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  I soon discovered that while I remained a misfit and (I felt certain) the most unpopular girl in school, Joey was slowly coming up in the world—this primarily due to his intellectual capabilities. By the middle of sixth grade, teachers began to respect him more, and there was talk of moving him up a year in school. Of course I was happy for him, but I prayed every night that it wouldn’t happen. I wasn’t sure what I’d do without Joey Divers as my best friend. And even though we became too embarrassed to sit together at lunch anymore as sixth grade drew to a close (primarily due to the insensitive teasing of our classmates—I still cringe inwardly when I hear kids chanting, “Two little lovebirds sitting in the tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G…”) we continued to nurture our friendship in private. (Not with any kissing, mind you! The thought never even crossed my mind back then, and I’m certain it never crossed Joey’s, either.)

  By the end of sixth grade, the fatal decision had been made. Mr. Garret, our grade-school principal, announced that Joey Divers would start the next school year in junior high as an eighth grader. An eighth grader! Why, that sounded almost like moving to another planet. Just going into junior high and starting seventh grade seemed like a pretty big leap to me, but eighth grade was unimaginable! And I felt completely devastated by this news. I believed this would prove the final blow that would end my one and only true friendship.

  As it turned out I was mostly right. Oh, not so much because Joey got moved up a year, but more because of the way that silly boy-girl thing in junior high intensified so greatly. It’s as if everyone had suddenly been bitten by the love bug and could think of nothing but pairing off. I’m sure it must’ve started with Sally Roberts and Jimmy Flynn, and I heard she’s the one who asked him to go steady. But whatever the case, the trend was begun, and nearly everyone in seventh grade just fell right into line. Well, except for me, that is. Naturally no one would want to go steady with the nerdiest, most unpopular girl in the entire school. And although the thought did occur to me that Joey and I could pretend to go steady (as a guise to cover our friendship) I found the whole idea somewhat disgusting. And so, as a result of all this romancing going on, even the thought of continuing my friendship with Joey became an uncomfortable option—if it was even an option at all.

  Because, for instance, how could I possibly tell Joey Divers that I needed a training bra but was afraid to ask Grandma lest she think me presumptuous? Could I possibly explain to him how terribly embarrassing it was to dress down in PE, or how I always tried to hide in the corner because I was the only girl still wearing an undershirt instead of a real brassiere? Or how could I tell him how I was scared to death that I might get my first period right just as I was standing in front of the class to give a book report? Because I knew from last year’s “Mother’s Tea” that menstruation (a word I couldn’t even bear to say aloud) was inevitable for young ladies of my age. But I ask you, how could a boy, even one as smart as Joey Divers, possibly understand and relate to these feminine secrets and womanly things?

  And so Joey and I parted ways. Oh sure, we still chatted with each other on occasion, and he still came to work in the store sometimes, but not nearly as much as he used to (since he was lots busier with school now). And I’d noticed how he was quickly developing his own sort of social life—somewhat anyway. Moving up a grade had proved good for him. It gave him something of a fresh start, I think. He joined the chess club and got himself on the honor roll and would even make a solid campaign for class president before leaving Brookdale Junior High. Why, he was almost popular! I think it had to do with the sixties movement and the way our generation was just starting to develop more compassion for others. Well, some others anyway—not for me. And Joey’s stainless steel leg brace became something of a real status symbol, I think, although I’m sure Joey never saw it quite like that. Anyway, it was never the same for Joey and me once he got moved up. We could never go back to the way it had been before, back when we were both just kids and rattling around the old neighborhood. And, oh, how I missed that.

  Four

  In some ways, those years living above Grandma’s store should’ve been considered the “good years.” And in many ways they were. Maybe it’s just that they ended too soon. For when I look back, they feel like a brief blur of contentment sandwiched amidst what was a trying and difficult childhood and an adolescence that always felt like it was going just slightly sideways, or worse.

