Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always (19 page)

“Cass. You wouldn’t be going if all the teachers got together and wrote sonnets about what an awesome person you are. Skipping church? Going to a concert alone? Riding in a hearse with a girl who won’t come into the house during prayer circle?” He laughs. “You’re not going.”

And it’s official. Now I
have
to go.

29. When you were a kid …

Mr. Dawkins isn’t impressed by the page I finally hand in, seventeen lame lines about each year of my life. I point out my use of metaphor—
I’m a heavy anchor dragging everyone down
—but he only rolls his eyes and gives me that wry teacher-face that says he thinks I could do so much better. He makes a deal with me, “because I know you have it in you.” He’s putting in enough points to keep my grade at a C for midterm, which is still going to make things interesting at home, but if I don’t revise and turn in a “worthwhile effort” within the two-week grade adjustment period, he’ll let the grade revert to an F. He also reminds me that people with a failing grade at midterm won’t be able to attend the Winter Carnival. I don’t care. It buys me some time.

“So … this means you’re really going to the concert with Kayla, right?” Darin falls into step with me outside the English room as I’m heading back for the last few minutes of study hall.

“What class are
you
supposed to be in?” Okay, so I’m not sure at what point I became a freaking hall monitor. What am I doing? “I mean … ” What do I mean? My brain is nothing but an endless stutter of stupid.

“You mean, why am I stalking you?” He grins, shaking a set of car keys. “I saw you walk past on your way to Dawkins’ room, so I left French on a bathroom pass. I was wondering if you wanted a ride home.”

“You
are
stalking me. Creeper.” My cheeks tingle, and I hope they’re not turning pink. I can’t even stand here like a normal person right now; I keep rocking up on my toes, all ridiculous. Everything about this moment feels strange and new, like the junior hall is a foreign country or something. I’m spending most of my conscious brainpower trying to keep myself from giggling, honestly.

“So I shouldn’t tell you all about the adorable puppies in my white van?” he asks.

So much for not giggling. “My mom will probably freak if I’m not on the bus.” Oh
god,
Cassandra, Empress of the Lame. What happened to growing a spine when it comes to my parents? “But I mean, I’m seventeen years old. I’m old enough to get into any strange white van I want, right?” I’ll cross my fingers she’s at the church again this afternoon. She doesn’t care so much about me being on the bus, but if I come home in some boy’s car she’s going to want to meet him, and that’s just awkward.

Darin smiles. “I’ll meet you at the doors by the junior lot. But, uh … I actually drive a ten-year-old compact car with a bad muffler, so don’t get your hopes up about the puppies, okay?”

Fifteen minutes later and I’m sitting in the passenger seat of Darin’s car, wishing I had some kind of witty banter planned out for this occasion. Instead, I clutch my backpack in my lap and come up with, “Your car is clean.”

Darin nods, both hands on the wheel, eyes straight ahead. “Yeah, I guess. I like to have things in order, you know?” I wonder if he’s as nervous as I am. He’s doing this sort of adorable thing where he’s almost biting his lower lip, grazing it against his eye tooth.

“I live over by the mall. Well, just past it, on Aspen Circle.” Otherwise known as God’s Armpit.

“Do you want to go straight home, or … ” Darin steals a glance in my direction, and I look away quickly, aware that I’ve been staring at him—at his
lips—
like some kind of weirdo.
Straight home or
… my cheeks tingle again.

“I don’t know.” Okay, so I hate this. All this energy I’ve spent trying to be more decisive, more
myself
, and here I am shrugging and blushing like I don’t have a single original thought in my head. “Wait.” I push my backpack away and sit up straight. “Let’s go to the playground by the old water tower.”

Darin turns left instead of right at the stoplight and finds a parking spot beside the chain-link fence that surrounds the playground. “I haven’t been here in years,” he says, reaching into the back seat for a warm hat. “Are you dressed warm enough? Got a hat? Scarf ?”

