PINKBERRY IS FUNNY. IT ALWAYS makes me think of a doll-house, with the pink walls and the white plastic tables and chairs. I feel like I should be ten years old when I’m there.
I get regular doused with strawberries. Ella gets the same, only with chocolate chips. We sit and I wait for her to burst out talking. Normally, Ella would be full of details about a big event like this. “Oh, my God, so-and-so was freaking out, I felt so bad for her.” “I could not believe when so-and-so said this and that.”
But she doesn’t say a word. Instead, she concentrates on scraping the chips off the side of her yogurt, as if it’s the only truly important thing in the world right now.
There are two kinds of silence. The “I have no idea what to say” kind and the “I have something to say but I’m scared to say it” kind. This feels like the second kind.
I have the hideous sense Ella knows what I did and she’s afraid to look me in the eye. The longer we sit, the guiltier I feel. As if Chloe’s ghost rose at the funeral and whispered to Ella, “To-o-ni, To-o-ni did this to me.”
Then I think, Stop being such an egomaniac. Ella’s just been to a funeral of a girl she’s known her whole life. Of course she’s freaked out and upset. But she doesn’t know how to say that without sounding like she’s siding with Chloe.
I tell her, “You can talk about the funeral, I don’t mind.”
“No, it’s okay,” she says in a listless voice.
She carefully digs a single chip off the top of her yogurt, nibbles it; it’s an old dieting trick. Make it last longer so you feel like you’ve eaten a lot.
Then, suddenly, she sticks the whole spoon in, pulls up an enormous bite of yogurt, and swallows it. She grimaces as it goes down, as if it hurts her throat.
“Pinkberry has to be allowed,” I say. “It’s yogurt, good for you.”
“I don’t know,” she says fretfully. “I don’t feel like anything’s allowed.”
“Ella, really. It’s all right. I came to be here for you. Talk, already.”
She looks at me, not sure I mean it. “It just—”
I nod encouragingly. “It just.”
Ella hesitates. Then she blurts out, “I don’t know, I guess I never saw anyone dead before.”
“Must be so hard.”
She kneads her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Not that I saw her, it was just the coffin, but …”
“Sure.”
She glances at me. There’s something else she’s feeling, we haven’t hit it yet. I stay quiet, determined to let Ella talk.
And she does, finally. “I was late, of course. So I ended up sitting right near Chloe’s family.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Oh, my God …”
This is part of my punishment, I tell myself. Having to hear what Chloe’s loss means to people. “They’re pretty destroyed, huh?”
Ella’s eyes pop open. “Her little sister never stopped crying. You could hear it all over the church. All these … I guess cousins? Tears down their faces. Shoulders shaking. And her mom was a drugged-out zombie. I don’t know what they put her on. Her dad looked like he wanted to kill. He kept clenching and opening his fists. His face was like this.” She makes her jaw rigid, sinks her teeth into her lower lip.
“Oh, man. That’s really hard.”
“It was, it was hard. I felt totally useless. I kept thinking that because I was near them, I should do something for them. I know what they’re going through, right? Someone in my family died. I’ve been through this.”
“Right.”
“But I couldn’t think of anything to do or say. I felt like such an idiot.”
“Oh, Ella.”
She shakes her head abruptly. “But that’s when I realized.”
“What?”
“I actually haven’t been through this.”
I shake my head. “I lost you.”
Ella’s hands flap in the air. “No, just … when I saw Chloe’s family, how wrecked they were, how they were putting their sadness right out there, because they couldn’t help it? I realized, Oh, this is what a normal family looks like. Normal people actually admit when they’re sad. It really made me think about my family. And how we are totally not dealing.”
Careful because I don’t want to shut Ella down, I say, “But you didn’t go to Eamonn’s funeral, right? You didn’t find out until you came home.”
“Right!” Suddenly, she’s all fierce. “I was at Costa del Porco, and my mom was worried Eamonn’s death would be a ‘stress trigger.’ Like I would shove a whole Entenmann’s into my face if I knew. Right away, there was a whole secrecy thing going on.”
“Well—or your parents are control freaks when it comes to your weight.”
“Okay, but even now.” Ella leans forward. “Even now, nobody’s talking. Eamonn’s name never comes up. My whole family’s like, Oh, yeah that happened—but don’t talk about it. There’s no crying. No, Oh, my God, we miss him. Everything’s so-called normal, except my aunt and uncle are like—” She widens her eyes and sways like the walking dead.
I think of Cassandra’s mom that day I met her, how it felt like she was going to fall apart any second. “Maybe it’s just too difficult,” I say helplessly.
