by Cecily Wolfe
Lunch was in the hospital cafeteria with tickets that had PH stamped on them. Partial hospitalization, that’s what the program was called. It was like lunch time at school, choosing from whatever was arranged in plates and bowls behind a glass window, where someone wearing a hair net handed it over at your request to place on your plastic tray.
As he stood in line behind the girl who couldn’t eat, he noticed that she twisted her hands tightly before deciding what to choose. The mixed fruit plate wasn’t a surprise, but the tapioca was. Kay would never have eaten tapioca, he thought as he watched her take careful steps towards the cashier. So much sugar.
He ate without tasting a small bowl of macaroni and cheese, washing it down with a gold plastic cup full of fruit punch. He hadn’t had that since he was a kid, when someone’s mother had jugs of it at a birthday party because it was supposed to be better than soda. Sugar water, that’s all it was, he thought now, almost smiling. Some people had no clue.
He sat with the others as if they were assigned a table, but no one spoke. They were bound but not, and there was something about it that comforted him. They didn’t have to sit together, but they did, as if they had an agreement to stick together. He watched the mother eat quickly, then wipe her mouth carefully, just as the college dropout boy swallowed mouthfuls of a grilled cheese sandwich.
The girl who didn’t eat was the last to finish, taking tiny sips of the tapioca from her spoon until the bowl was empty. At least she ate it all, Paul considered, and wondered how long it would take someone to die once they stopped eating. He hadn’t eaten for several days last week, but the doctors had been more concerned that he wasn’t drinking anything.
Water, of course, was more important, but still . . . Kayla didn’t eat much anymore, he thought, and wondered if she had been developing an eating disorder while he had stood by, without knowing.
It was something else to feel bad about. There were a lot of things to feel bad about, and he worried that there would be even more if he thought too much about it.
When they returned to the group therapy room, the counselor was standing at a desk at the front of the room where a computer and a stack of files rested.
“I am so sorry, I just drank so much coffee this morning . . . I’ll just run to the restroom quick and be back. You all are back a little early, anyway. I hope you had a nice lunch!”
She practically sang as she skipped by the group of them after they filed into the room. The girl who couldn’t eat brushed by him and he felt the dark hairs that he had noticed earlier on her thin arms. They all watched her as she turned around when she reached the desk and looked at them before smiling for the first time since they had started group together.
The counselor had left her purse on the desk and the girl unzipped it and leaned over. Her face was entirely covered by the faux leather as she vomited into the bag.
Day Fourteen
Saturday
“If she hadn’t been there, I would have, though,” Cass explained to Sarah, when Sarah came to visit her at the Dairy Delite. She had just unlocked the front doors, which probably wouldn’t be used much. Most everyone used the walk-up window, and that was where she spent most of her time during her shift.
The manager was around, but he had payroll and other things to do, and counted on her to handle the customers. After nearly three years working at the DD, she could have run the place blindfolded.
“Not good. Just as I would be coming back, you’d be out.” Sarah walked into the small building and sat at the front counter, which was outfitted with five attached stools. It was designed to look like an old fashioned soda fountain, but didn’t quite make it. Cass was explaining how the school newspaper advisor, who was one of the English teachers, had caught her right before she would have jumped the girls in the restroom at school.
That would have been a guaranteed suspension, and as Sarah noted, Cass would have been gone just as Sarah would be returning. Cass didn’t want Sarah alone at school, although she suspected that she could handle herself now.
“My dad has a meeting to go to tonight. Not sure what it is . . . so he’ll drop me off here so we can go to Mia’s game.”
Mia was cheering that afternoon and it would be her first game back after. After. There was bound to be some idiot talking crap, or maybe just little girls being girls. Cass wasn’t sure which would be worse. If the girls were hassling Mia about shaving her legs, what else were they saying?
“Hey, did anyone ever tell you to shave your legs?”
Sarah frowned.
“What?”
She was staring at the menu board above Cass’s head, listening to her stomach growl. She and her father had been eating Chinese a lot lately and she was craving something sweet. Come to think of it, she hadn’t been eating a lot, just what she had been was take-out. Half an egg roll here and there, a forkful of lo mein.
She wasn’t picky and usually just went along with whatever her father wanted, although he always asked her to be honest and let him know what she preferred. Right now, though, she wanted something sweet, something cold to counter the humidity of the morning.
