The Burning Girl

by Claire Messud

  I was pleased to see her get the dress, and we ate lobster salad off white linen for our ladies’ lunch, and I felt beautiful and new after the care of the tattooed stylist. On the way back to Royston in the car, I said to her, as we looked out at the highway (even the interstate verges were rendered beautiful by the mottled late-afternoon sun) that I felt thankful for our day together, and fortunate that she was my mother.

  I DIDN’T SPEAK TO or see Cassie until after school started, ninth grade, back in downtown Royston in the high school building we’d walked past and played around for so many years. Although she hadn’t grown much—she was probably 5'2", and still so thin—the proportions of her face had changed. Her nose was broader, her forehead higher, the arc of her cheekbones more deliberate. She had an adult face, one that looked as though it should be on a woman of six feet, not on a doll-sized person. No longer scrappy-looking, as I’d always known her, she’d become beautiful. Beautiful in a way that revealed my fancy haircut as a hoax, because with Cassie there was nothing to embellish or distract from her features. Her hair hung down, eternally fine and pale, below her shoulders; and either she’d become so expert with the makeup that she knew how to apply it invisibly, or she’d renounced it altogether. Her skin, lightly freckled, was like cream sprinkled with cinnamon. Her perfection made the gap between her teeth look like the handiwork of a marketer who, aware that perfection repels, had arranged, cannily, for this one alluring flaw.

  Her expression too had changed. She looked like an adult, yes, but a melancholy adult, as though great burdens had fallen upon her in the months since last we’d met. Her eyes, always saucy and impish, were wary now, withholding. She was oddly friendly on the first day, and ran across the forecourt outside school to throw her arms around me. “Juju!” she cried out, “I’ve missed you!”

  I couldn’t relax in her embrace. Jodie told me at recess that the Vosul family had moved up to Maine—that foolish mother had got some job in Portland—and so Delia was gone.

  “So you’re telling me that Cassie is suddenly short of friends.”

  “Could be.”

  CASSIE AND I had lunch a few times in the cafeteria, with other kids around. She hung around with the same crowd as in the previous couple of years—the Evil Morsel’s crowd, sans Morsel—but without her closest friend, Cassie didn’t belong in the same way. I’d always thought of her as a renegade, not a leader but an independent spirit; but watching Cassie that fall, I had a different sense: that she was small and distressed and fierce in her distress—that the devil-may-care act was a response to her powerlessness, a “better jump than get pushed” bravado. She was beautiful now, but she was also more clearly a wound, a wound trying hard to look like something else.

  She came to my house, one afternoon in late September. From the high school we could just walk; it wasn’t planned. As we lugged our backpacks through town, she phoned Anders—she called him Anders now—and told him not to pick her up; she’d make her own way home. His voice down the line sounded petulant, higher than I’d remembered. He dogged her a bit, about homework and getting dinner ready, but he didn’t yell or anything. When she hung up she made an exasperated sound in her throat. “Asshole.”

  “How’s it going, with that?” I asked, with an effort at bland concern.

  “Don’t patronize me, Juju.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “It’s okay, I get it. As my mom and Shute say, the world separates the wheat from the chaff. It’s from the Bible. They’ve already given up on me.”

  “Don’t be crazy.”

  “You think so? My mom says I’ll never amount to anything, and Anders—well, he’d do anything he could to stop me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “I love you, Juju—you’re so cute. If I was trying to tell you something, I’d tell it to you. No, just stating the facts.”

  “We’ve got our whole lives.”

  “Have you seen what that looks like in this town? Clipping hair at the Mane Event? Working the line at Henkel?”

  “We’re both going to get out. You don’t have to get far from here to see that the world is huge and full of crazy shit.”

  “Correction: we’ll both get out, but I’ve got to make my own way. I’ve got to make a plan.” She took a deep breath, and the words came in a rush like steam from a kettle. “Do you even know what I did this summer? Summer school in math. Babysitting for the Callaghans and the Justices—that obnoxious little kid Jackson, still in diapers, having tantrums in public where he lies down and waves his arms and legs like a bug and screams for his mom. Fucking awful. That, and watching Modern Family on demand, trying to make sure the a-hole didn’t catch me, because if you can believe it, he disapproves! You went off to your fancy camp and to Maine with your parents, and it was like I was in prison for three months. I couldn’t wait for school to start—me, Cassie Burnes, can you believe it? I couldn’t wait to get out of the house.”

