What I Thought Was True

Chapter Twenty-four

“Positive you don’t need some permit for this?” Mom asks, watching me line up pencils at the kitchen table.

“Mom, it’s not daycare. It’s teaching.”

She regards me dubiously as I rip open a stack of yellow lined-paper notepads.

“This is the polite boy, with the abs?”

“We’ve been through this. Yes. Nic’s teammate. I’m helping him pass an English test. No abs involved.”

Mom’s hovering. She never hovers. She has to know what’s up with Nic and Vivien, but I’ve never seen her show it by word or glance—not when Nic comes in at the crack of dawn after “dinner at Viv’s,” not when Vivie and Nic vanish into the bedroom when Grandpa Ben is out and I’ve got Em. Why do I get the suspicious eyes?

I guess because I’ve never brought a boy home. “Nic’s teammate” sounded nice and distant and official . . . but kind of like a lie. Not the real story. Like every other way I define Cass. Mom, who never gives me sharp looks, keeps studying my face. I consciously try not to blush.

She realigns the placemats on the table. Nic, Grandpa, Em, Mom, me . . . one two three four five. Mom frowns, readjusts number five.

“Mom. It’s tutoring. Not a date. What are you worrying about?”

“Nothing, Gwen. Just making sure.”

After a series of firm knocks, Cass shifts back on his heels outside the door, wearing dark jeans and a button-down cobalt-blue shirt. His face is faintly flushed and freshly shaved—there’s a tiny cut near his chin. Still damp, his hair appears to have been recently combed. Basically, he comes across as though he’s taken trouble with his looks.

Not good. I might have changed four times, but he has no way of knowing that. There’s no concealing his tidiness—he looks like someone who might have a bouquet of flowers hidden behind his back.

“You didn’t need to dress up,” I tell him immediately.

Glancing down at his shirt, he raises his eyebrows. “This was the only thing that was clean. And not pink.”

“Oh. Well. Come in.”

He strides in, looking around curiously at our combined kitchen/living room/workout room/playroom. His face is expressionless. All the soaring ceilings and expensive lighting and artwork at his house, all those rooms . . . and look at us. Sagging Myrtle and worn, peeling wallpaper and a few of Emory’s creations taped up, along with a photograph of Rita Hayworth that Grandpa Ben is way too fond of, and some of Nic’s exercise routines posted in sequential order high along the wall. Also Vovó’s solemn portrait/shrine and a pin-the-tail on the donkey game that we put up for Em’s birthday and haven’t taken down because it helps him with fine motor skills.

“I like this. A lot of personality.”

“Isn’t that what guys say about ugly girls?” I snap.

“Is this a bad time or are you just randomly pissed off?” He scrubs his hand through his hair, and it flops back into disarrayed perfection once he’s done.

“I’m not randomly pissed off. I’m—”

Randomly pissed off.

I’d been fine two minutes ago. Now I’m totally uptight. Not a date. Just tutoring.

Cass has moved around me to the table where I’d laid out the yellow lined pad and pencils, opening up his backpack, the same one he had on the beach with Emory. That softens me immediately. He slaps a copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles down on the table and grins up at me, looking through his lashes. Long lashes. Why do boys get those when girls are supposed to need them?

“So, we sit here?” He pulls out a chair, piles into it, rests his elbows on the table, looks up at me again.

“Uh, yeah. Here’s fine. My room is kind of small and it—” Is my bedroom. Has a bed.

Just then, Mom comes out of our room, stopping dead, as though she hadn’t been expecting anyone.

Cass leaps to his feet, extending a hand. “Hello, Mrs. Castle. I’m Cass—Cassidy Somers. Gwen’s agreed to give me some Lit 2 help.”

Mom stares at his hand for a moment as though she has no idea what to do with it, much as I do when Cass makes one of his super-polite moves. Then she gingerly extends hers and Cass shakes it. As they do, I get a whiff of some sort of lemony-spicy scent.

Aftershave?

Cass is wearing aftershave.

Ha. He did put in an effort. Now, this gives me a little thrill, when seconds ago I was upset by the thought. I’m becoming more bipolar by the minute. Maybe because the aftershave is fighting with the perfume I put on, from a bottle Vivien gave me four years ago. Which has probably expired and is emitting toxic fumes and scrambling my brain.

