Wintergirls (4 page)

Tomorrow, okay?”

The edges of her smile crumble. I pull myself up the rest of the stairs.

Close the door. Close the door.

My knitting basket is one of the few things I bothered to unpack when I moved here. I sit on the edge of my bed and dig into it, past the never-ending scarf/blanket project, past mateless needles and woolly balls of orange and brown and red, to the magic bottle of blush-colored Emergency Only pills. Cassie got them for me, but she wouldn’t say where they came from. I take one, only one.

Plastic stars wait on the cold ceiling, watching the light switch, nervous, ready for the dark and their cue to glow. This girl has Physics homework. This girl has a paper on genocide to write and last week’s Trig problems, and a makeup quiz about literary devices in some stupid story.

This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses.

The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.

When Dad comes home, the microwave heats his supper. More wine is poured. Jennifer tells Emma that it’s past her bedtime. I turn page after quiet page, but I’ve stopped seeing the letters, stopped understanding the words.

His footsteps on the stairs.

I arrange my face in the middle of the book, my hair spread like seaweed floating in the current of the story that sweeps me under and away to sleep. I drape a loose hand over the edge of the bed.

No, better not. I pull the hand back in.

His footsteps in the hall. Door opens.

“Lia?”

Lia is not available. Please leave a message when
you hear the beep.

she called me thirty-three times.

“Lia? Are you awake?”

Jennifer uses the cranky-Mommy voice to tell Emma

“for the last time get up those stairs.” Emma’s answer is too quiet to be heard.

Dad sits on the edge of my bed. He brushes the hair off my face, leans forward, and kisses my forehead. He smells like leftovers and wine.

“Lia?”

Go away.
Lia needs to sleep for one hundred years in a locked glass box. The people who know where the key is hidden will die and she’ll finally get some rest.

He lifts my head and slides the book out from under it. I open one eye a slit and watch through the spiky lashes. He marks my place by bending a corner of the page, then reads the stuff on the back. Above his collar, the skin jumps, the blood rushing to feed his giant brain.

My father is a history professor, the Great and Power-ful Expert about the American Revolution. He’s won a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, and a job consulting on a cable news show. The White House invites him for dinner so often that he owns a tuxedo. He has played squash with two vice presidents and a secretary of defense. He knows how we became who we are today and where we should go from here. My teachers tell me I should feel lucky to have a father like this. Maybe if I didn’t hate history, I would.

“Lia? I know you’re awake. We need to talk.”

I stop breathing.

“I’m sorry about Cassie, honey.”

The glass around me crackles. Cassie called me before she died. She called and called and called and waited for me to pick up.

1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 . 1 0 . 1 1 . 1 2 . 1 3 . 1 4 . 1 5 . 1 6 . 1 7 . 1 8 . 1 9 .

2 0 . 2 1 . 2 2 . 2 3 . 2 4 . 2 5 . 2 6 . 2 7 . 2 8 . 2 9 . 3 0 . 3 1 . 3 2 . 3 3 .

My father smoothes my hair again. “Thank God you’re safe.”

Fracture lines etch the surface of the glass box as if a body fell from the sky and landed on it. He doesn’t hear the impact, can’t smell the blood.

He takes a deep breath and pats my shoulder hidden under the comforter. “We’ll talk later,” he lies.

We never talk. We just pretend to think about talking, and we mention from time to time that one of these days, we really should sit down and talk. It’ll never happen.

The bed creaks as he stands. He turns off the light on the nightstand and crosses the room in the dim glow of the plastic galaxy glued overhead. The
snick
of the tongue of the catch finding its place in the door frame releases me.

I roll to face the wall. Shards of glass race for my heart because Cassie is dead and cold. She died in the Gateway Motel and it is my fault. Not the magazines or the Web sites, or the knife-tongue girls in the locker room, or the neck-sucking boys on the back porch. Not her coaches or directors or counselors or the inventors of size 0 and 00.

Not even her mother or her father.

i didn’t answer.

. . .When I was a real girl, my best friend was named
Cassandra Jane Parrish.
She moved in the winter of third grade. I sat with my chin on the windowsill and stared across the street as they unloaded the moving van. A guy carried out a kid-sized bike and a pink plastic dollhouse. I crossed my fingers. Our development was still raw, mostly unfinished skeleton houses and freezing pits of mud. I was dying for somebody my age to play with.

