*Fiction — December 1, 2022
Silent All These Years
Content Note: The following piece depicts: mental illness, non-specific suicidal ideation, loss of a loved one to suicide and alludes to: injury from self-harm and suicide. Please take care.
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Sixteen days after my sister’s death, two days before my junior year started, I dyed my hair purple. The drugstore dye stained my scalp and forehead and hands because I didn’t use Vaseline to protect my hairline, or wear gloves to apply it. I left the stains until my mom told me it was in poor taste to walk around looking like a bruise—I scrubbed under my hair and across my forehead with her loofah, leaving behind patches of raw skin. My dad said my behavior was a red flag. I said more like a purple flag and he told me not to be smart. When the roots grew in, I left them brown.
The new dog licked the dye off my hands until her golden beard tinted purple. Our neighbors had come over the day after Cassie’s funeral with the runt of their dog’s terrier litter. They said we should take her; she might make us happy again. My parents let me name her and I picked ND. “It stands for Notre Dame,” I told my dad, his alma mater. He looked pleased, the first time in weeks. What it really stood for was New Dog, because I couldn’t think of her as anything else. When I yelled to get her attention, ND, ND, ND, it sounded like I was calling her Andy.
Sometimes when I walked her, I chose the middle of the street instead of the sidewalk, her leash long and slack in my hand. Cars zipped around the curve at the end of our block and swerved or slammed on their brakes to avoid us. “That is so dangerous,” an old lady yelled from her station wagon. In those moments, I could picture it: ND flattened by a minivan or flying through the air after being hit by a UPS truck, orange leash bouncing behind her. I would stare at the other dogs we encountered—the hyper Golden Retriever puppy, the old white dog with the limp, the Cocker Spaniel who was always happy—and imagine what kind of dog we would someday get to replace ND.
*
The first secret Cassie demanded I keep came the morning after her high school graduation, four days after my sophomore year ended, the balloons claiming, “Class of ’98 is GREAT!” still hanging from our mailbox. She staggered home after the overnight grad party and collapsed on her bed. I curled up opposite her in the chair, my legs hanging over its arms, my feet tapping against the bedframe. Sunlight snuck through her blinds.
“What did you guys do all night? Did anyone sneak in drinks? Who hooked up?” 11 a.m. and I was wired from coffee and anticipation. I was always waiting for Cassie to return to me.
She sighed, kicking off her shoes so violently one hit the wall and scuffed the white baseboard, something that would exacerbate our mother. Cassie pulled the throw blanket from the end of her bed up to her neck. She was cold all the time.
“It was a long night.” She paused and I had to stop myself from jumping in with more questions. I pressed my legs back against the chair to stop their anxious tapping before Cassie yelled at me for shaking her bed. “I just—I realized when I turned in my cap and gown and spent eight hours listening to people talking about how our lives are really taking off now that I was different from everyone else: my life is going downhill and I don’t know how to stop it.”
I laughed, because how could she not be kidding? Her inevitable success had been one of the only sureties in my life.
Her eyes focused on me. “What the fuck, Julia? I tell you my life is falling apart and you laugh at me?” There was an edge to her tone. I stopped laughing.
“Cass, what are you talking about?” I said. “You’re the person everyone else wants to be.”
It wasn’t just me—girls had imitated Cassie for years: they wore the same chokers and patterned scrunchies in the hair they grew long to mirror hers; they tried out for soccer and joined French club and applied to peer leadership when Cassie was president.
“I should have been on the stage giving the speech about our potential last night, Ju-Ju, I should have been number one. Everything I worked for and Michael got the recognition instead and I can’t do it over. I’m the loser now, that’s how everyone will remember me.”
None of it made any sense. I had studied Cassie for sixteen years, but over the last one she had become a mystery to me. Her senior year was a roller coaster of extremes: perfect SAT scores followed by not showing up for her AP tests, her Stanford acceptance and then the loss of valedictorian status, not even a top three ranking when the final grades were calculated. Her weight plummeted and she ping-ponged between moods with alarming speed. A compliment received ecstatic gratitude, but any perceived slight led to battle. She sucked all of the air out of our house until the rest of us were left gasping.
“You have the whole summer to look forward to, Cass, and then Stanford!”
“I’m not going to Stanford, Ju-Ju.”