“Well, yes, then.” Mom takes possession of her hand once again. “I’ll just—get back— Would you kids like a snack or anything?”

Like what, Mom? Milk and cookies? Frozen Lean Cuisine?

“Nah, thank you, I just ate,” Cass says. “Thanks for letting us do this here, Mrs. Castle.”

He really is insanely polite. He sounds like a teenager from a fifties sitcom. “Golly gee, Mrs. Castle, you sure are swell.”

“Our pleasure,” Mom returns, rising to the occasion. “Make yourself at home, Cassidy. I’ll just get back to work. You two won’t even know I’m here.”

Work? Now?

She goes to the kitchen closet, pulls out the vacuum cleaner, attaching the filter. Then she turns it on and assaults Myrtle the couch, who I imagine is wearing an expression of upholstered surprise. We’ve pretty much given up on doing anything to maintain Myrtle. The vacuum cleaner sound roars through the room like a jet plane.

Cass seems to be suppressing a smile. He taps the cover of Tess, calls over the roar, “I guess we should get started. I have some questions.”

“Fire away,” I yell. Mom is laying into the part beneath the cushions in a kind of frenzy. I can hear these clanking sounds as things that belong nowhere near a vacuum cleaner get sucked up anyway.

This has to be her way of being a chaperone, but honestly, what does she think is happening here? We’re going to leap on each other in a frenzy of lust after talking Thomas Hardy—always such an aphrodisiac—brush aside the pad and pencils and Do It on the table?

Now I’m remembering Cass tipping his forehead against mine, perspiration sticking us together, his hand cupped around the back of my neck, one of mine flattened against his racing heart.

I clear my throat and focus on his paperback copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It’s easy to see he barely read it. The spine is uncracked, there are no notes or turned down pages or underlinings.

“Yeah,” Cass shouts, upping his volume slightly as the vacuum cleaner starts to cough out a Fabio hairball. “This is the book I didn’t even get a third of the way through. I hated every single character in it.” He hunches over a little bit, picking at a tiny gap in the corner of the cover, making it larger.

“Everyone does,” I tell him. “It’s like the Classic No One Loves.”

“Honestly? But we still have to read it.”

“Yup.”

“Why? They’re just people behaving badly.”

“People behaving badly is, like, most of literature, Cass.”

He squints at me. “I guess. And life. Maybe.”

“Maybe,” I concede. What are we saying here?

“That Angel Clare dude is a complete prick.”

Mom’s now moved on to the rug, and has sucked up something that’s rattling around frantically. Talking is like trying to be heard standing on a jetty in a hurricane.

Angel who? Oh, right, Angel Clare. The hero of Tess, which I reread last night just to be in practice even though it’s number one on my list of Books I’d Like to Throw Off the Pier. “I thought you didn’t read the entire book.”

“SparkNotes,” he admits, again with that embarrassed expression.

“Hey, we’ve all done it. Just to supplement, of course.”

He shrugs, with a smile. Mom jams the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner under his feet. He lifts them up obediently. I duck my head under the table.

“Mom. Do you have to do this now?”

She flips the deafening vacuum cleaner off, says quietly, “Sorry. You know how I am. Can’t stand a mess.”

“Try to survive this one until we’re done,” I whisper.

“Sorry, honey,” she responds in a normal voice Cass is sure to hear. “Didn’t realize you two wanted to be alone.”

“We don’t— Ow!” Attempting to raise my head, I’ve smacked it on the underside of the table.

“You okay?” Cass reaches out to touch my hair, succeeding in covering my hand as I’m rubbing the spot. He tightens his grip for an instant, then pulls his hand away. “Should I get ice?”

“No, I’m fine.” Not really. I’m imagining the deepening shades of red I’m cycling through, trying to recall their names from art class sophomore year: scarlet, crimson, vermilion, burgundy. “Let’s just keep going.”

Mom coils up the vacuum cleaner cord, looping it hand to elbow, hand to elbow, carefully not looking over at us, as though we have, in fact, started going at it on the kitchen table.

Now the kitchen door slams. “Mommy!” Em soars across the room to her. He’s followed by a sweaty-looking Nic. Who smells particularly ripe.

