“I just—I was so miserable.”
“Why were you miserable?”
“It was high school. Weren’t you?”
Tyler shook his head. “I mean, there was annoying shit. But high school was great. I kind of miss it.”
I couldn’t imagine what that would feel like—queers survived high school, we didn’t miss it. “Sometimes I don’t understand you at all.” The track reached its chorus. I had listened to this so many times over so many years, I felt it in my bones. “This song is one of my favorites.” We were finished eating and I lay back on the sofa, pulling him to me. He smelled of weed, muggy and sweet. We listened in silence, Tyler’s weight pooled against me. Was this so bad? To offer some part of yourself and have it gently held and cherished? This is all I wanted. We stayed like that to the end of the album.
When the last song finished, I tapped him. “Let me up.”
He peeled himself from me and I went to shut off the stereo. “I liked that,” he said. “You should play music for me more often.” He picked up the record sleeve again. He ran a finger across a piece of masking tape, faded letters scrawled in black sharpie, barely legible. “Who’s Cassie?”
“Oh.” I had forgotten the tape was there. Cassie labeled all her records—it had just become part of the cover to me. “My sister. This was hers. Lots of these were.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister. I’m so jealous, I always wanted one. Just like the idea of a sister seems so cool.” He laughed.
“Cassie was always much cooler than me.”
“Where is she now?”
I stumbled, caught off guard, and something must have shown on my face, I could see it reflected in Tyler’s eyes. He grabbed my hand. I couldn’t remember him ever doing that; it was always me reaching for him.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. I never talk about her.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, it’s just—I’m not sure, really.” I looked at him. A stillness around his eyes and mouth.
“What happened?”
By the middle of Cassie’s senior year, she and our mother rarely occupied the same room at the same time. When they did, it ended in fights that got so vicious, both of them screaming at the top of their lungs, I thought it might bring the house down on all our heads—and part of me wished it would. Cassie lied about applying to colleges. She never mailed in the applications and had found some way to get the checks cashed, so she’d been stealing from them on top of it all. The night my parents found out, I worried someone might really get hurt. Something inside Cassie was burning. I could see it, convoluting her, the anguish unbearable. Her rage was a way to let it out, to release the heat from her. But through all those months of fighting, screeching curses and slammed doors and broken dishes, it kept burning.
Rumors about Cassie filtered down through the grades, making their way to me. Stories about a blow job in the boy’s bathroom, a guy she was hanging out with who was almost forty. Stories about drugs, needles. I did everything I could to keep these accounts from reaching me, but my classmates seemed to take a sick pleasurein confronting me with them. Cassie’s grades had fallen so much she almost didn’t graduate. When she did, our mother said it was only because the school didn’t want to deal with her anymore.
The night before graduation, Cassie disappeared. She didn’t show up the next morning. The rest of us got dressed for the ceremony and waited in case she returned in time. When she didn’t, my father suggested maybe she had gone with a friend to the school and thought we should go meet her. “I’m not going to waste my time,” my mother said. She closed herself in for the rest of the day behind the shuttered door of their bedroom.
A few days later, Cassie returned. She had been disappearing on and off like that all year, a day or two every few weeks. As summer progressed, the stretches grew longer. We would hear nothing from her and then she would show up with no explanation, as if she had been gone an hour, doing errands. During her absences, I begged our mother to go easy on her, but Cassie’s return only set off another brawl that sent her from us again.
Then, toward the end of July, Cassie disappeared for almost three weeks. When she came home, I could see it immediately: She was not well. The rings under her eyes had grown so deep and dark, I almost missed the bruise yellowing beneath one. She was defeated. The fire had burned itself out, leaving nothing behind. She would sleep half the day, only leaving her room to eat scraps of food she mostly pushed around the plate. She smelled sour, her skin sallow, she had nothing to say. I felt frightened of her, this shell, and didn’t know how to ask what happened.
And also—I was relieved the fights had come to an end. And the waiting, the waiting for her to come home and then bracing for the explosion. I was glad this was over. I think this is what I felt most guilty for. That some part of me was grateful for Cassie’ssuffering, for whatever had broken her, so desperately did I want the semblance of calm that had returned to our home.
We were into August and nothing changed. Cassie had no plans for the fall, no job, but our parents had backed off. I think they, too, were willing to accept a tenuous peace. Soon, I would start eighth grade. I’d be thirteen in September and I’d been getting ready for my bar mitzvah, with no idea we would end up calling it off. I poured myself into preparing, the time at temple an escape from the pallor Cassie cast across the house, even locked up in her room. One night my parents picked me up—I’d been meeting with the rabbi to go through the prayers. It was dinnertime and we had leftovers at home, but it was a lovely night—frictionless, cool air. We wanted to linger in it. “Fuck it,” my mother said, and then laughed, covering her mouth. “Cassie isn’t going to eat anyway. Let’s go out.” They took me to a Japanese restaurant, a chain. We sat at a long table with two other families. The chef cooked right at the table, doing a hammy routine, rapid-fire dicing the cuts of meat and vegetables, showy flips of the blades at which we couldn’t help but gasp. Later I understood that this place was tacky and the food not very good, but that night, we enjoyed ourselves. Everything else dropped away, just me and my parents, a normal family, making stupid jokes, sneaking bites from each other’s plates, laughing at nothing.
We stayed out late, hours past my usual bedtime. When we got home, Cassie was not in her room. The bathroom door was locked. My mother knocked; no reply. A gentle whooshing hummed from the other side. I pointed to the crack of space at the bottom of the door. “There’s water coming out.” My mother started panting, repeating softly, “No. No.” I didn’t understand what was happeningbut my father was frantic, shouting Cassie’s name, pounding at the door. He was scaring me. “What’s going on?” He barked at me to step back but before I could move he barreled forward, the whole body of him crashing through, ripping the door from its hinges. My mother screamed.
My father rushed in, bathwater splashing up the front of his pants, spinning in tight circles, yelling into the empty room.
“Cassie! Cassie!”
My mother crumbled against the splintered threshold, pale-faced, eyes wide.
“Where is she?”
I told Tyler all this, more or less, sitting together on the couch, my eyes tracking the ceiling. It felt like the room had gotten darker but the lamplight had grown brighter, an orange glow cast about us, pulsing, holding us in place.