I looked at the framed photo on Cassie’s nightstand—my favorite—the two of us in front of dunes, our braces and bangs and baggy clothes, hugging our scruffy old dog when he was merely scruffy, less old. He died at the dog sitter’s house when we went down the shore for Memorial Day weekend, the month prior to Cassie’s graduation. Our dad said that happened sometimes, that they waited for their loved ones to leave them before they decided to let go. Cassie wept for two days straight. She had been the one who walked him, fed him, named him: Stannie, because even at eight, she’d wanted to go to Stanford. Less than three months later, when I rifled through her nightstand cabinet the day after Cassie died, I discovered Stannie’s ashes in a black plastic box hidden under her Stanford baseball cap. No one had ever told me we’d gotten them back from the vet.
Cassie moved into the basement the summer before her junior year, her new bedroom two floors away from mine. She was sixteen, I was fourteen and it was the first time in my life she wasn’t directly across the hall from me. She sometimes let me sleep in her bed downstairs, giving me a pair of her men’s striped pajamas when we stumbled home from a party. She reminded her friends I was off-limits for freshman soccer hazing, and usually pulled the second and always the third beer from my hand with an indulgent smile, the reminder: I shouldn’t press my luck. Summers had always been our time, more so every year. That summer and the next flew by in a haze of Coors Light and Dave Matthews and open car windows and smoky hair and sneaking in past curfew and trying to stay awake longer than Cassie so I never missed anything she wanted to share.
I stared at her, stripes of late morning sun catching the shimmer of graduation eye shadow still smudged on her lids. She returned my stare, as steady as I’d ever seen her. Her tone softened. “Everything I always planned is beyond reach. I can’t stand who I’ve become, it’s unbearable. I’m not going to Stanford or anywhere else, and you’re the only one I can talk to about this, Ju-Ju, the only one I can trust.” Now she did reach for my hands, so I leaned forward and let her grip them. They were cool and dry and I worried as I always did whenever Cassie touched me that she would be repulsed by my body’s betrayals—the sweaty hands, greasy hair, morning breath.
Cassie moved into the basement the summer before her junior year, her new bedroom two floors away from mine. She was sixteen, I was fourteen and it was the first time in my life she wasn’t directly across the hall from me. She sometimes let me sleep in her bed downstairs, giving me a pair of her men’s striped pajamas when we stumbled home from a party. She reminded her friends I was off-limits for freshman soccer hazing, and usually pulled the second and always the third beer from my hand with an indulgent smile, the reminder: I shouldn’t press my luck. Summers had always been our time, more so every year. That summer and the next flew by in a haze of Coors Light and Dave Matthews and open car windows and smoky hair and sneaking in past curfew and trying to stay awake longer than Cassie so I never missed anything she wanted to share.
I stared at her, stripes of late morning sun catching the shimmer of graduation eye shadow still smudged on her lids. She returned my stare, as steady as I’d ever seen her. Her tone softened. “Everything I always planned is beyond reach. I can’t stand who I’ve become, it’s unbearable. I’m not going to Stanford or anywhere else, and you’re the only one I can talk to about this, Ju-Ju, the only one I can trust.” Now she did reach for my hands, so I leaned forward and let her grip them. They were cool and dry and I worried as I always did whenever Cassie touched me that she would be repulsed by my body’s betrayals—the sweaty hands, greasy hair, morning breath.
“Cassie, you’re really tired from last night, you don’t mean it. Maybe Mom and Dad—” She pulled me closer, bent back my fingers. “Ow, Cassie, that hurts!”
“Julia, listen to me right now. This has to stay between us. You do not say one thing about this to anyone, especially not Mom and Dad. I would never forgive you if you did. Not one word. I am dead serious right now. I swear to God, I will never speak to you again if you tell anyone.”
*
At school, I sat in the parking lot in Cassie’s old Jeep—now mine—and listened to Tori Amos sing about wearing jeans with someone else’s name on them and I counted: seconds between the bells, cars in the junior parking lot, my heartbeats. My brain couldn’t endure the thoughts of her so it counted instead. Then it was the final bell and I ran across the muddy path on tiptoes, burgundy Doc Martens that also had someone else’s name still on them trying to leave no footprints behind.
