Dear Cassie

by Burstein, Lisa

  “I was just trying to help,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t be,” I said. “This has absolutely nothing to do with you.”

  “Okay then,” he said. “I’ll let you be.” I could hear Ben scramble up onto his squeaky bed and away from crazy, crazy me.

  He had been the one to give up.

  9 Fucking Days to Go

  I woke up and found a tray with food and a bottle of water in the corner of the room.

  It was some kind of meat sandwich that I would not eat. I’d never been a vegetarian before the clinic, but after that day, I felt sick to my stomach when I thought of eating anything that bled, when I thought of eating anything that had once had a heartbeat.

  When I thought about anything, really.

  There was another white pill on the tray. I took it without even thinking, anything to make my skin turn back to normal. The door was still closed and locked. I guess that was Rawe coming to check on me. Since she feels like she can do a half-ass job caring for me, I have decided to do the same with this entry. The only reason I’m writing is because there’s something I want to remember.

  There’s something I’ve realized I can never forget.

  I’ve tried everything I could think of to bury it, like the baby or whatever it was that had been inside me and never was.

  But burying it is not enough.

  What I want to remember, what I need to remember, is that no matter what I do, I will never be the same.

  8 Fucking Days to Go

  When I woke up it was dark and I’d forgotten where I was. For a moment, I did think I was back in the clinic, my brother about to open the curtains around my bed, look at me with his sad smile and ask me if I was ready to go home—the fleabag motel room we rented—where I bled and sweated all over the sheets.

  I sat up in bed. I could see that my locked door was open and the light in the hallway was on. I could see through the windows outside that it was dark. The tray from the day before was gone. Maybe Rawe had actually come to check on me instead of leaving food and slinking away like a scared servant. Maybe she was out there waiting for me now.

  I hoped she had some water. I was thirsty, very, and I realized it was the first thing besides itchy that I’d felt in hours. I hoped it meant that maybe the itching was getting better.

  I put on the clean uniform she’d left for me and stepped out of the room. I checked both sides of the hallway: no Rawe, no Nerone, no nobody—empty. I grabbed a bottle of water that had been left on the table and gulped it down so fast it hurt.

  The door to Ben’s room was open, too, but he wasn’t there, and his bed was made. How long had I been sleeping? Had I really just slept through an entire night and day? How tired must this place have made me that I could stay asleep in daylight with my skin on fire, my head full of confused, terrible feelings? I guess Rawe had succeeded in her attempt to break me. My body, at least, was done.

  Ben must have already gone back to his cabin. I wondered if he had come in and watched me sleep before he left. If so, he would have probably seen my fists clenched, my face tight. That was how I woke up every morning, like I wanted to tear up the air around me like paper.

  Or maybe he had left without even checking on me. Maybe I had finally succeeded in pushing him away. I felt that familiar emptiness in my stomach, craved it, knowing it was the only thing that would keep me safe.

  Before I left the infirmary I took another shower, cleaning off the calamine lotion that had dried on my skin like old pink cake frosting. In the shower, my skin felt less itchy than it had yesterday and was healing, from what I could see. I got out, dried myself off, reapplied more calamine lotion, and got dressed.

  I left the infirmary door wide open and walked in the dark back to my cabin, a bottle of lotion under my arm. I was more than halfway back when I realized I hadn’t even bothered to check the medicine cabinets in there for real drugs. Was I really too far gone to even want to get fucked up? Or was some part of this weird place working?

  The air was full of that sweet pine tree smell, like the needles had been tossed with sugar and cooked in an oven. I walked quietly back into the cabin, but the door still creaked as I closed it. Nez didn’t stir in her cot. She was out like she’d been hit in the head. Whatever training they had done that day and the day before had put her into a coma.

  Even though it felt like I’d been through hell, at least I’d missed that.

