Of the Trees Read online

  “So there’s no cause of death? No stab wounds or … Did someone strangle her?” Cassie blurted out, aware that it was bizarre for her to want that, to assume that just because Jessica was dead it meant someone killed her. But ever since she heard she was dead, she had known—had felt that something happened last night, that something bad happened to her. She had assumed it would have been obvious; a man like Jude didn’t seem particularly concerned with subtly.

  Her mother was shaking her head slowly. “She was found early this morning, out on the side of the road by a jogger. He called 911, the ambulance brought her here. There was nothing we could do. The autopsy should be able to tell us more.”

  Cassie sank back into her seat as her mother pulled the car onto their road. For all the rage and anger, hurt and betrayal she had felt this morning, a large part of her now felt strangely hollow. All she wanted to do was crawl into bed.

  “Do you want to stay home today?” Patrick Harris asked. “Your mother and I wouldn’t mind. She can take the day off.”

  “No,” Cassie answered. She sat at the kitchen table, her bag propped by her feet. Her father regarded her over the corner of the paper he was reading. She noticed it was the sports section. She looked about the table, but the front page was already gone. Most likely dumped in the garbage first thing this morning before she could see it.

  Jessica would be splashed all over it.

  The thought made Cassie swallow hard. She reached for the piece of toast left on her father’s plate and chewed slowly.

  The sun wasn’t up yet, but Cassie couldn’t sleep this morning. She couldn’t sleep all night, actually. It was Jessica’s murder, the guilt over leaving her there, the way she died, her feet, engorged and bloody. Cassie couldn’t get them out of her head. She hadn’t seen them, hadn’t seen Jessica’s body, maybe it would be better when she did. Not that, even at the wake, she’d be able to see her feet. Still, maybe seeing her face, still and silent, seeing her laying there, really and truly dead, maybe that would ease the nightmares. Because it still didn’t feel real.

  Cassie had spent the rest of Sunday in her house. She hadn’t stepped out, not even to get the mail. The police had been on her street all day, the blaze of red and blue lights washing the walls of every room Cassie ventured into. They had pulled the shades, trying to block out the swoop of colored light, but it didn’t help much. The blue and red saturated the blinds, slanted through, a constant swirl of chaotic colors. Cassie could see a patch of the woods from the window in her room. She watched for a bit, seeing officers walk into and then out of the woods, heading in the direction of the clearing. There was a swath of yellow tape and ribbon attached to the trees, wavering a bit in the harsh sunlight. There was black lettering on it, but Cassie couldn’t read it from her room. She thought it read: Police. Caution. Stay Back.

  She assumed mostly because that’s what it always read in the television shows and movies.

  Her parents had given her hell after she got home from the hospital, yelling about responsibility, drinking, and poor decisions. There was a lot of anger, though Cassie thought it was mostly provoked by fear. Her mother had seen Jessica, had seen her feet, had thumped on her naked chest and had shot drugs into her in an attempt to get her heart beating again. It hadn’t worked. Cassie knew that at the hospital, her mother’s fear wouldn’t have shone through, but at home, with her daughter who was at that same party, her daughter who could have just as easily been on that emergency room gurney, her mother’s fear turned to blazing anger.

  She shouted a lot. Cassie gritted her teeth and took it, knowing by the time her mother started crying and with the way her father wrapped his arms around her that it was almost over. Cassie had been pulled between them and held tightly. She didn’t mind.

  It was scary that she was at the same party, that she could have just as easily stayed. Laney hadn’t been ready to leave, they only left because Cassie had freaked. Just as Laney had said.

  Her betrayal hurt. Through a haze of anger and pain, Cassie could see why Laney said what she said. Corey blinded her. Cassie shouldn’t have even been surprised when Laney spoke like that at the hospital. She was diverting suspicion from her boyfriend. It was obvious now. What wasn’t obvious was how she could do that, how she could shred the trust between her and Cassie, the friendship that had spanned almost their entire lifetime, for a boy she had met not even a month ago. Cassie was furious with her. She blocked her on her phone, not even wanting to see her name pop up when she inevitably tried to text or call. She didn’t see when, or even how, they would patch this one up.

