“Shit, Klein, you are so fucked.”
“What?” That was like, the least bad part of this story. She’d fucked her friend’s mom and played footsie with her while at the same table as her daughter, but letting Erin catch her before she face-planted was what fucked Cassie over?
“So distracted staring into this woman’s eyes you fall over? And don’t mind when she catches you? With most people, you’d rather eat pavement than let them put their hands on you. I was mostly kidding about you being hung up on her, but damn.”
“Whatever,” Cassie said, because wanting to fuck her again and being hung up on her were two very different things.
Acacia went back to quiet listening until Cassie finished her story. She smirked before she opened her mouth, and Cassie knew she was going to hate whatever Kaysh said next.
“So you made out with my brother because you were sexually frustrated about Parker’s mom?” she said. “That is too good.”
“I hate you,” Cassie said.
Acacia beamed. “Actually, you don’t.”
“Actually, I do.”
Five
CASSIE
Actually, she didn’t.
She loved Acacia, because Acacia was the best friend she’d ever had. Acacia was stubborn and self-righteous and a little wild, but she was the most loyal person Cassie knew. And she was on her side.
She didn’t tell Parker. Didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t bring Erin up again, unless Cassie did first. Even then, she was the perfect friend—let Cassie whine a little bit, offered some comfort, then told her, “You really need to get laid. Like, by someone who isn’t Parker’s mom.”
Cassie knew this, but she didn’t do it. Spending too much time in the shop was a better way to get her mind off Erin than sleeping with someone else would’ve been. She’d probably compare them, which would be worse. Plus, the shop was more productive. She had reasons to spend too much time there that didn’t include thinking too much about Erin. Namely: Caltech. At the beginning of ninth grade, her school had students take one of those absurd “what career are you suited for” questionnaires. It had told Cassie to be a race car driver or a plumber. It told her that she had problems with authority and wasn’t built for academia. After, she’d googled “careers making planes” then “best aerospace engineering schools.” She found Caltech, and never looked back.
But it was about more than proving the test wrong. She’d always wanted to fly. As a kid, she’d spent entire summers outside, sunup to sundown. She climbed every tree she could. She rode her bike, a little farther each time, until she knew every street in a ten-mile radius of their town. It was about freedom, and going fast, and getting away. All things she still wanted to do. She’d never been out of the eastern time zone. California seemed dazzling. Sunshine and palm trees and a whole other ocean. More than two thousand miles from the trailer she grew up in. It was a different world.
Working in the shop was better than hanging out with people anyway. She didn’t like that many people. Leaving Acacia behind in Greensboro freshman year had been one of the hardest things she’d ever done. Keckley was a small school, but it was still full of strangers. Going from a best friend who’d known her basically since before she’d known herself to a place she knew no one had Cassie retreating into herself. She’d found Seth, and fell into a friend group, but she’d still always felt on the outside of it.
In the shop, though, Cassie fit. Her head didn’t go quiet, exactly, it just focused. Numbers and calculations and how to make whatever she was working on go faster. She never felt sad or scared or lonely. She didn’t worry about money. Things just made sense in the shop. She belonged. In a way she never had anywhere else. Certainly not in Greensboro, which wasn’t even that small, but felt it. Everyone always knowing her business, or thinking they did.
She was that poor girl with clothes from Goodwill. She was the skinny white kid who tagged along with the homeschooling Black family. In high school, Cassie was the promiscuous bisexual who probably wouldn’t be into chicks if she’d had a father figure. After her third speeding ticket, cops acted like she was reckless with her life, instead of understanding she just liked going fast.
And it always came back to her family life, or lack thereof. No one ever understood that Cassie was over it, past it, better without them. Her mom had never once chosen her, not over drugs or alcohol or some scraggly dude who often looked like he would’ve chosen Cassie, if he’d had the chance. People never knew what to do with that—most hadn’t in Greensboro, so she decided not to give people at Keckley a chance to not get it. She didn’t share. She’d tell stories of Acacia and Mama Webb and her favorite classes in high school. She’d skip over the absent mom and never-known father and the way she’d wanted to get out of that town so badly.