Beautiful (20 page)

She's dead, girl.

She's dead.

“I told them I didn't want her,” Lenora says, and her voice sounds far away, fluttering and drab like moth wings. “So they took her. What do you think they're going to do with her?”

Her fingers brush my arm. My skin feels like it's across the room. I see her touch me, but it is seconds before I feel it.

“Hey you,” she says, slapping my hand weakly. “I asked you a question.”

“I don't know,” I say. I am staring at the sweating window, at the smears of color contained in the tiny droplets of water. “I don't know what they do with the bodies.”

Bodies. A body. Not Sarah. Just another girl's body that is not useful anymore.

“The bodies,” says Lenora as I walk slowly to the door. I can see my legs moving, but I do not feel them.

“Cassie,” she says. “Is that your name?”

I keep walking.

“Cassie. Cassandra. What an ugly name.”

The birds are still chirping as I walk to the car. My legs are weak, like I have been walking for days. It is not them carrying me. They move out of habit, because they don't know what else to do. I am floating. The birds are somewhere close, but I do not see them.

I open the car door. I get inside. I buckle my seat belt. Mom stares at me. Her face is drenched with fear and love.

I start screaming.

The other day, I found one of your hairs on my blanket. I could tell it was not a hair you pulled out, not part of a clump you tore out of your scalp. It was a single hair, one that fell out naturally, one you never knew was missing. I held it in my fingers and thought it strange that it could exist without your body, that it was the last piece of you anyone would ever see.

Sarah, I put the hair in my mouth. I don't know why, but I pushed it in until it curled on my tongue. I drank stale water from the cup by my bed and felt it slither halfway down my throat. It's a strange feeling to have a hair stuck in your throat, half-tickling, half-choking, like it's trying to climb its way back out, like it's trying to reach sky and air and light.

I drank more water until I couldn't feel it anymore. It was somewhere inside me, but now it's gone. Disintegrated. Turned into nothing.

I wake up these days suspicious, wondering why I slept so well. Then I remember the pills Mom gave me to make me calm down. Then I remember the car ride home. Lenora. Alex. The screaming. You.

And that's when it hits me, the punch in the stomach, the carving out of my insides. That's when I realize that none of this is a movie. I will not go out with a bang. There is no ending. There are no credits. I will wake up and I will keep waking up and this will always be waiting for me.

Or maybe not. Maybe this is the movie where Cassie wakes up to the sound of walkie-talkies and hard knocks at her door. The mother's voice filtered through sleep-fog, “Honey, please wake up.” A montage of memories: crowded hallways and big girls, the feeling of choking, the sound of birds chirping, the smell of damp cigarette smoke and rotting food.

You, pale and lifeless. You, with your stomach full of poison. You, sitting on your mattress with a packed suitcase next to you, waiting for someone who never came.

“Cassandra.” The girl hears her name. She is not as beautiful as she was at the beginning of the movie. She gets out of bed and opens the door. There are a man and a woman
in blue uniforms. All she can see are the guns on their belts. All she can see is the man staring at her nipples through her thin pajama shirt as he says, “We just have some questions to ask you, dear.” He sounds kind even as he looks her up and down.

This is the kind of movie where the cops take notes in their little notepads. The mother tells them about the phone calls the girl missed while she was sleeping, death threats from the former best friend. Then it is the girl's turn to explain how it all came to this. This is when everything comes out. This is the purging, the moment of truth, when all secrets become not-secrets, when the cops take notes and make them official. This is the movie with the weeping mother, with the father bursting through the front door at just the right moment, the father who never before left work early, just when the man cop is saying, “We know that family well. We'll make sure she never bothers you again,” just when the lady cop is patting the girl's knee, cooing, “It's not your fault.” Then the girl cries, falling to the floor in gratitude at this excellent timing, at this synchronized concern, at all of these ears listening. The end.

Or maybe the girl feels nothing. Maybe she is doing what she must to make the phone stop ringing, doing what she must to make the cops go away, to get her house back to normal, to make everything silent like it should be. This could be the
movie where nothing changes, where everyone ends up exactly where they started.

Another moving van. Another new school. New girls and new boys who still want the same things.

The daughter on a couch in a small, sterile office, staring at a therapist's leg hair stubble sticking through nylons, staring at the clock on the wall. The sound of
tick, tick, tick
. The walk back to the car, the mother's hopeful face.

“What did you talk about?” the mother asks.

“Nothing,” says the girl.

Tick, tick, tick.