“I’m a Minnesota girl.” I wrap my scarf up tight and button my wool coat up under my chin. “Besides, it’s above zero today.”

“Barely.”

I lead the way to the swing set and wedge my butt into one of the cold plastic seats. “Do you ever lean way back on your swing and look at the world upside down?” I don’t wait for him to respond; I pump my arms and legs hard and feel the cold wind rush against my face as my swing flies through the air. I remember when we were younger, Kayla and I used to have races to see who could get the highest the fastest, here on these very swings. She had the advantage because her arms and legs were so much longer than mine, but I loved the feeling of flying through the air more than she did.

“Honestly, swinging makes me a little queasy,” says Darin. He sits on the next swing over and twists gently from side to side.

I lean back farther on the way up, tipping back in the seat so I can see him rushing away from me, upside down, and I stick my tongue out at him.
Queasy,
ha! This is amazing. I flip back upright, pulling at the chains, gaining speed and height. I feel myself lifting up, out of the swing, so light and free. My arms ache and I’m smiling so wide that my face actually hurts, and
why
has it been so long since I’ve done this? The freezing cold air on my face makes my eyes water, or I might even be crying, but it’s good—so good—and at the top of the next arc, I wiggle up to the edge of the seat and let myself follow the momentum off the swing, flying off it through the air, so high and fast that my stomach plummets and adrenaline rushes to my arms and legs in a tingle of fear and excitement. The ground is hard—frozen solid—but I land on my feet and only skid a little bit on the ice. I throw my arms in the air, victory-style, and Darin cheers.

“That was entirely made of awesome,” he says, and he jumps up from his swing and runs right over. For a second I think he might hug me, but we both get shy at the same time and look down at our feet. “You were seriously flying. Like I was afraid you’d just … take off, zoom up to the sun or whatever.” He makes this adorable little airplane motion with his hand.

“I landed kind of hard, but it was worth it,” I say. “Those three seconds I was up in the air were, like, the first time in forever I haven’t been all anxious about who I am and what makes me special and what things are all mine and … ” I trail off, aware that I’m talking too much to this kid I barely know, that I have something that’s sort of like tears in my eyes, and that maybe I look a little bit crazy. “Hey.” I point up the hill, toward the rocket-ship slide. “You afraid of heights?”

He nods. “Yeah, but what the hell. I’m always up for an opportunity to face my fears.” We hike across the snow toward the giant metal structure. “Anyway,” he says as we climb the final rungs and squeeze into the cone of the rocket, which sways in the wind far above the frozen playground, “if I get too scared, you’ll hold my hand, won’t you?”

I smile. My hands are sweating, even in my warm mittens, and I clasp them around my knees, feeling the chill of the metal slide seeping through the seat of my jeans. “So. Did you dream of being an astronaut when you were a kid?”

Darin tips his head to one side, thoughtful. “Not an astronaut, exactly,” he says after a pause, “but I did want to be the kind of person who was able to identify all of the constellations. I had a telescope and a couple of star maps. I had a hard time locating the actual constellations, though, so I used to make my own and draw pictures of them in my sketch pad. I remember I drew Chuck the Chicken and the Juggling Jackalope and a whole bunch of other ones I can’t remember.” A particularly strong gust of wind makes the rocket ship groan and shudder, and he scoots a tiny bit closer to me. “How about you? You seem like the type who would be up for a spacewalk.”

I shake my head. “Yeah, not a spacewalk, so much.” Despite my habit of jumping off swings, I’m not really a risk-taker. “But you know that song, from like the sixties, the one about us being stardust? When I was a kid, I read a science book about how all the carbon and whatever it is that makes up life on earth came from supernovas, how the atoms that make up all of us were once a part of stars that exploded a billion years ago in outer space. Ever since then, I just … I can’t get enough of looking at the stars.”

It’s true, and it warms a spot in my chest to think that this is mine—this is something all my own, even if I only realized it by sharing it with Darin.

