I should’ve asked her. I should’ve made sure she was okay, that she wasn’t alone.
She had June; she wasn’t alone.
But did June know her like I did?
They seemed close. Cassie didn’t usually let people get that close. She had a lot of practice at keeping secrets.
She’s fine, Graham. Get in the truck.
She was fine. It wasn’t any of my business if she wasn’t. Three days of keeping my distance and they had been good. I’d barely thought about her; of course now that I’ve seen her again, it was going to take three more to stop. I was doing this for me. I would be leaving at the end of the summer. Two months. Two months and I’d be in Texas and she’d be wherever and our lives would finally, truly be separate.
We’d both move on. We’d both find our lives. I would stop wondering about her and remembering her touch and asking the what ifs. It was good I didn’t ask because if I had, she would have told me and then we’d be that much closer. Closer for me and Cassie was trouble. Distance, now that was what I wanted.
I threw the grocery bag into the passenger seat, and backed out of the parking lot.
32.
Cassie
JUNE GAPED AT me while she ate her peach ice cream. She’d asked me to tell her about Graham and the whole story was too long, too complicated. The ice cream parlor was busy today. We were all crammed into the little space like sardines and this little kid next to us kept counting things.
“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. It was a bad lie, and I knew it as soon as it came out of my mouth.
“Bullshit. The other night was something with the way he bolted out of your place. That, out there, that was way more than ‘nothing.’ I already know he was the boy you were hung up when you came to Butler. Fill in the gaps.”
I sighed, stirring the ice cream with my spoon. “He’s been my best friend since I was eight.”
“He was your first kiss?”
I nodded, taking a bite of the melting ice cream. It didn’t settle well and it had nothing to do with the ice cream. I’ll never forget the way he kissed me that first time over the fence between our backyards, after I called him a jerk and he called me difficult and then we kissed. We were only fifteen but I knew that kiss changed me. It changed everything because it made everything that we’d both been ignoring become something. We were still ignoring something, bigger things, things that felt impossible to move past.
June leaned back. “First boyfriend?”
“Yeah,” I said, pushing away the bowl. That kid still counted behind us, which was a good distraction from all the thoughts of Graham as my boyfriend. Holding my hand, walking me home, taking me on dates, sitting and doing absolutely nothing.
“First fuck?” She practically yelled it.
“June!” I screeched. The mother behind her gave us a dirty look, and June laughed.
“He was, okay.” She pushed the spoon around in her bowl. “Is he good?”
I groaned. “That’s not what we’re talking about.”
But my brain went there anyway. I was sixteen the first time Graham and I had sex. We hadn’t been dating that long, but he’d already known everything about me, and it’d felt like we’d always been together. That weekend his parents were away; I went inside his house without knocking. He was in his room watching TV and when he saw me I remember him smiling. I curled up beside him, kissed him and said I knew he was the one; I was ready if he was. He spent most of our first time asking if I was all right, and we were both nervous and determined. It was awkward but perfect because we loved each other.
But then it got incredible when he figured out how to touch me. I remembered how he felt when I sunk my fingers into his shoulders and nibbled that place behind his ear that made him lose control. How it was when he’d move inside me and make my whole body fold at his touch.
“Oh my God, he is. You’re blushing!” June yelled, slamming her hand on the table.
“Stop it,” I whispered. My mind still flowed with thoughts of being with Graham, and I tried to block them out. I couldn’t close my eyes because they’d be there more vividly, so I sighed.
June laughed and looked pleased. “I knew he had to be good. You can tell with some people,” she said. She didn’t look away from me when she took another spoonful of ice cream. “Really good?”
I groaned. “June, seriously.”
She threw her hands up. “Okay. So he was your first rodeo—only rodeo aside from Rohan. So what happened? There’s obviously still something between you.”
She was wrong about that part. “There’s nothing between us. We’re just friends. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“It’s hard to go back to that after everything, but we’re both trying.”
“Outside didn’t seem like trying. Well, it did: trying not to fuck each other right there on the sidewalk.”
The mother gasped and grabbed her counting kid. I glared at June. “That’s not how it is.”
Was it? I thought about the look in his eye, and how hard he was trying not to notice I was upset. And the other night at my house, the way he stared at me like he was remembering or imagining. That couldn’t mean anything. I’d done the same thing hundreds of times…but then I did want something. Graham had plenty of opportunities; she was reading too much into it.
She shook her head. “I promise you, it is. That boy still likes you, and you still like him.”
“He’s moved on, June. I had the chance and it’s gone now. I’ve ruined his life enough.”
“How so?”
“I left him to go to school.” I stirred the ice cream some more. It was turning into a milkshake now.
“So?”
She seriously wanted me to spell it out. “So, it broke him. That’s what I do. I break people.”
“Fuck that!” she said. I looked at her again. I forgot how that was her favorite word. “Graham seems pretty solid to me. Get him back.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Oh, I think you can, but get one thing clear, Cassie Harlen,” she leaned into me. “You didn’t break him. And if you did, then you broke yourself too. I remember when you were still in pieces, but you healed. He seems healed, too. That’s what breaks do, they heal and then they grow back stronger.”