A doctor and a prescription pad lined with scribbles. A bottle of pills glittering with hope. The girl puts one in her mouth, swallowing. The pill settles into her stomach. The girl waits for hours for it to kick in, “to take the edge off” like the doctor said, to make everything go away.

But you are still there.

And then it is winter again. The edges of the lake have frozen over, all the life below hidden, suspended. And there is the girl, Cassie, on the shore, just breathing.

Or what if this is a different kind of movie? What if this is a kind of movie that hasn't even been made yet? What if this is my movie, really mine? What if I am the one with the camera in my hand, my fingers on the buttons? What if it is my voice
saying stop, go, action, cut? What if I am the one giving all the directions? And I am the actor. And you are the actress. And this is our set, our soundstage, this place that doesn't exist yet, a floating island out in the middle of the ocean, warm water lapping against the sandy shore. This is a place where it is never winter, where there is food everywhere, hanging from trees, waiting for us to eat it, perfectly ripe. We shower in waterfalls. We watch the birds do somersaults in the air, the most beautiful birds you've ever seen, with wings as long as we are tall, red, yellow, orange, feathers like flame. The feathers fall to the ground for us to put in our hair, for us to weave together to make our clothes. There are lakes so clear we can see the bottom lined with diamonds.

There are no shadows, no caves, no dark places where things can hide. There is only you and me and the birds with flame feathers, only soft sand and warm sun and moss for us to sleep on. We will lie on the beach and write songs on each other's skin. We will sing them to the birds and they will sing back. When the sun sets, it will be a different kind of dark. Not dark like suffocation, not like everything gone. Not a dark that can be used against us. It will simply be dark like sleeping, dark like heavy eyes.

We will build a fire with feathers. We will watch the light dance on each other's faces. It will keep us warm but
it will not burn us. Because it's fire that is ours, fire that we made. Can you feel it? Hold your hands out and wave them a little. Look, you can wave the smoke in any direction, into any shape. These are our smoke signals, puffs of white in the night air only we can read. We will build a fire bigger than any fire that's ever existed. The smoke will be strong enough to cross an ocean. Maybe one of our smoke rings, one of our Morse code letters, will travel somewhere we haven't been yet. It will reach land and someone will see it and they will wonder what it means.

But for now, there is no island. You are gone and this is not a movie. For now, there is only a new school in a new city, new teachers and new students who never knew who I was before. There is me with a naked face and my hair in a ponytail, trying not to be seen. There is a scholarship with my name on it and an expensive classroom with desks arranged in a circle. There are students who speak without raising their hands. A teacher who listens. Nodding and thoughtful hands on chins. There are strangers looking at the new girl. They are looking at me and wanting me to speak.

I am sitting at my desk, listening to everyone talk about Dostoyevsky. I am trying not to look up, trying not to show how much I want to be in on this conversation, trying not to show how much I want to say. I am holding my pencil too
tight. I put it down so I won't break it. I stare at my blank notebook, trying to make the blue lines move.

And then there is something in front of me, a foreign object covered with lines and squiggles that are not mine. I look up and the girl next to me smiles, her freckles so perfect she could be Annie. I squint and look closer. I scour the white skin, the red curls, the blue eyes for cruelty. But all she's doing is smiling. All she did was put her notebook on my desk, turned to a page with a picture I do not recognize.

It is a drawing, a penciled comic. It is a room full of ducks arranged in a circle, their cartoon beaks open, the dialogue bubbles spelling
Quack!
At the bottom of the page, at one edge of the circle, sit two geese, one with a ponytail, the other with curly hair and freckles. The freckled goose says, “Hi, I'm Chelsea.”

I pick up my pencil and write words for the other.

Cassandra. Nice to meet you.

Thank you

Thank you

Thank you

To my parents, who always supported my creativity and weirdness, even when it was loud and messy. You knew, even when I didn't, that all those messes were just part of the plan.

To my mentors and teachers and readers: Lisa Rosenberg, Sarah Stone, Edie Meidav, Brian Teare, Daphne Gottlieb, Felicia Ward, Carolyn Cooke, Helen Klonaris, Chris Savino, everyone in Writing & Consciousness at New College, and so many more. Your wisdom and support made me a better writer than I'd ever be on my own.

To my agent, Amy Tipton, who believed in me when I was starting not to—with that first phone call, you gave me a taste of what it feels like to have a dream come true. And to Anica Rissi at Simon Pulse—I am truly blessed to have an editor who gets my work as well as you do.

And finally—to my fantastic, amazing, adorable, and talented husband Brian. This never would have happened without you. Your love makes me brave.