Click, click, click. The bicycle pulls up behind me when I stop short in front of Cassie’s house, where the grass is a tad too long and the pile of fallen leaves grows.
I can’t move.
Because there’s Cassie’s car in the driveway, parked askance the way it always is, and there’s the light in her bedroom. Neither of those things tell me why she won’t answer the phone, why she didn’t come back or send someone my way.
For the first time in my life, my dad curses. Then his hand is on my shoulder. “Let’s get you home, sweetheart.”
I HOBBLE UP our driveway, afraid to look back. Dad could lecture me on any number of points and for once I’d have no excuse, with “attempting to fight vicious skinheads in the woods by myself” at the top of that list.
He unclicks his helmet and casually tugs off his gloves, as if this was simply another ride. He sets them down on the shelf, spins one pedal and frowns. The bike hums as he rolls it gently into its holder.
Just when I think he’s forgotten that I’m standing there, he says, “I’m sorry about your friend.”
I don’t know which one he means. Marcos, face down and those strong shoulders moving up and down with his breathing, but nothing more.
Cassie, the little-girl quiver of her bottom lip. The most unmotivated person I know with a rare determination in her eyes. I am not following you.
Cassie would save her own ass before she saved yours, Marcos told me. I guarantee it.
The memory makes me shake all over again. Marcos had sensed it, and I hadn’t believed him. Of course I knew Cassie better. Of course she’d never leave me.
When Mom sees me running up the stairs with tears running down my cheeks, she doesn’t try to stop me.
MY LIMBS HAVE turned to lead. I want to go to the hospital, I want to see Marcos’s eyes open and that blood wiped off his face, except I can barely do more than toy with my phone that never rings. The last message was from Andreas: They got him doped up real good for his arm.
“You dropped something.” My mother slips into the room without knocking. I managed to doze for a few minutes, jerking awake at any sound.
“Thanks,” I say without turning my head.
The bed by my feet tilts down, and I look up in surprise. Mom sits with my medals in her hand. The meet. That was this morning.
“What’d you place second on?” she says.
“Bars.”
Mom smirks, almost like Dad. “Really?”
“They probably confused me with someone else.” It feels strange to be joking when I haven’t seen Marcos yet, when I don’t know what the hell Cassie did.
“Why didn’t you tell us? I would have loved to have seen you back in action.”
“If it helps, I qualified for States.”
I expect Mom to hug me and say something about how she’s glad I had a safe competition, and isn’t it nice that I’m doing gymnastics again? Instead she has the look in her eye that she usually reserves for mapping out Richard’s current location. “When is States? How about Regionals? I’m taking off from work.”
Regionals. Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I’m smiling, though, just a crack.
“What happened with you and Cassie?” she says.
I turn back onto my elbow, ignoring the stab of pins and needles. “Nothing.”
“You came home covered in dirt and I expected Cassie to show up behind you, lying through her teeth about whatever you guys were up to. Trying to fight guys in the woods seems like a Cassie thing to do.”
That’s what I had thought when I’d asked her to come with me. Apparently I was wrong.
Mom rolls the medal in her hands. Strong hands. She’s never been a pusher, like Dad. She doesn’t need to know every one of my test grades. She didn’t care who my competitors were. As long as she knew I’d landed on two feet, she was happy.
“You were always on Cassie’s side, no matter what,” she says. “I’d started to think you couldn’t make your own decisions.”
A Cassie decision. As if there are two kinds of decisions: the ones that Cassie makes, spontaneous and making for a good story, and the ones that I make. The kind that stir no ripples.
Today, I made a Cassie decision, except she didn’t back me up the way she’s always expected me to follow her. She didn’t do anything.
I’M DREAMING IN dirt and leaves and voices that sneak up behind me, until they start singing and I realize it’s my phone.
Cassie, it has to be, and I pick up without looking.
“Hey, it’s me.” A female voice, clipped and familiar.
“Who?”
“Juliana.”
Wow.
“Thank God you answered,” she says. “Freakin’ Cassie won’t pick up her phone. I thought you guys were still out there doing your vigilante thing.”
Cassie wouldn’t admit that she backed down. That she walked out of the story at the best part. I take a breath. “Yeah, about that.”
“You guys found him?”
“Well, I found him. And his friend.” My free hand clenches the blanket. “By myself.”
A long silence. In the background, water runs and dishes clank. Then she swears under her breath. “She left you out there?”
I pluck at a thread sticking out from my comforter. “I thought she was going to get help. Except I haven’t heard from her since, and her car is in her driveway, so she obviously made it back.”
She falls into a silence so deep that I wonder if she put the phone down and walked away. “Shit,” she says finally. “That’s…terrible, Savannah. I’m sorry.”
It feels uncomfortable to accept sympathy from Juliana, the girl of steel. It only solidifies the sinking pit in my stomach.
I assume the next ping of my phone is from Cassie. Making sure that I’m alive, perhaps even, I don’t know, apologizing. It could happen. Instead, it’s Emery. What are you up to tonight, champ?
Before I can stop myself, I write, My boyfriend’s in the hospital and my best friend ditched me, so…crying in my bedroom.
