The Burning Girl Read online

  Peter was badly hurt—he told me so, and even months later he would have got back together with her in a minute, if she’d wanted. “I’ve liked her for ages,” he confided. “Remember last summer, when you guys were walking past our basketball game, and Beckett yelled something rude? I knew you’d laugh it off, but I could tell she was pissed. And I came after you guys because I wanted her to know it wasn’t me.”

  “You wanted her to like you.”

  “Yeah.”

  He felt a lot—he feels a lot—Peter, even though he didn’t want people to see it. He wanted to be cool, and emotion wasn’t; but he couldn’t help feeling. That all seemed so clear to me—it was part of what I’d always loved about him. You could say, in a way, that I loved how much he loved Cassie: I just wished it were me instead. And she? I don’t think she knew it for love, not then. She wasn’t earnest in that same way. She was, somehow, a little cold inside—actually cool. It was the right word. It was part of what both Peter and I loved about her.

  As for Cassie’s other friendships, needless to say, Bev didn’t like the Evil Morsel any more than I did, though I’d like to think that at least some of her reasons were different. But it meant Cassie didn’t talk much about school at home, or vice versa. She segregated these two sections of her life, lived two lives. She kept lipstick and eyeliner and jeans with holes in them in her locker along with makeup-remover pads, and she took to dressing a second time before the first bell and a third time after the last one. From what little Cassie conveyed to me, Delia thought it was funny. I might have found it funny too if we’d still been close, but when I told Jodie, she rolled her pristine, un-made-up hazel eyes and whispered, “Doesn’t that just strike you as so sad? I mean, almost pathetic? Like, why doesn’t she feel okay being who she is, instead of putting on a disguise, like a costume, every morning?”

  “What if she feels like the person she is at home is the one in disguise, though? And like she’s not allowed to be her real self when she’s there?”

  Jodie shook her head. “That’s just sad, you know?”

  In the New Year, maybe late February or so—after Valentine’s Day, and maybe it was even decided then, in the course of an evening Bev and Anders Shute spent canoodling over lo mein and a tiki candle at the Lotus Garden on Route 29, while Cassie sat at home with Electra on her lap, watching reruns of Friends and texting with Delia—Dr. Anders Shute formally moved into the picturesque white Cape with its skirt of fence.

  Cassie said that they’d sat her down and explained that they were married in the eyes of God. They’d prayed about it together, Bev and Anders Shute told her—they sat on the sofa holding hands while they talked, Cassie said, and they finished each other’s sentences—and God had blessed them as man and wife. If they weren’t yet married in a courthouse, Anders Shute said, it was only because of her, because of Cassie: they didn’t want to complicate things legally until Cassie was comfortable. This, Anders Shute made clear, was Bev’s wish. But they would henceforth be a Family—Cassie said they both kept saying the word as if it had a capital letter—and Anders Shute said she must think of him as her Father (again, a capital letter); and that sentence, Cassie said, Bev made no move to finish for him. But when he said it, Cassie saw that Bev couldn’t look at her, but looked instead down at her lap. “Because she knew,” Cassie said, “that it was fat fucking chance. Like anyone but my real dad could ever, ever be my father.”

  Dr. Anders Shute abandoned his apartment in Haverhill, put his furniture in storage (with the exception of a few inexplicable artifacts: a signed Red Sox baseball in a satin-lined box; a garish and not-small painting of a sunset in Maine involving boulders, seascape, and great swathes of pink and purple, all in an ornate gilded frame; and a large orange-and-yellow blown-glass display bowl that looked so much like a wedding gift that you wanted to ask him whether he had, in fact, been married) and arrived, according to Cassie, on a Sunday afternoon, with three large suitcases and a box of books, in his silver-green Honda Civic that matched Bev’s crimson one, only it was a newer model. In bulk, his clothes, Cassie said, smelled like the health-food store, that particular vitamin stink that seeps from the pill bottles and makes you want to gag. She was also perturbed to find that he—like she herself—used Clairol Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner on his lank locks, and blue Listerine mouthwash for his gums.

  “Just the idea of him in our bathroom grosses me out,” she told me one early spring lunchtime in the cafeteria. Under the fluorescent light, her eyes were red-rimmed and her nostrils too—she had a more powerful white-rabbit aspect than usual.

  “But do you still think he’s so . . .”

  “Of course.” She turned to her french fries, swiping a couple at a time through their glob of ketchup. “But mostly, an asshole.”

  “Asshole. Oh no. How so?”

  “You know how he’d never been to church, I think, before joining Mom’s Bible study class? Well, it’s like he’s now the most Christian of all.” She shook her head. “Is he trying to impress Mom? Does he really believe this shit? Or is it some calculated way to control us—to control me?”

  “Like how?”

  “Like, there’s the clothes and makeup thing—”

  I looked at her black concert T-shirt and her torn jeans, her raccoon eyes and purple lipstick. “You seem to be dodging that bullet pretty well so far.”

  “So far, yeah, but you have no idea. They check my closet. They ‘confiscated’ three skirts for being ‘too short.’ He told her my party heels were too high. I had to take down some of my posters—like the Supernatural one, because he said it wasn’t ‘appropriate,’ because there are demons on the show.”