“Do you mind making me a milkshake?”
The moment the words came out of her mouth, before Cass could respond or reiterate the shaving question, the bells over the door rang and Cass looked up as Sarah turned her head.
“Peanut butter, right?”
Sarah blinked. Danny was standing inside the door, holding it open the smallest bit.
“Flies,” Cass said flatly. He let the door fall closed but didn’t move forward. Sarah could see him swallow before he spoke again into the silence.
“You like peanut butter milkshakes, right?”
This was true, but Sarah wasn’t sure why or how Danny would know this. Cass squinted darkly.
“Are you stalking her?”
His hands flew up and he held his palms out.
“No, I just . . .” He looked confused for a moment, then let his arms fall to his sides.
“I came to see how you were, I mean, after what happened at school, and I heard you talking about milkshakes.”
The girls stared at him, which Sarah could see was not helping his composure.
“Yeah, those are my favorite. How did you know?”
He offered a careful smile, small and unsure.
“When my football team used to come here after games, back in elementary school. Sometimes I’d see you here with . . . Cassidy and Kayla. You’d ride your bikes, right? I just noticed that you always had a peanut butter milkshake.”
“And what did I have?”
Cass interrupted him before he could continue and it threw him off balance for a second.
“Uh, you?”
Cass snorted.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Have a seat. Not too close to her.”
Sarah huffed what might have been a laugh, but Cass wasn’t sure. Obviously Danny had a crush on Sarah and had had one for who knows how many years, if he had been that attentive when they were just kids.
Sarah didn’t do boyfriends and Cass wasn’t about to watch her go down that road, not when she, and Cass herself, was vulnerable. Still, Sarah and Danny had teamed up to beat the shit out of that football player, one of his teammates, no less, so maybe she was being overprotective.
Kay would probably tell her to let Sarah figure it out, and just be there for her when she was needed. That’s what Kay would have done, too.
She was always one to walk the walk.
Danny sat two seats away from Sarah and kept his gaze on Cass, who had started to go through the steps to make Sarah’s milkshake.
“Everything okay out here, Cassidy?”
The owner peeked around the corner from his office in the hallway, and Cass nodded. He looked pointedly at Danny, then back at Cass.
“Holler if you need anything, girls.”
Dangerous Danny, Cass thought, holding the large silver cup up against the back of the mixer as the machine
rattled. Her hands grew cold as the ice cream and peanut butter mashed together.
“Uh, I have to tell you something.”
Cass turned and Sarah stared, both unsure what to expect. Danny had always been one of those smiling faces everyone knew, but didn’t know, actually. What went on in his head when he didn’t have a football in his hand?
Neither of them had thought about it that much. He was one of those kids who was always there, but not all that interesting. Cass suddenly felt shallow and a little mean. Still, she didn’t want him following Sarah around.
“Well? I’m sure it isn’t anything good, not by the look on your face. Just say it. Not like it can get any worse.”
Sarah’s eyes were wide as she turned her face to Cass, and Cass was immediately sorry. She wasn’t sure why she had said it, or why it felt wrong, but Sarah was upset and she never wanted that.
“Hey,” she started, stepping towards her friend with a slim paper cup and the chilly silver one in each hand, but Danny had moved over to sit beside Sarah faster than she could reach her.
“I’m sorry,” he blurted, his eyes on Sarah as Sarah continued to look at Cass. “I know you’re both probably sick of hearing it, and I know it’s just something people say most of the time, but it’s true. I really am. I wish I could change everything. But you have to know that they found him, the guy who gave it to her.”
The cups slipped from Cass’s hands and she felt the heavy one hit her foot through her shoe.
“What?” she managed to whisper, and Sarah held her silence. Both of them watched Danny as he continued to speak, as if his restraint had broken completely and he couldn’t stop now.
“He’s a friend of my brother, from college. I guess he’s been selling at parties there, but no one’s ever . . . there just wasn’t a problem.”
“How is selling heroin not a problem?” Sarah’s voice was low but firm, her incredulity clear.
“It just didn’t come to anyone’s attention, because no one said anything. The campus cops are always on the lookout for that kind of stuff, but they don’t know anything if nothing is ever reported.”
He took a deep breath and looked from Cass to Sarah, his gaze softening on Sarah.
“He was in the bedroom with her, in the bed. One of the cops talked to him before he could leave, and you guys . . . well, you were busy, and probably didn’t really notice him, right?”