“Maybe,” says Ella. “Or maybe nobody wants to talk about it because we’re all thinking the same thing and not saying it. Maybe it’s because—”
But then she stops. Taking up her napkin, she starts to shred it.
“Because what?” I ask.
Wiping her mouth with the shreds, she mutters, “Forget it.”
“Say it.”
“No, you’re her friend now, I forgot.”
Her friend. So all this is about Cassandra.
“I’m your friend too,” I remind her.
Ella looks into my eyes, as if checking whether I’m telling the truth.
“I know,” she says quietly. “I didn’t mean it like that. But you shouldn’t say not-nice things about people to people’s friends.”
I open my mouth to say, “Ella, it’s allowed.”
But Ella cuts me off, saying brightly, “Let’s do something else. Let’s do … Top Chef.” She flaps her arms in pretend exasperation. “I was so pissed Carly got eliminated!”
I don’t want to talk about Top Chef. I want to know what Ella was going to say about Cassandra.
But Ella doesn’t want to talk about Cassandra. And I tell myself that right now, I am about what Ella wants. So we talk about TV and forget real life, and for a while, you could almost believe everything was back to normal.
It’s dark by the time we leave. We roll through Central Park on the crosstown bus. Ella turns her head to watch the trees, all shadow as we fly by.
“You know what’s weird?” she says dreamily.
“A million things?”
“I’ve never seen her cry.”
Confused, I ask, “Who? What do you mean?”
“Cassandra.” She turns, looks at me. “I’ve never once seen her cry for Eamonn. Supposedly, she loved him so much—why doesn’t she cry?”
“I’m sure she did at the funeral,” I say.
Ella looks out the window. Almost to herself, she says, “I’m not.”
I drop Ella off at the corner where we part. As I’m walking the rest of the way to my house, my phone rings. I dig it out of my pocket. It’s Cassandra.
I’m about to answer, but I hesitate. We’ll end up talking about the funeral. I’ll tell her I didn’t go, but I sort of did. I’ll tell her I talked to Isabelle, walked home with Ella.…
And she won’t be pleased. By any of it.
The phone stops ringing.
Much later, I get up the nerve to listen to Cassandra’s message. “Hi, I don’t know why, but I’m having this weird feeling you went to the funeral today. So, I’m just calling to find out …” There’s a big sigh. Then: “… you know—where you are.”
“So, how was it?”
The next day, Cassandra and I meet after school. That’s how Cassandra starts: “So, how was it?” asking about Chloe’s funeral in a quick, offhand style that means I know you went, so let’s get this out of the way.
We are sitting on a park bench on the path that winds around the rocks and into the Eighty-Third Street playground. Somehow, neither of us wanted to go to the rock; we both seemed to feel it was time for a change. Only we’re not sure how big the change should be—or why we feel that way—and it’s making us nervous. Our rhythm is off. I keep trying to find the beat of what Cassandra says, get a sense of how she’s feeling. But she’s all jumpy and zigzaggy, and it’s hard to follow her.
I say, “It was sad. From what I saw. You know …” I shrug.
“I’m still not sure why you went.”
I hesitate. Any mention of guilt over Chloe is a criticism of Cassandra. So I try, “Ella sort of wanted me to.”
“Repeat: not sure why you went.”
I want to say, Because we did a terrible thing, Cassandra. I needed to face up to what we did—a little tiny bit.
I say, “Yeah, I’m not sure either. It made sense at the time.”
“Why did she want you to go?” Cassandra, I notice, rarely says Ella’s name.
“For support. She was upset.”
Cassandra leaps on this. “Oh, because Ella had to deal with two funerals? Poor Ella—no doubt she’ll eat New Jersey to make herself feel better.”
A warning bell goes off inside me. There is some intense weirdness in this family around Eamonn’s death.
Struggling, I say, “I guess.”
“Ella didn’t even go to Eamonn’s funeral, you realize that.”
“She wanted to; her parents didn’t even tell her until she got back.”
“Oh, right.” Cassandra throws herself backward. “What, she’s whining that she didn’t get to go? Saying how much she cared? Because she didn’t, believe me—”
Cassandra’s like a train, gaining speed, charging toward Ella, ready to wipe her out.
Trying to slow her down, I say, “That’s not what Ella said at all—”
“So she was talking about Eamonn.”
“She—” Confused, wanting to help Ella and Cassandra, I say, “She just wants to be there for people.”
“So what’s stopping her?”
“She feels like your family won’t talk about it. Like it’s this big … forbidden subject.”
Something—maybe the word “forbidden”—catches Cassandra’s attention. Turning on me, she asks in a low voice, “Did Ella say things about me?”
“No, Cassandra!” I lie. “Seriously.”
Her gaze is still on me.
“We mostly yakked about Top Chef,” I tell her.