My babysitter walked me and a pot of coffee across to meet the new people. The house was exactly like ours only flipped backwards, with the same smell of new paint and clean carpets. The mom, Mrs. Parrish, looked old enough to be a grandmother. She had blue eyes that stayed wide open all the time, like she was surprised by everything she saw. The babysitter introduced me and explained about my parents and their million-hour-a-week jobs.

Mrs. Parrish called upstairs to her daughter. Cassandra Jane shouted back that she was never coming out of her room.

“Go on up, dear,” Mrs. Parrish said to me. “I know she wants a friend.”

Cassie was unpacking a box of paperbacks. When she stood up, she was a head taller than me with long blonde hair that curlicued down her back. At first she wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even look me in the eye, but she let me hold her mouse, Pinky. His beating heart vibrated against my fingertips.

Her room was the same size and shape as mine, but filled with different stuff: a canopy bed fringed with lace curtains, the dollhouse marked with black crayon scrib-bles, a tall, skinny mirror that stood by itself in the corner, and a bookcase that didn’t look big enough to hold all those boxes of books. She showed me her antique dolls and plastic horse collection, and best of all, a real treasure chest that had rubies and gold and a piece of green sea-glass born in the heart of a volcano.

I told her that sea-glass came from the ocean.

“This is different,” she said. “It’s ‘see-glass,’ like seeing with your eyes. If you look through it when the stars line up right, you can see your future.”

“Oh,” I said, reaching for it.

“But not today.” She put the see-glass away and locked the treasure chest. I saw where she hid the key.

We sat down with a box between us and started unpacking. As I handed her book after book, we compared favorite series and authors and then movies and TV shows and music that we pretended to listen to, even though it was way too old for us. When Mrs. Parrish and my babysitter came in, Cassie put her arm around my shoulder.

“It’s fate,” she told her mom. “We were meant to be friends.”

Mrs. Parrish smiled. “I told you things would be fine here.”

Cassie’s dad was our new principal, hired from up-state after the old one had a stroke. Her mom became our Girl Scout troop leader and the volunteer who chap-eroned field trips and sewed costumes for the school play.

She invited my mother over for cards and scrapbooking parties and book club meetings, but Mom was too busy transplanting hearts. Mr. Parrish didn’t play squash; my dad didn’t golf, so that was that.

Cassie was a little moody, but I got used to it. I slept over at her house almost every weekend, but she never slept at mine. She wouldn’t talk about her sleepwalking or the temper tantrums that exploded when her mother nagged her or her father made her do her chores over again.

Once I heard her mother talking to my babysitter about something bad that had happened in their old neighborhood, something with a boy. I asked Cassie about it. She said I was trying to hurt her feelings and she hated me and we weren’t friends anymore. I sat on my front steps, reading
A Wrinkle in Time
and gnawing on the end of my ponytail, until she came back an hour later, like nothing had happened, and asked me to ride bikes with her.

Every afternoon in the summer we’d crawl into my tree house to read armloads of books filled with great quests and dangerous adventures. I made swords out of branches, sharpening the tips with a steak knife stolen from the kitchen. Cassie picked poisonous berries and cut a rose from her mother’s garden. We smeared the berries on our faces and pricked our fingers on a thorn. We swore sacred oaths to be strong and to save the planet and to be friends forever.

She taught me how to play solitaire. I taught her how to play hearts.

In the spring of fifth grade, the boob fairy arrived with her wand and smacked Cassie wicked hard. She became the first girl in our class to really need a bra. The boys stared and snickered. The glittering girls, the ones with split tongues and pinchy fingers, whispered. I was secretly glad for my skinny chest and undershirts.

The boys tried out their dirty words and crude com-ments on her for weeks. Cassie pretended she didn’t hear them, but I knew. Things boiled over in the lunch line on a Friday. Thatcher Greyson snapped the back of Cassie’s bra so hard everybody heard it. She whirled around, pushed him to the ground, jumped on him, and started pounding. By the time the aides pulled her off, he had a black eye and a bloody nose.

