Dear Cassie (12 page)

I don’t know what I was hoping for, maybe that the equestrian counselor was a smoker and left her smokes behind on the last day of camp.

I got up, pushed the chair back in, and noticed the belt buckle paperweight was missing. I looked on the floor, thinking that Troyer must have knocked it over while she was cleaning, but it wasn’t there. Had she swiped it? Maybe that was why she was here. Maybe that was why she was afraid to talk.

I might not be able to figure her out, but I know who I am taking with me to steal those cigarettes from Ben.

19 Fucking Days to Go

W
e were crunching on our allotted afternoon snack of trail mix—the shitty kind without chocolate chips, because,
hey, we are being punished
—when the letters came. In plain white envelopes like we really were in prison. Rawe gave Troyer and me one each, and then handed Nez a stack as thick as a deck of cards. Maybe all her sexual partners had written her specially to thank her for giving them gonorrhea.

“I didn’t even know we were allowed to get mail,” I said, looking at my envelope. I recognized the handwriting; it was from my brother. Nez got letters from hot boys. I got a letter from my brother.

Aaron truly had ruined me.

“Well, someone in your family read the manual,” Rawe said, “even if you didn’t.”

“I read it,” I said, because I was feeling argumentative. Really, I had figured I could learn the rules when I got here, that I would have more than enough time to learn them when I got here. I should have read it. Then I would have known I was coming to the Nazis’ idea of a relaxing vacay.

“Great,” Rawe said. “I guess you missed the section on approved mail, and also the one on approved language.”

Nez laughed.

I shrugged.

“Twenty minutes to read,” Rawe said. “Then we start the dinner fire.”

She went into her room at the back of the cabin with her own envelope, maybe from someone who knew her by her first name, like the people who had written our letters knew us. In that moment I realized that I didn’t even know Rawe’s first name. I probably never would.

The dinner fire sucked. If we couldn’t start it, and by
we
I mean Nez, Troyer, and me, then we didn’t eat. There had been several nights we didn’t eat. I considered leaving the rest of my trail mix for later just in case.

“I’m definitely going to need longer than twenty minutes,” Nez said, rifling through her letters.

“You better get started then,” I said. I considered adding “shut the fuck up and” before “get,” but I wasn’t in the mood to fight with Nez. I had my own letter to read.

“What the hell do you know? You got one letter and it’s probably from your mommy and daddy,” Nez said. “Like Troyer’s.”

Troyer looked up from her envelope and gave Nez the finger.

“Say it or I can’t hear you,” Nez said.

Screw you
, Troyer’s lips said, but no words came out.

“It’s from my brother,” I said.

Nez bounced on her cot and looked at me excitedly. “Is he hot?”

“Do you ever turn off?” I asked.

“So that means he’s not,” she said, frowning.

“It means you make the cast of
Jersey Shore
look like prudes,” I said.

“Jealous,” Nez smiled, fanning herself with her letters.

I ignored her, picked up the envelope, and looked at my hands. The areas around my nails and on my palms were cracked and bleeding from rock climbing that day. They looked like they were made out of bloody wax paper. I wiped them on my uniform; it was dirty anyway.

Troyer was already reading, her face hidden behind a stack of stationary pages. I wondered who her letter was from. Maybe she had a boyfriend at home. What a catch, a girl who couldn’t bitch at you.

I looked over at Nez. She had turned away from us and was lying on her stomach reading one letter at a time.

I opened my letter. Inside were two envelopes: one from my brother and one from someone else. The only someone else it could have been was my mom or my dad.

Crap, what the hell did they have to say to me?

Rather than find out, I opened my brother’s first.

I unfolded the letter. In the middle of the page were three lines:

You can do this.

You will do this.

I love you.

Sometimes I wished I could meet a boy like my brother and sometimes I wondered if my brother was the only boy I would ever meet like him.

I sniffed the paper, hoping to catch a whiff of cigarette smoke, wanting to do anything other than read the letter that I knew had to be from one of my parents. What the hell were they going to say? It certainly wouldn’t be as nice as the letter from my brother. It probably wouldn’t even have the word
love
in it.

I pushed the paper against my nose but couldn’t smell anything. My brother smoked, always had a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, but the paper smelled of nothing. It was sad to realize that it had traveled so far that his smell had worn off.

Troyer turned to me, my nose still to the paper.

“What?” I asked.

She stared at me. I knew her look asked,
You know you’re smelling paper right?

“I miss my brother,” I said as explanation, but I’m sure that didn’t really make sense, even though it might have been the first true thing I’d said since I’d been there.

She blinked slowly and went back to reading her own letter, which was many pages, written on both front and back. It was like whoever had written to her was so used to doing all the talking when she was around that he or she felt the need to still do all the talking even when she wasn’t, even when it was in writing.

I braced myself and opened the other envelope. Whatever my parents had to say, at least they weren’t here. I unfolded the letter. Loopy girlish cursive covered the page. Not my mom’s writing, certainly not my dad’s. I recognized it, but not enough to make the connection without looking at the bottom of the page to see who had signed it.

Amy.

It was from Amy.

Snitch-rat Amy.

The last time I talked to her was the day I was sentenced. The first time since the arraignment that my mother, father, and I had gone anywhere together. The last time we had gone anywhere together.