  I slipped onto my cot and could see Troyer was still awake, lying in bed, her eyes wide like bowls of milk with two blueberries in the middle. I did a small wave and pulled my sleeping bag up and around me, realizing that it was weird to feel comfortable here. That when I thought of leaving the infirmary, even though I could have gone anywhere, could have left the grounds if I had the guts to disappear into the night and turn into a different person on the other side, I came back here.

  To this.

  Troyer wrote something on her pad and showed it to me. Where have you been?

  “Infirmary,” I whispered. Better to say that than, The place of my nightmares. The place I wished I could pretend had never existed. The place that took me back to the place in my mind that I wish had never existed.

  You okay? she wrote, like she could tell.

  “Compared to what?” I whispered.

  She shrugged.

  “Exactly,” I said, turning away from her and trying to go back into the nothingness of sleep. She was trying to be nice, I guess, trying to make me feel better. Unfortunately, even coming from her, I was way beyond that.

  7 Fucking Days to Go

  I woke up still in my uniform, sweating in my sleeping bag. I gasped and looked around. I was so hot that I wondered if the rash had gotten worse. So hot that I wondered if the fever I had after my time in the clinic had come back.

  I must have looked insane, because Troyer got out of her bed and put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I guess her way of saying, You’re okay, you’re awake, you’re here.

  Not like it mattered.

  So what if I was here?Was here really better than the clinic when it was obvious I would never escape it?

  Nez rose up out of her sleeping bag and stretched—her brown arms and neck reaching toward the ceiling like tree branches.

  “Oh goody,” she said, furrowing her brow, “Cassie’s back.”

  “Fuck you, too, Nez,” I said.

  Troyer let go of my shoulder and sat on her bed.

  “Already starting things out the way we left them,” Nez said.

  “Well, I haven’t changed and my guess is you haven’t either,” I said, trying to match her expression. Even though I had changed. Being locked up in the infirmary had unlocked something in me. Something I wasn’t sure I would be able to contain anymore.

  “How was the infirmary? Get a lot of rest?” Nez asked, her last word hissed on the s, extending it, her way of letting me know that she and Troyer had not.

  I could feel Troyer’s head moving back and forth between us, like she was a cat watching a bird fly from one end of the cabin to the other.

  “It was hard to sleep with your boyfriend trying to break into my room the whole time,” I said, hating myself for it.

  Nez’s mouth opened, her chin almost touching her chest.

  “So, no, not too much rest,” I said, embellishing the s with my own hiss.

  Nez’s eyes went smaller, the black balls in them turning to thin dashes. “You’re a liar.”

  “That would be easier, wouldn’t it? For all three of us,” I said, not dropping my gaze. “But no, I’m not.”

  It was bad enough I didn’t know how to deal with Ben, that after what happened in the infirmary, it appeared he didn’t know how to deal with me. But now I was using him like this.

  “You were probably delirious from your flesh-eating virus,” Nez said, brushing her hair so hard I thought it would scream.

  “Save it,” I said. “Oh, and Ben doesn’t say ‘Hi.’” I pulled myself out
of the oven of my sleeping bag and gave my left arm a quick scratch, then scratched the right one. Whatever Rawe had given me was working—my skin only looked like it had been sautéed in oil for ten minutes instead of for an hour.

  Troyer was smiling at me like she was waiting for me to give her a piece of candy. “What’d you guys do yesterday?” I said. I could have asked about the day before too, but this was Troyer and I knew she would need to write it down. I wasn’t in the mood to wait for her to pen a novel.

  Troyer scribbled on her pad and handed it to me: Packed. A look of fear settled on her face, the same look she got when she had to go into the canoe alone with Stravalaci.

  “Packed what?” I asked, scratching at my arms again. My legs didn’t feel itchy. It was progress.

  “Oh—” Nez laughed. “You’ll see. I almost couldn’t sleep thinking about your reaction.”

  Rawe came out of her room, a backpack secured to her back. She didn’t look at me, didn’t even mention that I had returned. Maybe she was mad at me. Or whatever you could be toward someone who was doing everything she could to keep you out of her head.

