by Susan Currie
“Hey, Cass! I was hoping I’d see you.”
Mr. Gregor fell into step beside her, beaming down. “Confession time: I was actually looking for you. Have to know how it’s going this morning. Everything okay?”
She flushed, thinking about Degan. “Yes!” she said brightly.
Except it wasn’t.
Except someone thought she was a bully. And she had to let him know she wasn’t, that she knew what it was like to be the victim and she could never stand by and watch it happen to someone else. She wasn’t like Ellis!
“What did you do in class? Did you meet any kids?”
Somehow words came out of her mouth, but she wasn’t really paying attention to them. And Mr. Gregor was chatting back, but she wasn’t really noticing his words either.
“And your mom, what’s she up to today?”
Cass came back to the conversation. “I think she’s looking for a job.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Gregor. “Can you please tell her again that I’d be happy to look over her résumé? I really do know a lot of people besides Bessie.”
“I will.”
At that moment, a kid stopped them. “Mr. Gregor, that guy over there fell down and he’s crying.”
“Excuse me,” Mr. Gregor said to Cass.
“See you later,” Cass said.
She walked quickly past everything. Degan had to be around somewhere. The trouble was, it was hard to look for him without looking at everyone else. So she kept glancing up and down, heart bouncing in her chest.
She found him at last, around the back of a portable, hunched against it with knees drawn up. His head was bent over the notebook, and his hand moved swiftly, sketching something.
Cass stood there in front of him, trying to figure out what to say. Just then, a figure bounced up beside her.
“So this is where everybody went!” Ellis shouted.
Cass jumped and let out a sound that was part frustration and part terror. He had followed her!
“Please leave me alone. I’m not bothering either of you. I’m just drawing.” Degan spoke in a soft, level voice that reminded Cass of the distant rumble of thunder.
In one smooth gesture, Ellis leaned down and grabbed the notebook. However, his fingers slipped, and the book turned like a wheel, flying out of his hands.
All three stared as it arced in the air and dropped down, directly into a puddle.
Cass leaped forward and retrieved the notebook from the puddle. It was dripping wet with mud. She wiped it on her coat, both sides.
“I’m so sorry,” she gasped. All the words she had hoped to say about not being a bully were now scrambled in her head. She stared helplessly at the notebook. The picture was half-covered in a brown smear.
Even under the mud, though, she could see what he had been drawing. There was a man crouched on a cliff, maybe ready to fly or to dive. His face was twisted, with eyes not quite the same size, and a lopsided, smiling mouth. Masses of hair floated around his face.
She drew in breath sharply. Something in the man’s face was very much like her mask.
“I didn’t mean to,” Ellis said.
Ellis grabbed the notebook again, but she held on. She winced, expecting him to hit her now, but she couldn’t let him have it.
R-r-r-rip!
Then her eyes were filled with tears as she stared at the book in her hand. Ellis had torn out half the pages. The man on the cliff had been ripped in two.
Ellis stared at the pages in his fist too, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was holding.
Degan said in a low voice to Ellis: “It doesn’t matter to you, does it? It doesn’t matter what I think or what I am inside. I’m just a target to you, just a joke you keep making.”
Ellis looked stung at this. He frowned, and Cass could see him trying to think what to say back.
“Well, at least my family pays taxes,” Ellis snapped at last, “unlike you, you Indian.”
chapter eight
Cass walked quickly away from the school, arms crossed, heart pounding. She kept seeing Degan’s face when the pages of his notebook ripped in her hands. She had helped Ellis to be a bully again, although she hadn’t meant to. She had destroyed that astonishing picture of the man on the cliff, who pulsed with the power of choice—to fly or to fall.
Inside, faintly, almost like a beat that wouldn’t stop, the mask voices seemed to agree. They vibrated with regret, with sorrow. They were inside her head, resounding in her heart. She could hardly bear their disappointment.
And then she heard it.
“Yeah, head back to your tepee, whatever. I don’t even care.”
It was Ellis’s voice, raised in defiance, not far behind her.
Was he talking to her?
But then came Degan’s voice. “Why are you following me?”
“We go home this way, in case you’d forgotten,” someone else called. “Except we don’t turn on King Street and go to the criminal side of town like you do.”
Cass shrugged into her coat, like a turtle trying to get its head into its shell. So Ellis had at least one other person with him, maybe more.
The mask’s pulsing voices kept thumping inside her, calling to her, telling her to turn around.
I can’t, she thought. Ellis hasn’t seen me. I can get away if I keep walking.
“I didn’t mean to wreck your stupid notebook,” Ellis said. “I don’t even know why you keep drawing that stuff all the time. It’s not like you’re ever going to get a job from it or make money. It’s a waste of time.”
Several voices laughed.
The pounding grew inside Cass.
Before she could think about it more, before she could tell herself not to, she swung around.
