Dear Cassie (17 page)

“I’m scaring
me
.” She laughed, lifting the cigarette again. The tip was angry orange. She moved it closer to her cheek and squinted from the smoke. “Before you got here I was holding a razor blade like this, getting up the guts to cut my face on the diagonal. Like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

Was she fucking serious?

“I’m going to be too drunk to drive you to the emergency room,” I said, taking another sip from my glass like I wanted to prove it.

She moved the cigarette closer. I saw her cheek contract from the heat.

“Lila, fucking stop!” I said. I could get up and tackle her if I had to, but did I want to? Did I want to see if she had the guts to go through with it?

“I wonder how many guys would try to get in my pants with an oozing blister on my face,” she said.

“Seriously, enough.” My voice was strained, like I’d been screaming all night and there was nothing left.

She didn’t pull the cigarette away. Only stared at herself in the mirror, waiting. Maybe she was trying to decide if she could do it, if she was drunk enough, crazy enough, or really ready to leave the
burden of her beauty
behind.

Especially because I knew exactly what she meant when she said it.

“Doing that isn’t going to prove shit,” I said. I could feel my hands and arms start to tingle. Lila was scaring me. She was actually really fucking scaring me. I might not have been able to admit it to her, but that was the truth.

“What will not doing it prove?” she asked.

The door to her room flew open and Lila dropped the still burning cigarette on the vanity.

“Oh my God, give me a drink,” Amy said. She was wearing a skirt, tights, and a puffy white sweater that she pulled off and threw next to me on the bed.

She stood in the middle of the floor in her bra and skirt.

“Amy,” Lila said, picking up her cigarette from the vanity and showing it to her. “New rule: knock next time. I dropped my cigarette and almost burned the house down.”

“Sorry,” Amy said, pulling off her tights, throwing on a T-shirt she grabbed out of her backpack, and sitting on the floor.

I laughed, mostly because I was so glad Amy was there, so Lila would stop scaring the shit out of me.

“What have you guys been doing?” Amy asked.

“Missing the fuck out of you,” I joked, pouring myself another glass of vodka.

“Ha,” Amy said, looking at Lila. Maybe she noticed that she looked frazzled, or maybe she was just so relieved to be away from her parents that she didn’t care.

Eventually Lila’s house was filled with kids from our school, playing super-loud rap music and drinking out of a keg. As the night went on, Lila turned back into Lila—vain, pretty Lila—but even with our secret, I decided I would avoid ever being alone with her again.

Out on the road now, wherever the hell Lila is, my guess is she doesn’t look like Lila anymore—that the freedom she got by running away had maybe finally let her leave the burden of her beauty behind.

For her sake, I hope so.

14 Fucking Days Left

I
woke up with Troyer standing above me, her hand covering my mouth. It tasted like worms and fish guts. Leave it to her to pick the night after we had our training in fishing to surprise me above my bed.

I pushed her hand away and spit on the floor next to my bed. “Sick, Troyer.”

She put one finger to her lip, spit, and wiped her hand front and back on her uniform.

“See,” I said.

She looked at me.

“What do you want?” I asked. It was becoming standard at this camp that at least one person was standing above another’s bed once a night, scaring the shit out of them.

She grabbed my shoulder, probably because she couldn’t just tell me to get up.

I sat and looked across the dark cabin at Nez. She was still sleeping. Nez had actually been really good at fishing, talking about the correlation between catching fish and catching guys. She kept making kissy faces at the water, saying,
Here fishy, fishy
, and it was like they actually heard her and jumped onto her pole. If Rawe hadn’t been there watching, I might have thrown Nez off the dock to see if any of her beloved fish tried to save her.

Like Ben had saved me.

Troyer steadied her gaze. I got it: Nez was not invited. Super. But since when did Troyer call the shots?

I guess since tonight.

I was kind of surprised that Nez wasn’t gone already, into the arms of whatever boy would take her that night. Maybe she had her period. Of course, she kind of always acted like she had her period.

I guess I did, too, but that was more ironic than I wanted to admit.

That afternoon when we got back to the cabin we were supposed to write about what we feared most at Turning Pines. I hated that the only thing I could come up with was Ben.

I was terrified of the part of me that Ben was able to get to, which more and more was feeling like the soft part of a clam; before Aaron, I was all closed up and no one could get in there. Ben could easily. Maybe other boys would also be able to. Maybe I would never be able to shield myself again.

Troyer grabbed her pad back and wrote,
Get dressed. Let’s go.

“We better not be going over to the boys’ cabin,” I said. “I’ll never hear the end of that,” I continued, though I’m not sure why.

She grabbed the pad she had given me and scribbled,
I’m not stupid
.

“Hey,” I said, but she was right. It had been stupid when Nez went, when I went. There was no way in hell I was ever going again. If I could avoid it, I was probably never speaking to Ben again.

But my guess was I couldn’t avoid it.

I got dressed quickly and quietly, laced up my boots, and followed Troyer out of the cabin. She waited for me to step off the porch then closed the cabin door so lightly it looked like she was afraid it would burn her.

“Any chance we’re breaking into the shower house?” I asked.

She wrote on her pad and showed it to me.
Even better.