  My grandma had her first stroke when I was thirteen and a half. Fortunately, by then, we’d already had the training bra conversation and covered the details of getting my first period (having raised two girls, Grandma was surprisingly well versed in the ways of a woman). But just the same, I was completely devastated to see her laid up and suffering in the hospital.

  “You’ll get better, Grandma,” I assured her with all the thirteen-year-old confidence I could possibly muster.

  She pressed her pale, thin lips together and nodded. She was still unable to speak, but she squeezed my hand as if to assure me she was trying her best. And within a few days she made considerable progress and was able to speak again with just a slight impediment. Still, it gave me hope. And I tried to be strong for her sake.

  “You’re doing better, Grandma,” I said as she showed me her daily progress, sitting up in bed, moving her fingers and toes, and finally getting up and shuffling behind a walker a little. Still the doctor seemed concerned about her recovery and refused to release her from the hospital just yet.

  “You be all right,” she mumbled to me one day after school.

  “Yes, Grandma, I’m all right.” I studied her face, noticing how the left side looked loose and slack again. The nurse had already explained how she’d had a bad spell and that I could only visit with her for a few minutes today.

  “You…be…good…girl,” she said, taking care to form the words so that I’d understand.

  “Of course, Grandma,” I promised.

  “You…make something…of yourself…someday.”

  I nodded, fighting to keep the tears from forming. I knew that she thought she wasn’t long for this world, but I didn’t want to believe it. I wasn’t ready to say good-bye.

  “You…good girl…Cassie.”

  I leaned over and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Grandma,” I whispered in her ear. “I’ll see you later.”

  I stood by the door and listened as Grandma talked to Aunt Myrtle. “You…take care of…Cassandra Jane.” She struggled to say my whole name.

  “Of course, Mama.” I heard Aunt Myrtle shift in her chair.

  “You…promise me,” said Grandma with a surprising firmness in her voice that almost gave me hope.

  “I promise you, Mama. Cassandra will be fine.”

  “Good.”

  Grandma didn’t die straightaway, but suffered a couple more strokes that left her completely debilitated. For three sad days, she lay confined to her bed. I could tell by her eyes that she felt something awful about leaving me on my own like that. I tried to keep up a strong front for her sake, talking like everything would soon be right back to normal, but all the while I figured the end must be near. And it was. After a week of suffering, she died, the doctor said, “peacefully and in her sleep.” I know I should’ve been relieved for her, but I was shattered. I knew I would be completely lost without her. My ace in the hole was gone.

  As it turned out my daddy was released from jail just the day before her funeral. (I suspect he may have used her death as a sympathy plea or something of the sort). To everyone’s surprise, Mr. Clarence Maxwell (also known as the town drunk, child beater, and now jailbird) actually had the nerve to show up at her burial service, all dressed up in a navy blue suit and looking like he was on top of the world. I avoided him by dashing back to the big limousine that was driven by Mr. Parsons, the undertaker. I pretended to be so grievously devastated as to be unable to converse with my daddy or anyone for that matter (which wasn’t too far from the truth).

  Later on that afternoon, he came by Aunt Myrtle�
�s, where I’d been deposited just days before, and apologized up and down and all over again for all he’d done to me and all he’d put me through. He swore, once again, he was on the wagon, for good now and that he would never, ever drink again. The perpetual salesman, just as charming as ever.

  I remember vaguely wondering why some authorities (like the county or something) would allow this to happen. But then, why should I matter to them? Later on, I learned that I was just one of those many cases that fell through the cracks. Maybe that’s the story of my life—the girl who fell through the cracks. Who fell and fell and fell…

  Anyway, I took one long, weary look at my daddy and then turned to my Aunt Myrtle, still dressed in her new black sheath dress (she’d bought it special for the funeral, but already it pulled tightly across her midsection). With God as my witness, I wasn’t quite sure which one of them would be worse. I actually considered flipping a coin right then and there, but I figured that wouldn’t place me in a very good light with either one of them. It was plain to see my Aunt Myrtle was already taken in by Daddy’s neatly pressed suit and sugarcoated words, and she quickly settled the question for all of us.