Ellis had three boys with him. Degan was walking a few paces in front of them, head down, hands in the pockets of his coat—like if he tried hard enough, he could become invisible.
Cass fell into step beside Degan, who was ignoring her. He probably thought she was going to join in the bullying.
“Hey!” she heard herself saying to Degan brightly, like she hadn’t wrecked his notebook, like they were friends. “I just wanted to say: I think you’re an amazing artist. How did you learn to draw like that? I wish I could draw. Maybe you can show me sometime.”
Degan said nothing.
“I guess some other people must be pretty jealous of that,” Cass went on. “Because they can’t draw and everything. But we can’t all be good at stuff, right, Ellis?”
She whirled around on Ellis and his friends.
“Don’t worry, you’ll find something you’re good at. Everybody’s good at something. Everybody’s got a talent. Just keep trying.”
“What is your problem?” Ellis said, looking confused and fierce.
“I haven’t got a problem,” Cass said, head whirling, riding on a wave of adrenaline, sure she was going to crash at any moment. “Just walking with my friend. Just walking home. Did you know Mr. Gregor is my neighbor? He’s probably going to drive along here any minute.”
“I’m good at lots of things,” Ellis said.
“You should go do them,” Cass said, while the beat inside her kept growing. “You should go do them right now.”
Then everything got very quiet. The whole world seemed to stop. It was just Cass and the four of them, the four bullies. And she was not going to look away first.
At last Ellis kicked a stone across the road, frowning at it.
“Come on,” he said to the other boys, voice high. “We don’t need to talk to a girl.”
™
Degan was far up the street now, moving fast. Cass sprinted till she was beside him, then slowed to his pace.
“Please go away,” Degan said, walking faster. “I just want to go home. I’m just trying to go home.”
Words burst out of her. “I’m sorry about the notebook. I was trying to keep him from taking it again, then it ripped. It was—it was the most beautiful drawing. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I didn’t know what he was planning to do—to take off into the sky, or jump, or just stay crouched like he was hiding.”
Degan looked at her sideways.
“I will figure out how to buy you a new sketch book or to fix the old one. I don’t have any money right now, but I’ll get some, I can get a job doing something like shoveling sidewalks when there’s snow, or I could rake leaves…”
Degan said in a low voice: “I don’t want a new notepad.”
“I’ll get you one anyway. I wish I could fix your picture. It was so—so—” She struggled for the words. “So strong. That man deciding what to do. Which way to go.”
Degan kept pounding along, while Cass ran beside him.
“Which way would you choose?” Degan said suddenly, stopping to look at her as if this was important.
Cass thought about that man. She thought about what it would be like for him to soar above everything. It was like the daydream she had about being carried on the wind, seeing the lake laid out far below.
“I’d go up,” she said. “I’d go so high that everything was tiny below me, so high I was above the birds.”
Degan said bitterly: “Maybe he’s waiting to pounce. Like Ellis.”
“I’m not like Ellis,” Cass said desperately. “You don’t know. Back at my old school…”
How could she explain it?
“Every day,” she said softly. “They used to beat me up every day.”
The voices curled around the memory, the fear of it.
“And nobody ever cared. Not the principal, not the teachers. Not the other kids. Sometimes someone would stop them, some stranger. But not for long.”
Degan shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. He was listening.
“I guess I can see why they did it,” Cass whispered. “Because of my clothes. Because my mom wasn’t very rich. Because we went to the food bank.” Her voice shook with the memory. “They thought they were better than me, I guess. You can beat up someone you think isn’t as good as you.”
“No. It wasn’t you. There’s nothing wrong with you. My aunt says they do it because something’s wrong inside them. Something’s broken and needs to be fixed. They think they can fix it by hurting other people.”
Cass wiped away the tears that had suddenly welled up in her eyes when Degan said that. Nobody had ever told her there was nothing wrong with her, except Mom. And Mom didn’t even know most of what had gone on, because Cass hadn’t wanted to worry her. She had already told this boy, Degan, more than she had told Mom.
“Come on, let’s go,” said Degan, and they started walking again, past the big houses that lined Cass’s street. It was weird, Cass thought, walking with someone she had only just met. But it felt perfectly normal too. Maybe people who had been bullied had a bond.
They walked in silence for awhile, along the pristine road with the hedges and balconies, past houses in which neither of them might belong. Then, in a hesitant voice, Degan said, “My aunt thinks my generation can be healers. Change the way things are. She tells me to look past now to the future, and then channel the spirit to make it happen.”
He looked sideways at her shyly. “That probably sounds weird to you. My aunt’s a little out there. She’s a healer, she has dreams, people come to her for help.”
Cass asked curiously, “Do you think it’s weird?”
He laughed, and it was the first time she had seen him smile. “Nah, I grew up with it. Dreams, spirits, healing. Part of our traditional ways.”
Dreams and spirits.
