Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always (18 page)

“Thanks for passing the petition around.” Kayla is suddenly standing beside my desk, holding it out to show me all the signatures. “We got the whole class. I mean, really, this is so stupid. Now they’re trying to make a big deal about supervision, saying that last winter there was some kind of bullying going on or something. They’ve been going on and on about teens thinking about sex when they see comic book characters, and dancing for Satan around the bonfire, but when that didn’t work, now they’re saying it’s about violence. Well … all I can say is if they cancel my snow sculpture contest, there may be some violence.”

I tear out a sheet of paper.
Don’t think about it.
I pick up Darin’s pen and tap it against my bottom lip. And then I write. My confession.

This is Just to Say

that I have

been trying

to be more

interesting

which you

have probably

been wishing for

all these years

forgive me

I am so dull

and I suck

at poetry

“This is for you.” I hand the poem to Kayla, who reads it and laughs.

“That’s the lamest WCW knockoff I’ve ever read,” she says, though her smile softens the words. “But I forgive you.”

She forgives me. For writing a bad poem, or for being a boring human? “How was your date?” I’m asking more about our friendship than about Gary’s conversational skills, but she only shrugs and hands back my poem.

“What are you doing next weekend?” she asks.

There’s something so guarded about her right now, something that tells me that while the petition and the poem may have broken the ice, our friendship isn’t back to all good again. Or back to all normal, which might not be the same thing.

“I … nothing.” As long as I’m not trading makeovers with Drew.

“Yeah, so you should come to Minneapolis with me for once. I mean it. Bryan’s band is playing at First Ave on Saturday night. You remember Bryan, right? It’s an all-age show. You know my sister won’t care if you stay over.”

It’s a test. There’s no way my parents will let me go, and she knows this. So it comes down to the same thing it always comes down to with us: my parents. And my reluctance to defy them. Well, things are not the same with us anymore.

“All right,” I say. “Sounds like fun.”

“Are you talking about Bryan Crypt?” asks Darin. “From Categorical Denial?”

“No way, you’ve heard of Bryan?” Kayla seems to notice Darin for the first time. “He’s my boyfriend, pretty much.”

Okay, so I’m guessing things didn’t go all that well on her date with Gary if Kayla’s calling this old drummer dude she hooked up with one weekend her boyfriend.

“I’ve already got tickets for that show,” Darin says. “I’m totally going.” He shakes me by the shoulder. “Cass, if you go too, that will be so freaking awesome!”

Wow. He’s that excited about me going? Words leave my mouth. “Yeah, I’m going for sure.” Okay, so I’m panicking now. My parents are seriously never, ever going to let me do this. It’s highly probable that they would actually lock me in my room to prevent me from going. What am I going to tell them?

“And Kayla’s
going
, too,” says a voice behind me. I turn to see Mr. Dawkins, smiling that patient-yet-exasperated smile of his. “Right back to her seat.” He raises his voice to the rest of the class. “Four minutes, folks, and then we’re sharing these confessions.”

“Awesome, Cass,” says Kayla as she walks back to her spot. I guess I passed the first test. Or, knowing Kayla, that was only the first question on the first test.

Mr. D picks up my poem. “You only suck at poetry be-
cause you think you should,” he says mildly. “Dare I ask about your song?”

I make a face. “Can’t I write, like, three extra essays on transcendentalism or something?”

“Give me seventeen lines,” he says. “One for each year of your life.”

“But … ”

“Grade reports go today, you know.”

“Please.” I’ll never see the light of day again, much less get to go to Minneapolis with Kayla and Darin, if they get an email about an incomplete.

“I’ll hold yours. End of the day, Cass.” He walks away, but then turns back, once, and says, “Seventeen lines.”

“I’m sorry,” whispers Darin. He sketches a pile of weird little shapes underneath his drawing of the girl on the skyscraper.

“What are those? Rocks?”

He tosses his hair, looking shy. “Marshmallows,” he says.

28. When you grow up …

Seventh-period study hall is basically my last chance, so of course I’m not making any progress on my poem. It’s not really my fault; Eric won’t stop talking to me.

“Everyone’s going on and on about this Divinia Starr thing,” he says, and then he lowers his voice. “People are commenting.”

“Yeah.” When we went to the computer lab for social studies, I saw new comments even from the last time I checked. I didn’t have time to read them all. I’d like to do another reading tonight, and I’m quiet for a second, thinking about how to get on the computer without Mom and Dad finding out.

Eric shifts in his chair. “They’ll be upset if they catch you. Like, crazy upset.” He knows what I’m thinking, like always.

I sigh. “Kayla wants me to go down to the Cities this weekend with her. I really want to go, but I have no clue how I’m going to get that one past them.”

“For what?”

“Her boyfriend’s band is playing.”

“Oh, no way. They won’t let you go.”

“Also, I’m failing English.”

“What? Cassandra, what’s going on?”

“I—” I glance up at the study hall monitor, who’s giving us a dirty look. I lower my voice. “Nothing’s going on, Eric. I can’t write this stupid poem Dawkins is making us write. I can’t do it. It’s due in like twenty minutes and I’ve got exactly nothing.”

“Cass, just write something.”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone says.”

“You should listen, then. Cass, seriously, Mom and Dad will kill you if you fail English class. What about college?” Eric’s already applied, like, everywhere. I haven’t even finished getting my exams scheduled.

“I’ll go to the community college. Or I’ll take a year off.” I have no idea what I want to do, anyway. Why spend a bunch of money and go into debt when I don’t know what I want to do with my life? Sometimes I think I’d like to be a scientist, but what is that, even? All I have in my head are these vague images of lab coats and sketchy details from a biography of Marie Curie. What
kind
of scientist? What would I study? Where would I go to work?

