stuffing hamburgers and french fries into their milk shakes. Salsa. And then drinking it. It was disgusting.”
I remember.
“But everyone’d be egging them on. One time Neftali poured half her kale smoothie in there. Kendra gave Billy a piece of her sushi roll. And there were other things, not just at lunch. It was like this whole complicated game of pretend, all the time. With everyone. So much I didn’t know—almost everything, I guess.”
The sadness in her voice allows me to finally look at her.
“Lana showed me that,” she finishes in explanation. “And Nono, too. Though, of course, finding out that Cory wasn’t really texting me helped.”
“Do you still like him?” I venture.
She glances again at the skaters. “I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s him I like, or—”
I understand before she says it. “If you liked liking him.”
We smile at each other. Now would be a good time, maybe, to tell her about Tyrick, and then my fight with Aja, or my heart-to-heart with Dad—so many things. We’ve covered a lot, sitting here, and aside from a few hesitations and pauses, it’s felt surprisingly natural. But there’s so much she still doesn’t know—so many parts we haven’t even touched on, the least of which being how she ended up in Maine. Trying to span this giant distance we let grow between us feels daunting.
She smiles at me again, this time shy, but it’s enough to let me know—or, at least, hope—that eventually, with work, we will bridge this new awkward gap.
Over our heads, an old Lenny Kravitz song squalls out, breaking the moment.
“Lana loves this song,” she says. “Mind if I tell her it’s playing?”
“Go ahead.”
While she texts her cousin, I look for Leelu again. This time she’s easy to spot—skating backward while holding hands with one of her friends. I watch carefully, too, for Cory and Jeannette, though after three full rounds I still don’t see them. Maybe they left. Maybe, when school starts, we’ll somehow find out they really are dating now. Or maybe we won’t care anymore, since they’ll be in high school and we’ll be on to something else. Something new to watch, together.
“We should go out there,” I say, but Cassie’s frowning at her phone when I turn back. “Everything okay?”
“Oh. Yes, it’s actually fine. Great, really.”
I quirk my eyebrows, wanting to know more. Not just about Lana, but about who Cassie is in this new friendship, too.
“Long story. Let’s at least skate a couple rounds. Don’t want to waste the rental fee.”
We parse our way carefully across the carpeted floor, Cassie watching both the skaters zipping by us—probably looking for Cory—and the floor in front of her, so she doesn’t fall on her butt. Eventually we make it to the edge and step gingerly out onto the slick glossy rink.
“I don’t know.” Cassie grabs my arm for balance as a tall boy wearing big earphones whips past.
“Come on.” I reach down for her hand, in part to hold us both steady, part because it just feels right. At least for now. “It’s not as scary as it looks. You have to just do it to find out.”
Acknowledgments
PEOPLE TO THANK FOR HELPING ME WRITE THIS BOOK: A LIST
by Terra Elan McVoy
• Anica Rissi, because she has good ideas and I have good ideas, and yet, it is somehow even more supersparkleamazing when we put them together.
• Alexandra Arnold, because I never thought that after having the best editor in the world, I’d get the other best editor in the world. THANK YOU for all the time, encouragement, and enthusiasm, and also for pushing me.
• Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, who is not only a smart and helpful agent, but a lovely one too.
• Laurel & Elizabeth for all that writing talking time together.
• Every single fan of Drive Me Crazy who wanted more from Cassie, Lana, and Fiona’s world. BUT HUGELY MOST ESPECIALLY THANKS to Jojo Desir, Lee Rachel Carlomogno, Nora Colussy-Estes, Emily Becker, and Will Walton, whose encouraging faces I pictured while writing.
• Katherine Tegen, Heather Daugherty, Ro Romanello, and all the delightful people at HarperCollins who have welcomed me with such amazing kindness, and were excited enough by Drive Me Crazy to want another book.
• Ida, Gavin, and Grant from Kids & Companions at Little Shop of Stories for helping me come up with Fiona’s creative writing camp story ideas.
• The Bat Cave writers, for inspiration, but mostly a serious education.
• Every single person who has ever cheered me on, either in person or online. Writing is great, but it can also be hard to know if you are doing a good job. Friends who high-five me, hug me, congratulate me, smile at me, ask about me, listen to me, and otherwise help me keep going are—well, it’s hard to say exactly, but I really couldn’t do it without them.
• That guy who I’m married to, because there’s none of this without him.
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About the Author
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TERRA ELAN MCVOY is the author of Drive Me Crazy. She has held a variety of jobs centered on reading and writing, from managing an independent bookstore to answering fan mail for Captain Underpants. She lives in the same Atlanta neighborhood where many of her acclaimed YA novels are set. To learn more, please visit her online at www.terraelan.com.
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Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT, CASSIE PARKER. Copyright © 2016 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015955195
ISBN 978-0-06-241449-6
EPub Edition © April 2016 ISBN 9780062414519
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