I shook my head. “You don’t know the whole story, June.”
“So tell me.”
“YOU’RE SERIOUSLY MESSED up,” June said. She didn’t even blink. It was the first thing she’d said in eighty-six seconds since I finished the story about Graham and how I left.
“Gee, thanks,” I said.
“Seriously. That is the biggest bunch of shit I have ever heard, and I grew up in the system.”
I stopped walking. “I was eighteen, and I was scared—”
She stopped, too. “And now you’re nineteen—and you did the same thing to Rohan. You decided you were out and you left. You were going to do it to me, too.”
“But I didn’t.”
She threw her hands in the air. “Only because I caught you! Admit it, Cassie.”
“Admit what?” I crossed my arms. I didn’t like this conversation.
June lit a cigarette. She wasn’t supposed to smoke in the park, but I didn’t care enough to get into that fight. She took a drag and left me waiting. “You’re too terrified that if anyone saw the real you, they would be fucked up for life because you are fucked up.”
“I’m not fucked up!” I shouted. Some families walking around us all stared.
“The hell you aren’t,” she said. June started walking, cigarette in hand, and I moved with her. “We all are. We all have issues. Life sucks, but you can’t act like the world owes you something because you got dealt a shitty hand. It seems like God or the Universe or Queen Shiva—whatever the hell you want to call it—gave you a smoking hot boy. Twice, I might add. One who has never given up on you, and you left him. I would be pissed if I was him.”
“He is pissed,” I said.
“What did he say when you told him why you left?”
I looked away and bit the side of my jaw. June grabbed my shoulders so I was forced to look at her. “Christ, you didn’t tell him?”
“He’s over me! He has a girlfriend and a plan and I stumbled back into his life. I can’t be selfish again. I’m trying to do the right thing here and let him live his own life.”
“Who are you trying to convince?”
“You.”
June shook her head and crossed her arms. “I think you mean yourself.” June was a little scary right now. I’d never seen her this worked up. “One, you’re not doing the right thing for him; you’re doing the right thing for you. The right thing for Graham would be to apologize. Two, that boy is not over you. Girlfriend or not, no one looks at a girl that way who’s ‘just a friend.’ He still has feelings for you.”
I needed her to stop saying that. It was really annoying that she came in here like she knew everything. She didn’t. “He doesn’t.”
June grabbed my arm when I tried to storm off ahead of her. “And you’re an expert on feelings? God, Cassie. You haven’t even talked to Rohan since you left him. He told me he called you.”
She talked to Rohan about me? What was she trying to do? I already felt guilty enough for how I left that. I yanked my arm away and we walked on in silence. She was kind of right. I was fucked up. Who does the same thing to two people? The worst part was that I didn’t see it.
“Listen,” June said, “that was harsh.”
“Don’t apologize.”
June scoffed. “I’m not. I meant every syllable,” she said, tossing her cigarette into a trash. “You made some mistakes, but own up to them and fix it. It’s not too late yet.”
Where did I start? Just thinking about all of them was as if I was tornado who’d destroyed a whole town and left all the shit I’d broken. Where did I start with that? How did I fix it? Graham felt impossible to reach now, no matter what June thought about how he felt. Rohan was a mystery; I owed him something, but what and how to give it to him, I wasn’t sure.
We crossed the street leaving the park. Neither of us had spoken for the whole five-minute walk back to the car. “You know why Stevie Nicks is a rock legend?”
“Enlighten me,” I said.
“Because legends change the game,” June said. She paused and took a breath. Her eyes wandered around the park like she was seeing it all for the first time, green and monkey bars and kids running around, then she continued. “Stevie Nicks put women on the map. She wrote her own music and she entered the industry at the right time. She set a bar, told the truth in her songs, and spoke to the soul. She didn’t care what people thought and she was true to herself. That’s the woman you are named after.”
I watched June as we walked. Under what she put out there—the hair colors, the clothes, the attitude, the sex—she was something else entirely. I couldn’t quite figure her out, but I thought that maybe I should start trying. That’s what friends did—called each other out and saw beyond what they put in the world.
“Legends don’t raise the bar; they set a new one,” June said as I opened the car door. “Set the bar, Cassie.”
33.
Graham
COOL AIR SEEPED through the open window while I filled out the paperwork for school and tried not to think about anything else. Cassie’s laughter flooded my ears, carried to my room in the breeze. I froze and listened. Her laughter was met with Mrs. H’s, and what had to be June’s. I pushed back the curtain to see outside. The girls were in the backyard, light shining from bug repellent lamps. I wondered what they were talking about that made them all laugh so loudly.
I couldn’t keep doing this. The sooner I was out of this town, away from Cassie, the better.
“What are we doing for dinner?” Molly asked, wrapping her arms around my neck.
I peered at her over my shoulder. Her long blonde hair was up out of her face, eyes on me. You have this great girl; don’t fuck it up, Tucker.