“Listen, do you … ” Eric pauses, his hands sliding over his jeans absently. “Cass, do you think there’s anything, actually, to this whole tarot thing? I mean, do you think you’re really doing some kind of fortune-telling?”

“I
knew
you were going to want a reading. I think it’s a great idea.”

“No, it’s not that, sissy. It’s just … I’m worried, you know?”

“Worried? About what?”

His eyes slide down to the empty page in front of me. “Well, don’t you think it might be wrong? I know you hate to believe what the church says, but what if sometimes they’re right? Don’t you think there could be things in the world that are actually evil? Powers of darkness, that kind of thing?”

“It’s a bunch of cards, Eric. Cards with pictures on them and a little book that tells me what they mean. It’s not like I’m inviting demons into my soul or something.” I press the end of my pencil against the page until the lead snaps.

“How would you know?”

I look at him. He’s truly concerned for me, for my soul. I click the end of my pencil to get more lead. He should stick with being concerned for my English grade.

“What do you mean, how would I know? Are you saying the devil writes my blog posts?” I stare at the page.
One line for every year I’ve been alive.
When I was born, I had a fuzzy black mohawk and gave my mom some kind of stupid depression that made her cry all the time. Should I write that?

When I was one, I had an allergic reaction to Eric’s birthday cake and ended up in the hospital. Exciting, but it really doesn’t tell anything about me, except that for about a year I was allergic to eggs. If it was Eric’s poem, we would learn that even as a toddler he was such a nice kid that he didn’t cry once about his birthday getting ruined, and he gave me one of his stuffed animals to cheer me up.

“Not the devil, not exactly.” Eric presses his finger against my paper, picks up the little chunk of lead and examines it. He drags it across the page, making a faint gray line in the margin. “I don’t know. Probably I’m being stupid. I just … I can’t help it that those cards give me a bad feeling, somehow. Like you’re messing with something that shouldn’t be messed with.” He keeps his eyes on the page and I take a long look at his profile; the skin around his eye is still a bit swollen, a little yellow. He looks older, somehow, like he’s already left us all and moved on.

“What was I like when I was a little kid?” I ask.

“You used to suck my thumb.”

“What? Gross.”

“No, like … I actually remember this. You were little, just a baby, and you had that huge pacifier thing. It was purple, and it had a big button on it.”

I nod. “Yeah, I’ve seen it in pictures. It had Winnie the Pooh on it.”

“Yeah.” He brushes the lead off my paper. “I don’t know. It fell out, when we were napping or something. We had one crib for a while, and I can remember you fussing, and I reached over and gave you my thumb.” He holds his left hand in his right for a moment, a thoughtful look on his face. “This one,” he says, giving me a thumbs-up.

“You couldn’t remember that. You were only a baby too.”

“Well, but I do remember. You were all right, as a kid. You’re the one with a good head on her shoulders. You’ve always been the one asking questions, like why is the sky blue, or where does this meat come from and why is it called chicken when that cute little birdie is also called chicken.”

I laugh. I remember that one, how uncomfortable it made my mom to explain that the two chickens were one and the same. “You stopped eating meat after that,” I say, remembering Eric’s big eyes, all full of sympathy for the poor animals.

“Yeah. I jumped into that plan without thinking things through, though.” He smiles, both dimples creasing his cheeks. “I didn’t actually like vegetables, you know.”

I stare at my paper, wondering if I can put this into a poem. The One Who Asked Questions. Questions that made my brother have an ethical dilemma and nearly starve to death. Questions that made it impossible to believe in God? I shake my head. “It didn’t bother me, eating the chicken,” I say. “I wanted to understand how it all worked.”

Eric nods. “You always want to understand things, Cass. At least, that’s how you used to be. Methodical, I guess. It’s like Dicey’s this flurry of silliness, and you know me, I’m the moody one, daydreaming all the time. You’re the solid one, Cass. You’re reasonable. You’re our anchor.”

“Oh, hey, it’s a metaphor: I celebrate and sing myself, an emotionless anchor in the riptide of my family, dragging everybody down.” I stick out my tongue at Eric.

“Yeah, that’s the kind of thing you’ve never had patience for, I guess.”

“What?”

“Metaphors. You know. You like things to make sense right away, logically, no pieces left over. No messy feelings left out in the open.”

It makes me sound like a robot, unfeeling. “That’s not true.” Is it? Am I so rational I lose track of feelings? “I just don’t like contradictions.”

“So write about that.”

“Like, how? How is that poetry?” I remember what Drew wrote, those few lines about Cassandra believing in nothing. How come everyone else thinks they could write a song of me when I can’t?

“I think you need to think about it differently, Cass. Poetry isn’t just pretty words. You’re so insistent on logic, but sometimes a contradiction can be true, you know?”

No, I
don’t
know. “You’re as bad as Mr. Dawkins.”

“I don’t mean to be.” Eric brushes his hands lightly across the legs of his jeans. “I’m nervous, Cass. About this class you’re failing, but especially about that blog. It’s not like you. You’re not using your head.” He looks behind me, over my shoulder, and I know he’s looking at Drew. “People are sort of like poems,” he says.

“They don’t make sense?”

“Not all the time.”

“Or never, if they’re like you.” I sigh. “Now go away. I’ve got to turn this in before the end of the day. I’ll never get to go to the Cities for the weekend if Mr. Dawkins gives me an incomplete in English.”