Cassandra rolls her eyes. “Her pathetic obsession with food shows. How’s that diet of hers going? I bet she’s too ‘stressed’ to stick to it.”
I don’t touch that one. Cassandra bitching about Ella’s eating is better than Cassandra demanding answers.
Cassandra lets it go—sort of, settling back and glaring at the world in front of her. I pull myself in, huddle down into my coat. It’s cold. Why did we decide to be outside?
Wanting to get off the subject of Ella, I say, “Guess who I talked to at the funeral? Isabelle.”
“What the hell did she want?”
“She was nice. She said she’d be willing to go to the administration, tell them what’s been going on.”
“I hope you told her to join her friend in the morgue.”
This is too flip, even for Cassandra. I say, “Come on.”
She stares at me. “What?”
“I don’t want to joke about—it.” I shrink inside my coat again. “It’s not funny.”
“Oh, God.” Cassandra stretches her full length against the back of the bench. “Please don’t tell me you still have the guilts. What, you think if you become besties with a single-celled amoeba like Isabelle, that’s going to make what we did to Chloe—”
“Jesus, Cassandra!”
“—all better? Get a grip.”
I look at Cassandra. Half of me expects to see a murdering psycho. But I just see a girl like me. Her face is flushed, her hair’s blowing every which way, her hands are pushed deep into her pockets. She’s fierce, upset—and alone. Furious that people are talking behind her back and she has no power to stop them.
I remember when Cassandra’s fierceness made me feel sane. When the whole world decided I was a whore, when my parents were lost in their own craziness, when Ella was just … Ella, Cassandra was the only one who said, “Hey, this isn’t right. You don’t deserve this. Let’s do something about it.”
That counts. That matters.
Cassandra looks at me, her big eyes searching my face. I know she’s asking, Are we actually friends? Or did you just kind of use me and now you don’t need me anymore?
I kick her foot gently. “Why don’t we try some happy magic? Love spells? Smart potions? Some good old-fashioned giggle juice?” When she doesn’t answer, I add, “Now that the enemies are all gone.”
In a distant voice, Cassandra says, “Yeah, right.”
Later, as we’re leaving the park, she says, “Tell me again.”
“What Ella said.”
It’s a test. I take a deep breath. “Only that she wishes you would talk to her. If you want to. She feels bad she wasn’t there when it happened. Like … nobody trusts her enough to tell her the truth.”
Cassandra stops, looks at me. “What truth is that?”
Stumbling, I say, “About … how they feel.” Cassandra narrows her eyes. “For real. She feels left out of the family, that’s all.”
There’s a long pause. Cassandra finally says, “Okay.”
But her eyes stay on me.
When I get home, I have an impulse to call Ella and give her a heads-up that I told Cassandra she feels left out of the family.
No, that’s not what I want Ella to know. It’s that I told Cassandra that Ella talked to me about Eamonn.
Then I think, This is ridiculous. Why shouldn’t Ella talk about Eamonn?
What will be, will be, que será, será, et cetera, I tell myself. My job is to just try and stay out of it.
At school, there are still flowers and cards massed in front of Chloe’s locker. Her picture is still up in the entrance. Kids still start crying in class and have to be excused. In science, Noah Bergstrom asks for a moment of silence in Chloe’s memory.
Ella is struggling in Spanish and so am I. So one day, we decide to struggle together after school. As I wait for Ella to pull what she needs from her locker, I hear Kendra Fargate pseudo-whisper to Dahlia Capshaw, “Wonder how long before she goes after Oliver?”
Dahlia says, “Did she ever stop going after Oliver?”
Ella turns, opens her mouth, but doesn’t say anything.
I give her a little shake of the head: Don’t bother.
As we head downstairs, she says helplessly, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Ella keeps her eyes on the steps as she makes her way down. “I wish I wasn’t always so scared. I wish I could stand up to people. Say things that need to be said. Not be this terrified, quivering jelly thing.”
I smile. “How are you this quivering jelly thing?”
Ella struggles, then says, “You know that show Real Interventions?”
“Um, no.”
“It’s seriously good, you have to watch. They take addicts, alcoholics—people who are totally destroying themselves. And their families and friends sit them down and say, Okay, here’s the deal: You’re going to die if you keep going like this. You would not believe how hard it is for these families to do the confrontation thing. You know they’ve felt this way forever, but they’ve been too scared to say anything. When they finally do speak up, it’s like they’re … hurling truth out there.”
“Wow.”
“I was watching it last night, and I was thinking, Why can’t I do this?” She looks at me. “You know?”
“Tell people they’re going to die?” I joke.
“No, like with my family, I feel like I’m such a wimp—”
Below us, I hear, “What about our family?”
