by Sarah Dessen
“No,” my father said. “You must come home.”
“This is what I want,” she said. “You have to respect that.”
“You’re only eighteen,” my father told her. “This is ridiculous, you can’t possibly know—”
“Daddy,” she said, and I realized suddenly I was crying, again, the receiver wet against my face. “I’m sorry. I love you. Please tell Mom not to worry.”
“No,” my father said, firm. “We are not—”
“Caitlin?” she said suddenly. “I know you’re there. I can hear you.”
“What is she saying?” my mother kept asking, now close to the receiver. “Where is she?”
“Margaret, just hold on,” my father told her.
“Yes,” I whispered back to Cass. “I’m here.”
“Don’t cry, okay?” she said. The line crackled, and I thought of her tackling me that night, her breath against my neck, laughing in my ear. “I love you. I’m sorry about your birthday.”
“It’s nothing,” I said.
There was a voice outside her end, a yell, and another buzz on the line. “Is that him?” my father demanded. “Is he there?”
“I have to go,” she said. “Please don’t worry, okay?”
“Dammit, Cassandra,” my father said. “Don’t you hang up this phone!”
“Good-bye,” she said softly, as my father’s voice dropped away. “Good-bye.”
“Cassandra!” my mother wailed into the phone, all the anger and fear of the last twenty-four hours bursting across the line. “Please—”
Click. And she was gone.
CHAPTER THREE
By the time I started school two days later, we hadn’t heard from Cass again. The first call had come from somewhere in New Jersey, but beyond that there was a whole world that could have swallowed her up.
I still didn’t have anything I thought worthy of being entered in my journal. I was waiting for something that was meaningful, real, a night when I saw Cass and she spoke to me. But instead my dreams were as dull as my everyday life, consisting mostly of me walking around the mall or school, looking for some undetermined thing that I could never find, while faces blurred in front of me. I woke up tired and frustrated, and felt like I never got any real sleep at all.
My mother kept Cass’s bedroom door shut, with all of her Yale stuff piled up on the bed, waiting for her. I was the only one who ever went in there, and when I did the air always smelled stale and strange, pent up like the sorrow my mother carried in her shoulders, her heart, and her face.
She was taking it the hardest. My mother had spent the last eighteen years just as involved in Cass’s activities as Cass herself was. She sewed sequin after sequin on ballet costumes, made Rice Krispies Treats by the panful for soccer team bake sales, and chaperoned Debate Club bus trips. She knew Cass’s playing stats, SAT scores, and GPA by heart. She’d been prepared to be just as involved long-distance. A copy of Cass’s Yale schedule was already taped to our refrigerator, my mother a member of the Parents’ Organization, plane tickets pre-bought for Parents’ Weekend in October. But now, in claiming her own life, Cass had taken part of my mother’s as well.
I got my license, finally, and without comment was given the keys to Cass’s car. It was due to be mine anyway, since she couldn’t have taken it to Yale, but it still felt strange. I put all her tapes and the Mardi Gras beads she’d hung on the rearview mirror into a box and stuck it in the corner of the garage, under a patio chair and some flowerpots. It seemed like I couldn’t do anything without thinking about her: The scar over my eye was always the first thing I noticed in the mirror’s reflection now.
As for my father, he threw himself into his work. With a new semester, he was now busy with a class of incoming freshmen, a set of demonstrations over a controversial speaker, and a group of football players who had started a brawl at a local dance bar. He couldn’t “fix” the problem of Cass running away, but through work he could still do his daily miracles, smoothing tensions and reassuring nervous administrators.
Whenever I see my father in my mind, he is wearing a tie. They were the only gifts Cass and I ever gave him for his birthday, Christmas, and Father’s Day, year after year. In all, he owned hundreds by now, the collection carefully hung and organized in his closet by color and degree of loudness. (During our grade school years, we were enamored of polka dots and big stripes.) It had become somewhat of a family joke, at this point, and we’d taken to wrapping them in strangely shaped boxes and tubes, even folded up tiny in a jewelry box—just to make things more interesting. But he wore them, proudly, each day to work, and prided himself on remembering not only the giver and the occasion, but the year as well. If my mother was the emotion of our family, he was the fact-keeper. He remembered everything.