“So both of us were kids who spent their nights gazing up at the heavens, imagining,” Darin says, and we look up right now, through the rust-colored metal slats of the creaky old rocket-ship slide. The sky appears—to our eyes, like usual, the flat white color of winter. But underneath that color—or beyond it—we know the stars are there.

30. To save your
friendship, you would …

I haven’t said anything yet to my parents about going with Kayla, even though I’ve had two somewhat promising opportunities to speak with Mom about it—once while I helped her carry in groceries, and once while the two of us made the dessert we’re bringing to Wednesday-night church. It’s just that “promising” is not quite the word for my chances here. There’s no way they’re going to let me skip church on Sunday for an unsupervised overnight trip to a rock concert.

But what if they thought I wasn’t missing church? Could I convince them that I’m going to services in the Cities? Not with Kayla. She’s nominally a Lutheran, but she and her dad don’t attend church outside of Easter and sometimes Christmas. Mom and Dad wouldn’t believe me for an instant.

But as long as I’ve already crossed the mental barrier between honesty and dishonesty, why do I have to tell them I’m there with Kayla? Who else would they believe? I come up empty.

“Cassandra, are you getting into the van? Because you should be.”

“Getting my Bible,” I call, and then I have to actually get it. What can I tell them? And then I do the stupidest thing on the face of the earth. “Drew Godfrey asked me to come to the Cities with her this weekend for her cousin’s kid’s baptism,” I say, climbing into the waiting van.

My father’s eyes focus on me for a moment in surprise, and then he nods. “Drew from youth group? She’s a sweet girl.”

“She sings beautifully,” says my mom. “I wish she’d sign up for the choir. I hear her singing the hymns, and I think it’s such a shame she won’t join.”

For a second I puzzle that out, as if it really matters that Drew Godfrey can sing, as if it really matters that it’s something I haven’t noticed about her, something I don’t think I’ve even contemplated. Her singing voice. I spend a moment trying to recall the last time I heard her sing, but then my brother jabs his knee into the back of my seat and it hits me: Oh
god
. What have I done?

And what am I going to do? I have to take it back, retract this crazy lie that tumbled out of my mouth. I have to fix it. We’re on our way to church. We’ll be walking in there, and Drew will be there, and … wait. Just wait. What if … what if it
works
? What if I can convince my parents that I’m going to church in Minneapolis with Drew Godfrey? What if I can convince Drew to lie to my parents and cover for me? Okay, so this is too much. I can’t make Drew lie for me.

“Yeah,” I say, my chance to turn back rapidly fading, “Drew from youth group.”

I’m not going to say I never lie to my parents—it’s probably more accurate to say that I’m rarely one hundred percent honest with either of them—but this is a big deal. And not only for me.

Dad turns to Mom. “That seems reasonable, if we could meet her parents,” he says. “Doesn’t it?”

She taps her fingertips together. “Well, I don’t—” She twists around in her seat belt and studies my face. “What about church on Sunday?”

I can’t do this. I can’t ask Drew to do this for me. But …
Darin
. I curl my fingers into my hands, remembering the little smiley-face fingertips. He was so excited to hear I was going to the concert, and especially after our rocket-ship moment, I feel like he’s more excited about seeing
me
than seeing the Crypt People or whatever. And Kayla. Okay, so I realize our friendship has strayed a long way from where it used to be, but it’s not hopeless, is it? I don’t want to lose her, to lose our history together. I don’t want to
be lost
. She’s my best friend. And if I don’t go …

But Drew. I can picture her hopeful face, looking for me, catching my eye. I’d be asking a lot of her. What would she want in return? For me to come over again and bake more cookies? That wasn’t so bad, if I’m going to be honest with myself here. Okay, so it was awkward at first, but the cookies were delicious. And now that I think about it, of course my mother’s right about the singing thing—how could I have forgotten? When we were baking, Drew sang the whole time, belting out all these classic musicals that I’ve never heard of. It was kind of cool, to see her surrounded by such confidence.