I Am Not Thirteen

Story of the Human Race

Story of the Human Race

Cassidy waits for me to buckle my seatbelt. She doesn’t say, and I don’t ask, but I’m pretty sure Tom called her.

“You were getting on the tram? Didn’t you get my text?”

“‘Wait’? Seriously? You couldn’t be more specific?”

Cassidy rolls her eyes as she eases into traffic.

“I thought you’d be at work,” I say.

“Election flu. I forced them to give me my own PTO. Half the department’s been sick for months.”

“This f*****g election.”

“I know. Every conversation, it’s Trump this, Trump that, the polls, the tax returns, the emails, blah blah blah blah blah.”

“Only three—no, two and a half months left. Then the nightmare’s over.”

“Hopefully.”

“Cass. He can’t win.”

Cassidy shakes her head.

“I’m not being a Pollyanna, the math—”

“Hey! Election flu, remember? Don’t turn it into election pneumonia.”

“Okay. Jeez.”

Cassidy looks at me when we come to a traffic light. Her eyes snag on my neck. She points to her own neck, eyebrows raised. “You wanna talk about it?”

I give her the story in snapshots: the church doorway, the long walk down Mission Street, the car bumper, the ambulance. Tom’s appearance lies on the cutting room floor. She doesn’t mention him, either.

After a moment of deliberation, Cassidy hands me her scarf. I loop it around my neck, moving slowly to stave off the pain. Cassidy surveys my handiwork at the next stoplight. “It’s funny,” she says. “I picked that out this morning, even though it looks horrible on me. On you, though, it’s perfect. Must be fate.”

“Or luck.”

“No, fate. Why else would I wear cerise-colored—anything? That’s a star-crossed scarf, for real.”

“What’s wrong with cerise?” I look at the scarf, which is a dark, cherry pink. I don’t know cerise from chartreuse, or what skirt length goes with what heel height, despite Cassidy’s patient and persistent tutoring.

Cassidy shakes her head. “Cerise overpowers me. It’s perfect for your complexion, though. You don’t even look like you got stabbed.”

“Thanks a lot.”

We drive under the shadow of an enormous building. A man in dirty black sweatpants sits on the sidewalk, next to a shopping cart filled with trash bags. His eyes meet mine as we pass. A moment later, the car’s in sunlight again.

“Traffic’s gonna be awful going back,” Cassidy says. “If I stayed the night, would that be awkward?”

“I don’t think so. I’ll call her.”

Cassidy leans back in her seat, blows a stray blonde bang out of her face.

“Cass, you don’t have to—”

Cassidy silences me with a look. “Your sister tried to kill you. For all we know, she’s trailing you right now.”

I look back reflexively and see the back seat, full of tissue-topped shopping bags.

“What about Nate?”

“Nate can look after himself for one night. No one’s trying to kill him. Except me.”

Cassidy and I wouldn’t be friends if we met today. She’s blunt, even when she shouldn’t be. She’s cynical to the point of perpetual gloom. Her interest in culture begins and ends with fashion magazines—hence the gloom. She’s still the best friend I’ve ever had. We’re there for each other in a way no one else is. That’s what counts, not the music she listens to or the books she doesn’t read.

“Thank you so much, Cass,” I say, and give her a one-armed hug. White-bright pain bolts up my side. I pull away, blink away the tears. A perfunctory smile flickers across her face.

The San Francisco Bay gleams in the late afternoon light. Tiny white sailboats dot the water below. I lean back in my seat, watching the beams of the Golden Gate Bridge fly past my window. The fence’s bars turn into a blurred red haze over the water.

Mom, it turns out, is over the moon at the thought of a sleepover, “Just like when you were girls.” Cassidy lived with us for the last year of high school. She reminds Mom of the good times, before Dad died and Leah vanished into the drug life.

Cassidy gazes intently at the traffic ahead. “What were you doing at church?” she asks. I tell her. “Are you Catholic now?”

“I don’t know what I am.”

“Is he cute?”

“Who, Jesus?”

“No! The, you know, the new guy. The one who reawakened your love for the Lord? Is he Mexican or something?”

“There is no guy this time.”

“That’s a shame.”

Cassidy’s referring to an old college crush of mine, who led one of UC Davis’s Christian groups. I went to church twice a week, for about six months, just to be near him. Yes, he was that cute. Church was nice, a bit bland: lots of platitudes about Doing the Right Thing and Loving One’s Neighbor. The music was old, staid, not that Jesus-is-my-boyfriend crap you hear on the radio. When my crush picked a different girl, I faded away from church, from Christianity, and never went back. Until today.

Sunlight sparkles on the water below. The sky is a cloudless pure blue, fading to white along the horizon. The Farallon Islands stand, tiny and hazy-gray, above the water. A seagull hovers parallel to the fence, floating on a breeze.

Cassidy sighs and leans back in her seat.

“What?” I say.

