Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always (22 page)

When Kayla and I were younger, before her family got all complicated and she got all difficult, we’d always beg and plead with our moms to let us have sleepovers. Eventually we’d win, even though everyone knew we’d be cranky and tired all weekend long. We’d sit and giggle over Kayla’s Magic 8-Ball toy, asking it a million questions and trying to get it to tell us what we wanted to hear by rephrasing our questions a million different ways. Okay, so most of our questions involved when we would finally get our first kiss, and who it would be with when it happened. Come to think of it, it was soon after K’s first kiss that the sleepovers tapered off, which was right around the time her mom moved out and Rhonda moved in. And Kayla started doing everything she could to get out of that house.

Maybe if I had found someone to kiss, too, it might have helped us to stay close. Maybe we would have kept giggling about the boys, about how far we’d gone, what it was like. But after Kayla started skipping her Friday classes with a forged note and driving down to the Cities, I don’t think even that could have saved us, especially once she started hooking up with all these guys. Guys who were nothing like the boys in our yearbook, those names we would ask the Magic 8-Ball about, over and over. Her new guys were scary and fast, and no matter what she said, I couldn’t believe that they actually
liked
her.

And okay. So is it totally lame if I still haven’t had that first kiss? I guess so, but the boys Kayla hooks up with, it’s like they’re breaking her somehow, making her into a stranger, someone who’s really good at hiding the part of her that used to be more like me. They use her and then leave her full of this strange angst that I don’t know anything about.

I sigh, clicking to the next message. Come on, I need a good question.
I think I’m pregnant. What should I do?
Can I even begin to tackle this one? I find Eric’s words coming back to me, how some things are too important to leave to a silly deck of cards to decide. But then, here’s this girl in crisis, writing to my blog. Should I answer her in private or something, tell her I think this decision goes beyond me as a fortune-teller? Should I ignore it? What happens if I do, and then she feels all lost and desperate? I wonder who she is. Even wondering makes me feel guilty, like I’m as much of a gossip as Annika and Britney. But still. Who is she? I click past the message; something to deal with later.

The next one has an interesting subject line, just one word:
Quitter?
I read.

Dear Divinia Starr (or whoever you really are),

Are you someone at our school? If you are, it feels weird writing to you, but here’s the deal. I play … a sport. I don’t want to say which sport because, well, that would make it so much easier to figure out who I am, and I can’t let anyone know who I am. I play this sport and I’m okay at it, maybe better then okay. My parents think I’m good enough to get a scholarship or whatever to a college and that’s pretty much the only way I’m getting into college, so they are really gung-ho about me playing, you know? And I used to like playing but I had this thing happen, well, I guess it’s called an epiphany, right? Like this moment where I saw myself playing this sport and getting into college on a scholarship and having to keep on playing this sport and having everything get more and more competitive and difficult and dangerous and then I thought hey, I don’t want that kind of pressure. Maybe it’s lame of me but I want an easy-going life. I want to stop this path but if I quit, like I said, I’ll have no chance at going to college really. And everyone’s counting on me to do this, to go to college, and I guess in my family it’s sort of a big deal since I’d be the first one. Everyone else has grown up and worked at the mines and married and had kids or whatever and I sort of wish that could be my life too, you know? Why do I have to be something special? Anyway, I’ve never said any of this to anyone at all so I hope nobody will guess that it’s me. I just want to know what your cards say about my future and if there’s any way to make it work out all right.

Thanks Divinia and if you publish this, will you go through it and change anything you think might help people guess who I am? I appreciate it.

—Quitter

I read through the email twice, and it’s sort of stupid of me, but my throat gets all tight and scratchy like I’m going to cry. I can’t really explain why, but I
get
this feeling he has. Or she has. I understand it. Okay, so my parents don’t have my future all planned out, and obviously I don’t play any sports or have any pressure on me to be the first in my family to go to college or anything. So what is it about this letter? Why do I feel like this kid is speaking a truth about me?

Footsteps. My parents’ voices grow louder down the hall, and though some of the strain is gone from their interactions, it still sounds different than normal. I clear my browsing history and get off the Internet, and by the time they enter the kitchen, I’m staring at the Whitman words, tapping my fingers lightly on the keys.

“You’ll drink some tea if I make it?” says my mom, digging in the cabinet above the stove. She’s clearly speaking to my father, and she’s just as clearly trying to reconcile some disagreement, since tea is my mother’s main peacekeeping weapon.

“I suppose I will,” he says. I can feel him peering over my shoulder at the screen, but he doesn’t say anything. Even without looking back, I can picture him adjusting his glasses, searching for any minimized windows. I’m glad I cleared the history.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.
Seventeen years, seventeen lines. I know Mr. Dawkins wants something better for my revision, something new, but how can I start? A baby with wild black hair. A one-year-old with food allergies. A two-year-old sucking my brother’s thumb. I type up the lines from memory, more or less like the first draft I handed in, but none of it is poetry. A three-year-old …

“What was I like when I was three?”

My mom gives me a startled glance. “Messy,” says my dad, at the same time as my mom comes up with “sweet.” They laugh at their own descriptions.

A sweet, messy three-year-old. What a boring poem. I type the line anyway.

“What are you working on, honey?” Mom leans in closer, wafting along the smell of some flowery tea.

I close the document, not bothering to save it. “It’s nothing.” I shut the computer down as fast as I can and escape to my room.

34. When you
look at the stars …

Kayla makes me go shopping with her in the Cities before the concert, shows me what to buy and how to wear it. For a while it’s like old times.

“Hold still.” She’s putting eyeliner on me in the mall bathroom, pinning my eyes open under her thumb. She bites the edge of her upper lip as she works. “And … ta-da! You officially have a face.”