In English, sentences were missing words and no one seemed to notice. Perhaps I needed glasses, the teacher suggested, when I told her there was no preposition and the sentence needed one. She said of course there was a preposition and she pointed but I still didn’t see it, so I repeated, but there is no preposition, and she asked if I wanted to go to the nurse’s office. The soccer player stuffed into the chair in front of me—a boy named Stuart who I once kissed in a closet on a dare at a seventh-grade party—turned around to stare, his mouth open, his breath Cool Ranch Doritos. I sat on my hot palms so I wouldn’t raise them again.
“Line up for suicides,” the gym teacher barked, and people still looked at me. Across the basketball court we ran, back and forth, back and forth, distances covered, nothing gained. A florescent light blinked and buzzed above us. Tiny pieces of chewed food unstuck from the back of my throat; I rubbed my sleeve against my tongue to get rid of them. Beside me, rubber soles squeaked and boy sweat stank. I tapped the varnished black sidelines and skimmed my fingers against their smoothness, shiny as my nail polish. Every night I added another coat of Black Onyx or Midnight Calling until the polish was so thick I couldn’t feel my nails underneath.
Cassie used to watch me pick my nail polish or cuticles in the kitchen. She’d tap her perfect pink nails against her water glass, trying to force eye contact before our mom lectured me again about how trashy my habit was, how my cuticles were going to get infected. Cass would whisper, “Ju-Ju, na-na,” in the language we made up when I was six and she was eight. But in those last months with her, if I were sitting on her immaculately made bed and didn’t realize I was doing it, she was harsher than our mom. “Julia! That is revolting. I am not going to sleep tonight with pieces of your skin and toxic chemicals touching my face. Get out of my room if you can’t stop doing that.” I loved Cassie more than I loved anyone, but it was sometimes hard to be around her because she saw everything I wanted to hide.
*
A month into my junior year, forty-six days after Cassie died, my parents decided it was time for me to speak with a professional. On our first session, Judee—“with a double e,” she clarified—declared that every day we have a choice about how we will feel, and if we want to feel happy, we have to decide we will be happy. I never told her I was searching for happiness. Her office smelled like burned coffee and the lilies that overpowered Cassie’s funeral. Judee asked me to pick one word to describe how I was feeling that morning and I said guilty. She nodded, and said, “of course, of course you feel guilty that your sister is dead, and you are alive,” as if that’s what I’d been trying to admit.
She tapped her chin like the therapist character in a TV show and said, “Guilt is also a way of trying to wrestle back control when we feel out of control. Does that resonate with you?” I nodded because that actually did resonate with me. “And it’s a way to stay connected to someone we’ve lost, especially when we lose a primary relationship. As long as we feel guilty, that connection remains.” For a moment, I thought maybe Judee might be brilliant because she understood my relationship with Cassie in a way no one else did. I considered telling her about the secrets I’d kept for Cassie. Maybe Judee could tell me she understood why I had done it and that it didn’t make me a monster. But Judee grabbed a notebook from her desk, and I saw her write down her own quote in big block-letters and the rest of the session passed in silence.
*
The second secret came later that summer, in July, after Cassie picked me up from an evening soccer practice at school. Despite the heat, she wore her oversized Beach Haven hoodie. She was barefoot but complained when I started taking off my cleats and shin guards in the passenger seat.
“God, Julia, that is disgusting. Now the car smells like feet. If that smell gets into the seats, I’m never picking you up again.” I lifted a foot and dangled it above the steering wheel. She swatted it away and gave me a dirty look. “Seriously, Julia, sometimes you’re repulsive.”
“I’m repulsive? You’re the one bleeding through your sweatshirt.” A quarter-sized circle of blood stained the left arm of the grey hoodie Cassie never let me borrow; she’d always insisted it was her favorite, that I’d ruin it.
“It’s nothing, I cut myself,” she said, pulling tissues from the front pocket of her sweatshirt. She pushed them up under the cuff. When she reached again into the pocket more tissues, dotted with blood, fell out.
“On what, a knife?”
She made a circle with her right fingers, cuffing her left wrist. She could touch each of her fingers against her thumb. I’d seen her perform this ritual before, a test she always passed. I mimicked the motion but my bare wrist was thicker than the span of my hand. Her head tilted down; she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Cass, seriously, what happened?”
Two of the soccer team seniors walked in front of our parked car, their laughter floating into the open windows. Cassie plastered a big smile on her face while nodding to them but dropped it immediately when she turned back to me.
“Julia, I’m fine, it’s really not that bad, I just forgot to bring a Band-Aid,” she said. “I’m sorry, I know how you feel about blood.”
