Dear Cassie

by Burstein, Lisa

  “You are still under my supervision. You are not free yet,” Rawe said.

  What I thought but didn’t say was, I will never be free. Not until my secret isn’t a secret anymore. What I knew but couldn’t believe was, I really never was.

  “The calls will come soon,” Rawe said.

  I looked at the phone. Would the calls about our flights come before I could tell my secret? Did I want them to?

  “We could talk,” Rawe said, looking right at me when she did. I guess she was still trying, and that said something about her. She had more faith than the rest of the girls put together. She was like Ben. She didn’t give up.

  “Sounds like just what I want to do,” Nez said. “I hate Cassie and Troyer doesn’t speak …”

  “I hate you, too,” I said. Even with my new, easier silence I wasn’t able to let that one go. Nez admitting she was as messed up as I was certainly didn’t make us best friends, but I guess it did make us best enemies. We’d come to an understanding, but that didn’t mean we liked each other.

  Rawe chewed on her granola bar. There was no way she was going to fix Nez, or any of us, in the next forty-eight hours. Whatever had started at Turning Pines wouldn’t be complete just because we weren’t there anymore. We were messed-up cases, sent here because they didn’t know what else to do with us. People who were normal didn’t stop talking, or lie all the time, or hate themselves so much that it was easier to just hate everyone else.

  “Fine, turn on the TV,” Rawe said.

  Troyer grabbed the remote and clicked it on. She moved through the channels quickly, letting each one get a word out, like she was trying to have the TV say a sentence for her.

  Rawe looked at me and shook her head. I suppose she pictured each time she’d tried to talk to me, how I’d turned her down cold. Like she’d said, she can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. But what about someone who needs to be?

  2 Fucking Days Left

  No one left today. The phones stayed silent. We fell asleep with the TV on, wrappers from the vending machines covering our beds like shed cocoons. I woke up and saw the light on in the bathroom with the door ajar. I found Troyer on the white tile floor with a watercolor set and papers with muted paintings all around.

  “Close the door,” she whispered.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What’s it look like?” she asked, like I was stupid.

  She had really turned into quite the smart-ass since she’d started talking again.

  “Grab a brush,” she said, pointing to where they were piled next to her on the floor—black sticks, like the kindling we’d used to start our fires.

  “You took all this from the art cabin?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know how long we would be in the woods for.” She shrugged. She was painting a sky—a sunset, full of oranges, purples, and reds.

  I sat against the tub. It felt cold, clammy on the back of my arms. “I’m not in the mood to paint,” I said.

  “When are you in the mood to do anything?” she asked, not looking up from her paper.

  “You’ve really fucking gotten your voice back, haven’t you?”

  “Sorry,” Troyer said, turning to me, her skin almost colorless in the overhead light. “It’s just been a long time since I’ve been able to tell someone to do something.” She smiled. “I kind of like it.”

  I picked up a brush and put a piece of blank paper in front of me on the floor. I was all ready to go for the red, but Troyer covered it with her hand. “Use a different color. It’s time for you to use a different color.”

  I didn’t fight her; she was right. If I’d learned anything in the woods, she was right.

  I knew which color I needed to pick, but I also knew what picking it would mean. I stared at it and waited.

  “Go on,” Troyer said.

  I dug into the blue, painting a wash over the paper at first, then I pointed the back end of the brush to stipple dots on top, all the tears from the day in the infirmary—small tears, big tears, falling down the page like rainwater, soaking through to the white tile.

  “What is that?” Troyer asked, pointing at my painting.

  “Sadness,” I said, without even thinking about it.

  “That’s a lot of sadness,” she said.

  I nodded. It was.

  “Is it yours?” she asked.

  Troyer was newly confident and I could do nothing but applaud and surrender. “Yeah,” I said. It was and there was more. Coming from the red I never thought would end, now there was blue. But the red had ended. Maybe the blue would, too.

  I looked at Troyer’s painting. It had transformed from a sunset to a beach scene, complete with a cottage, chairs, a striped umbrella.

  “Our summer house. My favorite place,” she said.

  I looked down at my painting. Why couldn’t I paint my favorite place, or a flower, or a fucking sky full of birds that looked like spastic Ws? Why did I paint blood, tears, the colors that coated me like a constant cloud?

  “You okay?” Troyer asked.

  “No,” I said, the tears starting to come in real life.

  “Why are you so sad?” Troyer asked.

  “I’m not. I mean, I don’t know what I am,” I said, wiping my face, but they still came. I couldn’t stop them.

  “You should flush it,” Troyer said.

  “What?” I asked.

  Troyer waited—strong, solid. “Your sadness,” she said, picking up my painting and dismissing it. “Flush it down the toilet.”

  “That’s not going to make it go away,” I said, even though I didn’t have any better ideas.

  “It’s symbolic, Cassie,” she said.

  I looked at her, Troyer, back and talking, in her real-world jeans and paint-splattered light blue T-shirt—such a different Troyer than she was when I first saw her. Such a different me than I was when I got out of the van that first day.

  “You really are the daughter of psychologists,” I said.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” she replied.