We were waiting in the judge’s chambers. His crimson-haired assistant had already come in and told us he was stuck in a meeting and would be with us momentarily. Right, I knew that meant he would be with us whenever he damn well felt like it. I knew that meant,
Your future can wait.
None of us was talking. My mother was rolling an unlit cigarette between her fingers and my father was cracking his knuckles, one by one, like they were walnuts.

I had to get out of there.

“I’ll be back,” I said, leaving before I could hear either of my parents respond.

I went out into the hall and lunged for the nearest bathroom. I went into the stall and sat without even taking off my pants. I breathed, in and out, in and out, trying the technique my brother had shared with me for keeping myself calm. The one he used when he and his fellow soldiers were, as he put it,
in the shit.
It didn’t work. I flushed out of habit and when I came out I saw Amy at the sink drinking water like she had a camel in her stomach.

Without even thinking about it I pushed her, hard—hard enough that she screamed. I held her against the wall. She squirmed under my grip and I watched her, as helpless as a potato bug that had been turned over. I was going to punch her. I was going to kill her. I wanted to take her big, fat, snitch mouth and break every pretty tooth in it.

She was the reason I was even meeting with the judge. The reason I was here with my parents wondering where the hell I would spend the next month of my life. My lawyer had told me that she had signed some confession that made the fault “rest” on Lila and me. When my mother asked him
what the fuck that means
, he said, “It means we need to make a deal.”

Rehab was going to be my deal.

Amy’s face was priceless, her mouth open wide, her eyes darting, like I was holding a knife instead of a fist. I was ready to hit her, but then she brought up Ruthie Jensen spreading around that shit about me and I let her go.

Mostly because I couldn’t breathe; her words were like the punch I hadn’t gotten off.

To change the subject, to
kill
the subject, I’d told Amy the lie about throwing a Pepsi in Aaron’s face and telling him to get lost.

I put my hand to my stomach and read her letter.

Cassie,

I hope you're doing well.
(Yeah right.)
I am trying to move past prom night and the arrest but there is something I feel like I need to tell you in order to do that.
(What the fuck is this?)
Remember when we were in the bathroom the day we were sentenced and you talked about that guy Aaron?
(Oh fuck.)
Well, I lied to you. I did know him. I was sort of his girlfriend, I guess.
(No fucking way.)

I felt my hands fist on the paper, squeezing so hard, so angry, so tight.

He tried to get me to turn myself in. He tried to get me to do a lot of things. I guess he made me do a lot of things.
(Oh don't I fucking know all about that. Fuck me, that fucking bastard.)

Anyway, I'm sorry. I probably should have told you that day, but I was embarrassed that I fell for it. That I believed anything he said. I want you to know that most of the reason I signed that confession was because of what he did to me, was because I was tired of being used by everyone. I know it didn't turn out the best for you and so I'm sorry. If I could go back I would have done things differently, probably a lot of things.

Amy

My teeth were clenched so hard that my jaw felt like it might dislodge. I ripped the letter once, then again and again smaller and smaller. I guess I was grunting because Nez turned from her
Penthouse
letters and sat up.

“Who spit in your Cheerios?” she asked, cocking her head to the side like someone had put her in a cubist painting.

I couldn’t even respond. I ran from the cabin, slammed the door so hard behind me that it screamed on its hinges. I sat on the ground. I felt like I might cry, but I wasn’t going to. I had allowed myself to handle what had happened with Aaron, allowed myself to deal with it as a mistake, as something that was out of my control. But now, I realized that it was something completely in
his
control. That he knew exactly what he was doing—and he did the same thing to Amy.

I felt sick. I threw up the trail mix, punched my stomach again and again and again until I couldn’t breathe. Aaron hadn’t just fooled me, he had fucking fooled me and I had fallen for it.

Fuck.

I heard the door to the cabin open. Rawe walked out. I wiped my mouth and turned away from her.

“You okay, Wick?”

I wanted to say,
I’m fucking fine
, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t. “Don’t worry, I have my Assessment Diary for times like this,” I snarked. That was what it was for, right? Pouring our shit ton of feelings into it so Turning Pines could claim it was doing
something
to make us better.

“You can talk to me if you want,” she said, coming up beside me and touching my shoulder. Part of me wanted to fall into her and part of me wanted to break her hand. I couldn’t decide which to do, so I didn’t move.

“Right,” I said, my eyes on my boots. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t see.

“When it’s the three of you,” she said, her hand digging into my shoulder trying to get me to look at her, “I’m on script, but when we’re one on one, I’m here to listen.”

My eyes were still on my boots.

“I get it,” she said. “There are all these things inside you. Being here you feel them starting to come out and you don’t know how to deal with them. It’s like someone is pouring you a glass of water and it’s full, full, full and then it’s overflowing and you just keep screaming, ‘Stop, stop, stop.’”

I looked at her. She was right and I hated it. I hated her for finally being nice to me when I most needed it. For all the people before her who never were.

I left her there and went back to the cabin. I didn’t know what else to do but write. I put my pad on my lap and carved into it—
fuck, fuck, fuck
, over and over and over—the word I used as a shield and a bullet.

The word I used as a mantra.

Fucking fine, fucking okay, since nothing else is working, I’ll fucking write the thing that led to the thing that brought me here. I’ll finally burden this journal with the words that are true, even if I can’t say them.