Emo-gency! she replies. Be there in fifteen.
FOURTEEN MINUTES LATER, Emery walks in with a plastic container of chocolate chip cookies and says, “Hey, Mr. Gregory, what do you think about our state qualifier here?”
My father turns off the sink. “Who?”
“That floor routine was a revelation.” Emery tosses me the container. “Did your boyfriend’s friends film it? I bet it’ll go viral.”
“Who?” Dad says again.
“Savannah,” Emery says through a mouthful of cookie. So graceful, she is, the crumbs trickling down her chin. “She made her comeback this morning.”
Dad looks at me, measuring Emery’s words with my face. Scanning my eyes the way he does the answers to his students’ tests. Right or wrong? He believes her. I see it, though his voice is skeptical. “Really,” he says.
Emery gleefully gives the play-by-play of the competition, certain not to leave out my pissy post-beam stomping around. She magnifies my split-decision floor routine–“I swear, the judges had tears in their eyes”–and describes the soccer team’s ruckus. “32.225,” she concludes, licking chocolate from her fingers. Really. No shame. “With two falls and a floor routine with no real tumbling.”
“And an improvised bar routine,” I add. For the first time since the meet, I almost feel happy.
Dad raises an eyebrow.
“My vault was legit,” I say.
“Oh, yeah. A real crowd-pleaser,” Emery says.
“Did you know about this?” Dad says to Mom.
Mom wipes a glass with more concentration than usual, a slip of a smile on her face.
SHE CALLS ME when I’m asleep. I answer with the cool clearness that arrives when the only light in your room comes from the waxing moon.
“What are you up to?” she says.
“Sleeping. You?”
She sighs. “Nothing, really.”
She waits for me to continue the conversation.
I wait, too. I watch the white glow on the pink carpet.
“Unbelievable about Marcos, huh?” she says finally.
My fingers tighten around the phone. “I guess so.”
“I can’t believe you went after those guys like that. What the hell were you thinking? You knew we were overmatched.”
Of course, Cass. Make it seem like I’m the wrong one.
“I warned you about Marcos,” she continues, and I imagine her eyes staring up at the ceiling, crafting all of her evidence. “These were the consequences. There are some risks that aren’t worth taking. You have to know when to bail out.”
Yes. All my fault.
This time, I’m not buying it.
“Hello?” she says.
“What would you do if I got hurt?”
A sharp inhalation. “What did they do to you, Savs?”
“Let me get this straight.” I am not burning. I am cool as the moon’s white glow, and just as clear. “You leave me in the woods. You wait twelve hours to call me. And you don’t ask if I’m okay.”
She exhales, long and shaky. “I went to get help.”
“So that’s how my dad appeared in his Spandex glory yet never saw you along the way?”
The silence extends for so long that I almost hang up, because goddammit, I’d rather she come up with an excuse than admit that she left me with no intention of helping.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice hitches like she might cry.
Don’t budge.
“I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything. The whole thing felt surreal. I’m sorry.”
That’s the closest she’ll give me to the truth, and even if that’s the way it went down, it’s still not enough.
“After all the times I’ve been there for you, Cass, I really thought you’d be there for me. Just this once.”
She’s quiet.
Both of us let the moment stretch until my eyelids droop. Then she says, “I thought you’d be there for me too with everything that’s happened.”
Eyes wide open. “Every time I try to have a real conversation, you blow me off.”
“Because I don’t want a goddamn conversation!” I hold the phone away from my ear. Her voice quiets, but not by much. “Don’t you understand? I just want to move on. I thought you’d get that, but you don’t. It’s all about your gymnastics and all about your boyfriend, and you don’t want to listen to anything I have to say about either of those.”
“You kept telling me to stop!” I no longer care that I’m yelling or that my parents might hear. “You never supported me.”
“Of course I did. I didn’t want you to get hurt,” she says. “I am looking out for you. Even if today wasn’t my shining moment.”
I don’t know what to believe anymore. Cassie’s perception of the truth, or my truth? Looking back now, the way she talked to Beth and Marcos under the guise of looking out for me seems extreme. She didn’t have to tell off Beth because I couldn’t make it to her birthday party. She didn’t have to be so cold to Marcos, the person who pulled her from freezing water. She’s wanted all of me, and yet at the same time, it’s not enough for her.
“You don’t need to protect me,” I say, “which you demonstrated so well today. I’m capable of making my own mistakes.”
“You’re the one who wants to freaking talk about our feelings every five seconds,” Cassie says. “Why did I do this or that or the other thing? God, Savannah, that’s what I have therapy for. I’m still trying to figure it out myself. You were supposed to just…” She falters. “Just know. You always knew me better than anyone.”
A pause.
“Well, I guess not anymore,” I say, and hang up the phone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I SUFFER THROUGH Monday morning with only Marcos’s texts to go by. Did your knee hurt as much as my head does? he writes. The verdict: concussed, stitched up, and with his elbow popped back into place. He assures me there’s no need to visit him and that he’ll be back in action in a few days. It seems too far away.
When I walk into AP Chem to find Cassie’s seat empty, my palms sweat and I itch to text her. Where are you? Are you okay? She didn’t go looking for me, yet that doesn’t stop me from wanting to search for her.