  I wiped my eyes and caught my breath. The room looked fuzzy. My body felt bare, like someone had picked it clean of my organs. I had thought I was empty at the clinic, at the motel after, and then in the infirmary. But now I knew being empty would mean finally being free.

  “Do it,” she said.

  “You’re serious?” I asked.

  “Unless you want to keep feeling like this,” she said, “I am.”

  I stood, slowly, getting my bearings, deciding if I was really ready to let it go, even as the symbol that Troyer suggested. I lifted the toilet lid and seat and lay the paper on the water. It floated there, rippled, the blue paint bleeding into the bowl.

  “Flush it,” she said.

  I looked at it, moving in the water—waiting. My sadness, the symbol of it turned by Troyer into something I could just get rid of.

  It seemed impossible, but I pushed the handle. The water rushed from the sides of the bowl and drowned the paper. It spun in a tornado of blue, sucked into a hurricane of white, before it was forced down the bowl.

  “Do you feel better?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “At least you’re honest,” she said, touching my back, “but you will.”

  “I was pregnant,” I said, the words feeling like marbles in my mouth. I’d never really said them before, never really admitted them. Not even to my brother. I just told him I was in trouble and needed him to drive me to the clinic. That was all I had to say. He knew me enough to know I didn’t want to elaborate and loved me enough not to make me.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Yeah, wow,” I said.

  “Was?” she asked.

  “Yes, was,” I said, making myself look at her. I felt the room spin, moved my fist to my belly, but I didn’t hit. I let myself feel the hurt that was there, for once not trying to mask it with more pain, with physical pain, with anger.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Ca
ssie.”

  “I did it,” I said, like I’d had to do that day in the judge’s chambers with my parents, when I admitted that the huge bag of pot we were found with was my fault, even though Lila was the one who snatched it, even though Amy was in the car, too.

  I had. I’d made the phone call. I’d given the folded-up twenties to the receptionist. I’d signed the piece of paper that said: I understand that if something terrible happens to me it isn’t their fault. It seemed ironic to have to sign that. Something terrible was going to happen whether their estimation of something terrible happened or not.

  “You know you couldn’t have had a baby, right? You’re seventeen,” Troyer said.

  “I know,” I said, starting to cry again. It didn’t matter if I’d flushed the sadness—it was still there.

  She reached out and hugged me, just held me, the fan in the bathroom going above us, humming and swirling like we were in a snow globe. I could smell her hair, clean with the scent of flowers from the hotel shampoo. “You need to live this life,” she whispered. “You can live it with regret, or you can let it go.”

  And even though I had no idea how, with the two of us having helped each other get here, get to this place, I knew she was right.

  Well, you can count how many Fucking Days are left.

  I woke up in an empty bed. It made me wonder if the night before in the bathroom had been a dream. I lifted my head—no sound coming from the shower, no light coming from under the bathroom door, just the soft snore of Nez sleeping in her bed next to me. It was still dark. Maybe Troyer had snuck out to get a soda. I felt her side of the bed, but it was cold. If she’d snuck out it had been a while ago.

  I looked over at the love seat where Rawe slept—it was empty. She must have noticed Troyer was gone, too. Crap. I pictured Rawe out in the hotel hallway calling Troyer’s name. Would Troyer even answer? Or would she sit with her knees up to her chest next to the soda machine, hoping for just a few more seconds alone?

  Even after last night, I still didn’t think of her as Laura, but I guess that was because we now knew each other so well that names and their meaning made no difference.

  The hotel room door opened. Light from the hallway pierced the bed, sheets glowing white for a moment as the door was propped open then closed. I lay back down quickly but watched as Rawe tiptoed to the love seat. I guess that meant she hadn’t found Troyer. She was trying really hard to be quiet, but that wasn’t easy to do in hiking boots, so she bent down to untie them. Why was she still even bothering to wear them?

  “Where’s Troyer?” I whispered into the dark hotel room. I knew it was no surprise to her that Troyer was gone if she was awake.

  “Shhh,” Rawe said, pointing at Nez. Not like I would have cared ordinarily, but I definitely didn’t care at that moment that Nez was sleeping.

  “Where is she?” I asked louder, like I could already kind of tell from the way Rawe was acting that maybe she wasn’t just missing; I needed Rawe to tell me what I didn’t want to hear.

  “Nez is sleeping,” Rawe said.

  “Not anymore,” Nez said in a raspy voice.

  “So where is she?” I asked, looking at Rawe. It was pretty obvious, even in the dark, that she was trying not to look at me.

  “Wick,” Rawe said, “we can talk about this later.”

  “Just tell me,” I said, even though I knew what Rawe was going to say next. Even though I didn’t want to hear it, I was asking for it.

  “She went home,” Rawe said.

  I felt the ache in my stomach and immediate nausea. Why didn’t Troyer wake me up? The one person in the world who it seemed had kind of understood me felt like she could leave without even saying good-bye.

  And, worse than that, the one person I had finally, really let in was gone.

  “She left you a note,” Rawe said, walking across the dark hotel room to hand it to me.

  I took it from her and flicked on the light that was stuck by a brass arm to the wall above the nightstand. It was a piece of paper from Troyer’s Assessment Diary—just plain notebook paper like all of us had. She’d folded it down so small that the edges were sharp.