“Nico! You stink like old gym socks!” Mom says. “Take your shirt off, outside, please, and get into that shower.”

Nic, however, has spotted Cass. His expression hardens into one of unnatural grimness. “I was running up the Ocean hill carrying Em,” he says. “Seemed like good training. Now I’m going to lift, though, so the shower will have to wait.”

The combined odors of Cass’s subtle aftershave and the disgusting reek of Nic are overpowering. I wonder if Cass will keel over and I’ll have to perform CPR. This speculation should not feel so much like a fantasy.

Cass is biting his full lower lip now, looking down at Tess. I can’t tell from his downturned face whether he’s amused or completely horrified by the three-ring circus that is my family.

“Hi!” Emory’s face lights up completely. “Superman. Hi!” He points triumphantly at Cass, like ta-da!

“Hey there, Superboy,” Cass says easily. My brother immediately comes over and throws his arms around Cass’s neck. And kisses him. On the neck.

Cass pats Em’s back. “Hey buddy.” His voice is muffled by Emory’s hair.

“Superman,” Emory repeats.

Cass adjusts so that Emory has room to sit on his chair, but Em’s having none of that and climbs into his lap, occupying it firmly, like Fabio in his “here I stay” mode on my bed.

Time to intervene.

“Em, you need to give Superman some room. He has to—”

“It’s fine, Gwen.” Cass cuts me off. “Want to keep going? You were about to explain why Angel Clare wasn’t a di—uh—jerk. I’m all ears.”

“Well, of course he’s a jerk! I mean, come on. She tells him she was basically raped and he can’t forgive her because she’s ‘not the woman he thought she was’ even though I’m sure he’d been around. That’s without even mentioning the scene where he sleepwalks afterward, carries her to the cemetery and puts her in a coffin.”

“This is why I read romance novels,” Mom says, abandoning all pretense of not eavesdropping. “None of that nonsense there.”

Cass rubs his nose. “Seriously? I didn’t get to that one. Must not’ve been in SparkNotes.”

I wave my hand, exasperated. “It’s supposed to symbolize that the person he loved is really dead to him now, and—”

“But it’s just basically twisted—” Cass interrupts. The door to Nic’s room slams open. He’s wearing a wife-beater, takes a few menacing steps into the room, then lifts the forty-pound weight and starts doing bicep curls with a belligerent expression. Very Stanley Kowalski. Hullo, Nic was the one who begged me to take on this tutoring thing.

Cass lifts an eyebrow at Nic. “Cruz, hey.”

“Bro,” Nic returns, practically snarling. He swings the weight to the other arm. More curling. More glowering. Cass’s eyebrow remains in an elevated position. How does he do that?

“Shiny.” Emory smoothes Cass’s hair, pushing it behind one ear. I notice now that it’s longer than usual, and has a little wave to it. It is shiny. I practically have to sit on my hand to avoid reaching over and brushing back the other side.

I need to do something to break the tension. “Sure you don’t want a snack?” I ask, forgetting how lame that offer seemed when Mom made it.

“Nah. I’m fine. Thanks, though.” His eyes meet mine and linger a few moments before returning to the paperback edition of Tess. Who I’m starting to hate even more than before. Look back at me. What was that you were thinking?

Mom has settled herself on the couch with a book that, naturally, has one of the more aggressively sexual covers. Most of hers are not quite so bad, but this one has a guy with his shirt off, one thumb hooked into his overly tight white, practically painted-on pants, crooking his index finger out at the viewer. Come and get me, baby.

Nic’s set down the first weight with a thunk; picked up an even larger one. Em’s now resting his head on Cass’s shoulder. His lashes float down, snap up, drift down again. He’s falling asleep.

It all just keeps getting better and better.

I start to say something, though I’m not sure what it could possibly be, and in comes the missing piece in the whole situation, Grandpa Ben, carrying a large plastic bag in which there is an enormous dead fish, judging by the size of the tail fins sticking stiffly out the top. He’s got another bag full of kale greens and root vegetables and is grinning from ear to ear, prominent front teeth accounted for.

“Look what Marco caught—right off the pier at Sandy Claw. He got three even bigger than this monster.” His voice drops. “Above the legal limit, but who’s counting? Can you believe it? We eat well tonight!” He stops, noticing Cass. “Ah, the young yard boy. Como vai, meu filho?” His delighted smile spreads even farther across his face as he looks back and forth between me and Cass. “Você tem uma namorada?”