  At that point we reached my place. My mother was bringing groceries in from the car, so we helped her. She made a fuss of Cassie and how happy she was to see her (“We’ve missed you, you know,” she said emphatically, trying to look meaningfully into Cassie’s eyes) and how she hoped we’d see more of her now that we were in town at the high school.

  “Wander over anytime,” my mother said. “Consider us a second home.”

  “Sure thing. Thanks, Carole.”

  We clattered up the stairs to my room at speed, as if we were having fun, making a familiar percussive thunder unheard in the house for years.

  “Careful, girls.” I could hear from my mother’s voice that she was smiling.

  What did we talk about? Peter, maybe a bit. Other kids at school, teachers. We watched videos on YouTube—pop music and rap, but also comedy shorts like Eddie Izzard, Key and Peele, superficial stuff, a few laughs, but nothing between us that mattered. Then my mother called up to say she was heading out to pick something up and did Cassie want a ride home, and that was that.

  If my mother thought it would be the first visit of many, she was mistaken. Cassie was friendly enough at school, as if I didn’t have ice shards in my heart, as if I couldn’t possibly; but she must have sensed something. Either that or she chose to keep a distance. I would not, could not, make a significant overture. My pride depended on this. She would have needed to make the effort, enough to be openly vulnerable; she would have had to risk my revenge. I like to think I wouldn’t have rebuffed her, but it’s possible that I would have. It’s possible that I would have felt the need to exercise the power if I’d had it. But she didn’t grant me the opportunity.

  “She’s so plastic,” I complained to Peter, who also spoke to her only at school. “Like she’s a cyborg. The real girl who was my friend all those years has gone over to the dark side.”

  Peter sighed. “She’s got problems.”

  “How do we know?” I knew he was right, but still.

  “The very fact that she doesn’t want us to see. You don’t hide if you don’t need to. It’s like a planet: you know it has to be round, but you only see a crescent, or half a circle. So you infer that part of it is in shadow. Then you have to figure out what’s in the shadow, and what causes it.”

  “But what if there’s just no there there?”

  “That’s crap, Juju.” It was.

  “Anders Shute,” I said.

  “What about Anders Shute?”

  “Anders Shute is the shadow.” We talked about this. “Though maybe,” I offered, “the person she really hates is Bev; only that’s not allowable, so Anders is the scapegoat.”

  “Maybe. It seems more complicated than that.”

  “You don’t think he’s doing anything bad, do you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Why would you even suggest that?”


  “That shit happens, you know.”

  Peter frowned. “Did she say something?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You’ve got to be careful, Juju. You can’t go saying—even thinking—stuff like that. It’s dangerous.”

  “Okay. But what if he’s dangerous? What if he’s the Dark Thing?”

  “What?”

  “What if she needs our help to fight him?”

  “She’d have to ask for help, you know? Short of that, we’d be stirring up trouble where maybe there isn’t any.”

  “But what if—”

  “You can’t make a case on ‘what if,’ ” he said, more certain now. “My mom’s a lawyer, and she always says that. Unless Cassie tells you something—or me, which doesn’t seem likely—then it’s conjecture. Which is to say, it’s nothing at all. Don’t go repeating that idea to anyone, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Not to your mom, or Jodie, or anyone. It’s not a joke.”

  “I know.”

  I didn’t take it lightly. But once I had it in my head, I couldn’t entirely get rid of it. It felt logical, somehow. I read the papers. I watched TV. That kind of shit went on all the time, almost in plain sight. He was essentially a stepfather, wasn’t he? And if wicked stepmothers had the worst rap in all fairy-tale history, stepfathers had the worst rap, as far as I could tell, in real-life history: they had all the power of a father, without the constraints. And if not Anders Shute, what was making Cassie into a half moon?

