Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always (15 page)

“Yeah, like all the gay-rights people who try to convince us to turn away from God’s path,” says Ronnie. His greasy gaze slides over me and lands on Eric, whose head is bent over his Bible, one finger resting on the page. I know without looking that he’s pointing to John 3:17, the verse about God sending Jesus here to save us, not to condemn us. Eric keeps these words on an index card taped to his bedroom wall; he letters the passage neatly onto the covers of his notebooks, recites it as a mantra. These are the words that allow him to exist without being torn in half by his faith.

“Uh … ” Terry always hates it when the discussion wanders into sex. Usually he chooses this moment to suggest a group prayer, but instead he pulls a newspaper out of the canvas tote bag near his feet and opens it to a page that looks very familiar to me. “This is more what I wanted to talk about, actually.” He points at the ad for Divinia Starr.

I smother my laughter. It’s all so ridiculous, you know—to go from a rather uncomfortable public examination of my lack of faith, to an implied attack against my brother’s sexuality,
and now this. They’re fast, I have to give them credit for that. It’s funny, right? So funny.

“What is it?” It’s the breathy, earnest girl. She reaches for the newspaper and reads the ad with her lips moving.

“It’s evil,” says Terry simply. “Insidious evil. In your school newspaper.”

I can’t breathe. I push my chair back and mumble an apology—I have the hiccups, a scratchy throat, my contact fell out—whatever, I don’t even know what I’m saying, but I need to get out of here before I lose it to the tsunami of laughter inside me. I run into the bathroom and stare into the mirror above the sink, trying to get a grip, to stare down the mirth inside me. A yellow beam of light from the ceiling fixture falls across the glass, making it hard to see. I lean in closer—for whatever reason I feel like I need to see myself clearly.

Okay, so I’m not crazy, but really, this is what happens. Have you ever done this? Have you locked eyes with yourself in a strange mirror and wondered about the spaces between the spinning motes of dust? There is the Cassandra in the mirror, and here is the Cassandra standing on pale pink tile, leaning over a sink that is decorated with a crocheted yellow soap dispenser cover and a little wicker basket filled with slightly dusty potpourri. And which one am I? The Cassandra in the mirror is clearly the crazy one. I can’t take my eyes off her eyes (or can she not take her eyes off mine?), and I watch as two round tears well up and hang on her lower lashes, water molecules desperately clinging together against the force of gravity. I don’t understand. Why is she—am I—crying? I feel a drop on my hand. I reach up to touch the surface of the mirror with the tip of my finger, forcing myself out of the dissociative moment and into reality. The teardrop slides across my wrist, leaving a trail.

This is reality. I have no faith and my brother is gay and my youth group leader thinks I’m insidious evil. And I can’t tell the difference between myself and a reflection.

“Cassandra?” Drew whispers from the doorway of the bathroom. Her voice doesn’t surprise me; I heard her turning the knob. I knew it would be her, yet I didn’t do anything to hide this mess. Neither Cass tries to fix herself up, to look a little less crazy.

“Are you … okay?”

I mean, it’s obvious I’m not. But I nod because … well, what else am I going to say to Drew freaking Godfrey? It’s not like she’s going to somehow help me, when she can’t even help herself. I tear my eyes away from my eyes in the mirror.

“I’m fine.” Haha.

“Is it what Ronnie said?” Drew chews a little on the end of her ponytail. “You know. About the gay thing?”

The gay thing? I study her face, trying to read the intentions behind the question. “No.” I wipe the back of my hand across my eyes. “It’s not that. It’s … ” And what is it?

She hands me a tissue and smiles. “Well, they were being stupid, you know. Not like that’s a big challenge for Ronnie and Blake.”

I take the tissue, squeeze it in my fist, brave a quick glimpse at Mirror Cass to see if she’s less crazy now or what. “I’m failing my English class.”

Wait. I didn’t say that, did I? Really? Why would I tell Drew Godfrey about my stupid English grade?

“I saw him talking to you after class,” she says, and then she blushes. “I mean, I’m not stalking you or anything, you know. I’ve got Dawkins’ class after you. The regular American Lit class. Not honors.”