  “You go on home with your daddy now, Cassandra Jane.” And then she had the nerve to quote my grandma as if to solidify her point. “You know your grandma always used to say Blood is thicker than water, and your daddy is your only blood relative right now. Besides, I happen to think kids should be with their parents.” Then she winked at my daddy as if they’d hatched this crazy scheme earlier today (maybe they’d come to an agreement while standing over my dead grandma’s fresh grave, totally ignoring the promise Aunt Myrtle had made just days earlier at her deathbed).

  Of course I don’t know why I should’ve been surprised by any of this. I knew that Aunt Myrtle had never liked me as a child, and I’m sure she despised me even more as the gawky teenager I was quickly becoming. I think she’d even disliked me living with Grandma during the last few years. To her I was nothing more than an aggravating nuisance that she’d just as soon not think about, let alone have living under her own roof. Already she’d complained about my long, straggly hair, threatening to cut it all off before the funeral except there hadn’t been time. And so I told her good-bye and packed up my paisley canvas bag (the one Grandma had found for me last year at the Goodwill for only two bucks “just in case I ever needed to go somewhere…”) and off I went with my daddy.

  Naturally, he didn’t have a car or anything yet, so we had to walk across town on foot, and I felt certain that every single soul in Brookdale was staring right at us as we went. I’m sure they were thinking, There goes that good-for-nothing, child-beating, drunkard of a car salesman and his skinny, hopeless daughter with her stringy black hair. I don’t know exactly why, but for some reason I felt horribly embarrassed and miserably ashamed as we walked down the street. Me, in my old brown coat that used to belong to Cindy Walters, carrying my little, worn suitcase, and my daddy fresh out of jail and walking with his chin up as if nothing whatsoever had ever gone wrong in his life.

  What a pitiful pair we made! And it’s not like I had any illusions of grandeur or any reason for pride of any sort. Goodness knows, I knew better than anyone that I was just a nobody—a scrawny, pitiful, little nothing. And in some ways I’d always considered myself the next thing to invisible. But not that day, oh no! On that day I felt painfully and glaringly conspicuous. It’s as if someone had aimed a high-powered spotlight straight at me, taking me in from the top of my straggly head clear on down to my toes that were painfully rubbing the ends of my penny loafer shoes (a half-size too small, but I’d liked their looks when I found them at the Goodwill shortly after Christmas, and I’d tried to ignore their worn-down heels that had the tendency to make me walk slightly pigeon-toed if I wasn’t careful).

  I’m quite sure my cheeks were just blazing, and I think I must’ve had real tears in my eyes (even though I’d become quite adept at holding back tears by then). Oh, maybe I was being overly melodramatic, or maybe I was missing my grandma. Or maybe it was simply the result of being thirteen and a half and the way everything in my life just suddenly seemed sadder and worse and more hopeless then ever before. But I’ll never forget the humiliation I bore on that gray afternoon in early February. And I think something inside of me just snapped during that long walk across town.

  Somehow my daddy, without a cent in his pocket, had managed to secure us a tiny, furnished two-room hovel in a shabby apartment complex on Main Street directly across from Masterson Motors, where Daddy felt certain he would be able to get his old job back. Actually, I think the place was more like a motel, because the tenants seemed to come and go weekly, but I believe they called the place “The Manor Apartments,” which seemed slightly ridiculous. Daddy kindly let me have the one and only bedroom and he slept on the couch. The nasty place smelled like old cigarette butts, bad booze, and God only knew what else. I hated it there.

  And I suppose that’s when I began to go truly wrong. That must’ve been about the time when those words from my daddy started to ring true in me. Because that’s when I first began to believe that I really did have “the devil in me” after all. And the funny thing was, my daddy was staying true to his word back in those days. Why, he did manage to get his job back at Masterson Motors, and he did stay on the wagon, for a while at least. So I really couldn’t blame my actions and misbehaving on him or his drinking. Well, not directly anyway.