  THE NEXT TIME she came to my house after school was in late January. A snowstorm blew in in the late morning, earlier and stronger than had been predicted: classes and practices were cancelled from one o’clock onward. Bev and Anders were still working, and Cassie had no way to get home, so I suggested that she come to my place. She asked a couple of other people before she agreed, but they lived farther away. So we walked back through the snow, the wind biting at our noses and cheeks.

  I reminded her of our best sledding winter, when we were eight or nine, and of the snow fort we’d built in my yard with my father’s help—a real igloo, nicely packed smooth—how we’d crawled inside with hot chocolate my mother made us and my sparse bag of leftover Halloween candy. We loved the igloo so much, wanting to pretend we weren’t freezing, that we stayed there until we couldn’t feel our toes. Afterward, we’d taken a steaming bath in the big Victorian claw foot, half laughing, half crying at the burn in our thawing extremities. It was probably the last time we’d been fully naked together. Even then I’d been slightly shy, aware of being a big-boned giant in the porcelain tub.

  We were almost conspiratorial, remembering. When we got to my house and my mother was out, we made hot chocolate for old time’s sake, and sat on the barstools in the kitchen to drink it. The snow came down in fast little flakes, almost sideways in the wind, the kitchen illuminated by its white light. Our faces tingled from the heat after the cold—“a healthy glow,” my mother would say—and I could see Cassie’s scalp pink through her snowy hair.

  We felt so close, kicking our feet against the cabinets under the island, sticking our noses in the hot-chocolate steam.

  “What’s going on with you?” I asked. “I mean, really?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I only get the sunny side, nowadays. You may not notice it, but it’s true. And I know there’s stuff going on.”

  “You do?”

  “C’mon, Cass. How long have we been friends?”

  “Are we still friends?”

  “Aren’t we?”

  Her face was suddenly serious. “We’re friends, of course we are. Remember the Girl Scout song?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “So you’re my gold friend. My goldest friend.”

  “But?”

  “But what?”

  I looked away. “But nothing,” I said, and turned back to her, and smiled a good fake smile.

  PART THREE

  CASSIE DISAPPEARED in early April of ninth grade. She disappeared not once but twice, although from the outside, the two incidents seemed like one.

  Some things I wrote down in my diary. I know that on the ninth of April, about a week after Easter, people were talking about it at school. It was a Tuesday. Cassie had gone missing on the Friday night or Saturday, apparently, but Bev and Anders didn’t report it, not straightaway. There’d been an argument—she’d broken curfew on the Friday night and didn’t come home until two in the morning—and Anders, according to Peter, who heard it from Cassie in the brief moment she was back, threatened to throw her out of the house for good.

  “Out of my house!” Cassie had said to Peter, red-eyed and still wild about it. “Can you believe that? Standing in my kitchen in his Jockey shorts at two in the morning, that pimply white chicken breast with his wispy chest-hair goatee between his tits, standing there telling me I’ll lose my right to my own fricking house?!”

  Bev, apparently, remained up in their bedroom while Anders yelled at Cassie. “My own mother doesn’t give a shit?” she said to Peter, incredulous even days later. “After all I’ve put up with, day after day of it, over two years now, biting my tongue every single day, all for her, and she can’t be assed to drag herself downstairs for me?” And again: “I half wondered—no, fuck it, I totally wondered—if she’d sent him. Do you know what I mean? Can’t you see it? Fluffing her hair with her fingers, all flirty, like ‘Oh, Cassie, she’s so out of control, I can’t handle it, Anders honey, off you go!’ All that bullshit about how we were a team! All my life, ‘Just you and me, Cassie! We can do anything as long as we’re together, Cassie! You’re my one and only, Cassie!’ That fucking lying fat cunt! All bullshit, all lies. From the get-go.”

  Cassie had come to Peter, she told him, because he was the one friend she could trust. He was beyond surprised when she showed up—they hadn’t hung out in ages—although he told me that after only a few minutes it felt like no time had passed. She told him that she knew he loved her—I rolled my eyes at that one, we all did; he hadn’t gone out with any other girls after Cassie—and she knew that he was strong and sane. Peter told me he felt relieved, in a way, that at last it seemed like she could see him clearly. Peter wouldn’t try anything, she knew, she said, and he didn’t. But still, when Peter tried to put his arm around her—just as a friend, he told me, just consolingly—she flipped away fast and angry and lay on his bed facing the wall. She was that upset.

