by E. M. Fitch
“Well, maybe we should close it!” a man in the crowd called out. A round of shouts went up with this, rallying cries of support.
“People, we cannot close a federal trail!” Mr. Fisk cried out, jumping back to the podium. He pounded on the wood with his fist again until the crowd settled. Mrs. Evans swept her eyes over the room.
“We can’t stop others from living their lives,” she started in a whisper. “But we can choose to protect our own. We need to find the ones responsible. We need to start bringing people in, question them—”
“Like you brought us in!” Ami yelled, jumping to her feet. It was obvious she had been waiting to speak. She was dressed in her typical style, black clothing, hair styled with spikes, silver chains and jagged bracelets running up her arms, rips in everything. She stood, fuming and trembling, facing off with Mrs. Evans in front of a room full of angry adults. Officer Gibbons jerked upright, moving from the wall. “Is that your answer? Bring in anyone who looks different?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Evans answered. “If that’s what it takes.”
The room exploded with shouting. Half the crowd seemed to be condoning Mrs. Evans’ speech, shouting about safety above all else. The rest were screaming about freedom, protection from persecution, witch hunts. Her father had moved between Ami and Mrs. Evans, his hands outstretched toward the podium, trying to get the older woman to stop speaking.
Mr. Fisk moved back to the podium, pounding the wooden surface until Cassie could see it tremble under each blow of his small, red fist. When the room settled the next time, he adjourned the meeting, much to the relief of Cassie.
It didn’t help initially. Mrs. Evans kept right on speaking; several of the people stood and turned their backs, heading toward the door. This only served to heighten her emotion, her words got louder, shriller, until Officer Gibbons moved to the front and began ushering people out, shouting loudly above the din.
“It’s over for tonight, folks,” he said. “To the door, if you please.”
They grumbled and shuffled their feet but the room eventually cleared. Cassie’s dad and Gibbons kept people moving, even offering to escort people to their cars, anything to keep a mob from forming again. Cassie was glad, watching from her position in the queue of people lining up to exit the town hall. All she wanted was an escape from the frightening truth Mrs. Evans was spewing and the horrifying realization that Cassie had been right to never tell anyone. No one would have believed her anyway.
Cassie got pushed into the cool air of the night accidentally. The woman behind her apologized but was swept away so suddenly that Cassie didn’t have time to accept. To her right, a stream of people moved toward their cars. In the murky shadows to her left, Cassie could hear the shuffling of feet.
Her muscles tightened and she pictured them, the monsters of the forest. But a moment later, the acrid smell of tobacco hit her nose and she knew this wasn’t them. She peered into the shadows, not surprised to see Lexi and Ami staring back at her. The lit end of a cigarette was a red pinpoint in the darkness. When she took a drag, Lexi’s face glowed momentarily.
Cassie moved toward them, just as her father appeared at her elbow. She wondered for a moment where her mother had ended up, not seeing her in the crowd getting pushed out of the meeting.
“Are you girls okay?” her dad asked, walking up to Lexi and Ami. Lexi’s hand trembled as she lowered the cigarette from her mouth, exhaling a trail of smoke into the night sky. An exterior light flickered on, bathing them both in unnatural light, painting their dark clothes a vivid orange. Ami looked up at the teacher approaching her, huffing through a shaky laugh.
“That woman has been down at that school, telling them to take us out and question us,” Ami said, looking up at Cassie’s father. “Do you know what it’s been like the past few weeks, Mr. Harris?”
“I do know,” he said. “The whole town is letting fear control their behaviors. It’s—”
Behind them, a yelling match broke out in the scrum by the door. Cassie’s father looked in frustration from the two girls leaning against the exterior wall to her. “Stay here, Cass,” he muttered, turning back to the riled crowd.
“He’s good shit, your dad,” Ami said, sighing as she fell back against the wall. She stubbed the end of her cigarette out against the bricks and let the dead butt fall to the grass. Cassie nodded.