When I was in third grade, we played Hide-n-Seek with our neighbors and I ran to crawl beneath a pile of propped up boards in their backyard. I didn’t notice the metal edge until it had sliced through my leg, knee to ankle. Cassie put her hands on my shoulders and told me to focus on her face instead of the blood while we waited for the other kids to get help. She held my hand as our dad carried me to the car, blood dripping from my ruined yellow flip-flop. We glared at our mom when she ran back inside to get more old towels before I could sit in the car.
“Look at me,” she said, as the doctor laced black thread through my skin.
“I don’t care about the blood, Cassie,” I replied in her car that day, even though I did. I couldn’t look at her arm again. “I just want to understand what is going on with you.”
Her jaw clenched and I wanted to suck the words back in. “What is it you don’t get? What part of me hating my life is so difficult for you to grasp?” All traces of apology disappeared from her voice as those words burst out. “Jesus, you’re not stupid, Julia, stop acting like it.”
There was a time I thought I’d seen every side of Cassie that existed. But there was something I recognized in her eyes now that I had only ever seen in my own reflection. She looked out the car window for a minute while I tried to think of anything to say that wouldn’t enrage her further. She scrunched up all of the tissues into one ball, pushed the ball down into the cup holder, then laid her hand on my forearm and massaged it the way she used to do to the top of Stannie’s head when she was tired. “Ju-Ju, I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened, I didn’t really mean to do it.” This was too much to process: she did it to herself.
“Cas-Cas, I—I don’t know what I’m supposed to do or how to help you.”
“You can’t. No one can. I can’t even explain what it’s like to feel like this, because it doesn’t feel like anything.” I’d never seen her look quite like this, both desolate and resigned. I put my hand on top of hers on my arm. “It’s like…I know I love Mom and Dad, obviously, and soccer and my friends and Stanford but I just can’t…there’s this blankness where the feelings should be.” My heart sank further. Did she realize she hadn’t included me in that list? “Yesterday I threw a glass into the bathtub and I could barely hear the smash, it was like being underwater. But then I cut my thumb as I was throwing the pieces away, and I felt—it was like I could focus on that pain, that made sense to me, and some of the tightness in my chest released and the burning in my throat receded when I watched the blood drip out. I know it sounds crazy. I just—I wanted to see if I could feel that again today.”
“Was that all it was? It wasn’t…” I couldn’t finish.
“That’s all, Ju-Ju. I promise. It’s going to be okay now.” She changed the look on her face to one that said this was more lighthearted than I was making it, but instead of reassuring me, it devastated. The one thing Cassie and I had always had with each other, even when we fought, even when it might have gotten us in trouble, was the truth. But I had seen her face when she lied to our parents, and it looked just like hers did now.
“Are you really sure?” I pushed.
“Enough, Julia.”
Had I ever said no to her? She had always been the one in control. I choked back everything. What happened to you? Can you still feel that you love me?
She jumped out of the car and hopped across the hot asphalt of the parking lot in her bare feet, dropping the bloody toilet paper into the garbage. When she returned to the car, she smiled at me, and I could almost convince myself it was her normal-Cassie smile, as she started the Jeep and pulled onto the road home.
*
When Cassie had been dead for sixty-three days, I started sleeping in her bedroom in the basement. I sniffed every crevice for the lingering orange blossom scent of her hair. I buried my head in the delicate sweaters and vintage graphic tees but all that remained was the overpowering white musk she had begun wearing that last summer. Her baby-doll dresses were lined up as though she might slip one on the next day, hangers all facing the same direction.
My mom had replaced all of Cassie’s white wicker furniture with a matching mahogany wood set from Pottery Barn and had gotten rid of Cassie’s bedding. The new cotton sheets were a hopeful pale green. When I forced myself to eat, I let chocolate stain the top sheet and the new paisley duvet. “This is not how we take care of our things, Julia,” my mom scolded as she scrubbed a brush across the top sheet and threw it in the washing machine. When it was clean and ironed, tiny pills appeared in a faded green circle where the chocolate had been. My mom looked around and asked, “Isn’t it nice down here now.” There was never a question mark at the end of her question.
In the early weeks after Cassie’s death, my mom’s questions were endless, unanswerable. “What did we do wrong? How did we miss all of the signs? Why didn’t we know she was suffering?” Usually addressed to my dad, who offered absolution because he couldn’t stand a problem he couldn’t solve.
