Peter had a keyboard and a guitar in his room, and he’d play and sing for me, and we’d work on the lyrics together. I’m not a trained musician, but I know, somehow, how a song should go, the way I know how a story should go, the way I can anticipate the plot of a TV show before it unfolds and I’m almost always right. He said nobody else could do it the way I could, that we were collaborators. He said he kept forgetting that I was younger than he was, because I gave such good advice and seemed so wise. I tried hard not to let his praise feel like it meant something else.
I couldn’t imagine him ever doing these things with Cassie, or praising her in this way. But he carried a torch for her—for some fantasy of her anyhow—and even as I searched for a glimmer of romantic interest from him, I couldn’t find it. The way his eyes went soft, and his voice, when he spoke about Cassie, I knew he still loved her. He had a habit too of rubbing his left index finger with his right thumb when he talked about her, as if he were consoling his very hand, consoling himself, like it was hard to talk about her even though he wanted to. Otherwise, with me, he was easy and free: no long glances, no awkward silences, no fumbled gestures. Of course I looked for them—I hoped for them; I remembered how his hand, so briefly on my shoulder, had burned, that long-ago summer morning—but there was nothing.
Peter told me more than once how lucky he felt to have so close and smart a female friend. “You’re a rock,” he said. He told me all kinds of things—about how his mom drank too much, not strictly a drunk but one glass of wine too many, too often; and how she yelled at his dad, and how he hated it and felt sorry for her at the same time. He told me about his older brother’s severe dyslexia—Josh was five years older, and in college—and how he’d never done well in school and was struggling to get through UNH, “on the eight-year plan,” Peter said, quoting his dad with a rueful smile; and how disappointed his parents were in Josh, how they looked to Peter to make up for it. He told me about his insect phobia and his childhood asthma, about loving old music like Bob Dylan, and Japanese anime. He showed me tons of photos of Tokyo on the computer—he dreamed of going there. He talked to me about anything and everything, but like we were girlfriends, or old people. He was oblivious, either willfully or naturally, to my interest.
My mother said he’d figure it out in time: “Don’t be the im-patient!” she joked, although I had trouble cracking a smile at the allusion to Anders Shute, emblem of everything that had gone wrong.
FROM THE SPRING of seventh grade to the fall of ninth grade is a long time. A lot happens. Some things happen fast, like a car accident or a heart attack; other things happen slowly, like the disintegration of a friendship or a marriage, or like cancer, and you don’t even know they’re happening, really, until the crisis comes, by which time it’s too late.
With someone you’ve always known and have loved without thinking, there’s the strangeness of knowing everything and nothing about them at the same time. At school, sometimes, we’d chat in the hallway or the cafeteria, and Cassie would make a certain face, or use a certain word, or run her hand through her hair a certain way, and I’d know exactly what she was feeling, and it would all still be there between us: you couldn’t take away our whole lives. But our friendship was, at the same time, like a city you hadn’t visited in a long time, where you know the streets by heart but the shops and restaurants have changed, so you can find your way from the church to the town square, no problem, but you don’t know where to get ice cream or a decent sandwich.
Cassie and the Evil Morsel were close, all that time. They went to parties together at the weekends in the eighth grade. On Instagram, you could see they were at high school parties, and Peter—with whom I still spoke and texted and whom I saw regularly, even though he was at the high school campus in Royston—said when he saw them, after Homecoming or on Bonfire Night or the midwinter formal, the girls were always together, laughing loudly and cracking jokes about booze and weed. If they weren’t partying, they wanted you to believe they were.