Neither of the girls spoke.
“They just told him not to go anywhere, like leave the state or anything. I’m not sure how they got all their information, but after what happened, some of the kids he’s sold to at college, and others who saw him do it . . . one girl, well, I guess something else happened after she used it, and she ended up in the emergency room for . . . that.”
He put a hand on the chair behind Sarah, as if he could protect her from something.
“Nothing happened like that, did it?”
Sarah shook her head almost imperceptibly. Sure, she remembered the lump in the bed, but with everything that was going on after Cass called 9-1-1, with Paul trying to bring Kayla back, she had no idea what had happened to him. Anything could have happened before they found Kay, and obviously a bed wasn’t the only place it could be.
Just because they found her in a chair and not in the bed with him . . . she leaned down onto the counter with her arms folded beneath her head, trying to think. They should have paid more attention to him, maybe found someone else to keep him there before the police arrived.
What if he had left and no one had known he was there but the three of them?
Cass bent down, ignoring the ice cream and peanut butter mess all over her shoes and the floor, her head level with Sarah’s.
‘No, he didn’t do anything else to her. There was a report.”
She was speaking to Danny but looking at Sarah.
“Sarah’s dad, he talks to everyone, finds out stuff. Unlike my parents, or Paul’s parents, he tells us.”
At the sound of Paul’s name, Danny flinched, and Cass caught the movement from the corner of her eye and turned to look at him.
“What?”
Sarah tilted her head, resting the side of it on her arms, and she could see the dampness seeping through Danny’s t-shirt. He was such a big, tough guy but right now, he looked as anxious and scared as a little kid.
“Paul won’t talk to me. I don’t know what’s going on with him, and you know,” he nodded to Cass. “He isn’t in school. Doesn’t go to open gym. I know he hates me, and that’s nothing compared to what he’s going through, but I want to do something, and I don’t know what I can do. I just don’t know how to fix this.”
His hand moved from the back of Sarah’s chair to the top, just where the metal bump stuck up on the corner. He gripped it as he started to cry, as if it could help him hold back his tears, but Sarah and Cass could both see that nothing was going to stop them. They each reached out a hand, Sarah’s to his that was pressed flat on the counter, and Cass’s to his arm.
“Paul’s doing some kind of therapy at the hospital, and he’s there all day, but his dad says he’ll be back to school.”
Cass took a deep breath before continuing, unnerved by her emotional response to Danny’s tears. She wanted to sit on the floor and dissolve into her own, as if she had any left. She did, though. She probably would always have tears for Kayla.
“He won’t talk to anyone, but maybe after this therapy he’ll be able to.”
“You can’t fix it, Danny. None of us can.”
Sarah spoke up, and while Cass knew her own voice had been shaky, Sarah’s was low but steady. Her assertion made Danny cry more intensely, but Sarah didn’t flinch or turn her gaze from him. Cass knew that none of this was Danny’s fault, but like Sarah, some part of her held him responsible.
She suspected that Sarah held him responsible even more than she did, and that part of Danny’s sorrow had to do with hurting Sarah. That part she knew was true, no suspicion about it.
“What the hell is going on?”
The owner walked into the dining room at a fast clip, taking in Danny’s tears, Sarah’s repose, and Cass’s position, squatting behind the counter. Cass stood up but didn’t answer.
“This town is crazy. You kids . . . drugs and I don’t know what else is going on. If I didn’t know you, Cassidy . . .”
She stood up straighter, unsure if he was insulting her, or her friends, or what he was trying to say. He pushed both of his hands through his hair, as if he was trying to figure it out himself.
“I know this is a hard time for you, Cassidy. Sarah, Danny - I know your parents, I know you’re good kids. If you need time off, Cassidy, just say the word. I just can’t have this going on when we could have people coming through that door, and this is scary, for all of us. I know it’s about you, and Kayla, and I knew Kayla, too. We all did. We all liked her. But people are scared about this, drugs here we didn’t know about, and this isn’t good.”
Cass had known him long enough to understand that he was trying to be kind and patient, but to everyone, and that included the families that he was trying to serve. Yeah, it was just ice cream, just hot dogs and shakes, but they were coming here for a break, to relax with their kids, not see the three of them crying over their dead friend.
“No, I’m good. We’re okay. We’ll keep this at home.”
