But it’s a strange thing, to share your love with a phantom—or more than that, to feel that the love between you is basically love destined for her that she threw back at you. How else could we have gone in a matter of a few weeks from Peter recoiling when I touched him to his not being able to keep his hands off me? Jodie said it was all perfectly logical, that he’d pulled back in the first place because of how much he desired me, but that he’d felt it would be wrong on account of Cassie, especially when she was in trouble, and so on. Her version was the inverse of mine, like the Escher drawing of a staircase in our attic bathroom; but I could only see things her way intermittently, and I kept worrying that when he kissed me and closed his eyes, he saw Cassie, or that when he slipped his hand onto my leg at the movies or when we watched TV, he was comparing, in his mind, the doll-like breadth of Cassie’s thigh beneath his palm, and the substantial weight of mine. When we talked about poetry or played music, I didn’t worry; those passions we shared weren’t hers. But then he wrote another song about her—another ballad, with a sweet refrain about how she smelled of roses—and then that too was tainted.
So maybe I killed things because I was so sure they were dying—like everything else, like all my stories it sometimes seems, I willed the make-believe into reality, fiction into fact, as if imagining made it so. Or maybe I was right all along. By Christmas, anyway, we agreed we were better off as friends—it made us seem like characters in a novel, and certainly it was coolest to stay close to your exes, in that nonchalant but affectionate way where the next girlfriend couldn’t worry, but also couldn’t help but worry. Above all, I didn’t want to be the sad girl, the one who lost her girlfriend not once but twice, and then lost in love in the bargain; although like the Escher drawing, once you’ve seen things from a certain perspective, you can’t entirely unsee them.
My story about Peter and me worked out pretty well; we really were good friends, almost inseparable friends, until late in the spring of tenth grade—eleventh for him—when Peter started seeing Djamila, a new girl in his year with green eyes and fine café-au-lait skin and a beautiful—really beautiful—spirit. She was in eleventh grade too at that point, and she ran track too, and she sang, in the bargain. Everyone really liked her—I really liked her—and when she opened her mouth, it was like Whitney Houston suddenly appeared in the room.
But all that is much later. I’m still here. I’m fine. I’ll be a senior soon. I still go once a week to see a therapist in Newburyport that the school shrink recommended to my parents. My mother drives me and waits in the local Dunkin’ Donuts with her laptop while I sit in the woman’s drab office, overlooking a parking lot. It has a daybed, which I ignore, and a hard chair, on which I sit, and a large potted fern. Boxes of Kleenex strategically dotted around.
On the wall hangs a strange dark painting, a sort of fairy scene of sprites and toadstools in a night forest. Why? Who would choose that, whimsical but super dark? One of the sprites—with hideously shimmery wings like a dragonfly—has white-blond hair and reminds me of Cassie. More than that, the sprite reminds me of my dream about Cassie and her black feathered flying cloak, the poisoned cloak that would kill her instead of setting her free. Every week when I look at that painting, it is like a goad, urging me to tell this woman about that dream, about that girl, about what I now know—not in words, but just in knowledge, like a weight in the atmosphere, like the residue of an odor—about growing up. Each week, I resolve more firmly to say nothing about it.
Now I know, for what little it’s worth, what it means to be a girl growing up. Maybe you can choose not to put on the cloak, but then you’ll never be free, you can never soar. Or you can take on the mantle that is given you; but what the consequences may be, what the mantle might do, what wearing it may entail, you can’t know beforehand. Others may see better, but they can’t save you. All any of us can do for another person is to have the courage not to turn away. I didn’t, until I did.
We have little to say to each other, this therapist and I. She’s a nice lady, but honestly, what does she know? To her, I’m another mildly troubled teen, a girl whose friend got really depressed. But my curse is to see things, to know stories, how they unfold, and people, what they are like. I don’t seek to know these things, I just do. It tires me, to be honest. Cassie got the prophetic name, but I got the curse—or the gift, depending how you look at it. If the nice lady saw these things too, then there’d be no need to explain; but if she doesn’t—and at this point, I’d venture with some confidence that she doesn’t—then there’s no point in trying. What I’d like is for someone to take the burden from me, or at least to share it. If I didn’t see, I wouldn’t try to know; and of course, you can’t ever really know what happens to another person, or what they think happens to them, which amounts to the same thing. I can’t know what the poisoned cloak felt like burning into Cassie’s skin. I can’t even really imagine it.
AFTER THE AMBULANCE men left to ferry Cassie up to Haverhill, and the policeman came to take charge of her stuff, Rudy took me home. My parents hadn’t woken up yet, so they might never have known I’d been gone. Rudy wasn’t the kind of grown-up to march me to the front door and engage my mother in conversation—he was probably more afraid of my parents than were most of my friends. We sat for a few minutes in the warm cab of his truck, the three of us—him, Bessie, me—hollowed out by the morning’s events. The stink wasn’t as strong by then, or maybe my nose had just been filled up.
“Rudy,” I said eventually, “thank you. And Bessie—” She turned a hooded eye in my direction, and sleepily bared a fang.
“Paramedic seems to think she’ll be okay.” Rudy’s grubby hands clutched the steering wheel with force.
“I’d better go in. My parents will be wondering where I am.”
“Sure thing, missy.” I thought he might lean toward me, across the dog, but he didn’t. “When you go visit her, tell her Rudy’s glad she’s okay, okay?”
As I slipped into the house, I thought that Rudy had never once asked why I thought Cassie would be at the Bonnybrook. He trusted that I knew. I wondered whether my parents would be angry with me when I told them what we’d done. I’d have to tell them about my time there with Cassie, years before; my mother especially wouldn’t be pleased.