Cass said he didn’t know Portuguese. Please God, let that be true. My grandfather did not just ask him if he had a girlfriend. If Cass got that, I’m going to go over and knock myself out with one of Nic’s weights. The fifty-pound one should do nicely.

But his blue eyes are simply questioning, searching me for translation.

“He wants to know how you are, and if you like, um, fish.”

“I do,” Cass tells him, “thank you. And I’m fine.”

Emory’s now definitely asleep. Drooling on Cass’s last clean shirt.

“You will stay to dinner!” Grandpa Ben orders, one finger extended, a Portuguese tyrant. “Você vai jantar conosco!” He pulls a sprig of lavender out of the vegetable bag, tucks it into the vase beneath Vovó’s picture. Blows it a kiss. Then marches majestically to the kitchen counter, calling, “Yes? Yes?” over his shoulder.

“I’d love to,” Cass calls after him. “I’m starving!”

This time there is no mistaking the laughter in his eyes, or the way his glance lowers quickly to my lips, then returns, innocently, to meet my eyes.

I give up, bury my face in my hands.

“I’m having a great time,” Cass says, very softly, so quietly perhaps my big-eared mother and nosy cousin can’t hear. “All good.”

Is it? All I know is that I can’t seem to stop—this—or slow it down. Or remember exactly why that’s what I want.

Here’s what happens before dinner. Nic finally gives it up and goes to shower, shouldering past Cass’s chair, unnecessarily close, waist wrapped in a towel, muscles bulging. Implication: Mine are bigger than yours, minor-league swimmer boy, and I can mess you up if necessary. Cass does not look intimidated.

Mom asks Cass to carry Emory to the couch. Em wakes up halfway, perhaps because Cass has him awkwardly slung over his back, head hanging. He starts to melt down until Cass agrees to read his current favorite book, which involves a “dear wee little fairy who lived under a petunia leaf.” Seven times, until Mom takes pity on either Cass or me and shuffles Emory off to take a bubble bath.

Grandpa Ben, in some sort of Old World display of machismo, reincarnating himself as a knife salesman (did he really ever do that? I haven’t heard one single story about it up till now), decides he needs to whack the head off the fish with one blow, and chop up all the vegetables with some sort of enormous butcher knife. Cass and I try to slog through more Tess but keep getting interrupted by loud thwacks and Portuguese curses from the kitchen counter.

Nic comes back in and he and Cass have another manly conversation in which they both use monosyllables and say basically nothing.

“Hey, man.”

“Dude.”

As the fish is cooking, Grandpa Ben comes over to the table and sits down across from us, grinning broadly once again. I shut my eyes, waiting for him to interrogate Cass about his suitability as a husband, but instead, he gives a startled, concerned exclamation.

“Coitadinho! Olhe para os seus dedos! Olhe a sua mão!” And I open my eyes to find him pulling the note-taking pencil out of Cass’s fingers, calling for my mother. “Look at this, Lucia!”

Mom folds her hand on her mouth. “Oh my.”

“What is it?” I ask, a little frantically. Cass’s ears turn red, the flush rapidly spreading across his cheekbones.

“Your poor hands, honey. How long have they looked like this?”

“It’s nothing,” he says in a muffled voice, trying to pull his arm back from Ben. “They were much worse before.”

“What are you cleaning these with?” Grandpa demands. Cass has curled both hands into fists and buried them under the table.

“Uh. Hydrogen peroxide. Please. It’s nothing.”

Grandpa Ben smacks himself theatrically on the forehead. “No no no! That seals in the infection, na infecção. That’s how you get the poisoning of the blood.”

“What’s going on here?” I ask, grabbing for Cass’s right hand, expecting to see it oozing blood from every pore. I didn’t notice anything odd about them during the swimming lesson. Or on the boat.

“Nothing,” he mutters. “No big deal. Blisters, Gwen. I’m not used to mowing more than one lawn a week.”

I turn his hand over, gently pry his fingers open and suck in a breath. His palm is a mass of blisters, new and old, popped and unpopped, some of them blood blisters. It hurts to look at it.