“She hid it from us, Carol. There weren’t any signs. She didn’t want us to know,” he said.
At the kitchen table, my mom’s eyes were unfocused. I pushed soggy cereal around in a bowl. Before she started going to therapy on Thursdays, before she stopped going to therapy on Thursdays, before she stopped talking about Cassie at all, my mom asked me, “Did she tell you anything?”
In November, I got a job at the deli counter at the grocery store because her questions were unbearable. My new boss instructed me to never look away while slicing as I learned to cut pastrami thin as a whisper on the hulking meat slicer. I looked at his stained apron and he yelled, “Never! I said never!” so I looked back down at the whirling circular blade. The metal was cold and I knew exactly how it would taste if I were to touch my tongue to its sleek side.
My coworker Luke told me the blade sheared off the tip of my predecessor’s index finger as it slid through yellow American cheese, and the swirl of blood on the cheese looked like squeezing ketchup onto mustard and wasn’t that ironic. He had clear skin except for one massive whitehead on his chin that I tried to avoid staring at all shift. If I were to squeeze it, the pus might look like mayonnaise that could be added to the ironic faux condiment mix. I looked down at my ten intact black fingernails and nodded, yes, that was ironic, and thought my first day at work might be my last day at work but it was okay because no one expected me to work anyway and I was just looking for a place where the hours moved only forward.
*
Otherwise, I returned to that last night. Me on the floor next to Cassie’s bed, my bare summer legs stretched long in front of me, the color of pecans, a mosquito bite near my knee swollen and smeared with my scratched, dried blood. Cassie searched for something to wear while I paged through a Cosmopolitan I’d already read. Smashing Pumpkins droned on the stereo. Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known. Can’t live for tomorrow, tomorrow’s much too long. She picked up one flimsy dress after another, holding each in front of her in the mirror above her dresser.
“What about the black one with the purple flowers and the lace across the bottom,” I suggested. It was my favorite, and I’d been shocked when she’d let me wear it to her graduation without mentioning once that I would stretch it out. She dug through one of the piles of clothes she was supposed to be organizing before packing for school—there hadn’t been any further talk about forgoing Stanford—and found it on the bottom. She went into the bathroom to slip it on; she’d stopped changing in front of me when I mentioned her weight loss that no one but me seemed bothered by, everyone else telling her she looked great. She returned and turned slowly in a circle, inspecting every view in the mirror, her brows grooving parentheses above her nose. She didn’t smile.
“Where are you going tonight?” I asked, as she continued to frown at her reflection. She brushed her hair so it swished against her jutting shoulder blades. Her thighs, smooth and pale below her dress, were barely wider than her calves. I reached under my own legs and pulled the skin from below so the tops would look slimmer. I could see one side of her face in the mirror as she put on mascara, then eyeliner, with her mouth hanging open. She still looked more beautiful than anyone I’d ever seen.
“Melissa is having people over. She leaves for Vassar tomorrow. Everyone else will be gone by the weekend.”
“Can I come? I’m sure some of the JV soccer girls will be there.”
“I’m sure they won’t,” Cassie said. “It’s for everyone leaving for school to say goodbye.” She came out of the bathroom and plopped on the end of her bed to lace up her boots.
“Hmm, I thought you weren’t going to school,” I said, then flushed when her eyes met mine in her dresser mirror. I switched focus back to our common enemy. “Mom is gonna be pissed that you haven’t gone through these clothes yet. Where are you even going to sleep tonight?”
She flung her arms wide and fell backward the way we used to do at the pool when we were little—stiff backs until we hit water. If our mom were there, she would be cringing and complaining about the wrinkled clothes, but Cassie was grinning, so I stood, threw my arms out too and did the same thing. I moved my arms up and down like I was treading water, knocking her pillow to the floor. She laughed. Grabbed my hand and squeezed it for just a moment as she smiled.
She sat up and threw her pillow at me before lifting her bag from the dresser and slinging it across her body. She spritzed her bottle of white musk three times, then walked into the cloud. I turned my head to her pillow and inhaled, searching for her smell, but there was only fabric softener.
“Okay, I’ve gotta go now.”
“Wait! You have to hear something first.” I found the remote and clicked to the last song on the mix I’d made for her to take to Stanford. How do I say goodbye, to what we had? She called this song “the worst kind of sap,” but I couldn’t resist singing along in my nails-on-a-chalkboard voice.