“Caitlin, Christmas, 1988,” he’d say, smoothing his hand proudly over a tie I myself didn’t even recognize. “You had the chicken pox.”
The other thing my father loved—besides ties, and us—was sports. Whenever the university basketball or football team played, Cass and I would find our way into the living room and plant ourselves on the floor at his feet to watch and scream and trash the refs together. It was the only time we got to see him lose his cool, get so emotional and ecstatic, and we loved it. The rest of the time, he was like the player with nerves of steel, the only person you want to get the ball to when it’s a tie game with only seven seconds left. He’d never let you down.
But now, Cass had done something to him: an intentional foul, illegal movement, the biggest of penalties. I’d been there the day Yale called to check on whether Cass was still coming, and saw my father’s face as he explained, no, not this semester. Then he sat back down in his chair to watch baseball while I went to her room and sat on her bed, breathing in that pent-up air, and pictured that world, too, going on without her.
I’d been back in school about a week when my best friend, Rina, finally convinced me to try out for cheerleading. She argued that it was one of the few things Cass had never done, and therefore I was pretty much required to do it. I wasn’t so sure about this.
“She never did it for a reason,” I told her as we walked to the gym for tryouts after school. Getting adjusted to school after a long, lazy summer had been tough, not to mention the occasional whispers or stares from people who knew about Cass running away. She’d been well-known at school, and it was great end-of-summer gossip, earning me a newfound notoriety that made me very uncomfortable.
“And what reason was that?” Rina asked me.
“Because she was an athlete,” I said. I was realizing that more and more I was referring to Cass in the past tense, as if she was dead and not just gone. “Not a Barbie doll.”
“Cheerleading is a sport,” Rina said firmly. “And besides, you get to go to all the good parties.”
I sighed, shaking my head. Rina and I were mismatched as friends, but somehow we’d stuck together since seventh grade, when she moved to town with her mom from Boca Raton to live with Stepdad Number Two, the dry-cleaning king, across the street from us. All the girls at school hated her immediately because she was flat-out gorgeous, even then: tall, with a perfect figure, strawberry-blond curls, huge blue eyes, and full lips in a heart-shaped face. Her arrival at Jackson Middle preceded the breakup of two well-established couples, as well as marking the beginnings of a reputation built more on speculation and wishful thinking than truth, which had followed her since.
But I knew Rina. I knew she only chased boys because her father, who hosted a cartoon and kids’ show in Boca called Harvey’s Heroes, had refused to acknowledge her as his daughter, even after a blood test proved otherwise. She once told me that as a kid she watched his show every day, and that he was great with the children in the audience, so funny and silly, pulling rabbits out of hats or telling stupid jokes.
“He just seemed like he’d be the perfect dad, you know?” she said. “And all I could think was that he hated me. But I still watched, every day. I don’t
even know why.”
Rina’s mom, Lisa—also tall, blond, and gorgeous—kept remarrying, and Rina got trips, clothes, jewelry, and big rooms in nice houses with her own TV and phone. The love she wanted she’d learned to look for elsewhere, with mixed results.
At the beginning of ninth grade, Lisa had an affair with her boss and moved Rina across town, divorcing Number Two to live with the man who would soon become Number Three. My mother breathed a sigh of relief, thinking now I could find a “nicer” girl to be best friends with. But I knew Rina, like me, didn’t make friends very easily. And she was good to me: strong, fun, and fiercely loyal. And if I didn’t have many other friends because of her—most girls were intimidated by her looks, or thought she was too pushy, or just flat-out feared for their boyfriends—it never bothered me. I never missed having a wide, thick circle of girlfriends: Rina was more than enough. We were comfortable with each other’s flaws and weaknesses, so we stuck together and kept to ourselves. And once my mother realized that I wasn’t going to start wearing tight skirts and dating half the basketball team—so Rina-esque—she relaxed and got used to her as well. She always liked to see Rina as needing structure (it was all those divorces), so she took to inviting her to dinners and holidays and on our yearly beach trip, folding her into our extended family.