I send a message to Juliana instead. Do you know where Cassie is?
She responds immediately. We’re on a field trip at the MoMA. She’s quiet. Keeping an eye on her.
I’m not sure how to reconcile the aching in my head and heart, as if our fight on the phone left me emotionally hungover, with the same blaze of disappointment that made me hang up. I don’t know if it’s right to feel relieved and angry at the same time.
Of course the entirety of Ponquogue High School knows what happened this weekend, although their accounts vary. “I hear you kicked some serious ass this weekend,” Jason Kortis says to me approvingly as I fumble my way through the chem lab. “I always knew there was a bad-ass within you.”
“Savannah! Are you okay? Is Marcos okay?” Jacki Guzman pounces at our lockers.
“Alive and kicking.” Figures Cassie would have a conveniently timed field trip. I’m regretting not taking up my father on his rare “Are you sure you want to go to school?” offer this morning. I don’t want to answer questions. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I want to crawl back in bed and sleep until it’s time for practice. Sleep until June while I’m at it.
“Savannah?”
I whirl around. There’s no way.
Jacki squeals. “You’re alive!”
“Guess so.” Marcos’s voice is gravelly. Forehead covered with a gauze pad, his arm in a cast, two dimples that can’t be quelled despite the scratches across his cheeks, he looks at me and grins.
My heart flips. He’s patched back together. He’s here. “You said you weren’t back yet.”
He shrugs. “They let me out this morning–”
I don’t hesitate. I wrap my arms around him and kiss him, ignoring the chorus of catcalls and “Get it, Gregory!” from my classmates.
He stumbles backward, cast knocking into the orange locker. “I should dislocate my elbow more often.”
“Please don’t,” I mumble into his shoulder, “or I will need to break your skull.” I inhale deeply. Still fresh as cotton, still strong despite being thrown to the concrete.
He hugs me back just as fiercely as someone can with one arm. “If you were anyone else, I’d think you were kidding.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Concussed, generally shitty, and these bones are killing me,” he says into my neck.
“Maybe hugging isn’t the wisest choice.”
His arm tightens around me. “I’ll take that chance.”
WE’RE BOTH EXCUSED from gym–him for his elbow and concussion, me because Dad must have bragged about my meet in the faculty room; when I approached the locker room, Coach Doroski said, “We need to keep you in one piece for States!” Like he has any idea what States are. If it means no mesh jerseys for the day, though, I’ll take it.
As our classmates play flag football, Marcos and I walk along the tree line, sidestepping twigs and pinecones. I take a breath of the cool air. “I’m sorry I didn’t want to listen to you about Cassie,” I say. “I didn’t want to believe you. I still don’t want to, if I’m being honest. I think that things have been changing between us for a long time now.”
If I met Cassie today, would we still be friends? I don’t know. I want my friends to be loyal, willing to be honest without making it about their own benefit. She makes me laugh, pushes the messy strands of hair into place, and makes the unbelievable seem plausible. She sat with me for hours on end when all I could do was stare up at the ceiling after my surgery. She’ll turn on my favorite song from when we were twelve to cheer me up.
But she calls the shots. She makes the decisions, and God forbid I want to do something else. She’ll dig and dig until I relent. It was easier to do what she wanted, because I genuinely thought she wanted what was best
for both of us.
She left me.
I failed her, too. I didn’t answer the phone when she called me that night. I wasn’t under the bridge as the sun broke over the horizon to lock the car door and keep her from walking out.
I didn’t fail Marcos. Yes, I made a risky and not-so-smart decision to chase after those guys. I refused to hang back, though. I took the chance anyway.
“I’m sorry for scaring you,” he replies, dropping the leaf to lace his fingers through mine. They’re chilly but firm. “When I woke up in the ambulance, I realized that all of this had gone too far.”
“It wasn’t your fault on Sunday,” I say. That’s what Juliana had said–that he’d gone outside to throw out the trash.
“Yeah, I know. I remember that much. It had been building, though. You know what I mean? One thing led to another and, God, it was the scariest experience of my life.” He shakes his head gently. “Not worth the risk. Andreas and I had a good talk at the hospital. We’re both going to work harder on controlling our impulses.”
“Your heart’s in the right place,” I say. “I think you just sometimes run up against the wrong people.”
He nudges me. “Speaking of risks, if I had any idea you’d gone after that guy–”
“I know. It was stupid.” Dangerous. Terrifying. “Even Cassie warned me.”
We pause by a majestic pine and both of us breathe in deeply, the shouts of class and screeches of the whistle far behind.
“It’s hard for me not to assume the worst about people when I’ve met so many shitty ones,” he admits. “It’s easier to stick with the ones I know best so I don’t have to worry about others disappointing me.”
Unfortunately, the ones you know best can also be the ones who disappoint you the most.
“I loved your letter,” I tell him. “It really means a lot to me that you trusted me enough to let me in. I know I can’t fully understand everything about your life.” Just the way I’ve never been able to follow Cassie down her dark roads. “I’ll do my best, though. Promise.”
Lessons in Falling Page 25