  “Or is it because the actors are too hot?”

  “Maybe that too. But suddenly they want to know every YouTube video I watch, every website I visit, every book I read, every song I listen to . . .”

  “And that’s him? Or your mom too?”

  “It’s both of them. But it’s coming from him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  I believed her. You didn’t have to be a shrink to see he could get Bev to do almost anything he wanted. “What about the other thing?”

  “What other thing?”

  “Well, you thought . . . you said before, at Thanksgiving, that maybe he—” If she didn’t remember what she’d said, I shouldn’t remind her. It was good if she’d forgotten; it meant it wasn’t true.

  “You mean that I thought he’d gone looking for me. That he’d found my mom because he wanted to get to me. That’s what you mean, right?”

  I nodded. I didn’t understand why I felt embarrassed, but I did.

  “Look,” she said, and because I knew her as well as I knew myself, I could tell she was both serious and sort of acting at the same time; she was “acting serious,” as if she were in an episode of Supernatural or something like it, a teen psychodrama that both was and wasn’t like life. “Look, I don’t exactly know what he’s trying to do. But he looks at me sometimes—I catch him looking at me through those little eyes—and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”

  “But does he—”

  “He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t say anything. Nothing I could point to and get him in trouble for. Nothing you’d know was wrong. But he’s just off, right? He’s started coming out with quotations from the Bible—‘from scripture,’ he calls it—and it always seems like he’s boning up, like he’s been memorizing this shit for homework—”

  “Like what kind of stuff?”

  “You know, ‘The works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness . . .’ or ‘Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy’—crazy, bullying stuff.”

  “And your mom?”

  “My mom is like . . . it’s like he’s literally sent by God. Like she never thought she could be so lucky.” Cassie looked down at the table and
for a second there was no pretense, no mask on her face, and her expression was baffled and sad. She looked like the little kid she had been. “I don’t want to be the one to ruin it for her, you know? I can’t do that.”

  I’d heard this already from Peter. But her despair felt real, as if it had a color and filled the air. It was ochre. Ochre and acrid.

  “What can I do, Cass? What can I do to help?”

  She switched back to her masked self, with a sharp bark of laughter. Mirthless. “Delia says I can come live at her place—how do you think that’ll go down?”

  “Badly.” I was trying to pull her back to me, to get the real girl to return. “But your mom might not say no to me, to my mom, if you wanted to come live at our place for a while. I can easily ask—”

  “That’s so sweet of you, Juju. You’ve always been the sweetest. But you know I couldn’t live at your house. That would never work.”

  “Why not? We’ve got lots of room, and your mom knows us so well—”

  “Trust me”—and she even put her hand on my forearm, as if the director of the TV episode had suggested the gesture, that it would demonstrate the right combination of condescension and fakery—“it just isn’t a good idea.”

  My new friends, people like Jodie and Jensen, couldn’t fathom my loyalty to Cassie. There was some leeway when you’d been friends since nursery school. We all made exceptions in our judgment for things like that. But Cassie’s tone when she said I couldn’t help her—I saw, suddenly, that while I’d felt our friendship, though in a bumpy stretch, was still the most precious, she thought she could laugh at me to my face. If I’d been going around with my mother’s words in my head (“Wait and it will change!” . . . “Things look different depending on where you stand!”), she’d been going around with a distinct hierarchy in hers, in which she was Regina George from Mean Girls and I was Janis. Frankly, if she wanted to play that game, I could list a dozen ways in which I was her superior, from my grades to my parents’ house to my boobs to my morals. I wasn’t proud of my internal rant—I knew better than to speak these ugly thoughts aloud, even to my mother, but I had them. I wasn’t just hurt but I hated her a little too.

  I discovered I could hate her a bit, and because I didn’t tell her so, because our friendship went along on this reduced, part-time scale that didn’t allow for arguments, there was no noticeable change in our relationship. She didn’t know my feelings had changed—and I assumed she couldn’t tell. I could also add to my list of superiorities the fact that I was more observant and sensitive than she, that I could tell when she was being fake but the reverse wasn’t apparently true.

  That spring, I had a busy exterior life, between school and speech team; but I had a busy interior life too, listening to Cassie’s intimacies as if I were still her loving friend, while feeling like a spy, gathering data for a professional report.

  That wasn’t why I became friends with Peter. He’d sought me out that winter after things between him and Cassie ended. We didn’t hang out at school—he was a jock, a track star, hot even when his hair was dark with sweat, and into math and science. But he called me one night in January, and invited me to meet up at the diner in Royston to talk about Cassie, because he said he was worried about her. That was when he told me about their breakup, how it had been her choice, but he secretly hoped they could work things out.

