Finding Cassie Crazy (16 page)

Dear Matthew

It's good to hear from you again, and it's good to know you've been paying attention.

Emily and Lydia are now talking German to each other, which is profoundly rude of them. I wish I'd done German but my dad said I should take Japanese, but then the school stopped offering it because the teacher left, so I had to take Commerce instead.

Well, as I said, Claire really wants me to find out some facts about you, so I guess I might just bring along your letters. She would so love them because she could analyse them and talk about your insecurities and so on, and my mum would be confused because even though she's a lawyer in a big firm what she's really most into is children's rights. In particular, she thinks kids should be able to
express themselves
. So, as I said, she'd be confused because she'd think you have a right to say those things, but she might not like you saying them to me.

Then she and the counsellor could get into a discussion about the copyright in your letters.

Either that or you could write the answers and I'll hand that in instead. Just tell me what you want to be when you grow up and the worst thing that's ever happened to you and what you love most.

Love

Cassie

PS I was just talking to Bindy Mackenzie again and she said she's SURE that you play the trumpet. She said she was singing at the School Spectacular last year, and there was a guy called Matthew Dunlop who was a trumpet player, though he was fairly bad at trumpet playing and she wasn't
sure why they let him in. I said, ‘I thought you were just being witty, saying he played the trumpet,' and she said, ‘No, I was only being witty when I said he'd blow the trumpet in your ear if he didn't like you.' She said it right off, just like that, as if she had never really stopped thinking about saying it and maybe laughing to herself quietly.

Cassie

Yeah, whatever.

Okey doke.

You wore me down.

Here's some infotainment for you:

A for my Future Occupation: There's a DC10 with my name on the captain's seat someplace out in the blue beyond.

B for the Worst Thing that Ever Happened To Me: A shark took a piece out of my board one time when I was surfing, and I'm not screwing with you when I tell you this. I was a kid and drowning, and this was down Jervis Bay way.

I've got a shark tattoo on my shoulder to show my respect.

C for the Thing I Love Most in the World: I would kill my mother and my sister and my mother's sister for one of those Mint Aero Bars. Any time of the day.

You can tell your counsellor that you are the most unfriggingbelievable wacked-out freak of all time.

And you can tell Bindy bitch-face Mackenzie that I'm the best trumpeter in the southern hemisphere and she can't sing for shit.

Okay, so nice work with the blackmail.

Now will you get on with your life and leave me alone to get on with mine?

Matthew

MATTHEW DUNLOP!

Well, you outshone even yourself. You're a surprise to everyone, Matthew. Your parents always believed in you, but never the general population. The general population always had doubts about you, Matthew, and look what you've done.

Wow, you are so weird.

I picked up your letter on the way to Maths which is why I'm writing on the back of this Maths exam. Can you please post the exam back to my teacher when you've finished reading so she can mark it?

I haven't answered many questions though, because I got tired after the first two and I decided to have a break and open your letter, and I got the shock of my life. You wrote a whole letter! A WHOLE INTERESTING AND SURPRISING LETTER!

Wow. But the weirdest thing is this: why?

I mean, why are you suddenly answering, like you think I'm blackmailing you by saying I'm going to show the letters to the counsellor? I wasn't trying to blackmail you. I could have shown your letters to a teacher or to my friends (and you wouldn't be alive to read this today if I'd shown them to my friends). I could have shown them any time, but I got the impression that you didn't give a crap about anybody knowing and for some reason that made me protect you.

Now it turns out that you got
scared into being human by the threat of a counsellor
. What's with that? Are you phobic about the mental health industry?

Imagine if a person was phobic about going to psychotherapy. How could the person get over their phobia? The person would have to go to a psychotherapist to get over it, right, and
once they got there, they'd be over it.

Anyhow.

Catch ya

Cassie

Hi Cassie

Look, okay, cut it out and give me a break. So, I've got an attitude problem.

And the reason I've got an attitude problem is because of a situation, which, step up closer to the speaker if you like, and I'll whisper a clue.

No, piss off, it's personal.

Can we just leave it now though? You got what you wanted. You moved me up to a higher plane, and you got some deep thoughts out of me, so you're the winner. Way to go, Cassie.

Matthew

Dear Matthew

Hello. I just had a really great weekend at Lydia's place. We painted the walls of Lydia's room and I used my wall to write a song, and then I painted over the song with many
layers of black paint, and one day someone will strip it back and think that a caveman wrote the song. So that' scool.

I love Lydia's house. It's huge with passageways going everywhere, and she's got a doll's house in the window of her bedroom.

We went shopping in the city on Sunday and Em got obsessed with the talking dog outside the QVB. You know the one that promises it'll say thank you if you put a coin in it for the deaf children or something? Well, Emily realised that you
don't have to put a coin in.
You can just stand there and stare at it, and it still says ‘THANK YOU, RUFF, RUFF.'

The weirdest things get Emily upset. Like one time we were making dinner together, including rice, and the rice kind of got ingrained into the saucepan, so it was all these little circles which we couldn't wash off. Em started going crazy. She couldn't stop scrubbing the pan, and she was practically crying about it.

Lydia's a lot more normal and would never cry about rice in a pan. But even she's crazy. She really wants to be an author and it scares her sometimes, thinking that she might never get published. She gets depressed because she always writes half novels and then gets bored and starts another novel. Sometimes she even stops after one sentence, like, she'll write: ‘Once upon a time there was a man who lived inside an empty packet of Twisties.' And then she loses inspiration and scrunches up the paper.

Plus, sometimes Lydia gets her stories mixed up with real life. For an example, she thinks her mother's a drug addict and her father's a sleaze. I think that's what they were a bit
like when she was younger and she just hasn't noticed that they've grown up now.

Her mother can be flaky. But she's really just being flamboyant.

It's freezing. My feet are cold.

Lydia's dad is okay. He just makes nerdy dad jokes, such as whenever he turns on the under-floor heating, he says: ‘You hear that, girls? That's the sound of the electricity company applauding.' He means because it's expensive to run under-floor hearing.

Also, he likes to get us to stare at these pictures (you know the ones with the squiggly patterns?) until a shape emerges. Like a tiger or someone doing a ski jump? After a while, we always pretend we can see it, but we never can.

Emily painted squiggly lines all over her wall of Lyd's bedroom and then called in Lydia's dad and told him she had painted something behind it which he could see if he stared long enough. But he could tell she was making it up.

Love

Cassie

Cassie

Okay, so you've got no plans to piss off. I get it.

I can tell you this. The thing about me is that I'm a loser. I'm no good at anything, except maybe playing the trumpet. I'm good at that, I guess like you're good at piano. And I guess it's the only thing that keeps me, like, gives me a reason to live.

You seem kind of wacked out, but you keep skipping
Science or whatever to go to the movies, and that's okay, but it means you must be kind of smart. I could not skip Science because I've got to go to every class because if I don't do okay in Science I'll never get to be a pilot, which is all I want out of life.

Just to play the trumpet and fly a plane. Is that so much to ask for?

Plus I think it's stupid, getting yourself in trouble unnecessarily. There's a guy in my class who is about to get thrown out of the school if he doesn't get his act together, and the other day he just went into Castle Hill shops for half the day, instead of going to this important across-the-form English test we had to do. I don't know. I just think he's a moron. And that's an example.

And let me tell you what happened: this is not a sob story and it's not bull. I got into trouble recently, and that's what I meant when I said ‘a situation'. The trouble was with a girl who goes to your school.