“Oh my God, what is wrong with you?” But she was laughing, and she leaned forward and pushed me back down on the bed. “You’re such a cheeseball sometimes.”
Making Cassie laugh was like receiving a present. Don’t leave me, I wanted to plead. Stay. How could I say it without reminding her of how much she wanted to go. “You sure you don’t want me to come tonight? I can sing this to your friends.”
“We’ll somehow have to survive without your musical talents.”
“Oh, I almost forgot. I need a ride to practice tomorrow morning.”
“Sorry, I can’t take you,” she replied. She was smiling like I was still funny to her.
“Shut up, yes you can.”
“No, I can’t.” I sat up on her bed as she moved toward the doorway.
“Why not? What are you going to be doing?”
“Stop it, Julia, ask Mom or Dad.” The smile disappeared. The warning was clear and I knew better than to push. I pushed anyway.
“What’s your problem? It’s just a ride. Why are you being so selfish?”
“Jesus, Julia, I can’t fucking do everything for you, and I can’t be everything you want me to be all of the time! I’m so fucking tired, it’s fucking enough already! Everybody keeps wanting more from me and I have nothing left. You have no idea, there’s like zero pressure on you. And you’re calling me selfish? You’re about the most selfish person I’ve ever met. You better grow up and start figuring things out on your own.”
“Why are you being such a bitch?” I couldn’t tell if my voice was shaking from anger or terror or both. I was terrible at fighting, especially with Cassie.
“Fuck you, Julia. I’m done with you.”
“Fuck you, too,” I said as she left and slammed the door behind her.
*
When my purple hair had grown out nearly two inches, my mom made an appointment for me at her salon, saying enough was enough and I had a job now. I showed Cassie’s prom picture to the colorist named Kathy, who said, “Sorry, honey, there is no way I can make your hair look like that.” She stripped the purple and the brown roots and what remained was platinum, which looked cool enough to leave the way it was, but my mom would have an even bigger fit and make a scene and I was just too exhausted.
Kathy was at her station mixing more little bowls while I sat with my head tilted into the black sink with what she called a vitamin mask on my hair. I whispered, Kathy Cassie Kathy Cassie Kathy Cassie to see how fast I could say it without jumbling the two names together. It was a relief to hear her name outside of my head again.
While she was at Melissa’s party that night, hours after I screamed, “Fuck you, too,” and before my mom gave me one of her melatonin pills to sleep, I went back down to Cassie’s bedroom. I folded all of the disheveled clothes, making neat piles on a clean towel I spread on the carpet. I pulled the corners of the duvet tightly from the bottom of the bed and turned down the top corner of the side she slept on. Propped on her pillow, I placed the note I’d written and folded into a crooked semblance of a heart, then sealed with a faded sticker I found in my desk drawer:
Dear Cas-Cas,
I’m sorry.
I love you.
You’re my bestest sistest 4ever.♥
Ju-Ju
Dear Cas-Cas,
I’m sorry.
I love you.
You’re my bestest sistest 4ever.♥
Ju-Ju
After all of the bowls had been combed through my hair and washed out, Kathy blow-dried and flat ironed and curled and we both stared at my hair in the mirror and the picture of Cassie because other than mine being a little frizzy, it really did look almost the same. “Wow,” Kathy exhaled. When I got home, my mom covered her mouth with a trembling fist. I walked past her, a box of cereal from the pantry in one hand and ND in the other and closed the basement door behind us.
At school the next day, people seemed to think my almost-Cassie hair meant I must finally be all better, and they bubbled around me throughout homeroom to tell me how good it looked. The girls next to me leaned over to ask how long it took to get the purple out and what was my shampoo that smelled like guava. I shrugged because I didn’t know, but these girls, the kind with shiny hair and perfect outfits seemed to take it as something a cool person might do and looked at me with a new respect, the way they had always looked at Cassie.
Stuart smiled at me in English like he understood me now. “Hey,” he said, and I jutted my chin in a sort of nod, which must have looked like that nod guys do to acknowledge each other. “What’s up?” he asked, as our teacher copied a poem onto the blackboard.
I paused before answering. “I taught my dog how to pee in the shower so I don’t have to take her outside when it’s really cold.”
