phone and think nothing except for this: that I didn’t want to understand.
NOW
I t was my turn to make dinner the night we almost lost our stage and Heather hatched her brilliant plan, so I used it as an excuse to leave before I could think any more about my crazy new feelings. There was a fantastic swooping downhill on the way to my house, and I loved the way I would sail down at twenty-five or thirty miles an hour with a shriek and a squeal. After that, two and a half miles of hills that rolled up and down—a just-right kind of distance. Two and a half miles was almost enough time to turn things over in my head, so that I could come up with an alternative to acting as if I’d just been hit over the head with something heavy.
But twenty-five minutes later, I realized that I wasn’t used to the idea at all. There was just a kind of dazed blankness where my brain generally purported to be.
Wow.
So. That’s interesting.
I pondered the way I would wait to hear her shoes on the stairs in the mornings. How I used to listen with a mix of guilt and anxiety and dread, and now—I was a little disappointed if she waited too long to show up. And she always came halfway down the stairs to wave hi to me even if she was spending the whole day rehearsing. And if I came up to sit in the audience for a few minutes and watch, she always hammed it up.
She liked me, once upon a time, before I’d been remotely able to think that was even possible.
When had that stopped seeming embarrassing, a convenient excuse to disarm me so I couldn’t fight back?
No. I had a better, simpler question than that. Do I say anything?
Are you insane? I answered to myself in the next moment. First of all, drama, by definition, already has enough drama. This, Julia had explained, was why you shouldn’t date people when you were doing a play with them. “I mean, it’s not like anyone listens to that,” she’d said. “Everybody dates everybody anyway, because you’re together all the time, and you’re pretending to be in love with each other, and it’s kind of intense. But you shouldn’t. So it’s actually a good thing that Oliver hasn’t asked me out yet, even though he’s really hot, and really nice, because it would just be too much drama.” That was, of course, right before she asked him out. It seemed like forever ago that I was too young to realize why she wouldn’t listen to her own advice.
I liked things the way they were. The past days had been peaceful and calm and happy, working in silence, listening to Heather’s CD collection, and talking about safe topics. School. Movies, until she got exasperated with the way I always answered “Haven’t seen it” when she mentioned one, and asked me if I lived under a rock.
“It’s a very nice rock, I’ll have you know, and you should come visit sometime.”
It should have been like in fourth grade, when the movies I wasn’t allowed to see made me the weird one, the target for jokes, but it wasn’t. Because of Heather, who laughed about it and took seriously the pleasures of terrible movies—but also because of me, because I had become more than the things I couldn’t do. Because, maybe, I was starting to understand something of peace, and something of integrity, that went further than arguing about whether Star Wars counted as a war movie.
Things were like that. Things were good. And she had had a very unpleasant breakup not too long ago.
And, and, and.
I moved through the routine of putting a pot of water on the stove to boil, and taking the bag of vegetables out of the freezer to thaw a bit, and kept worrying at it like a loose tooth—one minute resolving not to think about it because thinking the same things over and over and over wasn’t going to help, and then the next minute coming back to it anyway, because it was there. Until my mother said sharply, “Cassie, that’s about to boil over.” And I remembered that I was in the middle of something, and put the
NOW
I t was my turn to make dinner the night we almost lost our stage and Heather hatched her brilliant plan, so I used it as an excuse to leave before I could think any more about my crazy new feelings. There was a fantastic swooping downhill on the way to my house, and I loved the way I would sail down at twenty-five or thirty miles an hour with a shriek and a squeal. After that, two and a half miles of hills that rolled up and down—a just-right kind of distance. Two and a half miles was almost enough time to turn things over in my head, so that I could come up with an alternative to acting as if I’d just been hit over the head with something heavy.
But twenty-five minutes later, I realized that I wasn’t used to the idea at all. There was just a kind of dazed blankness where my brain generally purported to be.
Wow.
So. That’s interesting.
I pondered the way I would wait to hear her shoes on the stairs in the mornings. How I used to listen with a mix of guilt and anxiety and dread, and now—I was a little disappointed if she waited too long to show up. And she always came halfway down the stairs to wave hi to me even if she was spending the whole day rehearsing. And if I came up to sit in the audience for a few minutes and watch, she always hammed it up.
She liked me, once upon a time, before I’d been remotely able to think that was even possible.
When had that stopped seeming embarrassing, a convenient excuse to disarm me so I couldn’t fight back?
No. I had a better, simpler question than that. Do I say anything?
Are you insane? I answered to myself in the next moment. First of all, drama, by definition, already has enough drama. This, Julia had explained, was why you shouldn’t date people when you were doing a play with them. “I mean, it’s not like anyone listens to that,” she’d said. “Everybody dates everybody anyway, because you’re together all the time, and you’re pretending to be in love with each other, and it’s kind of intense. But you shouldn’t. So it’s actually a good thing that Oliver hasn’t asked me out yet, even though he’s really hot, and really nice, because it would just be too much drama.” That was, of course, right before she asked him out. It seemed like forever ago that I was too young to realize why she wouldn’t listen to her own advice.
I liked things the way they were. The past days had been peaceful and calm and happy, working in silence, listening to Heather’s CD collection, and talking about safe topics. School. Movies, until she got exasperated with the way I always answered “Haven’t seen it” when she mentioned one, and asked me if I lived under a rock.
“It’s a very nice rock, I’ll have you know, and you should come visit sometime.”
It should have been like in fourth grade, when the movies I wasn’t allowed to see made me the weird one, the target for jokes, but it wasn’t. Because of Heather, who laughed about it and took seriously the pleasures of terrible movies—but also because of me, because I had become more than the things I couldn’t do. Because, maybe, I was starting to understand something of peace, and something of integrity, that went further than arguing about whether Star Wars counted as a war movie.
Things were like that. Things were good. And she had had a very unpleasant breakup not too long ago.
And, and, and.
I moved through the routine of putting a pot of water on the stove to boil, and taking the bag of vegetables out of the freezer to thaw a bit, and kept worrying at it like a loose tooth—one minute resolving not to think about it because thinking the same things over and over and over wasn’t going to help, and then the next minute coming back to it anyway, because it was there. Until my mother said sharply, “Cassie, that’s about to boil over.” And I remembered that I was in the middle of something, and put the
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