  “Take a good look around the cabin,” Rawe said, staring at the front door, “because it’s the last time you’ll see it.”

  “That’s what packing means,” Nez said, smirking at me.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, looking at Rawe, but Nez was not about to let her answer.

  “Out there,” Nez teased, pointing at the door.

  “Like, for good?” I asked, suddenly experiencing everything I’d felt the day I arrived here in the van come rushing back. Somehow I had gotten used to being here. Sure, we had to be outside a lot, but we did get to be in the somewhat-safety of our cabin at night.

  Well, at least we had been allowed to.

  “You didn’t think this was going to be a spa vacation forever, did you?” Rawe asked, finally noticing I was alive.

  I didn’t bother answering. I guess I had. Not that any of this was pleasant, or even close to what Rawe was referring to as a “spa vacation.”

  “What do you think you’ve been training for? To hide in here with your tail between your legs?” I could feel her saying that directly to me. For each time she’d tried to talk to me and I’d shut her down.

  My stomach and lips sank. It felt like my skin was rolling down from my forehead to my chin. We were going out there? For good?

  “That’s the face!” Nez yelled. “That’s the face I was waiting for.” She clapped her hands together like a trained seal. “It almost makes having to actually do this myself worth it.”

  I looked at Troyer. She seemed like she wanted to apologize; I wasn’t sure why. None of this was her fault.

  Nez laughed again. “Surprise, Cassie. We’re spending the rest of our stay out in the woods,” she howled. “Aren’t you excited?”

  “Fuck you, Nez,” I said, trying to slow down my heartbeat. I could hear it in my ears, feel it banging on the inside of my skull like a cymbal.

  “No fighting,” Rawe said. “This is important. You need to be a team. Out in the woods we need to be a team.”

  I didn’t want to go out into the woods and I definitely didn’t want to be a team. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Whatever breakdown I had experienced in the infirmary was about to be eclipsed if I found anything in my tent with more than two legs.

  Would we even be allowed to use a tent?

  “Wick, let’s move,” Rawe said.

  I sat there. Moving meant leaving. Meant being out there. I wasn’t moving.

  “It’s time to use your training,” Rawe said.

  “I don’t want to use my training,” I said.

  “Okay.” Rawe’s hands were tight on the straps of her backpack. “Let me put it another way. We’re going. You have no choice.”

  “We already did this yesterday. It didn’t help.” Nez shrugged.

  “Well, I wasn’t here yesterday,” I said, grasping at anything.

  “We know,” Nez said, rolling her eyes.

  “We leave in ten,” Rawe said, marching out the front door. It was obvious the conversation was over.

  “You better keep your disease to yourself,” Nez said, blowing me a kiss.

  I was about to be in the middle of nowhere with bugs, bears, and Nez. If we had to share a tent I might be sent back here for attempted murder.

  I hiked between Nez and Troyer, Rawe in front of us, leading us into the gut of the woods. I had a pack on my back. It was heavy, slogging, as much weight as carrying another one of myself.

  The tall pine trees above us rustled in the wind, doing a really shitty job at keeping the sun off our faces. Up the trail ahead of Rawe, the boys’ camp walked in a line behind Nerone. They moved like they were each dragging a sled behind them, their backs bent and chins jutting out in front of them.

  When we met up with the boys that morning, Ben kept looking at his boots, staring at them like they were going to tell him the secrets of the universe, which let me know he didn’t want to look at me.

  I guess my freak-out in the infirmary had scared him off. It was hard to want a girl who turned into a pile of snot and estrogen at a moment’s notice. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore.

  But without him, would anyone worry about me anymore?

