The Burning Girl

by Claire Messud

  The next day, Friday, it rained heavily. Bev dropped Cassie off with a particular plump fuss and flurry—“I’ve got to run. I’m due at Abe Peterson’s and he won’t get his morphine till I get there. The night nurse missed her last round, so he’s been without since midnight. And it’s bone cancer. Imagine that, would you?”

  “I’d rather not,” my mother replied, shepherding Cassie in and Bev back out the door. Later, at the dinner table, she said, “Why, if she was in such a hurry, did she even get out of the car? To come rain in our front hall for a bit?”

  My dad smiled, weighing his quinoa and cranberry on his fork. “Bev likes a show,” he said. “She doesn’t think it happened if nobody was there to see it.”

  This sounded true, and made me wonder what other traits that sort of person might have. It made me wonder whether I was that sort of person myself: I always liked to imagine an audience. When I wrote in my diary, I couldn’t imagine that the only person who would read it was me; but the whole point of a diary was to record the things you didn’t want anybody else to know. Maybe, I sometimes thought, the other reader was simply your older self, the same you, changed by time. This bothered me too, because what was a self, a person, if she could be so changed—as changed as an abandoned building, say? What could we rely on then, besides the rocks in the quarry?

  But when Cassie arrived, her near-white hair dripping on her shoulders from the short distance between the Honda and the house, her white bandaged paw aloft, I was preoccupied instead with whether we should bake banana bread or chocolate-chip cookies, whether we should watch a comedy or an action movie, and whether, later, we’d weave friendship bracelets or write a play.

  The next Monday morning early, we had a call from Marj, who managed in her way to make tenderness seem businesslike, and who said she’d thought it over and knew how sorry we must be about what happened, and would Cassie and I like to come back for the rest of the month to help out with the cats—only ever the cats, mind you—because that might give everyone a chance to feel better about the whole sad story. She’d called Bev and Cassie first, I discovered later, and Bev had already said yes, which made it easy, even necessary, for my mother to say yes also. So on Monday afternoon, that very day, we were back in our smocks in the stinky, chilled cat room at the animal shelter, up to our gloved elbows in turd-filled litter and swooning over the kittens, Xena and Electra, we would take home.

  FROM THERE, the last stretch of the summer unspooled like thread off a bobbin. We kept meaning to return one more time to the Bonnybrook, but there was always a reason not to. Cassie’s dressing came off, her hand scarred but fully functioning. We returned to the Saghafis’ pool with its synthetic blue water as if the quarry had never called to us, had never been. We made plans for the fall; we went back-to-school shopping; we slept sanely in our beds, and got on with things.

  Only months later, we heard that the property had been sold on, that the developers who’d bought it were lobbying at the State House in Boston to build condos around the original mansion. We heard too that the new people had properly sealed the perimeter with barbed-wire fence, including on the trail through the woods from the quarry.

  Then, and for all sorts of reasons, our Bonnybrook days, our shared dream, came to seem like something that might never really have happened. And once Cassie and I came unstuck, neither of us had anyone to remind us it was true.

  PART TWO

  MY MOTHER assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later, for reasons more or less identifiable; everyone loses a best friend at some point. Not in the “she moved to Tucson” sense, but in the sense that “we grew apart.”

  I, who pride myself on seeing things, can’t even now properly sort out what happened. Cassie had her version, though she never told it to me, and when, much later, I asked her outright (“What happened to us?” is how I put it, which seemed more neutral than I felt) she looked at me a long time—a look I’d describe as “hurt,” though I was the one who’d been wronged, surely?—and shook her head slightly. When I gave her a chance to explain, that was the best she could do.

  Seventh grade is difficult for most. My parents said it was the time of life they’d least like to live again, which wasn’t helpful, as I had no choice but to live it. But seventh grade is differently difficult for each person. For Zach Filkins, it was difficult because they didn’t have a middle school math class challenging enough for him and he had to go over to the high school to join the advanced freshmen. On the other hand, Zach wasn’t interested in going to the middle school prom, so didn’t ask anyone, and didn’t have to contemplate the possibility of rejection. Whereas Brent O’Connor—a nice guy, but in seventh grade he still didn’t break five feet—had to brave the humiliation of being turned down for the dance by three girls, one of whom was me (I was already 5'6"—it was impossible). Then there was the slightly different challenge of being Alicia Homans, the fourth girl he asked, who knew it, but who accepted cheerfully and held her head as high as if she’d been his first choice.