Cassandra is standing at the foot of the stairs. Ella stops dead in her tracks. So do I. Cassandra looks from me to Ella, from Ella to me. Not unlike a cobra deciding where to strike.
“You were saying something about our family?” Cassandra prompts.
“N-n-no,” stammers Ella. “Just, you know—I’m the family dummkopf.” She fake laughs a little, can’t keep it going.
Cassandra nods once: Ah, yes. Then she looks at me, the question clear on her face: So, why are you hanging out with the family dummkopf and not with me?
She’s trying to make me choose, make it us against Ella. Or else her against the both of us. But I’m tired of enemies and battles. To Ella, I say firmly, “You’re not a dummkopf.”
To Cassandra, I say, “Want to hang after school tomorrow?”
Cassandra stares at me and I know: what I repeated to her about Ella that day in the park has not been forgotten.
Glancing at Ella like she’s a particularly revolting insect, Cassandra says, “Some other time.” Then walks past us up the stairs.
When Ella and I get to my house, we go to my room and struggle with the infernal subjunctive. It’s all but impossible to concentrate. As much as I don’t want to get involved in the weirdness between the cousins, I can’t stop thinking about what happened.
Ella must be fretting too, because she’s even dizzier than usual. Finally, I call for a snack break. After setting out tea mugs and cookies on the dining room table, I say, “Question.”
Ella takes a cookie, nibbles at the edge.
“What was all that in the hall with Cassandra?”
Ella looks evasive. “I don’t want to put you in the middle.”
“I’m already in the middle because I care about you both. What’s going on?”
Ella doesn’t say anything.
“I know you guys are very different, I know you’re not besties, but it feels like you hate each other now.…”
Ella looks at me. “I don’t hate her.”
“But you think Cassandra hates you?”
She nods.
“Always?”
Ella shakes her head. “We were okay when we were little. I can remember going over to her house, her coming to mine. We actually played together.”
“So what happened?”
“She’s brilliant and I’m a fat dope?” I give her a warning look. “Part of it was Eamonn. She was eight when he was born, and once her parents realized there was a problem, they became all about Eamonn. I can remember my mom telling my aunt to remember she had two kids. But Cassandra could get real fierce about him too. When we were all together, she’d blame me a lot.”
“Like how?”
She tilts her head from side to side as she remembers. “If he started having one of his fits, she’d be like, ‘Ella did it! Ella bothered him.’ ”
“That’s not great,” I say.
Ella takes another cookie, pours milk in her tea. For a moment, I think that’s all she’s going to say.
She takes a deep breath and announces, “Then this really weird thing happened when we were eleven.”
“What?”
“Our families had rented this house by a lake for the summer. One day, Cassandra dared me to try and swim out to the dock in the middle of the lake. She knew I wasn’t a good enough swimmer. But I tried, because she was looking at me like, If you can’t do this, you’re this fat, gross thing and I won’t play with you. And she was the only one around to play with, so …”
“So you tried?”
She nods.
“What happened?”
“I got exhausted, freaked out, and nearly drowned. My dad came just in time and pulled me out. Mucho drama, as you can imagine. But Cassandra just stood there, calm, no hassle. Even when I was in real trouble, flailing around in the water.” She frowns.
She picks up her mug, takes a long drink. “I’d totally forgotten that until the other day.”
“What day?”
“Chloe’s funeral,” Ella explains.
She waits. There is something Ella wants me to understand—but she doesn’t want to say it out loud.
I try, “Yeah, Cassandra likes to play with the extreme.”
“It’s more than that,” says Ella.
She picks up a pen, plays with it. “I know you’re her friend, but can I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“Do you ever get scared of her?”
I know exactly what Ella means. But all I say is “Cassandra has this tough-chick act. Yeah, it’s intimidating. But you can’t take it seriously.”
Ella watches me. I can tell she’s not buying it.
I ask, “What are you saying, Ella?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she picks up her Spanish textbook and says, “Can I tell you how much I hate the subjunctive?”
That night, I’m reading The Grapes of Wrath with my phone beside me on the bed. I’m supposed to have it off when I do homework. But uh, sometimes I forget.
I’m underlining a passage when I hear the bloop that tells me I have a message.
I check it out. It’s from Cassandra.
What is she saying?
I stare at the screen, feeling deeply annoyed. At least Ella tried not to pull me into this craziness. Cassandra just takes it for granted that I’m in it—and totally on her side. I want to say, Dude, you have the power here. Stop, already.
I text back, Uh, big doings on Hell’s Kitchen?
I hesitate, then add, Chill, okay? It’s not like she’s out to get you.
A few minutes later, Cassandra answers, Isn’t she?