It sprang into her head suddenly, that strange dream she had had of the children locked up. She’d forgotten about it until this minute. It had been so real, so soaked in sadness. Like a message, like a call through time.
“Tell me about the traditional ways,” she said. “Please.”
“What do you want to know?”
The words sprang from her mouth without her planning them.
“About the false faces. The false face masks.” She took a deep breath. “I think I have one. I found it in my drawer when we moved in. It’s made out of wood. It’s got a weird face, with eyes that aren’t the same size, and a mouth that’s only smiling on one side. It’s got all this black hair. Sometimes I think I like it, and sometimes I think it’s horrible.” She took a breath and decided to trust him with everything. “And I’m dreaming about it too. I think—I think it’s trying to send me messages.”
Degan didn’t laugh at her. “My aunt says you have to be careful with them. They’re tricky.”
“Tricky…how?”
“Lots of things. My aunt told me about this guy who had two of them, facing each other on two walls of a hallway. They got into all this trouble, moved stuff, turned lights on and off.”
“Could a false face…sing?” she whispered.
“Sing?” Degan stared.
“It—it makes music,” Cass said. “Not like music. I don’t know how to say it. It tells me things. It sings about bullies; it tells me I can be strong.”
They were on Cass’s driveway now. Degan had not turned onto King Street but had instead walked Cass home.
“Am I going crazy?” Cass whispered.
Degan shook his head, looking impressed. “There’s a spirit running through those masks, can go either good or bad, goes back to the very beginning of creation when there was a battle between the creator and another guy. The creator won, but instead of kicking the other guy out, he let him stay as long as he looked after people.” Degan shrugged, looking shamefaced. “My aunt tells it a lot better.”
“So you actually believe me?”
He shrugged. “I’ve heard a lot weirder stuff than that. And singing…it goes back forever with us. Songs for everything: war, death, birth, planting, marriage, curing people. But the real question is, Why is it happening to you? What does the mask want with you?”
They were by the kitchen door now.
“Do you want to see it?” Cass asked hesitantly.
chapter nine
Cass unlocked the door and pushed it open. Degan followed behind her into the calm blue kitchen and stood awkwardly, hands in his pockets. It was the strangest thing possible, to be returning home with a kid from school at the end of her first day. Maybe he was even going to be a new friend, something Cass would have never imagined.
There was a note on the kitchen table, with an apple on top of it. A bowl of fruit sat on the table. Mom had been to the food bank.
Hey, sweetness, I’m out returning the cube van and pounding the pavement but will be back probably around the time you get home from school. Hope today was good. I thought about you every minute and sent you heart phone calls! Lots of love, Mom.
“What’s a heart phone call?” Degan asked.
Cass blushed. She and Mom had started it ages ago to help with everything. Whenever Mom was down and doubting herself, or Cass was trying to get up the nerve to go back to school, they’d think about the other one so strongly, so lovingly, that they figured that the message was surely being passed between them. It was as if they were linked by a phone connection nobody could see.
“Just—how we support each other,” she said. “Mom and me.”
“What about your dad?”
“There’s no dad. Just us. He left before I was born.” She said shyly, “I don’t think they were together long. Or maybe at all.”
She half-flinched when she checked to see if he was giving her the withering look all of the kids had done at her old school. Looking down on her as if she was less than they were. White trash, they had called her.
But Degan wasn’t looking at her that way at all.
He said matter-of-factly, “My aunt isn’t really my aunt. She was my mom’s best friend. She left the reservation to come and get me after my mom got sick, because she had a dream about it. But then my mom died, and by then my aunt was working as a healer here in the city. So she’s raising me here. She thinks that’s how it’s supposed to go.”
It took Cass a minute to take this all in. “What about your dad?”
“He had some problems. There are a lot of reasons. He couldn’t help to raise a baby.”
Cass stared at Degan, scarcely able to believe how easily he spoke of his parents, amazed that his story was so like her own in parts, but that he hadn’t any trace of shame about it. The bullies had shown her so many times that everything about her was something to be ashamed of. But something had prevented Degan from believing that about himself, even though people like Ellis had surely tried to make him feel puny and worthless. What had kept him proud about himself and his background?
“Can I see your mask?”
“Come on.”
Cass led the way down the little hallway, listening for the music of the false face, the curling voice so similar to the vines in Degan’s sketch. It was pulsing there, at the back of her mind. The mask was pleased she was inviting Degan to see it, happy Cass had met him. Everything was somehow going as the mask thought it should.
But Degan’s words echoed in her mind. You have to be careful with a false face. Those are tricky. It can go either way with them.
™
Cass led Degan into her little bedroom, and over to the dresser where the mask lay in the drawer. “It’s in here.”
She slid the drawer open.
And froze.
It was empty.
“Where is it?” Cass asked.
Degan said nothing.
Then she was frantically pulling out each drawer, rummaging through clothes. She ran to the closet, pulled the door open, tore through everything hanging there.