“It’s weird, you being religious again.”

“I lit a candle in a church. I’m hardly an up-and-coming saint.”

“What would your dad say?”

“I don’t know.” And I don’t. When Dad was a kid, his mom got sucked into a cult. They lived in a commune for a while. Dad refused to discuss it. If I pressed him, he’d say, “That’s in the past.” At some point, they left. That was it for Dad and religion.

“Would he be mad?”

“No, he…He never talked about that stuff. Good and evil, life after death, is there a God…it wasn’t on his radar. Maybe he thought you die and that’s it. No mystery involved.” An image rises from the depths: Dad’s coffin, lowering into the earth.

We pass into the Rainbow Tunnel. I love everything about tunnels: the cylindrical roar of the air, the tube lights strobing overhead, the glowing red taillights in front of us. We leave the tunnel, soaring high above Sausalito, past highway lights, bushes, and golden-green pines.

Cassidy laughs.

“What?”

“Your sister, my brother, they both tried to kill us. We could start a club.”

“With badges.”

“Of course. A couch badge, for every hundred hours of therapy. I’d have a dozen of those. Paper bag badges for panic attacks. Flashbulbs for flashbacks.”

“A building block for every time you block a number or—”

“Yes—yes. I’d have so many block badges.” Cassidy’s laugh is bright and sharp, like mirror shards under a spotlight. The smile oozes off her face. She sighs, runs a hand through her hair.

“He hasn’t tried to call you again, has he?” I ask.

Cassidy shakes her head. “Téa said he looks homeless now. Long beard, long fingernails, broken teeth. Mom wants to go to Mongolia, hand him off to the shamans there.”

“They’re going to Mongolia? When?”

“Who cares.”

Cassidy’s brother, Jack Paradise “Slice” Clark, is a paranoid schizophrenic. We think so, anyways; he’s never been officially diagnosed. When their parents weren’t on vacation, which was rare, they “treated” Slice with new age moonshine: essential oils, reflexology, crystals, herbs. None of it worked.

When Cassidy was sixteen, her brother tried to kill her by drowning her in the toilet. If her sister, Téa, hadn’t stopped him, Cassidy might have died. Today, Slice still lives with his parents, still goes by his high school nickname. Cassidy doesn’t talk to them.

“He’s a sensitive soul, Cassie,” I say.

“He’s a sensitive soul, and we have to love him,” Cass says, taking on her mother’s ethereal voice. “If we could only see and appreciate your brother’s unique perspective, he wouldn’t have these little issues.”

Richardson Bay glints through a break in the trees. I close my eyes against the sun.

“How old is Slice? He must be, what, late thirties, early forties? Good God. Tempus—”

“He turns thirty-nine…tomorrow, actually. You guys have the same birthday, remember?”

“What do you mean, tomorrow—oh.” I check my phone screen, look for the first time at the date: Thursday, August 25.

“s**t. It is tomorrow, isn’t it?”

“Your golden birthday. Twenty-six on the twenty-sixth. And we both have the day off. It’s fate.”

“Or luck.” I rest my forehead against the glass. A small hill, covered in dry grass and green fennel, zooms past my window.

“s**t,” Cassidy says.

“What?” I say, right as I see it. A field of red brake lights stretches from the bottom of the hill to the overpass. Gridlock. Cassidy eases the car to a stop. The car next to us blasts some bass-heavy song.

“I think it’s the Backstreet Boys,” Cassidy giggles. “Listen.” She rolls down her window. Sure enough, the driver of the car—invisible behind tinted windows—is playing “Larger Than Life.” We sing along until the car pulls ahead. I look out my window. A white-haired man in neon spandex zooms down the bike path. A speedboat skims across Richardson Bay.

Cassidy pulls the emergency brake. She half stands in her seat and reaches into the back, rifling through her bags. At length she sits back down, hands me a little red box. I open the top. It’s a cupcake.

“Early birthday present. Strawberry’s okay, right?”

I cry, red-faced ugly baboon crying, hiding my face in my hands. The car lurches forward. Cassidy rubs my back. My fit dies down as the traffic clears.

“Don’t worry. Tomorrow will be better.”

“It better be.” I blink away the tears. “After Leah left rehab, I went to a recovery group. Not NA, maybe...I dunno, Women for Sobriety? Anyway. The group leader said, ‘Whenever you want to do something you know you shouldn’t, play the tape to the end.’”

“The tape?”

“The movie of your life. Say you want to do drugs. Ignore the craving. Think about what happens after. You’ll run through your money, start stealing again, sooner or later you’ll get kicked out of your apartment, maybe live in your car, strip clubs, craigslist, skeezy old guys, drug hovels—over and over, till you die.”

“Now that’s depressing.”

“That’s the point. Don’t stop at the good times. If you keep doing drugs, you won’t ever leave a mark on the world, not even as a tragic figure. Just an obituary in a database, a journal in a shed somewhere. The end.”