  There are the social struggles, and the agonies and embarrassments of puberty (I won’t forget the mixture of triumph and pity I felt when Bridget Mulvaney flounced down the corridor tossing her famous auburn curls, with a period stain the size of a saucer on her purple gypsy skirt), and the weight of the world that falls upon each of us in varying degrees, as we finally relinquish childhood’s clouds of glory to live, ever after, in our earthly realm.

  In seventh grade, Jude Robben lived up to his name and was arrested for shoplifting a camera from Walmart. Andrew Dray got a caution from his law-enforcement uncle for weed smoking and small-time dealing. Rumor had it that Stacey Bilic gave blow jobs to half a dozen guys in one night at Tessa Rubin’s party in late May of that year, and the struggle for Stacey was that it didn’t matter whether the rumor was true. There was no point loudly denying it, because that meant no more as a truth or a falsehood than did the original story: in seventh grade, we moved suddenly into a world of adult actions and of adult conjecture.

  It was also a world of adult consciousness, with all the strangeness that implies. Like: my mother’s story about Cassie and me is that our paths, always destined to diverge, simply took their natural course. It was a given, for example, that I’d eventually go to college. Because my parents assumed I would, but also because I wanted to, because I was good at school and proud of it and couldn’t imagine not going on to more school after school. Even when I’d dreamed of being a pop star, I imagined going to NYU or UCLA in between performances.

  But Cassie’s mother hadn’t gone to college for the pleasure of learning. She’d studied nursing only later, in her midtwenties, right before she had Cassie. She’d left school at eighteen and worked as a waitress, and then in the hat and glove department at Macy’s, apparently—which always surprised me, because I thought of department-store staff as tidy and elegant.

  Cassie wasn’t especially good at school, and she didn’t like it enough to work at it, and by seventh grade this had consequences. We’d left the elementary for the middle school, up Route 29, not far from the animal shelter. For those of us from Royston, middle school was just two years, because Royston Elementary had a sixth grade; but a lot of the other kids from neighboring towns had already been there a year. The school building, gray concrete unlike our cozy old Victorian elementary school downtown, squatted in an enormous parking lot between two strip malls. Its Astroturf fields glowed curiously green in all seasons; but mostly we lived in the locker-lined, windowless hallways, all of us lumpy and greasy in the fluorescence. Kids from the other towns seemed bigger and older than the kids we knew. Whereas before school had felt like a cheerful dysfunctional family—we’d known most of our classmates all our lives—now it felt like a parade ground, a theater of strange performances. Suddenly, we didn’t share the same schedules, or teachers, or classrooms; scattered, we didn’t necessarily even arrive or leave together. Cassie and I were pushed apart by bureaucracy.

  I got p
ut in advanced math and advanced English and while the school didn’t technically have an advanced history class, Cassie and I were in different sections, and mysteriously she was in with the troublemakers like Stacey Bilic and Andrew Dray, while I was in with May Hwang and Zach Filkins and Angie Pitts, the daughter of Mr. Pitts, the high school AP history teacher. Cassie and I were together only for PE and orchestra, where she played the flute and I played the cello and we sat on opposite sides of the room anyhow.

  That’s what my mother felt happened, and maybe partly she was right. But I blamed the new girl from two towns over, Delia Vosul, whom I quickly took to calling the Evil Morsel. At first Cassie laughed and we made fun of Delia together—she had orangey-blond blow-dried hair, bulging push-up bras and shiny lip gloss, and a way of glancing at boys out of the corner of her sleepy almond eye as if she were Sofía Vergara, starring in a TV show invisible to anyone but herself.

