CHAPTER 8
Aunt Chey,
It’s about time I tell you that I had sex in your bed . . . with your boyfriend.
Kisses,
Cassie
I try volleyball, arts and crafts, and horseback riding. I even play Bek in tetherball one afternoon after another torturous group “share-apy” session. In an exercise to get to know ourselves better, Madison asks the group to share one thing about themselves they’ve never told anyone. Katie says she cheated on a math test her freshman year. Hannah says she kissed her best friend’s boyfriend. Dori says that most days she’s pretty sure there’s no God, which would really piss off her Bible-thumping stepdad. I say I hate spinach.
“Then why do you eat a fucking spinach salad every night?” Cassie counters me.
I look down at my feet and try to remember the word for spinach in French, but come up blank.
“What about you, Cassie? What have you never told anyone?” Madison asks.
Cassie clicks her tongue on the roof of her mouth. “I’ve never told anyone that it’s weird that Zander eats spinach when she hates it.”
After that, I head straight to the tetherball courts. I like the feeling of punching something, but it catches me off guard—the sensation of actually liking something and wanting to do it again. I can’t remember the last time that happened. To my surprise, I end up winning. Hayes cheers from the sidelines chanting, “Durga! Durga! Durga!” Bek doesn’t look too disappointed and claims his artificial arm holds him back.
“Why do you lie all the time?” I ask.
“I don’t.” He rubs his very apparent arm and walks away.
An afternoon later that week, I lie alone on the raft, air-drying myself after a swim. It’s another thing I’d forgotten—how much I like being in the water. Or maybe I didn’t forget; I just didn’t care to remember. Out in the middle of the lake, it almost feels like I’m not at camp. My eyes glaze over and my mind fades away, but I realize that if I’m not at camp that means I’m at home and the anger comes back. I squeeze my nails into my palms. As I feared, the downside to actually acknowledging that I like something is that I notice when I don’t like something, too.
The raft starts to move as Grover climbs up the ladder and shakes his wet hair over me. Little droplets of water fall on my face.
“Finally, the legendary black bathing suit. All my dreams have come true.” He sets an apple next to me. “You didn’t take this at lunch.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, I don’t want it?” I roll over onto my side.
“A boy can try.” He tosses the whole apple into the water. It splashes through the surface, but comes back up seconds later and floats.
“You’re just gonna waste it?” I ask.
“You know the whole ‘eat an apple a day to keep the doctor away’ thing doesn’t really apply to me.” Grover watches the ripples on the water.
“How do you know you’re going to be schizophrenic?”
“I don’t know. But I feel it.”
Feel. I nod at the word.
“What’s it like?” I ask.
“Like sitting on a wobbly chair that will eventually break from the pressure.” Grover looks at the bobbling apple for a second before coming back to me. “But let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about you.”
“No.” I lie back down and turn my face up to the sun. A second later, I feel a shadow block the heat. I open my eyes and see Grover’s face inches from mine.
“You’re really pretty. Does your boyfriend who plays football tell you that?”
I don’t move. I just look into Grover’s oversized eyes.
“He should,” he says.
“He doesn’t really care about me,” I say. “He just likes my boobs.”
“I can’t blame him for that.” Grover smiles. “How do you know he doesn’t care about you?”
My stomach turns with anger. Again. When I try to push the feeling down, I hear Cassie’s voice in my ear. Apathetic mess. It makes the anger worse and I can’t get rid of it.
“Because he always forgets my sister’s birthday,” I say. I’ve never said that out loud before.
“You have a sister? What’s her name?” Water drips from Grover’s hair onto my forehead.
“Molly.”
I acknowledge Molly.
“When is Molly’s birthday?”
“September sixteenth.”
“I’ll write it down in my notebook when I get back to the beach. I can send her a card. Do you want to dump your boyfriend yet?”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to do that,” Grover says.
“Well, she won’t get it.”
“Is she off at college?”
“No, she’s younger than me,” I say.
“Boarding school? I can send it there.”
“She’s dead, Grover.”
The moment the words come out, my chest feels like a balloon pops inside of me. I deflate. Grover stays still, his eyes barely blinking. “You should definitely dump your boyfriend,” he says.
“I acknowledge that.” I close my eyes. The strain of looking at Grover so closely that I can see the pores on his nose and the freckles that rim his eyes makes my sight blurry. Nothing is spoken for too many long seconds. I try to find a verb to conjugate in French in my head, but it’s a jumbled mess.
“Why do you care so much about Cassie? She’s so mean,” I finally say.
“How does that make you feel?”
Feel. The word is haunting me.
“Cassie makes me mad,” I admit.
“Then it’s working.” I look at Grover, confused. “If you’re mad at her, then she can be mad at you. Get it?” He smiles.
“And being mad is a good thing?”
“What’s wrong with being mad?” Grover asks. I can’t muster the energy to respond. Being mad means being, and some days, I simply don’t want to be. “You may not want to be mad, Zander, but maybe you need to be.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. Only you know yourself.” Grover leans in closer to me, like he’s telling me a secret. “I care because she doesn’t want me to,” he says.
“But if Cassie doesn’t want you to care about her, why not give her what she wants?”
“It’s not about doing what people want you to do. It’s about giving people what they need.” Grover moves in closer, his nose inches from my face. For a moment, I think he’s going to kiss me and my heart rate picks up. “I want to remember you like this for the rest of my life.”
And then he sits back. The sun hits me directly in the eyes, making them instantly water.
“You should really think about dumping that boyfriend of yours,” Grover says.
“What about you?” I sit up. “What makes you mad?”
Grover smiles and does a cannonball into the water, splashing me. Chills cover my skin and when his head pops up, he yells, “I can wait for you, Zander!”
“I thought you said you hate waiting.”
“I do.” Water drips down Grover’s face. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t need to do it.”
He swims away as I sit sweating in the afternoon sun. When I get too hot, I dive off the raft and swim all the way to the bottom of the lake. My hair floats around me as I sit on the floor of Lake Kimball. I grab a fistful of sand and let it drain out of my hand slowly, like grains dripping through an hourglass. I try to clear my brain. When the pinch of suffocation starts in my lungs, I kick my way to the top and gasp for air. A second later and I might not have made it.
On the beach, I find Cassie sitting on her towel. Her nose points up to the sky as she leans back on her hands. I dry off and twist my wet hair into a ponytail. A few strands come loose in my hand. They cling to my damp fingers.
“Damn it,” I whisper.
“Talking to yourself again, Z?”
I wipe the strands on my towel and let them go.
“I pull on my hair too hard when I’m frustrated. I’m afraid I might go bald,” I admit. “I also have a sister.”
“Like I care,” Cassie says.
“And she’s dead.” Cassie looks at me, but I can’t read her face. “I haven’t said that out loud much.” I stretch my hands out at my side and resist the urge to clench up. “I can teach you how to swim,” I say.
Cassie’s face turns sour. “Who said I don’t know how to swim?”
“No one. I just guessed.”
Cassie blows out an exaggerated breath. “Who even says I want to know how to swim? If it means I have to wear a bathing suit like yours, I’d rather drown.”
“Fine,” I say and kick some sand on her towel. “But if you decide you need me, you know where to find me.”