  After that, we’d speak often on the phone, maybe even a few times a week, a strange friendship, rarely face-to-face in the beginning. There wasn’t, in our middle school lives, another way for us to spend time together. And while at first we talked mostly about Cassie—how she didn’t seem really to know herself, and how Delia had too much influence over her, and how she was turning, heliotropically, to the dark sun of the party crowd in a way that dismayed Peter, who so passionately wanted to be her savior—over time we talked about other things too: the pressures he felt from his parents (his dad was an engineer at Henkel and his mom had a general law practice in Newburyport, “nothing fancy,” he said, but for her to be a lawyer was fancy enough, and put him in the subset of kids at school in which I also found myself, of whom things were expected), or the school gossip (what parties there’d been, although he went to them and mostly I didn’t, and what funny or shocking or predictable things people had done, or how drunk or high they’d been), or funny observations about teachers or kids at school. He had a sense of humor and noticed things—that Monsieur Favreau, the Canadian French teacher who coached hockey too, sounded like a quacking duck when he made announcements on the PA; or that when nobody took down the popped balloons in the gym after the winter dance, their rubber corpses dangled like brightly colored condoms for a week; or that the smell in the cafeteria on chili days was oddly like the whiff he got when bagging the family Labrador’s steaming turds. He made me laugh; I made him laugh; and yes, Cassie was between us, our friendship’s reason for being, but she came to seem less the entire point of it as winter turned to spring.

  She wasn’t coming back to him either. That became clear. She acted out at parties that winter, drinking and flirting and slipping into dark corners with other guys. That’s what Peter told me; but when I asked her about it—“be careful,” I warned, nannyish but sincere—she told me that she knew what she was doing, that she never had more than couple of drinks. (“Think about it, Juju,” she said. “My mom picks me up from every single party. If I was blitzed don’t you think she’d know right away? She’s a nurse, for fuck’s sake.”) She assured me she didn’t get high; she said she’d never done more than make out with guys, though she did admit that there were several of them, and they were always in eighth grade and sometimes even in ninth.

  I wanted to believe her; but Peter told me other things, and he had no reason to make them up. Looking back, I wonder if she told me what she wanted to be the truth; but I still can’t square it all with Bev and Anders Shute, who would have dressed her as a Mennonite if they’d been able but who never stopped her going to parties in the first place. Did they only pretend to pay attention, when really they were too wrapped up in each other? Or did Bev have mixed motives—my mother always says that “people are contradictory”—and even while Bev ramped up her own religious devotion, she secretly, even unconsciously, loved that Cassie was a cool kid, behaving in ways Bev would only have dreamed of, accepted by people who, in Bev’s day, would have shunned her?

  Or was Cassie just turning into a very good liar, with her sweet little-girl face, those big eyes, and that pure, pristine near-white hair dazzling the grown-ups into believing what she wanted them to? When she told me that she was fine, that she was in control, that she knew her limits, I believed her. Sitting across from her in the cafeteria, with its prison lights and its bad smells, I believed her. Only later, talking to Peter, I wondered, and doubted, and frankly disbelieved.

  I defended her though. People started to say things, to assume things, to repeat them. Jouncing along on the bus on the way to a speech tournament, when the first cherry blossoms were out like girls in prom dresses, and the rain on the highway made a slick slurping sound beneath the tires, Jodie asked me if it was true that Cassie had been in the boys’ locker room after school, doing things.

  “Doing what things?”

  “You know. Things. A bunch of guys from the boys’ lacrosse team were there, and so was Cassie. Those kind of things.”

  “That’s crap, Jodie.” My hands trembled in my lap. “I can’t believe you’d even repeat that kind of garbage. What if it was you?”

  “It would never be me.”

  “You don’t know that. People have it in for Cassie. They’re jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Because she’s popular with guys. Because she’s cool.”

  “Do you really think Cassie’s cool?” Jodie was halfway between pissed-off and pitying. “Nobody thinks your friend is cool. Just sad and fucked up, really. The only reason she still talks to you is because you’re the last person to believe she’s cool. The big q
uestion is, why are you still talking to her?”

  I CALLED CASSIE that night. Her cell phone was off, so I tried the landline, something I hadn’t done in a long time. It was a surprise when Anders Shute answered—somehow all this time he hadn’t remained real to me: upon hearing his quiet, smooth voice, I was stunned concretely to realize that all these months he’d been present in that house, in Cassie’s house, every night at the dinner table and every morning fussing with the radio, his stray pubic hairs tangled in the drain, the vestige of his scent in her mother’s bedroom.

  “I’m afraid Cassie can’t come to the phone,” he said.

  “It’s Julia,” I said. “Do you know when she’ll be home?”

  “She’s home,” he said. “But she can’t come to the phone just now.”

  “I see,” I said, in a way that made clear that I didn’t.

  “It’s a family rule,” he explained. “Cassie needs to finish her homework before she socializes.”

  I left him my number, although she knew it. A family rule? What did that mean? He wasn’t family.

  Cassie didn’t call me back that night, and when we spoke about the rumor at school she was defensive and furious. She even seemed a little scared. “That’s gross, Juju. I can’t believe you’d even ask me that.”

  “I’m not asking if you did it, I’m telling you what people are saying.”

  “Even to repeat it to me is like saying it’s true.”

  “I’m not repeating it to anyone else here, am I? I’m telling you, is all.”

  She shook her head. “Whose side are you on?”

  “Are there sides?”

  “Friends don’t talk shit about their friends.”

  “I didn’t. I told them it was bullshit. But I thought you needed to know what’s going around.”