A close silence fills the car.

“Would that stop you?” Cassidy says.

“What, playing the tape? I think so.”

“I don’t. Look at me—I need to lose fifteen pounds, I want to lose fifteen pounds, but I can’t not eat the doughnuts in the break room. They’re not even good.”

“You’re not fat.”

“Not yet. I’ve tried MyFitnessPal, keto, paleo, ankle weights, even nicotine gum. But if I let my mind wander for a second—bam. Chow time.”

“If you can’t do it, nobody can.”

Cassidy shoots me the evil eye. “Almost everyone who loses weight gains it back within two years,” she says. “Talk about playing the tape to the end. All that does is tell you who you are. What you’re going to do, whether you want to or not. Knowing the outcome doesn’t make any difference.”

“That’s awful.”

“It’s realistic. Even divine intervention only goes so far. Remember that Bible verse you showed me once, ‘I don’t do the good I want to do, and I do the evil that I don’t want,’ something like that? Story of the human race.”

“No,” I say, fighting the sinking feeling in my gut. “It’s not easy to change, but you can do it. People don’t because they’re sleepwalking with their eyes open. That’s why every AA, therapy, all these programs, make you acknowledge your problem before you try to change. If you wake up, you have a chance.”

Cassidy smiles. The sun bursts through the clouds.

“What?” I say, pulling down the visor.

“That’s such an Amazing Amy answer. If only people could think like I think, do what I know is right—’”

“Yeah, me and only me. I’m the only person in the world who—”

“That’s not what I mean. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve pushed people to do what you want, ‘for their own good.’ Remember Tom’s stories about Rome? You can’t force him to publish those, but you tried.”

“I only said—”

Cassidy smiles.

“You haven’t read those stories,” I protest. “He’s got enough material for a whole series. If he’d only talk to a—what?”

Cassidy shakes her head, smiling. I glare at her for a moment before turning to the window.

Cassidy and I talk about other things—old classmates, ex-boyfriends, the latest dramas at our workplaces—but her words gnaw a hole in my head all the way up Highway 101. Cassidy asks me what I’ve been watching. Nothing, really, since I moved to El Cerrito. She’s shocked that I removed myself from Tom’s Netflix account. “Voluntarily? You really are an up-and-coming saint.”

Cassidy turns onto Railroad Avenue, the main thoroughfare through Woodacre. Dappled sunlight covers the road. The tires crunch over gravel and twigs. We drive by the same houses I’ve passed thousands of times, the same redwoods and willow trees and Monterey pines, the same passion flower vines, rock gardens, and high wooden fences.

I roll down the window, letting the afternoon air pass over my face. It’s always strange to come back here, to a familiar place that doesn’t remember us. We might have been gone twenty years, or twenty minutes.

“This is so weird,” Cassidy says. “It’s like the past has been waiting for me all this time. I still have nightmares about going back.”

“To Woodacre, or the past?”

“Both.”

A few kids, middle school age, run along the street’s edge, giggling.

“Baxter, wait up!” one of them calls out. The kid at the head of the group, a ginger in a Burger King crown, turns back. His dark brown eyes meet mine as we pass.

“Let’s go for a drive tomorrow,” I say to Cassidy. “We could go down to Stinson, see my grandma. I haven’t seen her in forever. We’ll blast some Wolfmother, drink beer on the beach. I’ll flirt with some cute surfer boys, pretend I’m still seventeen. If I wear this scarf, they might flirt back.”

“If you want.”

The car ascends steep and narrow streets, higher and higher into the hills. Cassidy swings the car onto Blackwood Drive, a one-lane road winding through the forest. A police cruiser is parked in front of Mom’s house. Cassidy pulls up alongside it, rolls down her window.

“Have they caught her yet?” she says. The policeman’s unfocused eyes meet hers.

“Leah Snowberger. My sister,” I call out. I pull down the scarf, point to the bandage on my neck.

The officer stares at the bandage, then stumbles out of the car. He checks our IDs, says something into his walkie talkie, does another survey of the road.

“Nobody’s seen her,” he says when he’s finished, shuffling from foot to foot. “Sorry. Nobody’s been by here all day.”

Cassidy pulls into the driveway, rolls up the windows, shuts off the car. We sit there, listening to the engine click and cool, hearing a breeze rustling over our heads.

Redwood trees loom over the car. I look out into the cool darkness of the forest, at the shrubs and shoots growing dense between the trees.

“Let’s pretend that everything’s normal,” I say. “Let’s pretend that my Dad’s still alive, that Donald Trump isn’t running for President, that my sister’s not a junkie. Let’s pretend that we’re not just killing the planet, that our lives mean something. Let’s pretend we’re not part of some big cosmic joke.”

Cassidy looks over at me, reaches out, readjusts my scarf. “If you want,” she says. She doesn’t look at me as she gets out of the car.

CHAPTER THREE