She took a sip of her drink, swallowed hard. "I worked out pretty fast that he told a lot of lies, mostly for no real reason, but I knew-well, he'd told me-that he'd had a terrible childhood and that he'd been bullied in school, so I figured he'd got into the habit of lying to protect himself. I thought-Jesus Christ-I thought I could help: if he knew he had a friend who'd stick by him no matter what, he'd get more secure and wouldn't need to lie any more. I was only eighteen, nineteen."
I was afraid to move, even to put down my glass; I was terrified that any tiny movement would be the one that would send her pushing herself up off the windowsill and spinning the subject away with some flippant comment. There was an odd, taut set to her mouth that made her look much older, and I knew she had never told this story to anyone, ever before.
"I didn't even notice I was drifting away from all the other friends I'd made, because he went into this cold sulk if I spent time with them. He went into the cold sulk a lot, actually, for any reason or none, and I would have to spend ages trying to figure out what I'd done and apologizing and making up for it. When I went to meet him I never knew whether he'd be all hugs and compliments or all cold shoulder and disapproving looks; there was no logic to it. Sometimes the things he pulled-just little things: borrowing my lecture notes just before exams, then forgetting to bring them back in for days, then claiming he'd lost them, then getting outraged when I saw them sticking out of his bag, that kind of thing-it made me so furious I wanted to kill him with my bare hands, but he was lovely just often enough that I didn't want to stop hanging around with him." A tiny, crooked twist of a smile. "I didn't want to hurt him."
It took her three tries to light a cigarette; Cassie, who had told me about getting stabbed without so much as tensing up. "Anyway," she said, "this went on for almost two years. In January of fourth year he made a pass at me, in my flat. I turned him down-I have no idea why, by that time I was so confused I barely knew what I was doing, but thank God I had a few of my instincts left. I said I just wanted to be friends, he seemed fine with it, we talked for a while, he left. The next day I went into class and everyone was staring at me and nobody would talk to me. It took me two weeks to find out what was going on. I finally cornered this girl Sarah-Jane-we'd been pretty good friends, back in first year-and she said that they all knew what I'd done to him."
She drew on her cigarette, hard and fast. She was looking at me, but not quite meeting my eyes; hers were too wide, dilated. I thought of Jessica Devlin's dazed, narcotized stare. "The night I turned him down, he'd gone straight to these other girls' flat, girls from our class. He arrived in tears. He told them that he and I had been secretly going out for a while, that he'd decided it wasn't working out, and that I had said if he broke up with me I'd tell everyone he'd raped me. He said I'd threatened to go to the police, the papers, to ruin his life." She looked for an ashtray, flicked ash, missed.
It didn't occur to me at the time to wonder why she was telling me this story, why now. This may seem strange, but everything did that month, strange and precarious. The moment when Cassie had said, "We'll have it," had set in motion some unstoppable tectonic shift; familiar things were cracking open and twisting inside out before my eyes, the world turning beautiful and dangerous as a bright spinning blade. Cassie opening the door to one of her secret rooms seemed like a natural, inevitable part of this massive sea change. In a way, I suppose it was. It was only much later that I understood she had actually been telling me something very specific, if I had just been paying attention.
"My God," I said, after a while. "Just because you bruised his ego?"
"Not just that," Cassie said. She was wearing a soft cherry-colored sweater and I could see it vibrating, very fast, just above her breast, and I realized my heart was speeding, too. "Because he was bored. Because, by turning him down, I had made it clear that he'd got as much entertainment out of me as he was going to, so this was the only other use he had for me. Because, when you come right down to it, it was fun."
"Did you tell this Sarah-Jane what had happened?"
"Oh, yeah," Cassie said levelly. "I told everyone who would still talk to me. Not one of them believed me. They all believed him-all our classmates, all our mutual acquaintances, which added up to just about everyone I knew. People who were supposed to be my friends."