  But Delia and Cassie had history and math and English together, and by the beginning of October they had “study dates,” which, as I said to my mom, seemed mostly to involve going to Rite Aid. Cassie tried to tell me that actually Delia was really nice—and funny, she said she was funny, when anyone could tell the girl had the sense of humor of a brick. Then it turned out that Delia liked to sing, that she too wanted to be a pop star, and planned to audition for the spring musical, though when she sang Adele in the cafeteria and Cassie, admiring, flashed her gap-toothed grin, her voice was thin and raspy and she sang flat and couldn’t tell. Mr. Montgomery, the music teacher, apparently couldn’t tell either, because he gave Delia the solo part in the chorus, which we were to perform at the holiday assembly in December. I probably shouldn’t have told Cassie that Montgomery only wanted to jump Delia’s bones; but I did. In the old days, Cassie would have agreed with me or at least she would have laughed; but in thrall to Delia, she just bit her lip and looked away.

  So it wasn’t such a surprise when I asked Cassie what we should dress up as for Halloween, and she said she wasn’t going trick-or-treating, she was going to spend the evening watching horror movies at Delia’s house. I’d discover only later that this was actually a boy-girl party, complete with Truth or Dare and Spin the Bottle, involving older kids. It constituted the Evil Morsel’s successful bid for cool. And Cassie’s, for that matter, even though she’d always made fun of those things. There were, I found out, just ten kids: five girls and five boys, one of them Peter Oundle from the year above, whom Cassie started dating that very night and would ditch before Christmas, even though she knew I’d liked him for ages.

  I COULDN’T HELP feeling she’d started going out with Peter Oundle just to hurt my feelings. She’d always said she couldn’t see the attraction. Maybe Delia the Evil had told her Oundle was desirable, and it wasn’t about me at all. Or maybe it was about how into her he was; because according to Cassie (though I couldn’t decide if I believed her), Peter confessed that he’d had a crush on her since we were all kids. Whatever her reason for saying yes when he asked if he could kiss her, it stung. We didn’t fight outright—I couldn’t risk it—but we became stiff with each other. We stepped through the looking glass into a world all of fake friendliness, where Cassie would give me a broad smile when she saw me—but not too big, do you see? Like the parody of her old smile; and I would smile too, although it felt like a grimace, and I was sure everyone around us, and Cassie most of all, could see the sham of it. But she wasn’t letting on; she would smile and smile and be a villain, and I, who felt like a Catholic light-up statuette of Mary with a bleeding heart, would stand there bleeding, invisibly bleeding out, holding my lunch tray with May Hwang at my elbow and a grin on my face.

  She fell hard for the Evil Morsel. If I’d held my tongue, if I’d tried harder—not even to be friends with Delia, but maybe just uncritically to let Cassie be friends with her—maybe then? I’m not convinced, but maybe. As it was, I’d shown my hand from the beginning. I’d called the girl Evil Morsel, for God’s sake. There was no way back from that.

  THAT SEPTEMBER Bev too fell in love. I didn’t know, at first. Strange, blowsy Bev, with her sweet-smelling honey hair and her flowy skirts, who seemed even further removed from romance than my own parents, as far gone into the realm of sexlessness as Nino Zeppala, the woodshop teacher with the leather vest and steampunk beard—Bev fell in love with a man at her Bible study group. Bev fell in love with Dr. Anders Shute.

  Now of course I wonder whether they first met at the hospital in Haverhill when Cassie went to get her bandage off. I don’t recall Cassie saying that she’d seen Dr. Shute that late August day; but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Because it seemed a pretty big coincidence that he’d join the Bible study that fall, just out of the blue. Bev had been a part of it for years already then—Alpha Group potlucks and scripture analysis with Pastor Phil from their church, a part of Bev’s life that Cassie rolled her eyes over and wanted nothing to do with, always on Tuesday evenings at the same time as Cassie’s youth group, which Cassie tolerated because there were a couple of plausible-looking guys.