  As I hiked, I could feel the three cigarettes I had left, stored horizontally in my bra strap like bullets. Sweat was starting to pool on my lower back, dampening my shirt, making it stick to me. We had been walking for hours when I finally had to stop. I sat down on a log and took a drink from my canteen. Troyer ran over and tried to pick me up and pull me along, her lips almost pointing toward Nez and Rawe up the trail. It looked like it was hurting her face—seemed to me it would have been easier to talk.

  “What?” I asked. “I need a break.” She shook her head, hard, fast. I wished she would tell me what she was thinking for once.

  “Wick!” Rawe yelled from fifty feet ahead. She didn’t look tired at all. Nez stood next to her, grinning. Troyer ran from me to where they were standing, a blur of white-blond hair.

  “Wick,” Rawe said again.

  “Yes,” I huffed, “here.”

  “Here.” Rawe chuckled. “No,” she said, halting her laugh to let me know no part of this was funny. “Here!” She pointed to the ground in front of her, like I was a dog.

  And, like a dog, I had no choice but to obey. I got up, hung my canteen back at my waist, and walked, head down, to where they were standing.

  “You didn’t get the rules yesterday, so I’ll give them to you now,” Rawe said.

  I looked at Nez. If she were smiling any harder, her teeth would fall out.

  “No breaks till I say there’s a break,” Rawe said, ticking off a finger. “No talking till I tell you to talk. And no fighting. I will not put up with that crap out here. We have enough things against us to be against each other.”

  “You should talk to Nez about fighting,” I said.

  “I’m not doing anything, Cassie,” Nez replied.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Rawe asked.

  “Yes,” I said, not moving.

  “You don’t look like it,” Rawe said. “What’s rule number one?”

  “No breaks,” I said.

  She looked at me, stared, really, her eyes fixed on my very tired ass. I started walking before she could say anything else. We kept moving in silence, the breaking branches below us and the birds in the trees above. Every so often something would buzz past me—a fly, a bee, a mosquito, and because we weren’t supposed to talk I couldn’t say, Fuck! Get this fucking thing away from me. All I could do was smack at it or run from it, the pack on my back working to push me down into the ground like a nail being hammered.

  After a ten-minute lunch and pee stop, Rawe started leading us in this weird march call. The silence had been better.

  “How far will we go?” she yelled.

  As far as we need to, we were supposed to answer. We did, but certainly not with the gusto
she had.

  “How far will we go?” she yelled again.

  “As far as we need to,” we answered again, with about as little energy as I’d ever heard from people who were supposed to be shouting. Of course, Troyer wasn’t saying anything, so I guess even my and Nez’s sad attempts were better.

  I knew Rawe was making us say this for more than the distance we were walking. I didn’t need a psychology degree to understand that going deep into the woods was supposed to help us go deep into ourselves.

  Lucky me.

  I’d had enough going deep into myself via my Assessment Diary and at the infirmary. I still felt like an empty husk from what had happened there. Writing and thinking about the things inside my head had turned me into a girl I didn’t recognize: quiet, scared, ready to cry or scream at a moment’s notice. I couldn’t find the anger that I’d used to hold it all together anymore.

  “Wick, tell us something you’ve never told anyone,” Rawe yelled from the front of the line.

  “Why?” I complained.

  “What’s rule number three?” Rawe said, not even stopping to yell.

  “I’m not fighting, I’m asking,” I said.

  “Stop stalling,” Rawe said.

  I was stalling. There was really only one thing I hadn’t told anyone, and there was no way in hell I was about to reveal it here.

  “Wick, answer or we keep walking,” Rawe said.

  My guess was we were going to keep walking anyway. It didn’t look like the boys were stopping anytime soon. It made sense to keep us moving, make us tired—less chance we would sneak out of our tents at night. Not that I had the balls now that we were out here to even unzip my tent.

  “I’ve never kept anything from anyone,” I said, but I’d kept everything from everyone.

  Even my brother didn’t know the whole story. Even Aaron didn’t. I knew that even I really didn’t. I had kept myself from the pain, the real pain. I had to. That was what I had felt at the infirmary.