He laughed, this huh, huh, huh, huh sound. “That’s classic. Can you imagine if someone really did that? Ew, that would be crazy. You’re hilarious, Grey.” I hated when guys called girls by their last names, so I turned away but could still hear his huh huh huhs.
At work, Luke stared at me with his mouth open as I put my almost-Cassie hair into a hairnet and didn’t talk about ketchup blood on mustard cheese. There was an inflamed red scab of a picked pimple on his forehead, like his face always had to have at least one at any given time. He continued to sneak glances of me as he took customer orders. I stood around counting the different varieties of ham, picking off my black nail polish and putting the pieces of it in my apron pocket.
A man approached the deli and asked, “Where’s your sister?”
It was the first time someone had asked me that since she died.
“Excuse me, miss?”
She was in a heavy silver urn in our family room because every time my parents argued about where to put her, my mom walked away crying and my dad sat on the sofa crying and I didn’t know which of them to go to, so nothing was ever decided. She was in a tiny metal pill case I found when Cassie and I once went vintage shopping in New Hope after she first got her driver’s license, because while my parents were at work I opened the urn and the bag inside and scooped out a spoonful and shook the ashes into the pill case because even though it was my fault she was gone, I should have some of her, too.
She was almost in my mouth because I didn’t know what to do with what stuck to the spoon and I’d heard of people licking or snorting ashes but I couldn’t go through with it and instead wiped them on ND’s forehead so she could have some of Cassie too, the beautiful, perfect girl she never knew, where Cassie remained like an Ash Wednesday blessing until ND went outside and rolled around on the lawn. So I guess Cassie was on the lawn, too, and maybe in the rest of our house where her hair was still in her hairbrush and her voice still spoke to me every night and her shadow always loomed just out of view. She was nowhere and everywhere.
“Aisle eleven,” Luke said to the man who continued to look at me before shuffling away. “All cleaning supplies are in eleven,” he reminded me. “Swiffers, mops, brooms, you know.” Swiffer. I nod. “Don’t worry, you’ll learn soon enough,” he said. I must have looked like someone who needed more reassurance because he lifted his hand, about to pat my arm but stopped short of touching me and pulled his hand away like it was almost caught in the meat slicer and I realized he knew about Cassie and who I was and maybe even what I did. I peeled the polish off my pinkie nail and wondered if he would be the one to discover all of the black flakes of it in my apron pocket, and if he would consider keeping them.
*
The third secret, the last secret. We were on the beach at the house we had rented for ten summers in Beach Haven. It was built on wooden stilts, so that when it stormed, the wind made it sway and thunder made it shake. My best Cassie memories were there: dancing to Whitney Houston singing through our bright yellow cassette recorder, sneaking junk food from the kitchen into the lofted storage space in our bedroom when we returned from the beach, sandy and salty and sunburned, adding more words to our secret language. “Sistest means sister, okay—I mean—kay kay, Ju-Ju?” We promised we would never write any of the words down, so there were a lot of basic vocabulary drills until we both—meaning I—remembered them.
We had been sneaking out at night for two summers already. We waited until we heard our dad snoring, then tiptoed barefoot on the creaky wooden deck stairs and ran across the short stretch of pavement to the dunes. The frogs croaked to each other and the waves bashed the shore as we collapsed out of view of the house. Sometimes friends would meet us there, the night filled with drinking and smoking and hookups, but often, like that night, there was no one on the beach and it was just us and the frogs and the relentless waves. I shivered because the noise made me feel cold even though the air and sand still held the day’s heat.
We passed between us a bottle of peach Schnapps, the only alcohol we managed to snag from the kitchen. Cassie was silent, unreachable. She was scheduled to leave for Stanford two weeks later, but she still wouldn’t speak about leaving or plans beyond summer. Instead she started to cry, letting me wrap my arms around her for the first time in ages, and then I was crying too, and I couldn’t tell where she began and I ended, both of us sniffling and exhaling warm peach Schnapps breath.
“You’re the only one who can still see me, Ju-Ju,” she finally said, and I squeezed her and buried my face in her shoulder because even though she was right, it was never enough. I would never be as close to her as I wanted, which was some unarticulated fusion, one CassieJulia being.
Already she had pulled back, loosening my arms and widening the space between us. “I don’t think I’m going to make it,” she whispered.
Did I know then, with the certainty that would come later, what she meant? I didn’t try to reassure her, or argue with her, or acknowledge what she said in any way other than to take her hand and thread my fingers through hers, my head still leaning on her shoulder even as I could feel her stiffening.