Oh, right. I remember her now, slipping past us with her lumbering tread. “Yeah, it’s this poem thing,” I say. “I can’t write poetry.”

Mirror Cassandra catches my eye, but she looks okay now. She looks relieved, like she’s actually glad I told someone about this stupid poem. Like she’s glad I told Drew.

“I … I could help you?”

I hate it when people uptalk. “I … I don’t really think it’s the kind of thing someone could help me with.” Unless she wanted to write it for me. But I’ve seen her poetry, and it pretty much sucks. Though, does it suck as much as me not turning in a poem at all? But okay. So I need a poem. But … I think of Annika, the way her nose scrunched up, the way she said she was looking out for me. I know—I’m not dumb. I know Annika’s awful, and the way she treated Drew wasn’t right. But … if I start letting Drew think that I’m her friend, won’t it be worse for her? She’s going to come up to me more often in the halls, and Annika and Britney will be even meaner. Or maybe they’ll drop me, too. Like Kayla did. The empty hole of my weekend stretches out ahead of me, and for a second I’m afraid the stupid tears will come back.

Drew’s face turns a dark plum color. “Maybe you could come over after group ends, and we could work on it together? I mean, it’s Friday, you could … well, I suppose you have weekend plans already.”

I tear the tissue in my fist into shreds. The only plan I thought I had has evaporated. I look up, but Mirror Cassandra looks as uncertain as I feel. I need an excuse, a reasonable excuse, and fast, why I can’t go over to Drew’s house. An excuse that doesn’t involve me telling her she’s gross or stinky or that she has this pathetic habit of being unable to recognize the end of a conversation.

“It’s okay,” she says, shaking her head and smiling. “Really, I get it, Cass. You’re so nice to me here that sometimes I forget we’re not actually friends.” She shrugs and goes back to playing with her hair. “Do you remember that time in sixth grade? What you said to Gunnar Nelson during the rehearsal for the Christmas concert?”

“I think that would be great,” I say. Wait, what concert is she talking about? “If you could help me on my poem, I mean. I don’t have any other plans.” Gunnar Nelson was an incredibly stupid kid with white-blond hair and a turned-up nose who used to go to this church. I’d forgotten about him entirely.

“Really? You’d come to my house?” Drew’s voice rises almost a whole octave in her excitement. “My mom will be so excited!”

Her mom? I give Mirror Cassandra a stern frown, but her returning frown looks sort of … I don’t know. Satisfied, somehow.

“What did I say to Gunnar Nelson?” I can’t believe I agreed to this.

She giggles. “He was flicking my neck, you know? He used to do that all the time, and you turned to him—you know how you raise that one eyebrow like you do? You did that, and you said, ‘Do you think it impresses people when you act like that? Because, frankly, it makes you seem like the biggest moron.’” She moves one hand to the nape of her neck, her fingers tracing over old memories. “He stopped flicking me then, and he never did it again.”

24. Your inspiration …

It takes about five minutes for Drew to decide that I’m hopeless.

“I can’t help it,” I say, my voice laced with whining. “The words don’t line up for me, not like this. There’s nothing to sing about myself.”

She stares at me. “I don’t believe you.”

“What?”

“I can’t believe that someone as perfect as you could have trouble finding things to celebrate about her life.” She doesn’t blush, doesn’t chew on her hair. Drew is surprisingly confident about herself here in her own bedroom.

I don’t really know what I expected Drew Godfrey’s bedroom to look like. Pathetic, I guess. Pink, maybe? Filled with cross-stitched Bible verses and photos of babies in flowers or something? I don’t know. Instead, it’s pretty and sophisticated like the rest of the house, with framed photographs on the wall—black and white prints of a bunch of women singers I don’t recognize. She has a beautiful dark wood desk that matches the dresser and bed frame, and there’s a tall vase full of some kind of creamy white flowers on the desk. It’s nothing at all like any teenager’s bedroom I’ve ever seen—more like a magazine photo—and it’s nothing like the baggy-sweatshirt, dirty-hair mess that is Drew.