I couldn’t figure how Bev allowed it. Maybe she was simply distracted by love. One time my family was out for Chinese at the Lotus Garden, a Sunday night, when Bev and Anders Shute came in for dinner. They stopped by our table and my mother asked them about Cassie, and Bev said she’d wanted to stay home and do her homework. I thought that was strange—she needed to eat dinner too, right? I figured that Bev and Anders Shute were happy to be together, and Cassie was happy to be without them. It seemed lonely, for a kid. Then it occurred to me she might not be alone, and that even if she was, she probably wasn’t doing homework. I was in all honors classes and I didn’t have that much homework. “The devil makes work for idle hands,” Bev used to say when we were little, whenever she gave us chores to do. At that point it seemed as though the devil might be paying more heed to Cassie than Bev was.
What I didn’t know until later—though I might have surmised it—was how tempestuous things had grown at the Burnes house. My father heard from Mr. Aucoin when he came in for his six-month cleaning, that one night well after dark he came across Cassie walking up the verge of Route 29 toward town, away from home. He stopped and told her to get into the car and he’d take her home, my father said that Mr. Aucoin said, and Cassie said, very politely, “No, thank you. I’m going to a friend’s house,” and Mr. Aucoin said, “Well, if that’s the case, at this hour your mother should take you there. You can’t wander along the highway. So get in, and I’ll take you home.” And she again demurred, and he said, “Cassie Burnes, I am not leaving until you get into the car. But if you would rather, I’ll call 911 and Officer Callaghan can take you home in the cruiser instead.” And then she got in the car, my father said Mr. Aucoin said, and he took her home.
I never heard Cassie’s side of that story, which meant she didn’t feel she could make a joke out of it. But I thought about what it would have been like, to be walking in the dark that way—she could only have been upset, right? Just plain running away, no destination, just away. Because why else would you? Unless Bev was on call and Cassie needed to go somewhere (but where? Delia’s house was way too far. I couldn’t imagine where she’d be walking—even my house was over a mile, and Peter’s more than three times that) and didn’t want to ask Anders Shute; or else they were both out and she was home alone and maybe it seemed no scarier to walk alone down the side of the highway than to be huddled by yourself—the cat, Electra, long vanished, by now, into the woods—in the little house down the cul-de-sac.
But whatever the reason she was walking there, what did it feel like when the car pulled over, the headlights turning onto you like a blinding heat, breaking from the chain of traffic, and the car—what car? You couldn’t tell in the dark if it was familiar or unknown, not what kind or what color it was. Like a nightmare, the window rolling down, and a man telling you to get in, and only then do you realize that he’s someone you know, he’s your next-door neighbor, and relief washes through you like new blood, all at once, a change in the inner temperature of your body—except that then he’s insisting you get into the car, the one thing your mother told you never to do, never to get into a car with a strange man . . . but he’s not strange, he’s Mr. Aucoin, big and hairy as a bear, you can see the fur on the back of his paw on the steering wheel, in the reflected light. Then there’s a new, cold wash inside you: it is strange that he’s insisting in this way—you don’t know him well; you know his wife and dogs better—and haven’t you been told that some high percentage of abductions are by people the victim knows? How is it you are in this situation by the side of the highway where a large man is maybe going to force you into his vehicle? He must weigh more than twice what you do. You don’t stand a chance. And if you don’t get into Mr. Aucoin’s car, how long will it be before another car arrives, another window rolls down, and another man—a face you don’t yet know, the face of your nightmares—insists in the same way? And then he says the thing about Officer Callaghan and you’re reassured—he wouldn’t refer to the policeman if
he planned to kill you, would he?—and you give in, you get in. And the old leatherette of his Buick LeSabre is crackly but smooth too, and the vents are blowing hot air on your already burning cheeks, and he pulls the car out fast onto the road so it spits gravel, and you think as the seat belt bell is pinging, I’ve fucked up, I’ve fucked up, he’s going to kill me after all, and you only really breathe again when he turns off the engine in the driveway, his belly in its pilled sweater tight against the steering wheel, and clears his throat in that characteristic way that you sometimes hear in the summertime through an open window, and he says, “Now, do you need me to come and have a word with your mother? Or are you going to sort this out?” And for the first time he touches you, just lightly on the forearm, a touch you can feel through your jacket is as light as a father’s, surprising from so meaty a man, and he says, with certain urgency, “She needs to understand—you need to understand—that you can’t go walking along the highway at night that way. It’s not safe. Do you hear me?”