  He couldn’t say anything and he couldn’t touch her. He listened to her staggered snotty breathing, and they waited, she and he, quiet like that, like she was an animal injured in a trap, and he watched the light fading at the window, the stillicy blue dusk, her eyes writ in the sky, and he sat on the floor with his knees up and his back against the side of the bed, and he waited, and waited, and eventually the breathing evened out and she was asleep.

  THIS WASN’T the story, of course; it was the hiatus in the drama—in Cassie’s real-life drama, so far from a game of pretend. She slept on his bed in her clothes, without stirring, from that late Wednesday afternoon until late Thursday morning. He didn’t tell his parents. He pretended to be sick, and skipped dinner, went downstairs only to say he was going to bed, and he stayed near her, eventually sleeping on the floor with a cushion beneath his head. She’d made him promise, when she arrived, that he wouldn’t tell Bev she was there; which meant that Peter’s parents couldn’t know, or they’d insist. Cassie was an official missing person, after all.

  “But you have to understand,” he said to me, “she said it was life or death; she said, she insisted, that it would kill her to go home.”

  “That they’d kill her?” I asked. When Peter and I had this conversation, Cassie had gone missing again, was missing, we realized, for real (though the first time had felt real too, until she came back). We had no idea what had happened to her.

  The official story—Bev’s story—was that they’d had an argument, another argument, the hundred thousandth argument, and
that Cassie had stormed off. It seemed almost certain that an argument was part of the truth, and almost as certain that it wasn’t the whole truth. Surely, we thought, sinister Anders Shute must have a part in the truth.

  “She didn’t say that,” Peter insisted, “she said it would kill her. Which kind of made sense once she told me the story.”

  CASSIE’S STORY, according to Peter, was this: back in the winter, probably around the time that she had come to my house in the snowstorm, her life at the Burnes house had become unbearable. She couldn’t do anything right—Bev and Anders and, it seemed, God himself conspired against her—and Cassie, without the Morsel, without me, without Peter, was on the verge of despair.

  I try to imagine feeling lonely the way she felt lonely, then. I’m not sure that I can. I’m a dog and she was a cat: I, slobbery and keen; she, self-contained and ultimately private. For so many years it didn’t matter; but then she was alone, in her feline nature, and lonely. I should have been able to sense how it was. She was too proud to tell me, or Peter for that matter; and I was too proud and too wounded to look.

  But Cassie had always had her guardian angel. She’d always believed in him. He called her baby doll, he protected her from harm. He saw the sheen of her, where Anders and Bev saw only tarnish; she had faith in his faith. She wasn’t crazy; she’d been told he was dead, but in order to find her path, her way out of Royston, she decided to search for Clarke Burnes, to see what she could find out.

  She’d looked before. We’d looked together once, on my mom’s computer, when we were younger. But she told Peter it had become a periodic thing, since Shute moved in, to check and see if she could find traces of her real father. She wanted to figure out, she said, who she was—and who she could become. She’d Googled his name a hundred times and there had never been anything that pertained. A Harvey Clarke Burnes of Rome, Georgia, and a Lucile Clarke Burnes, long deceased, and an Ann Clark Burnes, with no e, very much alive, with an account on Facebook. Documents involving a Mr. Clarke and a Mr. Burnes placed their names misleadingly side by side, so that they’d appeared on the search and caused her heart to beat faster for a minute. But this time, in the winter of 2013, when she Googled Clarke Burnes, she found—not on the first page of results, but on the fifth—a reference to an Arthur Burnes: “Coach” Arthur Burnes, “aka Coach, aka Captain Clarke, aka Cap’n Crunch.” It was the caption to a photo in the Bangor Daily News, of Bangor, Maine, from a few months before, when the Bangor High School football team had won the league final. The image showed entire the football team, along with Arthur Burnes, aka Captain Clarke, their senior coach. He was also, she discovered when she typed in the name “Arthur C. Burnes” along with “Bangor,” a beloved math teacher at the city high school, where he’d taught for the past fourteen years.