Cassidy

Nine years old

 

The elementary school secretary, Mrs. Hughes, peeks at me over the counter with cold eyes, and I slink down farther in my chair, staring at my beat-up sneakers, which are covered in drying puke.

After lunch, two kids trapped me in the bathroom, the smaller of the two standing in front of the door while the bigger one asked me if I was a “raping, murdering fuck” like my father.  When I didn’t answer, he pushed me so hard that I stumbled backward into the sink, crying out as the thin flesh covering my hip met the smooth, hard, unforgiving porcelain.

“One eye blue and one eye green,” he sneered, spittle collecting in the corner of his mouth as he advanced on me. “It’s weird as fuck. You’re a goddamned freak, killer.”

He pushed me again, and I whimpered softly.

“You gonna cry?” he asked.

I wanted to cry.

Heck, I wanted to cry just about every day of my life, but instead I sucked in my cheeks and clamped my teeth around the warm, wet flesh, willing the pain of the bite to overwhelm my tears as I stared down at the tiled floor.

“You don’t belong in this town no more,” he said. “You and yore mama give everyone the creeps. You got to move on.”

“J.J., we gotta go. Someone’s gonna come.”

“Shut up, Kenny.” J.J. turned back to me, smacking my cheek twice, hard, forcing me to look up. “You look at me when I’m talkin’ to you, boy.”

His eyes were brown and mean when I met them.

“You heard me? No one wants you here, killer.”

I gulped down the rising bile in my throat.

“No one wants yore tainted blood here.”

“J.J.—”

“No one wants the reminder of who yore daddy was and what he done.”

I tried to swallow again, but it felt like the muscles of my throat had frozen and I couldn’t force them to work.

“No one wants—”

A sharp, unavoidable heaving sensation lifted the contents of my stomach, and I opened my mouth just in time for my regurgitated lunch to splash all over J.J.’s Patriots sweatshirt, blue jeans, and Nikes.

“Fuuuuuuuuck!” he screamed, jolting back. “What the fuck?”

Tears streamed from my eyes, more a result of the puke than a reaction to the meanness. Vomit dripped from my lips and chin, onto my red T-shirt, onto my scarred Wal-Mart sneakers.

“Screw this!” yelled Kenny, opening the bathroom door and disappearing into the hallway.

“You’re gonna pay for this, you little shit!” bellowed J.J., turning around to follow Kenny.

My shirt and shoes were covered in throw-up, and without a change of clothes, I couldn’t go back to class. So I headed to the nurse’s office instead. She took one look at me and gasped without sympathy, giving me a pair of sweatpants and an old T-shirt from the lost and found. While I was getting dressed, I heard her tell the school secretary to call my mother.

Mama arrived forty minutes later, her eyes worried as she looked into mine. I mumbled something about being sorry, but she told me to stay put as she hurried into the principal’s office. Sitting on a chair outside his half-open door, I can hear just about everything he’s saying to her.

“This school simply isn’t a good fit for Cassidy, Ms. Porter. I’m sure you can appreciate how uneasy the other children are around yore son.”

“But why?” she says softly, her voice emotional. “Cass is a good boy. Kind.”

Mr. Ruggins clears his throat. “We’ve never had a problem with Cassidy, per se, and to be clear, I can’t make you pull him from school, ma’am. But I can tell you that episodes like today will not be isolated. I imagine it’ll just get worse for yore son as time goes on.”

“I don’t understand. He wouldn’t hurt a fly,” she says. “He’s gentle and—”

“No one here is disputin’ that, Ms. Porter. But I think it would be better for Cassidy, and for you, ma’am, to think about homeschoolin’ him.”

“Homeschoolin’! But I’m not a teacher. I don’t know how to teach him.”

I imagine Mr. Ruggins leaning forward as his chair squeaks. “Don’t need to be. You can buy a book from the Wal-Mart over in Lincoln that’ll tell you how to teach him everythin’ he needs to know. We can even order it for you if that would help. Or I can ask Mrs. Hughes to make a recommendation for you.”

“But what about friends? He’ll be lonely with no one but me for company.”

“Ms. Porter,” says Mr. Ruggins gently. “Cassidy doesn’t have any friends, ma’am.”

“Of course he does,” she says, “Joey Gilligan. Sam White. Marcus—”

“No, ma’am,” says Mr. Ruggins firmly. “He doesn’t have any friends anymore. Cassidy sits alone at lunch, alone on a bench at recess. He walks through the halls alone. No one speaks to him unless it’s to give him a hard time. He minds his business—yes, ma’am—but trouble still finds him.”

My mother sobs, and it tears at my heart a little because I’d been keeping it a secret, how the other kids had been treating me since my father’s arrest and conviction. I didn’t want her to worry about something else. Now she knows, and I can tell it’s hurt her. I clench my fists, and, even though my cheeks are still raw and bleeding from chewing on them in the bathroom, I bite down anyway.

“Mr. Ruggins! Cassidy didn’t do anythin’ wrong!” says my mother, her voice breaking a little.

“But his daddy sure did,” says Mr. Ruggins. His chair squeaks again, and this time I imagine him leaning away from my mother. “Ask the families of those poor girls. He did wrong, all right.”

“Paul is . . . well, he is a very sick man. We didn’t . . . that is, we had no idea what was goin’ on. He was away all the time, and . . . and . . .” She pauses before speaking again. “But Cassidy’s just a child. He’s only nine years old. He’s not his father.”

“Cassidy is his son, ma’am.”

His son.

I am the son of the man one reporter called “the bloodiest serial killer the state of Maine has ever known.” My mother tried to protect me from the truth, but there was no hiding it during the trial and sentencing. It was on the TV and in the newspapers at the grocery store. It was everywhere.

My father, Paul Isaac Porter, raped and murdered at least a dozen girls along the I-95 corridor between 1990 and 1998.

It’s a fact.

And now it follows me wherever I go.

Rapist’s son.

Murderer’s son.

Freak.

Killer.

Since his arrest, and especially since his conviction, I’ve been called every ugly thing you can think of. People cross the street when they see me and Mama coming. They egg our house and throw rocks through our windows. They move out of our pew at church when we sit down. The waitresses at the town diner pretend they don’t see us even when Mama asks if we can place our order. Even good people—like my teachers, like the pastor and his wife, like Mr. Ruggins —can barely look us in the eye.

Mama cries all the time. She calls herself stupid and naive and says that she should have known. She doesn’t sleep much. She jumps at the slightest sound. And lately, when she doesn’t think I notice, she stares at me hard, like she’s puzzling through something. If I catch her, she looks away quickly like I would if I was caught doing something wrong.

Cassidy is his son, ma’am.

But I’m not him. I’m me. A separate person.

There’s a long and painful silence as I wait for my mother to say something—anything—else to try to explain that my father and I are individual people. I didn’t rape anyone. I didn’t murder anyone. I didn’t hurt anyone. Not ever.

But she doesn’t say anything.

And her silence is chilling.

“You take him on home today, ma’am,” says Mr. Ruggins after a long and awkward silence. “And you think on what I said . . . okay, now? I’m certain it would be best for everyone.”

When Mama emerges from Mr. Ruggins’s office a second later, her face is white and her eyes are red and weepy, shell-shocked, and defeated.

“Mama?” I murmur, feeling worried as I take her hand and look up into her bloodshot blue eyes.

She looks down at me and lifts her chin. “We’re leavin’.”

I walk beside her out of the office, down the hallway, and out the double doors to the parking lot. I’m silent as I get into the backseat and buckle my belt, silent as my mother starts the car and silent as she cries quietly all the way home.