Now, as we walked into the gym, a pack of girls by the bleachers turned to look at us, narrowing their eyes, mouths already whispering. This was the standard reaction to Rina, anywhere we went, from Wal-Mart to the movies, from both strangers and schoolmates. It always bothered me—I was protective of her—but she didn’t even seem to notice anymore.
“I don’t want to do this,” I complained, even as she was writing both our names down at the sign-up table, which was manned by Chelsea Robbins, head cheerleader, runner-up to Cass for Homecoming Queen the year before.
“Sure you do,” Rina said easily, flashing her million-dollar smile at Chelsea, who smiled back just as fake, tossing her blond ponytail. “It’ll be fun.”
“So Caitlin,” Chelsea asked me, “how are you doing?”
I looked at her. Her head was cocked to the side, her face serious. “Fine,” I said.
She nodded, sympathetic, and dipped her blond head and her voice a little lower before adding, “I can’t believe it about Cass. I mean, she never struck me as that type.”
I had a sudden flash of Chelsea standing on the Homecoming Float, in her runner-up sash, waving with a perky smile that couldn’t completely hide the fact that she was bitter she’d been beaten. “What type is that?” I asked her.
Her big blue eyes widened. “Well, I mean, I just think ... she was going to Yale and all. She like, totally, flaked out, right?”
“Come on, Caitlin,” Rina said, locking her fingers around my wrist.
What I was feeling was new for me, a bubbling up of anger, mixed with so many images from the last two weeks: my mother weeping; my father running his hand over his head, closing his eyes; Cass’s name doodled on the back of that envelope; her inscription to me in blue ink: See you there.
Rina yanked me by the arm, hard, and began to pull me away.
“Good luck,” Chelsea yelled after us, and I tried to turn back but Rina held me tight. Someone was blowing a whistle: Tryouts were starting.
“Caitlin,” Rina said in a low voice. “I like a good fight as well as the next person, but—”
“Did you hear what she was saying?”
“She’s a bitch,” Rina said flatly, plopping down on the bleachers and crossing her legs. Two heavyset girls sitting farther down looked over, their eyes traveling up and down Rina from her face to her toes. She ignored them. “We knew that already, right? But starting something now would blow our chances at cheerleading, and we don’t want to do that, do we?”
“Yes,” I said.
She sighed, reaching up to fluff her curls. “Do this for me, okay? I promise you’ll thank me later. Trust me.”
I looked at her. Those two little words had gotten me into more trouble than I cared to remember.
“Okay, fine,” she said quickly. “Do what Cass would do, then.”
“And what’s that?” I said.
She shook her head. “You don’t know?”
From the middle of the gym floor, Chelsea Robbins began clapping her hands. “Okay, ladies, it’s time to get started! We’re going to show you a basic routine to learn for first cuts. Let’s go!”
Rina turned and smiled at me. “Kick their butts,” she said, standing up. “That’s what Cass would do.”
At least two hundred girls were milling around the gym floor, stretching and talking. I was sure they all wanted this more than I did. But still.
“Kick their butts,” I repeated, as if it would be that simple, watching as Chelsea Robbins cartwheeled down the gym, showing off her bounce and pep. “Okay.”
When I brought my cheerleading uniform home three days later, I saw Boo coming but didn’t move fast enough. She intercepted me on the front porch, leaving from a visit to my mother.
“Hel-lo!” she said cheerfully. “I have been working on your mother for the last hour to join this pottery class with me. You know, something to get her out of the house. But she’s so stubborn.”
The uniform was folded over my arm, and I tried to shift it behind me. “That’s great,” I said.
“Well, she’s not firm on it yet,” she said, craning her neck as I slipped the uniform around my back. “What’s that?”
