CHAPTER 16
Aunt Chey,
You’re not really my aunt, so let’s stop pretending.
Kisses,
Cassie
Cassie puts her head in the water and blows bubbles the next day. She just bends down and does it. I don’t have to fight her. She doesn’t even snap a sarcastic comment my way. We walk out into Lake Kimball. She looks down at the water and dunks her head.
“There,” she says, spitting water out of her mouth and wiping her face.
Shocked, I say, “What the hell did you steal last night?”
“Why?”
“Because this is weird. You’re weird. Did you steal drugs from the Wellness Center?”
“Who cares?” Cassie laughs.
“I care,” I yell.
A half smile creeps up on Cassie’s face. “Why do you care?”
I look down at the T-shirt covering my bathing suit. I need it to protect my shoulders today. They can’t get any more sun or blisters will form. The aloe helped but it didn’t fully heal them overnight. It will take a few days.
“I realized something last night.” I play with the bottom of my shirt.
“What?”
“I haven’t conjugated a French verb in three days.”
“What does that have to do with me?” Cassie asks.
I gnaw on my bottom lip. I can’t remember a time in the past year when I haven’t had a constant stream of foreign words running through my head, like a sea of letters I could dive into and disappear. But Cassie makes everything hard. She breaks the words to pieces until they’re too broken to read. Or maybe I’m broken. But now I don’t feel like putting the words back together.
“I don’t want you to get kicked out of camp, okay?” I say.
“Why? Because you’d feel bad for me?”
“No,” I snap. “Because I’d feel bad for me.” Cassie narrows her eyes, like she’s trying to see past my lie, but it’s not a lie. It’s the truth. “And I’d feel bad for Grover, too,” I say.
When I say his name, Cassie’s face gets serious. “You don’t have to worry. I didn’t steal drugs.”
“Good.”
“But what if I did.” Cassie invades my space. She leans in close, examining my eyes. “What would you do?”
This is a test. I can feel it.
“Nothing,” I say.
Cassie gives me a smart-ass look and eases back.
“I put my head in the water. What comes next?” she asks.
“Floating,” I say, taking a breath. “You need to be able to float to swim.”
Cassie yanks on the orange life jacket around her neck. “This makes me float, dumb ass.”
An angry comment. Confirmation she really isn’t on drugs. I drag Cassie by the life jacket back to shore and grab the packet of crackers from my pocket that Grover handed me under the table at breakfast.
“Eat.” I hand them to her.
“Only with a side of diet pills.” She scans my body. “You need them, too.”
“No diet pills.”
“Yes diet pills,” Cassie says.
“No diet pills,” I say. Cassie’s rigid stance doesn’t change. “I promise I won’t conjugate any French verbs as long as you don’t take any pills.”
“How do I know if you’re really doing it?”
“You won’t. You have to believe that I’ll tell you the truth.”
“The truth,” Cassie repeats. And then she says, “Fine. I won’t take any diet pills if you tell me why you were sent here.”
Cassie’s words surprise me. For the whisper of a moment, I see one sentence of the French imperfect in my head. My French teacher made us all go around the classroom and talk about something we repeatedly did when we were younger, using the tense.
Quand j’étais petite, nous allions à la plage chaque semaine.
When I was young, we used to go to the beach every week.
She clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth and told me that was impossible. There’s no beach nearby. She was right. I made it up, but I didn’t want to talk about the habitual stuff we did. She knew what my family did anyway. Everyone knew.
“I’ll tell you.” I can’t look at Cassie. “But not yet.”
“You promise?”
I force my eyes up. “Do you promise not to take any more diet pills?”
Cassie’s head moves up and down hesitantly. “I promise,” she says.
We shake on it. I look at the hideous life jacket around her neck. “Now what do we do about that?”
A wicked grin grows across Cassie’s face. “I’ll take care of it.”
Cassie puts her head under the water many more times before the bell rings to end our activities. I teach her how to kick. She holds on to the side of the H dock in the red zone making waves with her legs, her head in the water, and blowing bubbles. Every time younger kids swim past, she splashes them and smiles. By the end of the day, she’s lying on her back, face toward the sun, and floating in her life jacket.
I sit on my butt in Lake Kimball, feeling the sand and water between my fingers, and watch her. My shirt billows out in front of me like a heavy water balloon. It weighs me down.
Cassie watches me as I walk to the end of the dock. With the sun on the water, I can see the drop-off that marks the yellow zone from green. The sandy bottom disappears and all that’s left is navy blue.
When I dive in, my shirt drags as I push my way through the water. I touch the bottom with my hand just to know it’s there. There is a bottom. Looking up through the blue, I push my feet off the ground and start fighting my way back to the top. My shirt clings to the water, like a million tiny hands pulling on me, trying to make me go back down, but I don’t want to be on the bottom anymore. It’s dark down there. And I don’t want to fight so hard to breathe. Breathing should be easy.
When my head comes above the surface moments later, Cassie yells from the shallow end, “Show-off!”
We gather our things and head up the stairs toward the mess hall. Water drips off Cassie’s hair and down her back. The ridges of her shoulders and spine stick out; she’s so skinny. I don’t know how her parents look at her every day and don’t help. My mom would be all over me.
A sinking feeling overtakes my stomach. I swallow hard and ask her, “Do you still live with your mom?”
I see Cassie’s bones pull in tight. “Why?”
I try to act casual and even. “Just wondering.”
“No.” Cassie picks up the pace, but I follow closely.
“Who do you live with now?”
She whips around. “I did what you asked. I blew bubbles. Don’t burst mine with your questions.”
She stomps her way to the top of the stairs, but I stay put. My stomach is sour with sadness. I hate sadness. Anything is better than sadness. Even feeling nothing.
I look down and count the steps as I make my way up the stairs. At the top, a pair of large feet stops my movement.
“I have a package,” Grover says.
“What?”
“Do you want my package?”
I look down at the zipper on his shorts. I can’t help it. For a breath, I imagine what’s underneath. Grover is just so long.
He pulls a brown box from behind his back. “My package for you.” He smiles. “It’s not actually from me. I’m just the delivery boy.”
I take it from him.
“Delivery man, I should say.” Grover puffs out his thin chest, and the image that was in my head moments ago is back. My cheeks heat instantly.
“Thanks.” I start to walk away.
“She did it,” Grover says. “I told you she would.”
And he did. But that’s not what I want Grover to tell me.
“By the way.” I glance at the return address on the package. My address.
“Yes?” he asks.
“I don’t have a boyfriend anymore.”
“My heightened mental and emotional state just elevated.” Grover looks down at his package. “Along with other things.”
“Gross.” I shake my head as I walk away. Because it is gross. Kind of. Maybe. I take one more look over my shoulder at Grover. Okay. Maybe not.