“That was really brave of you,” Cassie said, looking at Ami, “back there, standing up like that.”
“Someone needed to,” she answered with a shrug. Cassie could see how shaken she was, getting caught up in the panicked crowd, half of them shouting her down. She was trying to play it off as though it was no big deal. Cassie understood, but she wasn’t sure she would have been able to.
“You’re right though,” she pressed. “It’s not okay how they’re treating you. I’m sorry.”
Ami sighed, not looking over at Cassie for a moment. The crowd behind was settling somewhat, or at least moving forward and letting other people pass through the doors of the building again. Cassie looked back and saw Officer Gibbons and her mother guiding people along, moving far enough away from the door so that whoever they were speaking to would have to follow to be able to be heard. It was smart, it kept the crowd thinning at the entranceway.
“It’s not so much that, you know,” Ami said after a moment. “It’s not because they’re all treating me and Lexi like shit. I hate that. I hate that our big projects, the ones we petitioned for, have been taken away from us. It sucks. But it’s the bigger picture really, that’s what really pisses me off.”
Cassie waited for a moment, looking from Ami to Lexi. Both girls stared morosely off into the crowd, mesmerized by the insanity of it all.
“They just want it all to be safe,” Lexi murmured, shaking her head. Ami snorted, obviously in agreement.
“Well, sure,” Cassie said, looking from the angry adults to the two quiet girls in front of her. “Don’t you?”
“There’s no such thing,” Ami answered quietly. Cassie had to move closer to hear the words. “Safety is an illusion. A method used to strip away freedoms. And look how well they did it. It disgusts me.”
“Curfew, interrogations in our own school, canceled classes for special lectures,” Lexi listed off, counting off each one on a finger. “And for what? To keep us safe? How well did any of that work out?”
“Because there is no such thing,” Ami continued. “Anyone of us could get hit by a bus just stepping off the sidewalk. A plane could crash down, right now, wipe us all out, and what would the use of individualized pat-downs be then? You know that’ll be next, don’t you? Metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs.”
“All in the search of a scapegoat, a single person or a group of people that compromise that Evans bitch’s personal definition of safety. As if it were any of us that killed her kid.”
Cassie recoiled at the harshness of Ami’s words; but she couldn’t deny the truth. Lexi nudged her friend, nodding at Cassie. Her pain must have shown on her face.
“I’m sorry,” Ami said. “She was your friend, wasn’t she?”
Cassie nodded.
“But even you can understand, can’t you? What we mean about all this bullshit?”
“Safety is an illusion,” Cassie muttered, testing the words out. “Life will come at you and there’s not a thing you can do about that. Except choose how you’re gonna handle it.”
Ami and Lexi both stared at her, a slow smile spreading on Ami’s face. She nodded in approval.
“See? You do get it.”
They cancelled Prom.
Cassie wasn’t shocked. The bulletin board that was positioned just outside of the cafeteria, the board that normally held the notice about Prom ticket sales, had a different message when Cassie arrived for school on Monday morning.
All Recreational Events (including Prom)
are canceled until the end of the year.
Underneath that outrageous noti
ce, a sentence was printed in small letters.
(with the exception of athletics)
Cassie knew that the outrage regarding the cancelation of Prom would be explosive, but it added insult to injury to allow athletics to remain ongoing and cancel the other activities that students had worked so hard to prepare for.
“Figures they let the jocks off easy,” a boy sneered, staring up at the notice.
“Think they’ll let the play go on? They can’t mean that, right?” a girl asked, looking from the board to the boy standing beside her.
“Who knows? Any of those jocks get up on stage?”
It wasn’t fair, but he was right.
The word around school was that Principal Rossi had decided to allow sports to remain ongoing because there was direct adult supervision over every aspect of the activity. Fields were fenced in, the gym was closed off, and many of the events took place at other schools and in other towns. That was not, Rossi supposedly argued, the case with the dances, after-school study groups, and art projects.