“Right, I’m perfect.” I roll my eyes, because what else is there to do? There’s no way to convince someone who thinks your life is perfect that, in fact, it’s really not.

“There has to be
something
you enjoy doing, that you’re good at.” She waits, like Mr. Dawkins waited, like Darin waited, like Kayla has apparently been waiting for the duration of our friendship. Waiting for me to do something interesting.

“I don’t know.” My mouth opens, and there’s an instant where I actually think about telling her about Divinia Starr. But that would be so dumb.

“What do you think about that fortune-telling blog?” Drew’s question startles me. It’s like she’s reading my mind.

“What?”

“That ad Terry was talking about, right before you left youth group? It was for this fortune-teller, I guess. A blog. Her site asks people to email her questions and then she’ll read some kind of fortune-telling cards or something and give you an answer. I think Terry’s overreacting. I mean, it seems like a game, not pure evil or whatever.” Here in her bedroom, Drew has opinions. She waits for mine.

“I don’t know.” I can’t tell her. “I don’t really believe in evil.” Once I’ve said it, though, I’m not sure. It’s one of those absolutes, those truths I have a hard time pinning down.

“Not at all? Like … you don’t believe in hell?” She raises her eyebrows, but she’s curious, not shocked.

I don’t know. Hell isn’t very logical. Where
is
it, for starters? And sin. It’s so absolute. How can someone draw a line down the center of life and say these things are okay and these things will cause eternal damnation, with the fires and the demons and the pain. And heaven too, for that matter. When I was a little kid, I used to believe in God, used to imagine him holding me at night when I was scared or sad or having a hard time falling asleep. I used to believe he would put his arms around me and rock me like a little baby, like a mother would hold her baby. But now?

“I don’t believe in anything,” I say. Is it the truth? Yes and no, I guess, like everything else. I expect Drew to be upset, to argue with me, maybe. To ask more questions. Instead, she sort of frowns like she’s deep in concentration and takes a battered spiral notebook out of a small desk drawer. She writes something without looking at me. I feel so awkward.

“Drew?”

She doesn’t look up, her pen moving fast, until finally she brings her pen up to her mouth and bites the end. “I celebrate Cassandra and sing Cassandra,” she says. “The girl who disbelieves. Free of heaven, free of hell, free like grass and leaves.” She laughs. “I was trying to make a reference to the
Leaves of Grass
thing, you know? But I’m ridiculous about rhyming, and I don’t think Whitman would appreciate that at all.” She tears out the page and crumples it into a ball. “But you could … play with that idea, maybe?”

Her stupid uptalking again. I scowl. “What idea?”

She chews her pen, speaking around it. “The freedom of not believing in stuff.”

I look down at my own page, which is still empty aside from those two lines of Whitman:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume.
So I assume nothing. And this is enviable for Drew? “But you don’t
have
to believe anything,” I tell her. “You choose to come to church all on your own.”

“Oh, I know. I have freedom, too.” Drew shifts a little, looking her usual uneasy self for the first time since we got to her house. “Especially with my mom gone all the time. She’s a textiles buyer. Travels all over the place. She used to let me come with her sometimes, but … ” She tugs at her sleeves. “My skin doesn’t react well to lots of different kinds of water and soaps and things. Also, the textiles. It’s all kind of bad for my eczema.”

I remember the red patches on her arms when she came to the nurse’s office, and I don’t know what to say. The rosy blotches she sometimes has on her face—the way Annika and Britney are always teasing her about having acne.
Stop.
I am not going to start feeling sorry for Drew Godfrey. I’m not so desperate for a friend that as soon as Kayla dumps me I go running to the lowest common denominator. I’m only here for some help with this stupid poem. With my stupid English class.

“So, this shouldn’t rhyme?” I ask. See Cassandra panic. See Cassandra change the subject. See Cassandra fail Basic Conversation Skills.

Drew rubs her arms through the fabric of her shirt—two brisk movements—and then she straightens up, composing her face into a businesslike mask. “Walt Whitman was free verse.”