Grandpa Ben barks a few Portuguese phrases at Mom.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cass continues,urgently. “I just pop ’em and wait for them to seal over. It’s not a big deal. The other hand isn’t nearly as bad.”

“No!” Grandpa Ben booms as Mom returns from the sink with a bowl full of steaming soapy water. “That is what you do not do. You let them pop on their own, heal under the gloves. Otherwise, you get the infecção. Are you wearing the gloves?”

Cass flinches, either because Ben is insistently lowering his hands into the hot water or because he feels incredibly self-conscious about all this attention. Or both. “Uh. No.”

“Is your father raising an idiot?” thunders Grandpa Ben. Nice, Grandpa.

“Do you have to scrub so hard?” I ask.

“Do you want your boy to get sick with the high fever?” Grandpa Ben doesn’t stop scrubbing away.

“Of course not,” I say swiftly, not even bothering to argue with the “your boy.”

“Does it hurt a lot?”

“Only my pride. ’S fine.” Cass’s voice is noticeably more cheerful than it was a moment ago.

Grandpa Ben finally stops his triage and barks another order at Mom, who returns a minute later with a clean towel and gently dabs at Cass’s hands.

“We’ll wrap them up for now,” she says. “Just until they dry out. Then leave them uncovered overnight with some antibiotic cream. In the morning, wash them with soap, let them air dry, tape ’em up. Wear work gloves, the canvas kind.”

“He doesn’t have any work gloves,” Ben growls. “Idiot. In the morning I will go to the Garrett’s Hardware and get him a pair of decent ones.”

After all this drama, dinner is anticlimactic. There’s a lot of clinking of spoons and requests to pass things. I resist the urge to cut up Cass’s food for him, as his bandaged hands make him closely resemble a mummy or a terrible burn victim.

“Walk him back to the Field House, you! He won’t be able to turn the key in the lock,” Grandpa Ben orders.

He’s suggesting I go to Cass’s apartment alone now? What happened to the knife salesman?

“It’s true, honey. Those hands must be so sore. I wonder how you’ve been able to do anything at all, Cassidy. You must be made of tough stuff.”

Cass shrugs, clearly embarrassed.

Tough stuff, Mom? Really?

All her vigilance and caution have apparently faded away in the light of Cass’s hands. Mom loves a victim. Even a self-inflicted one.

Or maybe it’s his charm, not his hands. Because that can make anyone’s caution fade away.

Certainly mine.

It’s a cloudy, moonless night, hard to see on the unlit High Road. I stumble and Cass’s palm catches me immediately under the elbow.

“Ow.”

“Don’t do that!” I say. “Your hands are hurting.” I yank my elbow away.

“Blisters, not shrapnel. It doesn’t feel any worse than it has for a while. Really. It’s not—”

“If you say it’s not a big deal again I will hit you.”

Cass starts to laugh, then laughs harder, until he has to stop on the darkened road. I can vaguely make out the flash of his eyes and his teeth, but not much else. “You send more mixed messages than any girl on the freaking planet,” he says when he finally catches his breath. “You need to come with a goddamn YouTube instructional video.”

“I do not. I’m very clear.”

More laughter. Now he’s practically wheezing. It’s hard to listen to someone laughing so hard without starting to smile yourself. “I’ve never given you mixed messages. The messages just changed. That’s all.”

“And changed again, and again, and again.”

“I’m not like that.” My voice thickens. Am I really some kind of confusing tease like the ditzy heiresses in Grandpa Ben’s movies? The ones you want to smack sense into? I’m not. Right?

“Watch out, the lawn mower’s right there,” he says, hauling me expertly around it with a little arm swing, like a dance move. Then he’s opening the door. No key.

“You didn’t lock it.”

“Course not. What are they going to steal? I don’t see Old Mrs. Partridge sneaking in to grab my gym shorts and a can of tuna.”

“But the whole reason I’m walking you home is so you don’t have to fumble with the key!”

“I wasn’t the one who came up with that excuse,” he reminds me, “but I was damned if I wasn’t going to go with it.” He reaches in to flick on the switch and the light slants out into the night, casting him in shadow, glinting off his hair, blinding my eyes.

“G’night, Gwen.”

As I hit the bottom of the stairs, he calls, “The whole reason?”