  “Oooh, love letters,” Nez said, in bed with her back to me. “Feel free to highlight the interesting parts for me for later, because like I said, I’m sleeping.”

  “Screw you, Nez,” I said. I stared at the note. I was glad she hadn’t left me with nothing, but it seemed ironic that Troyer was going to have the last word.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what it would be.

  “Turn the light off,” Nez said. She covered her head with her pillow.

  “You’re awake anyway,” I said.

  “Not by choice. Just because your girlfriend left you a note doesn’t mean I need to be awake, even if your lady parts are.”

  “Fuck off, Nez,” I said.

  “Hey,” Rawe said, finally jumping in. I always wondered why swearing was the last straw with adults. I guess it was because they were the sucker punch of words. “Nez, go take a shower.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” Nez whined, her hair all around her head like a shadow.

  “No, actually it’s morning,” Rawe said.

  I turned to the clock. It read five a.m. in angry red numbers. Five a.m. meant it was my last day. It meant tomorrow I would be sent home. Unless I was unlucky enough to get an earlier flight like Troyer had.

  Nez got out of bed and slammed the bathroom door behind her.

  “I didn’t read it,” Rawe said, indicating the note that was still folded in my hand.

  “Thanks,” I said, because I couldn’t think what else to say.

  Rawe watched me while I opened it. Indicating that even if she hadn’t read it, she was still interested in seeing what it said via my face. I tried my best to keep my mouth tight as I opened the note, fold by fold by fold, and read:

  You need to forgive yourself

  It wasn’t addressed to me and it wasn’t signed, which made me wonder if Troyer had written it as much as a reminder for herself as for me. That was it, one line in the middle of a sheet of paper.

  I knew it was true. I knew that last night was the first step. Without her, I just wasn’t sure what the next step was.

  “You okay?” Rawe asked.

  “Fine,” I said, folding the note back up, as tight as Troyer had.

  “Do you still want to use marijuana?” Rawe asked, like we had just been talking about that.

  “What?” I asked, dropping the note on the bed. It fell like a rock.

  “I’m trying to see if our program worked,” Rawe said, like that made more sense. “Do you still want to use marijuana?”

  “If the program worked?” I laughed, but not because it was funny.

  “I’m supposed to ask,” she said.

  “And you’re choosing now?”

  “We’re alone,” she said, looking at the closed bathroom door. “And it’s not like you were open to any of my other invitations to talk.”

  Awesome. She hadn’t sent Nez to the shower to punish her. She’d sent her to the shower to punish me.

  I shook my head. “Marijuana, no.” I couldn’t help laughing again. Prom night seemed so far away now. I was a different girl then. That was the girl she should have been asking, not me.

  “Great.” Rawe smiled. Her smile wasn’t soothing or pleasant. It kind of made it look like there was no skin left on her face.

  “Yeah, great,” I said. I picked up the note and unfolded it and refolded it.

  “There’s something else?” Rawe asked.

  Maybe she had read the note.

  “You keep asking me to talk,” I said. “What about you?”

  “We’re not talking about me,” she said, what all adults say when they are too afraid to answer your question.

  “What are we talking about?” I asked.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you my name,” Rawe said.

  “Not good enough,” I said.

  “You haven’t hear
d it yet.” She crossed her hands over her knees.

  I waited.

  “Fanny,” she said.

  “Fanny Rawe,” I replied.

  “Yup,” she nodded. “Bad, right?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  “School was—” She paused and flipped her braid from one shoulder to the other. “Not fun.” She smiled her skin-ripping smile, looked down, and rubbed her hands against her thighs like she was gearing up for something. Like what she was about to tell me was something she needed generated energy to say. “People don’t really like me much,” she said, still looking down. “I guess I work with kids like you because your reasons for hating me have nothing to do with me personally.”

  It was weird, but hearing her say that reminded me of what I did with my words and fists and anger. I was afraid people wouldn’t like me, so I made them hate me. I made them fear me.

  “I get it,” I said.

  “I know there are things you don’t want to tell me,” she said. “I understand, Cassie, I do. I just hope you’ll choose to tell someone, someday.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She smiled, like she was surprised that I hadn’t shut her down again. I guess I was, too.

  “Words aren’t magic,” Rawe said, “but talking, opening up can be.”

  “I know,” I said and I did. Rawe might be the one saying it, but it was Troyer who made me understand. Rawe meant well, but she wasn’t cut out for this like Troyer was. I guess Troyer had her parents’ genes. Wherever she ended up, I hoped she decided to do something to help other people, because she was good at it.

  The bathroom door opened and we jumped.

  Nez walked out and looked at Rawe, at me. It was obvious the words we had said were hanging in the room like smoke, making the room smell.

  “You guys done making out or what?” Nez asked, twirling her towel into a turban on top of her head.

  “Yes,” Rawe said, getting up, stopping to squeeze my shoulder and then entering the steamy bathroom. “We’re done.”

  I opened the note that Troyer gave me. Rawe might have thought I needed to talk to someone else to heal, but I knew I needed to start with myself. I needed to say and keep saying three words.