Susan Placentino was in tears in the girls’ bathroom. Cassie walked in on her sobbing over the sinks. She was head of the Prom committee and Cassie knew, from past conversations with Laney, just how much work went into preparing for the school dances, Prom in particular. The class treasurer had been saving money from the fundraisers for the past two years. The hall had already been rented and the deposit paid. The theme had already been decided on by class vote last month. It would have been ‘Starry Night,’ though Cassie herself had voted for ‘A Night to Remember.’ Not that any of that mattered now. All the dresses that had been bought or put on hold, the worrying over dates and limos and after parties, in one fell swoop: it was gone.
Cassie knew, in the logical part of her mind, that none of it really mattered in the long run. She hadn’t been worried about Prom all year. First, because she had Ryan and, though they never discussed it, she had assumed they’d go together. Second, because even after Ryan and she had imploded, she had other worries, other problems, and Prom had felt like a distant smudge on the back of her brain. There and coming and of no consequence either way because Cassie didn’t plan on going.
Still, it mattered to Susan. It mattered to the other kids that had nothing to do with the graffiti or vandalism or hospitalizations that had resulted after the party.
“It’s not like my mom would have let me go anyway,” Maggie Fallon confided in Cassie just before softball practice. Her boyfriend was a senior and had probably already ordered her corsage. “She told me that a month ago.”
Maggie shrugged, bending to tug the laces on her cleats tighter. Cassie had no doubt that there would be many parents who felt that way.
Mark’s death had sealed it. It was too much. The parents and senior members in the town couldn’t risk losing any more.
The sign by the cafeteria was all but ripped down by the end of the week. Dozens of students had written their feelings demonstratively all over the notice. The handwriting was sloppy and rushed, the words practically etched onto the paper, pens pressed so hard that indents were left under every letter.
Several of the seniors talked about having their own Prom anyway, a kind of Anti-Prom in the field behind one of the senior’s house. For two days there was an undercurrent of rumor about a “huge party” and wearing formal clothes with boots to dance the night away in a muddy field. It was a nice thought, if a reactive one, but it petered out by the end of the week.
The one thing that hadn’t been canceled, because it was out of the school’s control, was the town fair.
Cassie had just finished messaging Rebecca, telling her not to worry about picking her up and that she’d get a ride to the fair with her parents. She was sure her friend thought she was stalling and, in truth, she was. She had no real desire to go to a fair. She had no real desire to stay home in the abandonment of an empty house though either.
Her parents were almost ready to leave. They had seemed surprised when Cassie asked them to wait for her. Cassie wasn’t sure if that was because they had assumed she’d go with friends, or if they were surprised she was going to the fair at all. They had recovered quickly though, giving their daughter a ten-minute warning.
Cassie had wandered out to the garage to wait for them, looking out into the neighborhood from the threshold of where the concrete of the garage floor met the pavement of her driveway. Across the street, a few houses down, she saw the Sheridans pull out in their silver van. She had no doubt that Randall and Quinn were strapped into car seats in the back, probably bouncing with excitement in anticipation of the fair. Restlessness built in Cassie’s core and she felt a connection to the children, energy in the form of agitation swirled through her gut.
Her eyes wandered around the cluttered space of her family’s garage, skipping over a bike with deflated tires, leftover Christmas decorations, and a cluttered tool bench before her gaze landed on a rusty blue and yellow aerosol can with a red straw sticking from the nozzle. Her hand slid over the deep front pocket of her jeans that she had slid her knife into, its outline was a familiar pressure against her fingertips. She stepped forward and plucked the can of WD-40 from where it had rested, forgotten, on the shelf.