  The thought left her cold.

  As soon as she gave into it, Ryan’s face would creep up. He had been her Laney substitute, the person Cassie could always turn to, and a person who she was growing to value more and more each day. Now he was gone, too. As much as Cassie wished he would reach out to her, call or text or yell, he didn’t. Her phone was annoyingly quiet all weekend.

  “Where is Mom?” Cassie asked. She had finished the toast. It settled like lead in her stomach. Her appetite had vanished. She watched as her father swallowed the sip of coffee he had just taken and thought about getting a cup herself. She dismissed it almost immediately, not wanting to feel more jittery than she already did.

  “She’s showering for work,” her dad said, folding his paper and tossing it into the garbage bin. “She’s going to stick to day shifts for a while, be home after school for you.”

  “She doesn’t need to,” Cassie said. Her breathing hitched in that awful way it did when she was overwhelmed. She cleared her throat until the feeling passed. She didn’t look up from her hands, twisting together on the surface of the table in front of her. Her father didn’t answer.

  The silence in the kitchen stretched, becoming uncomfortable. Her mother’s greeting when she entered the room a moment later felt forced and too cheerful. Her father didn’t speak again until they were both in his car and about to pull out of the driveway. The police cars were gone now. They had left for good last night, though it must have been after Cassie had fallen asleep.

  “You sure?” he asked, pausing at the end of their driveway even though the street was dark and empty. Cassie nodded, her features glowing green in the dashboard light. “It’s not going to be a good day today.”

  Cassie looked at her father, saw the grief and pain etched on his face. Jessica’s death would do that to a lot of parents, Cassie thought. Remind them all of the mortality of children. “I know. But it’s not going to be better by tomorrow.”

  He nodded, accepting that stark truth, and pulled out of the driveway.

  What bothered Cassie most was how annoyingly normal the school looked. The brick remained the same, one spot looking cleaner from where a set of bloody eyes had been scrubbed off. Students trickled in from the parking lot, shoving each other and sipping coffees. The devastation that Cassie felt all weekend, the sorrow that still weighed her down, wasn’t permeating every facet of her school. She didn’t know what she expected: weeping, loud and attention-seeking sobbing maybe. But it just wasn’t there.

  There was a small collection—pink and white teddy bears, flowers, a few candles—propped up at the base of the large oak tree that overhung the softball field. Cassie drifted over to it. She could feel her father watching as she left him in the parking lot. A scattering of notes was stapled to the tree, hastily scrawled bits of paper that read how missed Jessica would be, how wonderful she was, what a great friend, student, peer she had always been. They made Cassie want to vomit.

  It felt artificial and forced. Who were these people? Did they really know Jessica?

  Did you? a sadistic voice in her head whispered.

  But no, she did. Cassie had played softball with Jessica Evans since she was five years old. Every spring, seven days a week and twice on the weekends, they worked together, played together. Jessica always brought sunflower seeds on game day; she loved to suck the salt from them but never ac
tually ate the seed. She hated the color pink and teal ran a close second. In sixth grade, she had this terrible haircut that her mom insisted she get, and she hated it so much she cut her own hair to try and fix it. She pulled out the scissors in the bathroom on picture day, and Cassie had been horrified, but Jessica had just laughed, remarking, “Won’t my mom be surprised when she orders my pictures?”

  She was tempestuous and fierce. Bitchy and forward. And now she was dead.

  The notes stuck to the tree fluttered against the rough bark. The fake fur on the teddy bears and stuffed animals, the petals on the dying flowers, they all ruffled and then stilled. Cassie pulled her jacket more firmly around herself, knowing she should be cold but not quite able to feel it. She pulled her bag from her shoulder, digging around until she found her stapler and a loose sheet of paper. She scrawled her own message on the paper, her pen digging trenches through the faded blue lines. Using a closed fist, she punched the stapler to the tree, catching her paper in between.