  Five

  My grandma liked funny sayings, and she seemed to have one for just about everything. When I was younger, I actually thought she’d been making all this stuff up as she went along. I later learned they were simply colloquialisms (which is a fancy word for funny sayings). One of these funny sayings stayed with me for many years, because for whatever reason, I thought she was talking about me. My grandma used to say, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” And while I didn’t know exactly what it meant back then, I somehow knew it had to do with me. But I could never quite tell if it was good or bad or somewhere in between.

  Being generally insecure, as time passed I naturally began to assume it was bad. I reckoned I was the twig, and it seemed no big secret that I was getting fairly well bent up by all my unfortunate circumstances with my daddy and his drinking ways. So I figured by the time I grew up I’d probably be one twisted-up, good-for-nothing, crooked old tree. And if you ask me, that wasn’t a very hopeful picture, so I tried not to think about it too much. Especially when it seemed I was getting more and more bent with each passing day.

  It’s not as if things went immediately bad for me (at least not so as anyone might notice) but inside me—deep down, in this secret, hidden, tucked-away place—everything just started to change after my grandma died. I suspect the only thing that kept me from changing right off the bat was her memory and those promises I’d made shortly before she died. But unfortunately, those restraints only lasted about six months, during which time I started getting as hard on the inside as I already was on the outside (or so I tried to convince myself at the time). Looking back, I can see how things might’ve gone better for me right then—except that I was in something of a trap—the trap of believing I was nothing.

  I didn’t start smoking cigarettes until the end of seventh grade. It wasn’t hard to get money from my daddy back then since he was still on the wagon and pulling in some pretty wages from old man Masterson by selling those used cars. Besides that, it was easy to lay a guilt trip on him. He was always ripe for the picking, and I picked him as much as I could, while I could, that is. I figured he owed me.

  Because of my impoverished lifestyle while living with Grandma, I had learned how to shop thrift stores—and I soon discovered that thrift-store finds, combined with my own natural creative ability of sewing on colorful beads and tapestry braiding, resulted in some pretty cool threads. Especially back in 1968, when patchwork jeans and smock tops made from old linens were the epitome of fashion chic. Well, for the cool, that is (or so I told myself).
Square people like Sally Roberts still settled for crispy store-bought clothes—probably from places like JCPenney or Montgomery Ward.

  And so in a strange sort of way, I became somewhat hip in our little podunk town (‘course, it took them a few years to figure this out). I tried to put on an air of confidence, and on a good day I imagined myself to be a trendsetter with attitude.

  It was that same spring of 1968 that I pressured my daddy into getting me a used guitar and shelling out twenty bucks a pop for guitar lessons. (Amazing what guilt can do to a man.) Every week I walked over to Fourth Street to be tutored by Pete Jackson (who just happened to be the coolest musician at Brookdale High and the first person I ever met who actually smoked marijuana). And right there in his parents’ two-car garage (thickly insulated for acoustics, he explained) Pete would teach me a few new chords each week. He also told me I had real musical talent. And I suspect if he hadn’t already had a girlfriend who liked dropping in on him, unannounced, he might’ve even hit on me. Or so I liked to think. So, in some ways, Cass Maxwell was sitting on top of the world. In a matter of speaking, that is. She just didn’t know it.

  I turned fourteen in August of 1968, and I know for a fact that that is when I first acquired my own “reputation.” I suspect it originated with my private guitar lessons with Pete and the way I often hung around to hear his band practice afterwards. And it didn’t hurt that I wore the shortest miniskirts in town (only allowed due to the endless guilt trips I habitually tossed at my daddy and the turning up of my waistband when I was out of his sight) or that I had “developed” and required more than just a training bra. I think my long mane of black hair may have turned a few heads as well.