It was a quick walk to the side of her house and toward the Blake’s backyard. She didn’t bother to stop and ask for permission. In a time not so long ago, these were Cassie’s second parents. She was nearly as comfortable with them as she was with her own mother and father. The swings drifted in the breeze, the metal of the fasteners creaking with rust and age. Cassie grabbed one of the chains, twisting it. The swing squeaked in protest of the movement. She shook the can vigorously before aiming the red straw and coating the spots where the chains met with hooks. She had to stand on the swings to get the highest points, rocking a bit as she tried her best to aim. She wasn’t too neat about it, but, in the end, the swings hung silently.
Cassie could hear her parents exiting the front of her house. She took off in a jog. As she passed the Blake residence, Cassie couldn’t help but notice the living room curtain fluttering back into place.
Cassie arrived at the World Famous Fair with her parents, separating from them quickly under the pretense of finding her friends.
She did find them. Rebecca was talking with Maggie Fallon. Ryan was next to her, his arm thrown around Jon’s shoulder. Jon looked terrible; but it was good for him to be out, Cassie thought. He had spent every waking moment that he wasn’t in school inside the hospital lately. He had so been looking forward to the fair, he did every year, it was good that he was here.
They hovered near the dunk tank game; one of her Gym teachers had volunteered and now sat shivering on the seat that fell every time a ball hit the target. The baseball team seemed to be taking turns dunking their favorite teacher. Maggie burst out laughing when a ball found its mark and poor Mr. Gosning took a fall into the water. Cassie watched as a small smile pulled at the edge of Jon’s mouth.
She couldn’t make herself walk over to them. It was like she was watching a movie on a screen, a picture of happiness and normality, but she couldn’t simply walk through the screen to join them. It was a make-believe world, a place she didn’t really belong.
She was surrounded in a chaotic spiral of lights and colors, smells and noises. The fair spun about her, jostled her with the ebb and flow of people. Ryan was in that swirl, not that he’d be looking for her, but Rebecca was there, too. Her softball teammates would be around and her parents, talking with old friends, laughing, unaware that Cassie was lost in the buzzing of this world. She felt adrift without anchor.
No, that wasn’t right. There was an anchor; but it wasn’t here, not in the mad confusion of people, hay-strewn earth, and heavy air that smelled of fried dough and powdered sugar. No, the forest was calling her, beckoning her home. So much so that it made the world around her, the real world full of people who knew her and cared about her, fade. It transformed reality to white noise that vibrated at the e
dge of her mind.
Stephanie and Sara Allen darted past her, knocking her a bit to the side. “Sorry, Captain!” one of the twins yelled, rushing on. Cassie wasn’t even sure which one it had been. Her mind was hazy, exhausted. She wanted to lay down and close her eyes.
Her hand tightened on the iron knife inside her front pocket. The handle was grainy, leaving bits of old wood and whatever remnants of varnish remained staining her palm. She couldn’t close her eyes. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.
She didn’t stay on the main circuit of the fair. The World Famous banner snapped in the breeze overhead. Cassie wandered beneath it, letting the lights fade behind her until the cool purple of the evening swept over her body.
She was still in sight, people laughed, talked, and yelled behind her. To her left, a group of men and women in uniform, radios clipped to their shoulders, sat in a circle around a portable speaker. Music drifted from it, not the twangy sound of country that was coming live from the bandstand behind her, something lower and rougher. One of the men whistled along, his legs outstretched on a turned-up log, his toes swaying in time. There was a large red cross painted on the ambulance that was parked beside them. The doors were flung wide open, the light from the ceiling inside harsh against the soft darkness at the edge of the world. A woman lay on the bench inside, also in uniform, her feet also swaying in time. They joked about the lack of excitement, Cassie could hear their words. Apparently one of the men in the ax throwing competition had missed, put the blade right through his boot and up into his foot.
“Nearly lost that one toe,” one of the men said, his head thrown back into his entwined fingers, his eyes to the stars that were just starting to appear.
“Nah, hit right smack dab in between,” a younger man said, laughing low. “At least his aim was good for something.”