You nod and say thank you, politely, though again part of you wonders if he’s a pervert even to think it’s not safe for you. He doesn’t have daughters; what does he know? And you get out of the car and wave back at him from your front door, where you let yourself into the yellow light, and see him nod at you, a curt sort of nod, that makes you wonder if he understands more than he lets on.
And then, afterward, there is the fleeting apprehension, the anxiety, that all the emotion and dread you experienced was a kind of pornography, a sort of made-up fear like the fear in games of pretend or in horror films, an almost erotic titillation bred in you by your deep understanding of how stories go, how they should go, and when a teenage girl walks alone in the night there is a story, and it involves her punishment, and if that punishment is not absolute—rape and even death itself—then it must, at the very least, be the threat of these possibilities, the terror of them. And that all the stories you’ve grown up with have made you feel, in that moment by the highway, not only like the victim but like the heroine in a story someone else will tell about you: this is a rare occasion when you are the star of the show.
All this I imagine for Cassie, even then, in the winter of eighth grade, so it doesn’t matter that she didn’t tell me, or anyone I know, about it, because I’ve lived it too. Although I wonder whether in Cassie’s head, when the car pulled over, all she felt was irritation—what the fuck is it now? How much worse can this day get?—and whether she would’ve got into the car, whoever’s car, and all the faster if it had been headed beyond, into the great, wild dark? We’re different, Cassie and me, it turns out we always were, wanting to hold on to and let go of different things. Like the Janis Joplin song my mother loves—freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose—maybe already then, Cassie was ready for the next thing, even though she had no idea what it might be.
Now, of course, all this time later, I wonder why, when my father told me Mr. Aucoin’s story, I didn’t text Cassie, or call her even, or stop at her locker and ask her to talk to me. To be honest, I didn’t even consider doing it. I shook my head and held the story inside. I didn’t tell Jodie—why would I? I already knew what she would say—although I did tell Peter, and we talked a bit about it, and he wrote a song, a slow, mournful song about a girl by the side of the road at night, that I told him was his most beautiful one yet (it was); and as far as I know he never talked to anybody else about it.
But surely the reason Mr. Aucoin spoke, lying back in my father’s dentist’s chair, his open mouth vulnerable under a different set of bright lights and my dad’s gloved fingers poking at his gums, the reason he told my father the story was because he knew Cassie and I had been friends forever, and he knew my father would tell me, and he thought that surely then the information would be in the right hands and someone, someone, would do something with it.
THAT SUMMER I went away to summer camp for the first time. Mr. Cartwright recommended a theatre camp in upstate New York, on Lake George, where he’d taught when he was young. Jodie and Jensen were planning to do it too, but it turned out to be too expensive, especially for the two of them, so I went without knowing anyone. My parents drove me there, my gear in the back of the station wagon, and they forgave me for shooing them away almost as soon as we’d entered the camp gates. “We’d think it was strange if you wanted to know us, bunny,” my father said—how could he call me bunny when someone might hear?—and my mother waxed sentimental. She’d loved camp as a kid—Archery! Canoeing! Campfires!—but also found this world of aspiring actors, many from New York, alien and a bit intimidating.
I loved it: the dusty cabins that smelled of old wood and the light on the water in the early mornings. Even the bad food and the slimy shower stalls with their industrial rubber curtains seemed part of the charm. Above all I loved the people, and the plays. I gouged a hole in my middle finger while striking a set, and even now I look at the thick white scar with pleasure and a little pride. I was as entertained as I was annoyed by “the Teflon crowd,” a set of oddly good-looking almost-successful child actors with headshots at the ready and blue-white teeth. But they were a small proportion of the broader group that included six scholarship kids from inner-city Chicago, a Canadian farmer’s daughter, and the heroically nerdy and myopic son of a trendy New York fashion designer. Forever pushing his bottle-bottom glasses up his bony nose, he was famous for his bad puns.