“I don’t think...” I said, but it was too late; she had it now, pulling it around me to hold up in front of her.
“Oh,” she gasped, one hand moving to cover her mouth. I felt my face burn, ashamed, as deep red as the raised JHS on the sweater. As far as Boo was concerned, I might as well have joined the Klan. “Oh, goodness. ”
“I know what you’re going to say,” I began. “But—”
“No, no,” she said quickly, handing it back to me. “That’s great. Good for you.”
“It was Rina’s idea,” I said, feeling so lame I could hardly stand it. Boo, a professor of women’s studies, had fundamental problems with pageants, the beauty industry and, of course, cheerleading. I knew this.
“It’s okay,” she said to me calmly, smiling now. “Whatever makes you happy.”
“It’s not making me happy,” I explained hastily. “It just kind of happened.”
And it had. One minute I’d been hating every second, the next so fired up no one could stop me. I’d had my requisite one year of gymnastics; I could do handsprings and cartwheels. But in the process of showing them—and channeling Cass to kick their butts—I’d gotten picked for the squad. The rest was just a blur of the squad hugging me and pom-poms rustling in my face. Rina had made it too, mostly because half the judges were football players.
“I understand,” Boo said, pulling back and holding me at arm’s length. “These things sometimes do that. They just—” and she looked at my uniform again, brushing her hand over the sweater—“happen.”
And then, before I could say anything, she squeezed my arm and went down the stairs, her clogs thunking across the walk and into the grass.
When I went into my room, I held the uniform up against me, trying to picture myself cartwheeling across the football field. It was hard.
There was a knock at the door. “Caitlin?” my mother called out. “Are you in there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Come on in.”
She opened the door and stuck her head in. She’d put on fresh lipstick and a squirt of Joy perfume, which I could smell, just as she did every day before my father was due home. She looked nice, but her face had that hollow look it had taken on since Cass left, like she was just a shell of her former self, functioning and talking but hardly alive. “How was school?”
“Fine.” I turned around, still holding up the uniform against me. “I made the cheerleading squad.”
“Really?” Her face brightened and she stepped into my room, clasping her hands in fr
ont of her. “Oh, Caitlin, that’s great! Why didn’t you tell me you were going out for the team?”
“It just kind of happened,” I said.
She walked right past where I was sitting to the chair where my uniform was, picking it up and holding it in front of her. “Well, look at that!” she said excitedly. “It’s just gorgeous. Now, you can’t just leave this here, it needs to be hung up. And this sweater looks like a good dry cleaning couldn’t hurt it.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.” I hadn’t seen her so excited about anything since Cass left.
“Now, did they tell you what kind of shoes you need? And what’s the practice schedule like?” She walked to my closet and hung up the uniform, smoothing the skirt with her hand as she did so. “I can’t believe they only give you one; we’ll have to really keep it clean if you have a lot of games.” I could see her mind already working over this problem as she examined the fabric of the skirt, turning it in her hand.
“There’s a meeting tomorrow,” I said. I was starting to feel a little strange about this, now. “I think they tell me everything then. All we got today was a game schedule,” I added, pulling it out of my pocket. She was standing in front of me immediately, hand out, ready to take it.
She unfolded the paper, then scanned it quickly. “My,” she said, “you are going to be busy. But we’ll work around it. We always have before, right?”
“Um, right,” I said. This we thing was kind of strange, considering I’d never been involved in any school teams, so far. It was like she’d forgotten I was even there.
She was already on her way out the door, the schedule in her hand. “I’m going to stick this on the fridge right now, so we’ll know when you need to be where. And tomorrow night, after they tell you what you need, we’ll go to the mall. Okay? Unless they have to special-order things from a catalog, in which case maybe I should just go ahead and write you a check to take with you...”
“I don’t know,” I said quietly.
“Well, I’ll just send a blank one with you and that way if they are ordering you can go ahead and do it right away. You don’t want to wait too long. Unless they all order in a group together ... ?”