“I didn’t have a face without these lines?” I lean over the sink and examine myself in the mirror. Kayla has drawn in huge, smoky black lids above my eyes, and she’s teased my hair up so it’s dark and spiky. It’s dramatic, halfway dangerous. I can’t help staring.

“You don’t mind if we split up after the concert, right?” she says, adding more eyeliner to her own eyes in the mirror above me. “You know, me and Bryan, you and Darin? Text him and see.”

“I … ” I don’t have Darin’s number. I never asked, he never offered, and now my stomach starts to twist because I see how it is. I thought Kayla and I were going to do this together, to be best friends again, but that was never her intention. She’s here to see this guy, and now that she has me here, her plan is to set me up with a different guy so we can meet up to swap stories later. Is that what friendship is now?

“Oh, forget it, Cass,
god
.” She sighs to let me know she thinks I’m being a baby.

And I don’t believe her. She’s totally going to abandon me when we get there, and honestly, I don’t even blame her. This whole weekend—I can’t believe all the shit I went through to make it happen, all the shit I put
other
people through, and it’s not going to change anything because Kayla’s the same Kayla and I’m the same Cassandra. It’s like I’m a wax dummy—she dressed me up and painted my face, and now she’ll ditch me for Bryan even so.

I look up, keeping the tears from streaking down my face in big black lines, and I try to enjoy being with her, try to rummage around inside the dummy to find someone that she’ll enjoy being with, too.

So we’re driving and we have eyeliner and Kayla’s blasting the debut album of her boyfriend’s band (okay, so Bryan’s not exactly her boyfriend but they’ve hooked up a couple of times after his shows), and I’m laughing too loudly at everything, trying to match her squeal for squeal. It’s not me, not exactly, but we seem to be having fun until she passes me a joint, which I take and then panic when I realize what it is. “Kayla,
jesus
.” I’m surrounded by windows and cars and even people walking right there, in big crowds along the street. We’re in a purple freaking
hearse
. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“What are you afraid of?”

“All this traffic. Getting arrested. Dying in a fiery crash under the influence.” I bend down and shove the burning thing into my coffee cup. “I can’t believe you handed me that right in the middle of all these people.” My hands shake. Kayla laughs.

At the door there are two lines spilling out onto the sidewalk, and Kayla herds me into one. I trip over the chunky heels of my new boots, and a girl I accidentally push up against turns to give me a tough look.

“Sorry.” My voice is raspy and a few layers down; it doesn’t work until the second syllable, and by then the girl has turned away again as though I don’t exist, as though her eyes passed through empty space. Music emanates from inside the building, bass vibrating into my belly, and I wish for a second that I had smoked that joint, that I could be a step outside of myself, outside of normal.

Beside me, Kayla is beaming, her cheeks flushed and sort of shiny, and I suspect she’s more than one step away from normal. Pills, probably. For a second I wish she’d offered some to me. Okay, so I probably would have said no, but just the fact that she didn’t offer means she assumes I’d say no, which makes me think I should actually say yes, which … makes me sad that she didn’t ask. If only we hadn’t been in the middle of all that traffic.

In any case, I am completely sober and wearing too much makeup and dressed very unlike myself. Also I’m invisible.

We pay, get our hands stamped with ultraviolet ink, and enter the club. Kayla grips my upper arm and steers me toward the stage via her approved course. She pushes me through the crowd where I don’t even see a gap, using me as a battering ram—I’m left to mutter apologies to the people parting along each side, and she keeps grinning, nodding her head in time to the electronic pulse of this weird trance music.

In the flickering blue strobe light, people are dancing. Their bodies gyrate slowly in frozen frames. I feel queasy. I bend my knees a little, to make sure I don’t fall over, and scan the gathering crowd, looking for a familiar face. Looking for Darin, I admit to myself. I don’t see him.

The opening band is rowdy, with pyrotechnics and loud, loud instruments. My ears are already ringing, even before I get to hear Bryan’s band.

“Let’s walk around,” Kayla shouts, toward the end of their set. “We can get back up front once Categorical gets onstage.”

I follow her through the crowd this time, which is easier since we’re moving away from the stage, toward the edges, where there’s a walkway that goes around the back. The sound once we’re back here is much more tolerable, and the ringing in my ears settles into a dull buzz. I should have brought earplugs, but that’s such an old-person move. The rush of people around me blurs into a kind of whirling pattern, a kaleidoscope spinning. The lights shift from red to blue to purple to strobe again, and I blink, dizzy and unsteady in my heels. Nobody makes eye contact with me. Kayla slips farther and farther ahead—a sliver of her shoulder disappears behind a chaos of elbows; a flash of her shiny, velvet-black bob glimmers above the horizon of hair. She doesn’t look back.

When she’s gone—when I can’t identify any relic of her in the press of bodies around me—I panic, a little. What should I do? Should I keep moving, or stay still and hope she remembers to look for me? Around me, kids are swarming all over. I can see the stage, and it looks like the band is getting ready to play. I don’t see Kayla or Darin anywhere, but this isn’t such a bad spot to watch the show, so I stay where I am. I try to enjoy myself, whispering Kayla’s sister’s address under my breath so I don’t forget. This is what I wanted, after all. Something exciting. Something interesting. I force myself to smile, and the kid next to me smiles back. The music is loud. I close my eyes for the smallest of moments.

“I’ve been looking for you!” A voice next to me, shouting, breath on my ear. A tingle traces down my spine, and I open my eyes to see Darin, incredibly close to me. “Where’s your friend?” he asks.

I shake my head, my smile immediate and spontaneous. “No idea.” I have to shout to be heard over the bass and the drums as the band starts into a long musical intro to their set. A long,
loud
musical intro.