  I don’t know how long it was, exactly, before Cassie became aware of Dr. Shute in the hallways of the church—mixing powdered mashed potatoes or frying sausages in the church kitchen, arranging the circle of puffed-seat folding chairs in the community hall before meeting. How long before she knew he was there at all, and how long before she realized that her mother made googly eyes at him and that he, even in his wanness, responded? And what does it tell you that I didn’t know until Thanksgiving, when Bev called up my mother to invite us all over to their house for turkey—which had never happened before, although they’d been a few times to our house, in quiet years, the two of them? And when my mother said thanks, but we had my grandparents and my father’s brother’s family coming to town, Bev said, well how about just for some pie and coffee then, even afterward, because there’s someone special I’d like you to meet. My mother agreed we’d stop by for pie, even though she said to me she knew we wouldn’t want any, seeing as Grandma Robinson’s specialty was pie—pecan, blueberry, strawberry-rhubarb—and we’d be stuffed to the gills by five o’clock.

  I felt awkward—and that was before I knew about Dr. Shute. In all the years, my dad had never spent time at the Burneses’, and my mom only for a chat or a cup of tea when picking me up or dropping me off. Cassie and I didn’t hang out at all, by then—“Wait, and it will change,” my mother said; or else, “Growing pains! Growing pains!” as though once we’d all reached some full-size state, fully boobed and menstruating and hormonally rebalanced, Cassie and I would fall back into the rhythms of our friendship as if the Evil Morsel had never existed. We rarely sat together on the bus, and if my mother or Bev picked us up, we ran to the car from different ends of the school steps, and the grown-up kept conversation going on the ride home. I pointed this out and my mother seemed not quite to believe me; but she always had the radio on in the background, so there was never any real silence, and maybe she couldn’t tell how it was.

  After school, Cassie was often with Peter and Delia and Delia’s boyfriend, Arturo, in the eighth grade like Peter, a double-date of cool kids cuddling against the wall; while I stood out on the steps with my backpack at my feet and my headphones on, listening to retro stuff, Adele or Duffy, looking out into the traffic, as if I were in a hurry. I had other friends, but I’d lost the friend I loved best, and had loved without thinking for as long as I could remember, and it seemed absolutely essential not to appear to care.

  (Here’s another thing I couldn’t quite figure out: I was full-sized, as was Delia too. I didn’t flaunt them like she did, but I had boobs and hips, and by October I had my period too. Whereas Cassie still looked like a kid, tiny and all bones, her jeans from the kids’ department. I couldn’t fathom how Peter would choose her, would want to kiss her, over everybody else—over me. Was it her sexy gap-toothed mouth, or the sense that she might not say no to anything at all? But he wasn’t like that. And I knew her; I knew that part of her w
anted someone else to say no for her, to rescue her from herself—and maybe that was what attracted him, smelling that need in her like an animal.)

  Halloween, a day I’d always looked forward to, suddenly turned into an ordinary day, even a worse-than-ordinary day, because it held the memory of its specialness. We still decorated the front lawn—the muslin ghosts hanging from the maple branches, the fake spider webs over the holly bushes, the Styrofoam gravestones tucked into the piles of leaves—and my father still carved the pumpkins and put them out with candles in them. We still raided CVS for jumbo bags of mini Snickers and Starbursts and Tootsie Rolls. All those things were the same, but instead of racing through pizza with Cassie and burning my tongue on the melted cheese, then getting hyped and giggly dressing in my room, I sat at the kitchen table with my parents slowly eating pork chops, mashed potatoes, and apple sauce—“masticating” is the word that comes to mind—interrupted occasionally by the thump of feet on the front steps. I played my mother’s role, handing out candy to the little kids whose parents waited in the shadows on the front path. Like my mother always did, I asked in a falsely jolly voice, “What are you meant to be? A burglar! Great costume,” I’d lie. “You get an extra piece of candy for that.”

  The Saghafi kids came as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and their costumes actually were impressive, made by their mother, involving repurposed baseball shirts and beanie hats and a great deal of wadding that can’t just have been cushions because it was too well distributed around their middles. They wore their father’s shoes, probably wadded also, so they looked as though they had clown feet. I gave a big thumbs-up to Mrs. Saghafi, who called, “Not going out this year, Julia?”