Days Like This (16 page)

SOMETHING WAS WRONG with
Cassie. I knew it because I knew her. I knew from the way she bit the side of
her lip, from the way she barely said anything. Her eyes gave away everything.
Whatever was happening, it wasn’t good.

I should’ve
asked her. I should’ve made sure she was okay, that she wasn’t alone.

She had June;
she wasn’t alone.

But did June
know her like I did?

They seemed
close. Cassie didn’t usually let people get that close. She had a lot of
practice at keeping secrets.

She’s fine,
Graham. Get in the truck.

She was fine.
It wasn’t any of my business if she wasn’t. Three days of keeping my distance
and they had been good. I’d barely thought about her; of course now that I’ve
seen her again, it was going to take three more to stop. I was doing this for
me. I would be leaving at the end of the summer. Two months. Two months and I’d
be in Texas and she’d be wherever and our lives would finally, truly be
separate.

We’d both move
on. We’d both find our lives. I would stop wondering about her and remembering
her touch and asking the what ifs. It was good I didn’t ask because if I had,
she would have told me and then we’d be that much closer. Closer for me and
Cassie was trouble. Distance, now that was what I wanted.

I threw the
grocery bag into the passenger seat, and backed out of the parking lot.

JUNE GAPED AT me while she
ate her peach ice cream. She’d asked me to tell her about Graham and the whole
story was too long, too complicated. The ice cream parlor was busy today. We
were all crammed into the little space like sardines and this little kid next
to us kept counting things.

“There’s
nothing to tell,” I said. It was a bad lie, and I knew it as soon as it came
out of my mouth.

“Bullshit. The
other night was something with the way he bolted out of your place. That, out
there, that was
way
more than ‘nothing.’ I already know he
was the boy you were hung up when you came to Butler. Fill in the gaps.”

I sighed,
stirring the ice cream with my spoon. “He’s been my best friend since I was
eight.”

“He was your
first kiss?”

I nodded,
taking a bite of the melting ice cream. It didn’t settle well and it had
nothing to do with the ice cream. I’ll never forget the way he kissed me that
first time over the fence between our backyards, after I called him a jerk and
he called me difficult and then we kissed. We were only fifteen but I knew that
kiss changed me. It changed everything because it made everything that we’d
both been ignoring become something. We were still ignoring something, bigger
things, things that felt impossible to move past.

June leaned
back. “First boyfriend?”

“Yeah,” I
said, pushing away the bowl. That kid still counted behind us, which was a good
distraction from all the thoughts of Graham as my boyfriend. Holding my hand,
walking me home, taking me on dates, sitting and doing absolutely nothing.

“First fuck?”
She practically yelled it.

“June!” I
screeched. The mother behind her gave us a dirty look, and June laughed.

“He was,
okay.” She pushed the spoon around in her bowl. “Is he good?”

I groaned.
“That’s not what we’re talking about.”

But my brain
went there anyway. I was sixteen the first time Graham and I had sex. We hadn’t
been dating that long, but he’d already known everything about me, and it’d felt
like we’d always been together. That weekend his parents were away; I went
inside his house without knocking. He was in his room watching TV and when he
saw me I remember him smiling. I curled up beside him, kissed him and said I
knew he was the one; I was ready if he was. He spent most of our first time
asking if I was all right, and we were both nervous and determined. It was
awkward but perfect because we loved each other.

But then it
got incredible when he figured out how to touch me. I remembered how he felt
when I sunk my fingers into his shoulders and nibbled that place behind his ear
that made him lose control. How it was when he’d move inside me and make my
whole body fold at his touch.

“Oh my God, he
is. You’re blushing!” June yelled, slamming her hand on the table.

“Stop it,” I
whispered. My mind still flowed with thoughts of being with Graham, and I tried
to block them out. I couldn’t close my eyes because they’d be there more
vividly, so I sighed.

June laughed
and looked pleased. “I knew he had to be good. You can tell with some people,”
she said. She didn’t look away from me when she took another spoonful of ice
cream. “Really good?”

I groaned. “June,
seriously.”

She threw her
hands up. “Okay. So he was your first rodeo—
only
rodeo aside from Rohan. So what happened? There’s obviously still something
between you.”

She was wrong
about that part. “There’s nothing between us. We’re just friends. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“It’s hard to
go back to that after everything, but we’re both trying.”

“Outside
didn’t seem like trying. Well, it did: trying not to fuck each other right
there on the sidewalk.”

The mother
gasped and grabbed her counting kid. I glared at June. “That’s not how it is.”

