Chapter 31 Cassidy
Chapter 31
Cassidy
She wouldn’t necessarily call herself a mean girl, but she finds something cringeworthy and satisfying in watching these boastful, happy couples crumble before her eyes. Maybe it’s insensitive, but she’s been the brunt of jokes and pity stares for the last however many years because she embodies that godforsaken word: single . She knows. She’s heard people talk even when they thought she couldn’t. Muffled whispers with sharp daggers: it would take a saint to put up with her (that’s why she is picky), poor thing must get lonely (that’s what she has her rabbit for), or her favorite, she’s too set in her ways (and she won’t apologize for that). She won’t apologize for any of it.
After Sienna follows fragile Lucy out of the room, a quiet descends on the table.
“Man, you just never know what people are going through,” Leo says while Adam keeps filling and refilling his own glass.
“You didn’t answer me,” Henry says to Adam. “Is there something you need to tell me?”
“You okay?” Penny whispers to Rosalie. “I bet this isn’t what you signed up for.”
Rosalie shrugs. “I’m in high school. Drama is a required course.”
They delve into a conversation about stereotypes and mean girls and bullies and cliques. “Stereotypes are dangerous,” Penny says. “Wherever you sit.”
It’s a relief for Cassidy to see her daughter talking to someone other than Jean-Paul.
Henry and Adam have that macho, sword-wielding ego battle waging between them. Something weird is going down. She can read the cues.
Jean-Paul places a coffee with chocolate and cherry cream in front of Cassidy. She won’t touch it. She’s already met her daily quota for caloric intake, and because there’s no gym and she can’t jog in the rain, she’s feeling stuffed and bloated. She grabs her wineglass and finishes the night off with a swig.
Adam notices her sitting there. “You must be enjoying this.”
“Now why would you think that?”
Adam thinks they’re on the same side. They’re not.
“It must be hard to raise a child alone.”
She snorts and lies. “Rosalie’s always been an easy child.”
“Does she have an uncle? A father figure? How’s she going to learn about sports?”
Cassidy is used to guys like this and their sexist, antiquated minds.
“Wow. They let you say things like that in the twenty-first century? ‘How’s she going to learn about sports?’” She uses air quotes. She loves air quotes. “Sydney Leroux and Hope Solo, for starters.”
This quiets Adam, and she thanks her lucky stars for Rosalie’s curious mind and the paper she wrote for a class about female athletes raised by single moms. But she’s going to need more than wine to make it through the rest of the week with a “man” of Adam’s “brilliance.” Her heart races, even though she put Adam in his place, and she feels around in her bag for her pills, wondering if anyone will notice if she pops one in her mouth.
The conversation continues around her. That Simone girl skittered out of the room with her camera in tow, and Leo Shay is trying desperately to join the conversation with Rosalie and his ex, which has shifted to Penny’s describing Leo’s high school insecurities. Penny bats him down, first with her eyes and then her words.
“You’re talking about me in the third person,” he says, “as if I’m not sitting right here.”
Rosalie smiles at Leo. Penny continues unfazed.
Cassidy understands. She’s been dumped and berated by girls her entire life. First, they made fun of her parents’ divorce and her noticeably absent father. Then it was her chubby phase. While all the girls conquered puberty with swanlike necks and long, lean bodies, she packed on extra pounds. She saw how they snickered at her—the cool, popular girls who never had to think about what they put in their mouths, devouring endless streams of Fritos and Pop-Tarts at sleepovers that she was never invited to and only heard about in PE class on Monday mornings.
She thinks maybe this was where it all began, her obsessive desire to be thin. And she never wants to feel not good enough again. When she grew a few inches, and the extra pounds evened out across her body, her mother showered her with praise and new clothes. Being thin and pretty meant being loved.
She still misses her mother, but seeing the relationship between Lucy and Sienna, she wonders what it would be like to have that form of trust. She feels a twinge of regret. She doesn’t have a best friend, a committed posse of loyal friends to usher her along life’s winding roads. Do the girls in her SoulCycle class count?