Our counselors too were an odd band of high school seniors and college kids who knew obscure monologues by heart. One girl, dressed like a druid, could recite all of Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”; another had seen Angels in America fourteen times; still a third wandered around singing the songs from Wicked at top volume. The techies were computer wizards and master carpenters who could transform the stage into a downtown disco or the Forest of Arden, with colored lights, burlap, and painted plywood; and for a black-box production of Cloud Nine put on by a troupe of older campers, the set designer and her team constructed a raked diamond-shaped stage with checkerboard parquet—all in four days—that made the whole play seem like a fantasy from Lewis Carroll.
There was, in that place, a different social order, where particular skills—solving a Rubik’s cube in less than ten minutes; sewing a Maid Marian dress out of five yards of turquoise polyester chiffon and some Christmas ribbon; having perfect pitch or a photographic memory for lines or the ability to do accents of many lands—had way more social currency than good skin or an expensive pair of sandals.
It was my first year—some kids were on their fourth or fifth, even—and I didn’t get the biggest part in my main play—I was the Nurse in Romeo & Juliet—but I did perform Ann in a staged reading of Albee’s At Home at the Zoo. And in truth, I had just as much fun being a props assistant on the musical.
That month, Royston fell away: for the first time I could picture myself elsewhere, doing something consuming and unexpected. It didn’t seem impossibly beyond reach.
When I came home, I kept telling my parents and friends stories about camp. They smiled and pretended to listen, but I could see their eyes glaze. I sent too many emails and texts to my new camp friends, and was as thrilled to receive their replies as if each were a new boyfriend.
In August, I went with my parents for two weeks to a rented house on Mount Desert, where we went boating and hiked in Acadia National Park and swam in the freezing sea. I read, and started writing a play I never finished—about two friends who go camping together and one of them gets injured—and I planned all the ways I’d be different in high school, how I could transform myself: be an actress, maybe start a rock band. I started listening to Amanda Palmer, a favorite of Shu-Lee, my bunkmate at camp. I decided I’d start wearing eyeliner, dress differently—vintage seemed right, some combination of ’50s or ’60s dresses and work boots. I asked my mother if I could get my hair cut in Portland, or even Boston, somewhere more sophisticated and trendy than the Supercuts next to the Target in Haverhill, and she said sure, she’d tak
e me to the city before Labor Day.
We made a girls’ outing of it, manicures and lunch at the Copley Plaza in addition to the haircut, done by a young guy with at least six piercings on his head alone, and his arms so brightly and fully tattooed that you could hardly see any bare skin. Once he layered my dark curls, the shape of my head looked different, and my face appeared delicately rounded rather than blockishly large. He’d been able to see my vision of my actress self—tough but soft, outgoing but cool—without having to be told. Like he got me, somehow. He assured me I had gorgeous eyes, which meant a lot to me even though he was gay and talked nonstop about his new boyfriend. My mother didn’t have her hair cut, but she did buy a peacock-green cocktail dress in a boutique on Newbury Street after trying it on twice—both before and after lunch—and agonizing mildly about the price.
“Where will I wear it?” she fretted. “It only makes sense if I wear it.”
“You can wear it to sleep in, if you like,” I said. “You can wear it to any dinner party. It’s not that dressy.” I could tell she really wanted it and needed to be given permission. My mother veers between extravagance and unexpected stinginess. When she’s putting out disintegrating leftovers for the third day in a row, she refers to her own parents’ wartime childhoods as if that explained it; and she’ll persist with the slippery nub of soap at the sink until it’s too small to hold. But she can turn around and blow hundreds of dollars in a single day on things that aren’t, strictly speaking, necessary. She calls this spontaneity. She’s probably worn the dress three times.
The Burning Girl Page 11