Was it? I
thought about the look in his eye, and how hard he was trying not to notice I
was upset. And the other night at my house, the way he stared at me like he was
remembering or imagining. That couldn’t mean anything. I’d done the same thing
hundreds of times…but then I did want something. Graham had plenty of
opportunities; she was reading too much into it.

She shook her
head. “I promise you, it is. That boy still likes you, and you still like him.”

“He’s moved
on, June. I had the chance and it’s gone now. I’ve ruined his life enough.”

“How so?”

“I left him to
go to school.” I stirred the ice cream some more. It was turning into a
milkshake now.

“So?”

She seriously
wanted me to spell it out. “So, it broke him. That’s what I do. I break
people.”

“Fuck that!”
she said. I looked at her again. I forgot how that was her favorite word. “Graham
seems pretty solid to me. Get him back.”

“I can’t do
that.”

“Oh, I think
you can, but get one thing clear, Cassie Harlen,” she leaned into me. “You
didn’t break him. And if you did, then you broke yourself too. I remember when
you were still in pieces, but you healed. He seems healed, too. That’s what
breaks do, they heal and then they grow back stronger.”

I shook my
head. “You don’t know the whole story, June.”

“So tell me.”

 “YOU’RE SERIOUSLY MESSED up,”
June said. She didn’t even blink. It was the first thing she’d said in eighty-six
seconds since I finished the story about Graham and how I left.

“Gee, thanks,”
I said.

“Seriously.
That is the biggest bunch of shit I have ever heard, and I grew up in the
system.”

I stopped
walking. “I was eighteen, and I was scared—”

She stopped,
too. “And now you’re nineteen—and you did the same thing to Rohan. You decided
you were out and you left. You were going to do it to me, too.”

“But I
didn’t.”

She threw her
hands in the air. “Only because I caught you! Admit it, Cassie.”

“Admit what?”
I crossed my arms. I didn’t like this conversation.

June lit a
cigarette. She wasn’t supposed to smoke in the park, but I didn’t care enough
to get into that fight. She took a drag and left me waiting. “You’re too
terrified that if anyone saw the real you, they would be fucked up for life
because you are fucked up.”

“I’m not
fucked up!” I shouted. Some families walking around us all stared.

“The hell you
aren’t,” she said. June started walking, cigarette in hand, and I moved with
her. “We all are. We all have issues. Life sucks, but you can’t act like the
world owes you something because you got dealt a shitty hand. It seems like God
or the Universe or Queen Shiva—whatever the hell you want to call it—gave you a
smoking hot boy. Twice, I might add. One who has never given up on you, and you
left him. I would be pissed if I was him.”

“He is
pissed,” I said.

“What did he
say when you told him why you left?”

I looked away
and bit the side of my jaw. June grabbed my shoulders so I was forced to look
at her. “Christ, you didn’t tell him?”

“He’s over me!
He has a girlfriend and a plan and I stumbled back into his life. I can’t be
selfish again. I’m trying to do the right thing here and let him live his own
life.”

“Who are you
trying to convince?”

“You.”

June shook her
head and crossed her arms. “I think you mean yourself.” June was a little scary
right now. I’d never seen her this worked up. “One, you’re not doing the right
thing for him; you’re doing the right thing for
you
. The right thing for Graham would be to apologize. Two,
that boy is not over you. Girlfriend or not, no one looks at a girl that way
who’s ‘just a friend.’ He still has feelings for you.”

I needed her
to stop saying that. It was really annoying that she came in here like she knew
everything. She didn’t. “He doesn’t.”

June grabbed
my arm when I tried to storm off ahead of her. “And you’re an expert on
feelings? God, Cassie. You haven’t even talked to Rohan since you left him. He
told me he called you.”

She talked to Rohan
about me? What was she trying to do? I already felt guilty enough for how I
left that. I yanked my arm away and we walked on in silence. She was kind of
right. I was fucked up. Who does the same thing to two people? The worst part
was that I didn’t see it.

“Listen,” June
said, “that was harsh.”

“Don’t
apologize.”

June scoffed. “I’m
not. I meant every syllable,” she said, tossing her cigarette into a trash. “You
made some mistakes, but own up to them and fix it. It’s not too late yet.”

Where did I
start? Just thinking about all of them was as if I was tornado who’d destroyed
a whole town and left all the shit I’d broken. Where did I start with that? How
did I fix it? Graham felt impossible to reach now, no matter what June thought
about how he felt. Rohan was a mystery; I owed him something, but what and how
to give it to him, I wasn’t sure.

We crossed the
street leaving the park. Neither of us had spoken for the whole five-minute
walk back to the car. “You know why Stevie Nicks is a rock legend?”