Thatcher went to the nurse. Cassie was sent to Mr.

Parrish’s office because he was the principal and her dad at the same time. He yelled at her so loud you could hear it in the hall, and then he sent her and Thatcher home for the day. The rest of us spent the afternoon writing essays about tolerance and kindness. This pissed off the glittering girls, who said it was all her fault.

On Monday, the girls declared that Cassie was a dyke lesbo and threw her out of the tribe. I didn’t know what a dyke lesbo was, but it did not sound good. I chewed on the eraser end of my pencil and didn’t talk to Cassie all day. She sat alone at lunch on Tuesday. Played alone at recess. Instead of taking the bus, she drove home with her mom.

On Wednesday the boys whispered a chant of “boobies, jugs, hooters, tits” whenever the teacher wasn’t paying attention. Thatcher drew a picture of Cassie with watermelon-sized breasts and passed it around the class.

The glittering girls giggled and twirled their gum around their fingers.

In the pecking order of fifth grade, I was closer to the top than the bottom because my parents were rich and my dad had met the president of the United States.

In the complex math of elementary school, I was a whole number, not a fraction.

Cassie and me had taken a sacred oath with poison berry juice and blood. There was no choice to make. I had to save her.

At lunchtime, I sat next to Cassie at the loser end of the table. I gave her all my french fries and talked loudly about the two of us going to Boston for a museum trip with her mom. The other girls watched, tongues flicking over their braces, tasting their lip gloss and testing the wind.

At recess, I walked up to Thatcher; me—a scrawny elf girl the size of a small second-grader standing up to a future varsity football player, offensive tackle.

“I dare you to punch me,” I said.

“You? Dare me?” He was laughing too hard to say anything else.

I shoved him. “I double-dare you. If you don’t have the guts to do it, you’re a weenie.” I shoved again, harder. “If you do, you’re an even bigger weenie because it’s harder to take a punch than to give one.”

I had no idea how those words snuck into my mouth.

Everybody said, “Ooooooooohhhhhh,” and made a circle around us. Thatcher looked around for a teacher to save him. I closed my eyes and crossed my fingers.

“Do it,” I said.

He punched me so hard my lip split open and the loose molar I had been teasing with my tongue broke off. I spit the bloody tooth into his face just before I passed out.

The glittering girls changed sides again. I had showed Thatcher. I had proved that girls rule. They made braided bracelets for me with embroidery thread and beads, but I wouldn’t take them unless they made some for Cassie, too. They invited Cassie back in the tribe, because really, Thatcher was a bully and the whole thing was his fault.

After that, Cassie and me
always told people we were
twins.

. . . body found in a motel room, alone . . .

The body of Cassandra Jane Parrish is asleep in a cold silver box. They’ll dig a hole in the ground and plant her on Saturday.

What about the rest of her, the real Cassie?

I think she’s coming here.

Emma goes to bed and Jennifer goes to bed and Dad goes to bed. On the other side of town, my mother stays up too late, but she finally goes to bed, too.

I cannot sleep. Heat lightning shoots through my skull, short-circuiting the wires. I am cold, then hot, and then I can’t feel my fingers or my toes. Someone is standing on the other side of my door. I can feel it. But . . . no.

Everyone is sleeping. Everyone is enchanted, pulled under into a dream.

The moon drips through my window.

I wait.

Spiders hatch and crawl out of my belly button, hairy little tar beads with ballerina feet. They swarm, spinning a silk veil, one hundred thousand spider thoughts woven together until they wrap me up in a cozy shroud.

I breathe in. The web presses against my open lips. It tastes dusty, like old curtains.

The smell of ginger and cloves and burnt sugar drifts over my bed, the smell of her body wash and shampoo and perfume. She’s coming. Any minute now.

I breathe out and it begins.

Thorn-covered vines creep across the floor, crackling like a bonfire. Black roses bloom in the moonlight, born dead and brittle. The web on my face holds my eyes open, forcing me to watch as Cassie steps out of the shadows, briars twining up her legs and around her body, reaching up through her hair. One minute she’s by the door, the next, she stands over me. The temperature in the room has dropped twenty degrees. Her voice is in my head.