We sat there on the cold sand until our butts were numb and we had to shake out the pins and needles out of our legs before we could walk back to the house. Cassie got into her bed in our shared room without changing or washing off her feet and fell asleep, but I was awake for hours, watching her chest rise and fall, fighting a nausea I attributed, at the time, to the alcohol. The next day we drove home, and a week later, she was gone.
*
My dad was saying the name Judee as I walked in the door after work and my mom looked stricken but no one said anything about therapy or my almost-Cassie hair. I scooped up ND and slammed the basement door behind me. I let ND lick the mayonnaise off the turkey sandwich Luke made, shredded lettuce falling onto the duvet. Cassie’s Doc Martens left two black smudges like arched eyebrows on the paisley design. I shuffled through her CDs but as soon as Smashing Pumpkins came on again, a burning began in my chest. It radiated down my arms and through my fingers. I threw the CD case across the room and ND flinched when it slammed the wall. I threw a second case and then a third, but it did nothing to relieve the heat.
I started to count again, because for the first time I couldn’t immediately remember how many days it had been since Cassie died. How fucking dare she. 133 days. She had to have known it would ruin me too. Why did I keep her secrets? How could I not have meant enough to her to stay? Why hadn’t I been able to stop her? My body fizzed.
I still dreamed about that night, and in my dreams, I could re-write our last moments together. I could conjure the smell of wintergreen gum and stale beer somewhere close to my face, the tickling of hair across my cheek, the pressure of lips on my forehead. Cassie a blurry outline that shifted and hovered and maybe even crawled into my bed and curved into an S behind me as she had done when we were little, her cold nose warming itself against the back of my neck. I love you forever, Ju-Ju, I could hear her say. It could have happened like that. But even in my dreams, I never woke up to save her.
I looked around her room now, at the new furniture and the rumpled bed and my pile of dirty clothes in front of the closet and the empty drinking glasses on a dresser Cassie had never seen. Her old wicker trashcan, forgotten in my mother’s quest to remake the space, taunted me from the hallway leading to her bathroom. When I went down to her room the day after she died, I found, inside that trashcan, the note I’d left on her pillowcase. Its crooked heart shape remained, the edges as sharp as I’d creased them, only the sticker curled neatly back so I could never be certain whether or not she had read the note before tossing it in the trash.
I stared at my reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall, drawn and pale with impossibly golden hair, until it scrambled and morphed into something unrecognizable and familiar. My heart did the thing where it thumped so hard, it obliterated all other sound. My vision wouldn’t clear, and I couldn’t see my face and my chest was burning and that hair was everywhere, tormenting.
I jumped off the bed, startling the dog again as I went into the bathroom. Under the vanity, in the bottom of a box of tampons, was the ten-pack box of razor blades Cassie gave me to prove she was fine over the summer, six of them remaining. I picked one up and slid the razor back and forth, faster and faster until small chunks of blond came off in my hand and glided to the floor. Ju-Ju, I love you forever. I cut all the way around but it still wasn’t enough, so I reached higher and started cutting from just under my ear. The ends sprang up into curls. I couldn’t tell if it was even or see the back of it at all, but I kept going.
When I stopped, I was covered in blond fuzz, surprised to see blood escaping from a small red slit on my thumb. I hadn’t felt the pain or the release. I wiped it on the lace-trimmed sweater of Cassie’s I’d worn most weeks since she died, then took it off, her chunky silver ring on my middle finger snagging the wool, pulling a long thread loose. Instead of smelling it again for traces of her, I threw it in the garbage.
ND looked at me from the bed, nothing left of my sandwich. I threw away the tampon box, buried it with its six razor blades under the sweater so I couldn’t see it anymore. I could hear again, the thumping now only in my chest, the space between beats lengthening. I changed the music to one of my CDs. I said sometimes I hear my voice, and it’s been here, silent all these years. In the mirror, golden hair curled around my ears. There, swollen eyes, faded winter freckles, the crooked left incisor, finally visible, there was my face. I sat back on the bed, offering my thumb to ND, who took steps toward me and sniffed, then licked the blood clean.
*
The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline can be reached 24/7 by dialing 9-8-8. For TTY users: dial 7-1-1, then 9-8-8. For more information, or to chat 24/7 with Lifeline, visit: https://988lifeline.org/
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.