  Larger than the other messages, fiercer and angrier —just like Jessica would have been at the sight of the pink and white teddy bears—sat Cassie’s message.

  SHE WAS MY FRIEND

  It was all Cassie could think to write. Stepping back, she thought maybe it was the most honest thing there.

  She turned to move toward the front door, half expecting her father to be standing there, still waiting for her. He wasn’t. Laney was. She stood, just at the edge of the parking lot, watching Cassie. Her brow was wrinkled in consternation. Her mouth bobbed open. Before she could speak, Cassie shouldered her bag and moved past her.

  She entered the school without a backward glance.

  Inside the school, it was in no way normal. Everything felt loud and rushed, more crowded and closer. Cassie felt claustrophobic in the halls for the first time ever. Was the ceiling really always that low? There wasn’t normally that many people in the halls between classes, surely. And weren’t the halls wider?

  The classes took forever to settle down, with students whispering among each other. Cassie kept quiet in her seat, her focus on her teachers or in her notebooks. She could hear them talking about her, but there was nothing she could say.

  “Wasn’t Harris there?”

  “Ask her.”

  “Not me! I heard she was busy anyway.”

  Amused sniggering.

  “Did you see that picture?” The group of boys behind her cracked up laughing.

  Great.

  Cassie gritted her teeth, squeezing her pen between her fingers. If it had been a pencil, she was sure it would have snapped. On top of everything else, thanks to Jon and his stupid picture, she was a documented slut now, too. Just wonderful.

  The classes she shared with Ryan were the worst. Laney she could ignore, grit her teeth and stare past her, overlook the pleading looks sent her way. With Ryan, it was different. He wasn’t pleading her to look at him, and she didn’t have the nerve to even attempt to explain. So they both stared straight ahead, teeth gritted, jaw muscles flexing and relaxing.

  What made it all the more terrible was the way, even though she would have loved to and it would have made it so much easier, she couldn’t ignore him. As if he had his own gravitational pull, she moved like a marionette puppet. If he sat back in his chair, she leaned forward. When he looked to the door, so did she. At one point she dropped her pen and leaned down to get it. Out of the corner of her eye, she was sure she had seen him move too, but when she let herself look over, he was back to staring straight ahead, his hands clenching and unclenching on his desk.

  Like magnets reversing their poles, they were pushing away and then unintentionally smashing back into each other. It was awful. Cassie felt self-conscious about it at first, feeling that the way they moved around each other, skirting and avoiding eye contact, it was obvious to everyone what had happened. But by the second class, sitting near enough to him to have a constant view of the idiotic way she still responded to him, she realized no one else noticed. It was just her, and maybe him. The tension he held in his shoulder, the way his foot tapped in regular beats throughout the class, it all spoke of how angry and upset he still was. He must have noticed—it couldn’t just be her—how connected they still were, how in tune they were to the other. It was what made it so uncomfortable, sensing the hurt and anger and anguish in the other and being impotent to fix it.

  The bell rang, and Ryan stood, reaching the exit before anyone else and disappearing into the rush in the hallway. There was a scrum at the door. Cassie slung her bag over her shoulder and put her head down. She moved toward the door.

  The hand on her elbow stopped her.

  “They can’t find it,” Roger Wilkes whispered, grinning down at her. Cassie blinked, looking up at her classmate in confusion. His brown eyes twinkled in amusement. “Settle a bet for me, could you find it?”

  “Find what?” Cassie asked stupidly. Roger’s grin widened, and he yanked his backpack up a little further on his shoulder.

  “The clearing,” he elaborated. “You know, where we were? Or can’t you remember?”

  “After the dance?” Cassie asked. “You mean where we were hanging out? Of course I remember it. I’m sure I could find it.”

  “Yeah, see, I thought so, too,” Roger said, leaning down closer to her. “But I couldn’t. I went back on Sunday. The cops were all over the place looking for it. My buddy Mike’s uncle is one of them. He said they couldn’t find it, said they thought we were making it up.”