Nothing at that point would have been better than a shower—well, not to me, anyway. And from the smell coming off Troyer, she could have used one, too.

We walked in the opposite direction from the soccer field, our flashlights yellow planets on the dark trail. I didn’t feel the need to talk this time, even though it was so quiet you could hear the bullfrogs croaking all the way down at the lake, like they had been the other night with Ben. But Troyer was in charge—silent, sneaky Troyer who couldn’t talk was telling me what to do.

Well, okay, not literally.

I could see the lake coming up on the horizon, black in the night. The moonlight sparkled, sprinkled on top of it like Parmesan cheese. I couldn’t help thinking about the day I found out I was pregnant. How I could no longer deny that something inside of me was spinning and sparkling like the water. The area just below my belly button filled with so much light and life.

“We’re not going fucking fishing again, are we?” I asked.

Troyer shook her head but kept walking. Fishing once that day had been enough.

We hit the beach, walked past the canoes and past the boat house. The door to it was smacking open and closed in the wind. Everything in this place was locked but the damn boat house. I guess they figured if you wanted to go to the trouble to life jacket up and push a canoe into the water to try and escape, they were going to let you do it. I think that, and the fact that the land on the other side was far enough away that the windows in the houses looked like snake eyes in the dark, might have been discouragement enough.

I didn’t know where Troyer and I were going. It was the first time I had been this far down the beach and for a weird moment I wondered if Troyer had brought me all the way out here to kill me—to drown me and leave me for dead. I let the calm of that realization fill me, because truthfully, I kind of deserved it.

Put me out of my misery, Troyer. Put me out of my misery once and for all. Make it so I don’t have to think whether Aaron was my or Amy’s sloppy seconds. Make it so I don’t have to wonder why she was smarter than I was.

I looked down at the sand: little grain-specks twinkled in the moonlight, our footprints foot-shaped craters. We finally stopped at a cabin twenty feet down the beach. The lock had been broken off the door and a sign that said A
RTS AND
C
RAFTS
made out of uncooked macaroni hung from it.

Troyer pushed the door open. I could smell paint, clay, glue.

“Arts and crafts?” I asked.

She nodded, picked up a piece of sketch paper, and handed it to me. It was a cartoon drawing of Nez with her ass on fire. A thought bubble floated above her head that said,
Even fire is attracted to my ass
.

“Ha!” I laughed. “You drew that?”

She nodded again, her head dipping up and down like a bobblehead doll while she showed me a macramé necklace, a watercolor painting, a small clay bowl.

“Wow, you’ve been busy,” I said.

She smiled.

“How did you get in here?” It looked like the art room at school but better; there were huge wooden art tables, easels, clay wheels, shelves and shelves of rainbow-colored art supplies. It was obvious why this door had been locked.

She turned to me but didn’t say anything.

“Well, obviously,” I said. “But
how
did you break in?” I was thinking about the other doors with locks: the dining hall, the shower house, the camp office.

She picked up an oar that was lying on the ground and broken in two.

“I hope we don’t have to go canoeing again,” I said.

Troyer laughed. It was nice to hear her voice, even if it was involuntary.

“When? When did you come here?” I asked, seeing there were a lot more art projects lining the table besides the ones she had shown me. “How?” I asked, thinking about all those times I was sleeping and Troyer was out, alone.

Without me, without Nez.

She shrugged and indicated a seat at one of the tables. She gave me a canvas, a brush, and a few jars of paint: red, purple, yellow. Why was she sharing it with me?

“I’m not very good at this,” I said.

Troyer took her own brush and wrote
Paint
in purple on the art-supply-splattered table. She sat next to me and painted bright purple lines on her own canvas.

I looked at the paint. The only color that mattered was the red. I dipped my brush in it and started painting, one line, another, another, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t right. I picked up the paint jar and splashed it, over and over again on the canvas. All the kisses Aaron gave me that ended in lies, the blood I prayed I would see spotting my underpants day after day after day while I denied it, the skin on my stomach after I hit myself—raw, angry gruesome.

I tipped the whole thing over, red paint running like a waterfall.

I felt Troyer looking at me, her eyes wide. I had scared her. I was crazy. Aaron had made me crazy and she could see it. The red paint dripped off the table and onto the floor, forming a puddle like spilled nail polish.

“Sorry,” I said. I grabbed a rag and bent over to start cleaning it up, but Troyer stopped me.

She spilled purple paint onto her canvas, a long sloppy drip, a melted grape Popsicle. She gave me the thumbs up, paint dotting her thumb tip.

I almost hugged her—almost.

I took the yellow paint and poured it, too, mustard covering the red, turning it orange, then blue paint, turning it brown. The thing was it took so much paint to change the red, to take away its power.

What will it take to change the red inside of me? How much more time will it take?

Will it ever be long enough?

13 Fucking Days to Go

W
hen I woke up this morning there was still red paint under my fingernails. We’d tried our best to clean up with turpentine at the art cabin, but red paint, even when you use turpentine, has a way of staying behind.

Just like my red. I’d always sort of known it, but when I’d thought the night before about how long it would take for me to feel normal again, I couldn’t even see a time where I would.