“Enlighten
me,” I said.

“Because
legends change the game,” June said. She paused and took a breath. Her eyes
wandered around the park like she was seeing it all for the first time, green
and monkey bars and kids running around, then she continued. “Stevie Nicks put
women on the map. She wrote her own music and she entered the industry at the
right time. She set a bar, told the truth in her songs, and spoke to the soul.
She didn’t care what people thought and she was true to herself. That’s the
woman you are named after.”

I watched June
as we walked. Under what she put out there—the hair colors, the clothes, the
attitude, the sex—she was something else entirely. I couldn’t quite figure her
out, but I thought that maybe I should start trying. That’s what friends
did—called each other out and saw beyond what they put in the world.

“Legends don’t
raise the bar; they set a new one,” June said as I opened the car door. “Set
the bar, Cassie.”

COOL AIR SEEPED through the
open window while I filled out the paperwork for school and tried not to think
about anything else. Cassie’s laughter flooded my ears, carried to my room in
the breeze. I froze and listened. Her laughter was met with Mrs. H’s, and what
had to be June’s. I pushed back the curtain to see outside. The girls were in
the backyard, light shining from bug repellent lamps. I wondered what they were
talking about that made them all laugh so loudly.

I couldn’t
keep doing this. The sooner I was out of this town, away from Cassie, the
better.

“What are we
doing for dinner?” Molly asked, wrapping her arms around my neck.

I peered at
her over my shoulder. Her long blonde hair was up out of her face, eyes on me.
You have this great girl; don’t fuck it
up, Tucker.

“Whatever you
want. We can go out.”

She shrugged,
moving her hands down my chest. “I was thinking we could stay in.”

I raised my
eyebrow and pressed my lips against her arm. “That’s a good plan.”

“Are you
almost done?”

“Almost,” I
said. “You?”

She sighed and
sat on the corner of my desk. “I need a break. I wrote myself into a corner with
my paper,” she said. She had to write some social justice studies paper. I
wasn’t sure how that went with being a nurse, but apparently it did. “Rawls was
right: everyone should be seen as equals, but where you come from does influence
your view of right and wrong. But the other side is right, too: nationality and
birthplace can’t be parts of justice. That’s how we got into this mess in the
first place.”

“Which one do
you agree with?”

Molly paced my
floor and her blonde hair fell loose from the ponytail. She was cute when she
was fired up and it brought out her Georgia twang more. “I don’t know—and I
can’t argue and defend both sides. I like what Rawls was saying, but it
justifies actions. This is social justice, so actions can’t be justified or
it’s the same cycle over and over again.”

“You don’t
think where you come from helps create who you are?”

“Of course I
do. We will always go back to what we know,” she said. Molly twisted a ring
around her finger while she paced through my living room. “If someone grows up
learning that it’s okay to eat sugar when they are upset, they will always turn
to it. Even if they’ve spent ten years not eating sugar—put it in front of them
when they’re upset, and they will eat it. Even knowing it’s wrong—”

“Why is sugar
wrong?”

She shrugged.
“Maybe it’s illegal.”

I tried to
keep myself from smiling. “Okay. Go on.”

She did. “Even
knowing it’s wrong to eat that sugar, on one side I can’t blame them because
it’s what they were taught to do. The other says that equality means one law is
wrong for everyone, regardless of background.”

“What does
sugar have to do with social justice?” I asked.

She threw up
her arms. “Seriously? That’s all you have to say?”

I pulled her
down to my lap so she was facing me. “It’s summer. Take a break.”

“I still have
to turn it in, that’s the purpose of an online class,” she said.

“Later,” I
said, moving my lips to hers. “It’s break time right now.”

Molly pressed
her body into mine, and her hands trailed down my chest and into the waistband
of my jeans. My body groaned at her touch, and my mind wandered to Cassie briefly
and wished it were her. Molly stepped away and pulled off her shirt and let her
hair down. When our lips met again, I ran my fingers through her hair, like I
used to do with Cassie’s, and kissed Molly harder to push Cassie out of my
head. I could forget her and her touch if I tried hard enough.

But Cassie’s
laughter echoed through my room, and I wondered what Molly would say about my
conditioning. Maybe she was viewing it wrong—maybe people needed something
familiar to cling to, and that’s why they went back. Because the unknown was
scarier than the bad thing they didn’t want.

Maybe I was
conditioned to Cassie the same way Molly’s fake person had to eat illegal
sugar. I didn’t want to think about Cassie, to have my thoughts wander to her
or to have her voice taunt my memory, but I couldn’t let it do anything else.