“Whatever you want. We can go out.”
She shrugged, moving her hands down my chest. “I was thinking we could stay in.”
I raised my eyebrow and pressed my lips against her arm. “That’s a good plan.”
“Are you almost done?”
“Almost,” I said. “You?”
She sighed and sat on the corner of my desk. “I need a break. I wrote myself into a corner with my paper,” she said. She had to write some social justice studies paper. I wasn’t sure how that went with being a nurse, but apparently it did. “Rawls was right: everyone should be seen as equals, but where you come from does influence your view of right and wrong. But the other side is right, too: nationality and birthplace can’t be parts of justice. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place.”
“Which one do you agree with?”
Molly paced my floor and her blonde hair fell loose from the ponytail. She was cute when she was fired up and it brought out her Georgia twang more. “I don’t know—and I can’t argue and defend both sides. I like what Rawls was saying, but it justifies actions. This is social justice, so actions can’t be justified or it’s the same cycle over and over again.”
“You don’t think where you come from helps create who you are?”
“Of course I do. We will always go back to what we know,” she said. Molly twisted a ring around her finger while she paced through my living room. “If someone grows up learning that it’s okay to eat sugar when they are upset, they will always turn to it. Even if they’ve spent ten years not eating sugar—put it in front of them when they’re upset, and they will eat it. Even knowing it’s wrong—”
“Why is sugar wrong?”
She shrugged. “Maybe it’s illegal.”
I tried to keep myself from smiling. “Okay. Go on.”
She did. “Even knowing it’s wrong to eat that sugar, on one side I can’t blame them because it’s what they were taught to do. The other says that equality means one law is wrong for everyone, regardless of background.”
“What does sugar have to do with social justice?” I asked.
She threw up her arms. “Seriously? That’s all you have to say?”
I pulled her down to my lap so she was facing me. “It’s summer. Take a break.”
“I still have to turn it in, that’s the purpose of an online class,” she said.
“Later,” I said, moving my lips to hers. “It’s break time right now.”
Molly pressed her body into mine, and her hands trailed down my chest and into the waistband of my jeans. My body groaned at her touch, and my mind wandered to Cassie briefly and wished it were her. Molly stepped away and pulled off her shirt and let her hair down. When our lips met again, I ran my fingers through her hair, like I used to do with Cassie’s, and kissed Molly harder to push Cassie out of my head. I could forget her and her touch if I tried hard enough.
But Cassie’s laughter echoed through my room, and I wondered what Molly would say about my conditioning. Maybe she was viewing it wrong—maybe people needed something familiar to cling to, and that’s why they went back. Because the unknown was scarier than the bad thing they didn’t want.
Maybe I was conditioned to Cassie the same way Molly’s fake person had to eat illegal sugar. I didn’t want to think about Cassie, to have my thoughts wander to her or to have her voice taunt my memory, but I couldn’t let it do anything else.
34.
Cassie
“YOUR MOTHER TOLD me that you’ve had a friend visiting for a couple weeks now,” Dr. Lambert said at our next appointment.
“June, yeah,” I said.
“How has that been?” she asked.
“Interesting,” I said. June was the most real person I’d met. She knew what she was, what she wanted, and she didn’t care if you liked her or not. She always said what she thought, wanted or not. Especially since our talk. It was refreshing. “I love being around her, but I didn’t know she was coming.”<
br />
“Why did she come?”
“She said I disappeared.”
Dr. Lambert smiled. “You tend to do that. Why change that with June?”
“I trust her. I didn’t want to lose her friendship.” And until I said it, I didn’t realize how true that was. “I told her everything.”
The pen scribbled on Dr. Lambert’s page. “What did she say when you told her about your mom and Graham?”
I chuckled a little. “I mean, she was understanding, but she said I was pretty fucked up. Her words.”
“That’s quite a friend.”
“She said other things, too, that I hadn’t thought about.”
“Like what?”
I recounted some of our conversation. The parts about being selfish, about me needing to fix things while I had the chance, about me setting a new bar. It felt like a good way to move on and deep down, I did want to move on. Be stronger. Be brave. Do something to deserve all the good people I had around me.
Dr. Lambert nodded. “How are you going to fix it?”
“I should probably start with Rohan.”
Dr. Lambert flipped through her notes, and I wondered what she kept written there. “Why should you start there? I don’t know much about Rohan. You’ve barely mentioned his name.”
I shifted on the couch. “I was dating him at school, and then I left him. The same way I left Graham. He wrote a song about me; it’s like number five on the Billboard charts.”
“A song?”
I scrolled through my music. I’d bought it so I could torture myself with how much I sucked. I let the song play and watched Dr. Lambert’s face for a reaction. She was stoic, jotting down a few lines here and there while she listened. When it was over, she said: “How does that song make you feel?”
“Like shit.” I paused for a breath and turned off my phone. “What do I say?”
“I can’t tell you that. If you feel the way you do and you think June was right about your actions, then what do you think the solution is?”
Days Like This Page 13