  “Why would anyone do that?” Cassie asked, confused and annoyed. They didn’t take her seriously either. Yes, a lot of that had been Laney, but a girl was dead; surely that warranted a bit of serious consideration for the people who were with her. Roger shrugged, smiling again.

  “Tell you what, if you do find it again, snap me a picture.” He must have noticed Cassie’s look of confusion because he continued. “You know, another picture because I’ve got twenty bucks going that you could find your way back there. Mikey doesn’t think so.”

  Cassie felt her jaw drop, a flush coming up her cheeks at his mention of the picture. Mike Stevens took this opportunity to poke his head in the emptying classroom.

  “Oh, c’mon man! You’re totally hedging your bet,” he said, smirking at Cassie. “No fair.”

  “Hey, I still say she remembers,” Roger said, shrugging.

  “Not a chance. No girl with that look on her face would remember much of—”

  Cassie pushed past them, leaving them laughing in her wake. Her face felt like it was on fire and she kept her head down. She was stopped again before she could even make it to the next classroom door. Samantha Collins stepped right in front of her, and Cassie was forced to a standstill before she ran into her.

  She could barely meet the other girl’s eyes, knowing that she didn’t need a photo to know what happened to Cassie that night. She had been there, standing next to Jon as he snapped the picture.

  “I told him not to do it,” Samantha said softly, ducking her head to try to catch Cassie’s eye. “I’m really sorry.”

  Cassie had no answer for this. She nodded tersely and skirted around Samantha. Less because she actually needed to use the toilet and more to get out of the crushing throng that was surging up the hall, she ducked into the bathroom. She paused for a moment, her back resting on the closed, wooden door, the silence ringing after the rush of the people in the hall. She faced a partition—a solid wall of gleaming tile, pale and yet gaudy pink, the grout now graying with age. She knew beyond that were toilet stalls, white sinks jutting out from the walls attached to silver pipes. Cassie sighed, her muscles drooping in protest over the anxious tightness she had forced them into all morning. Her eyes were burning, but she refused to cry.

  It wasn’t until she heard the splashing at the sink that Cassie realized she wasn’t alone. Immediately, her back knotted, her muscles aching in protest as she hunched, drawing her shoulders closer into herself. A headache
bloomed, nothing terrible, but a soft throbbing at her temples. She considered leaving, but the thought of wading through the waves of humanity, limbs and hands and swaying backpacks pressing into her, pushing forward, knocking her into the walls, made her fall back into the scarred door of the bathroom again. Her stomach clenched, and she decided.

  It wasn’t worth it.

  Whoever was in here would just have to deal with it. She wasn’t leaving this bathroom until the bell rang, at least.

  Cassie almost changed her mind when she rounded the corner of the partition and saw who it was.

  Rebecca Murphy. She was bent over the sink, bringing handfuls of water to her face and splashing them over. Mascara, not a lot but enough to make dark tracks like bruises, appeared under her eyes. She looked up and caught Cassie’s stare in the mirror. Her brow contracted, and she grimaced, but Cassie found she couldn’t look away.

  “Don’t know why I even bothered with the makeup today,” Rebecca murmured, breaking eye contact with Cassie and shutting off the tap.

  The door behind them flung open with a bang and Cassie jumped. Four girls streamed past, stopping just ahead of her as they saw who was at the sink.

  “Oh, you poor thing!” one of the exclaimed, rushing toward Rebecca. Their words were rushed and jumbled, vapid attempts at sympathy. They squawked and rambled in high pitch tones, phrases misplaced and awful streaming from their pink lips.

  “Wasn’t she your best friend?”

  “I just don’t know what I’d do if—”

  “Did you see her that night? They said she was drinking.”

  Cassie blinked, shocked at the morbidity, at the callousness of their tone, the absurdity of their questions. What was Jessica wearing that night? Who knew, who could remember? Why would that matter? Then the insinuations, questioning how they, people who had not lost anyone, who didn’t understand the grief, the chasm that must have erupted in Rebecca, how they would ever go on.