real coordinated kid, and I only gave it a couple of glancing blows.
Dad was going, “Come on, Cassie! You can do it! You can do it, Cassie!”
He was more excited than I was, I think. I just wanted to ride the real donkey, not smash up this fake one.
And I couldn’t do it.
Dad shouted louder and louder. In my memory, his words are colored red. “Cassie, IT’S EASY. JUST SWING.”
I sat down, and I started to cry.
According to Mom, Dane Armstrong kind of volunteered. He wasn’t pushy about it. Dane was my best friend—he loved animals too and his family had tons of them, rabbits in the yard, dogs, cats, even a goat. I used to hang out with him all the time, when my parents let me. After what happened next, his parents left town though.
Anyway, Dane apparently stepped forward and said, “Hey, I’ll do it for her.” Dad wasn’t happy about it, but Mom calmed him down. She was always good at that, which is one of the thousand terrible things about her dying, and pretty soon Dane had the stick and the cloth over his eyes.
I don’t remember how long he swung at the piñata for—I know he broke it open a little and candy started spilling out, because in my mind is an image of the little packs on the grass like jewels, shining, all colors and foils, golden and silver, and that of course was what made the kids run to try to grab them, which was when Dane, who was still swinging wildly with the stick, brought it around in a wide arc and smashed the somehow-now-sharp end of it into Molly Van Buren’s face, spearing her eye.
If you ever want to know what it’s like to be a pariah, to be so far outside the social circle you’re not even bullied, just ignored, it’s easy: arrange for everyone you know to come to a party, then make them watch as a kid gets her eye gouged out. They couldn’t rescue Molly’s—she wore a glass eye after that. She still does. She wants to go into the Peace Corps. I don’t know that from her; I overheard it somewhere. She doesn’t speak to me anymore.
Memory plays tricks, but I think I actually kept a couple of friends, even after that. So if you really want to be alone, what you must also contrive to happen is this:
One day, in the school dining hall, get some meat loaf with peanuts in it. At this point you don’t know you’re allergic—your parents are not into PB&J sandwiches, so you’ve never had any, or maybe you did once and your parents dismissed the redness around your mouth, thinking you’d scratched yourself. I don’t know.
The important thing is: you should eat the meat loaf, then very quickly suffer a massive anaphylaxis that swells your throat and bronchioles, fills you with a sense of black dread bearing down upon you like the grill of a massive truck, stops the air to your lungs, meaning that everyone in the dining hall panics as you lie twitching on the floor, until the school nurse finally gets there and takes the EpiPen from her bag and stabs it into your thigh, flooding your system with adrenaline and probably saving your life since the paramedics don’t get there for another twenty minutes.
After this, you will truly have no friends.
BUT BE WARNED!
Some new kids might turn up once you’re in high school, and they don’t know about the piñata, or the time Nurse Kelly did a Pulp Fiction on you. They don’t care about the stories either and they’re into books too, just like you, so you start to hang out. They may or may not be called Scott and Trish.
In this scenario, as I have already intimated, there is only one thing to do: make sure that your mother dies horribly, so that you are forever cursed, forever doomed like Cassandra of myth—the girl who leaves a trail of violence in her wake. That should be enough to see off fair-weather friends like, oh, Scott, or—for the sake of argument—Trish.
Got that?
The recipe for being totally and utterly alone:
Accidental eye surgery
+
Major medical incident on school grounds
+
Unpleasant
Dad was going, “Come on, Cassie! You can do it! You can do it, Cassie!”
He was more excited than I was, I think. I just wanted to ride the real donkey, not smash up this fake one.
And I couldn’t do it.
Dad shouted louder and louder. In my memory, his words are colored red. “Cassie, IT’S EASY. JUST SWING.”
I sat down, and I started to cry.
According to Mom, Dane Armstrong kind of volunteered. He wasn’t pushy about it. Dane was my best friend—he loved animals too and his family had tons of them, rabbits in the yard, dogs, cats, even a goat. I used to hang out with him all the time, when my parents let me. After what happened next, his parents left town though.
Anyway, Dane apparently stepped forward and said, “Hey, I’ll do it for her.” Dad wasn’t happy about it, but Mom calmed him down. She was always good at that, which is one of the thousand terrible things about her dying, and pretty soon Dane had the stick and the cloth over his eyes.
I don’t remember how long he swung at the piñata for—I know he broke it open a little and candy started spilling out, because in my mind is an image of the little packs on the grass like jewels, shining, all colors and foils, golden and silver, and that of course was what made the kids run to try to grab them, which was when Dane, who was still swinging wildly with the stick, brought it around in a wide arc and smashed the somehow-now-sharp end of it into Molly Van Buren’s face, spearing her eye.
If you ever want to know what it’s like to be a pariah, to be so far outside the social circle you’re not even bullied, just ignored, it’s easy: arrange for everyone you know to come to a party, then make them watch as a kid gets her eye gouged out. They couldn’t rescue Molly’s—she wore a glass eye after that. She still does. She wants to go into the Peace Corps. I don’t know that from her; I overheard it somewhere. She doesn’t speak to me anymore.
Memory plays tricks, but I think I actually kept a couple of friends, even after that. So if you really want to be alone, what you must also contrive to happen is this:
One day, in the school dining hall, get some meat loaf with peanuts in it. At this point you don’t know you’re allergic—your parents are not into PB&J sandwiches, so you’ve never had any, or maybe you did once and your parents dismissed the redness around your mouth, thinking you’d scratched yourself. I don’t know.
The important thing is: you should eat the meat loaf, then very quickly suffer a massive anaphylaxis that swells your throat and bronchioles, fills you with a sense of black dread bearing down upon you like the grill of a massive truck, stops the air to your lungs, meaning that everyone in the dining hall panics as you lie twitching on the floor, until the school nurse finally gets there and takes the EpiPen from her bag and stabs it into your thigh, flooding your system with adrenaline and probably saving your life since the paramedics don’t get there for another twenty minutes.
After this, you will truly have no friends.
BUT BE WARNED!
Some new kids might turn up once you’re in high school, and they don’t know about the piñata, or the time Nurse Kelly did a Pulp Fiction on you. They don’t care about the stories either and they’re into books too, just like you, so you start to hang out. They may or may not be called Scott and Trish.
In this scenario, as I have already intimated, there is only one thing to do: make sure that your mother dies horribly, so that you are forever cursed, forever doomed like Cassandra of myth—the girl who leaves a trail of violence in her wake. That should be enough to see off fair-weather friends like, oh, Scott, or—for the sake of argument—Trish.
Got that?
The recipe for being totally and utterly alone:
Accidental eye surgery
+
Major medical incident on school grounds
+
Unpleasant
Similar Books
Texas Gold
Liz Lee
B008P7JX7Q EBOK
Usman Ijaz
Midnight Heat (Firework Girls #2)
J. L. White
The Stolen Child
Keith Donohue
An Unforgettable Rogue
Annette Blair
Andrea Kane
Echoes in the Mist
Deadline
Stephen Maher
Sorrow Space
James Axler
Obsession
Kathi Mills-Macias