I amuse myself by timing Cassie’s whine: thirteen minutes over the dress shoes. Everyone knows they’re meant for Sunday brunches, church services, maybe picture day at school, but she wants to wear them for riding her bike in the street.
Cassie was born the year before me and will turn twelve soon. She’s starting to never listen, rejecting the braided pigtails Mom likes to weave from her spun-gold hair on mornings before school. Cassie got the blonde, the exotic green eyes; I got dirt-dots dumped across Dad’s too-wide nose. People more often said Cassie looked just like Mom, because that was the bigger compliment. “But both of your daughters are beautiful,” they’d add too quickly, so the lie burned in neon letters.
Mom gives in—she always does. I learned long ago the tangible and unpredictable benefits of good looks. Cassie runs off to play outside, the shoes’ heels clacking across our driveway’s pavement. She stomps them extra-loud on purpose.
Dad is the one who finds her in the grass on the side of the street, two doors down from our house. I later realize she could have hobbled back home, but Cassie is the kind of girl who will lie in wet grass for a half-hour until someone rescues her. Maybe she’s on to something—people seem to like girls best when they’re helpless. Dad carries her inside, dress shoes scuffed on her oversize feet. Cassie is curled in his arms, a little snotted snail in its shell. He unfolds her on the kitchen counter.
“Jesus Christ!” This is my mother.
“It’s okay,” Dad says.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Sarah, stand back a bit,” Mom says, using her annoyed voice.
The gash runs from Cassie’s knee to ankle. Her blood seeps scarlet. “Oh, it’s just a cut,” I say, to make myself feel better. I want to cry. Cassie wails as my mother pours hydrogen peroxide on the wound, which bubbles up on her tanned, lanky legs like Alka-Seltzer tablets in water. By the time the bandages are on, Cassie blubbers only the occasional whimper.
“Do you see why I told you not to wear these in the street?” Mom says. Her voice doesn’t seem harsh enough.
The cut heals without a trace of scar. Cassie is still perfect. Mom throws out the scuffed shoes against protests. “We’ll get you better ones,” she says.
After her fall, Cassie stops going outside as much and starts leafing through teenage magazines. One of them advertises a Junior Miss Pageant in September. “Hey, Sarah, look at this.” She shows me the picture; even in black and white, I can tell that the girl is wearing bright red lipstick.
“You finally joining clown school?”
“Will you be serious for once?” Cassie sighs with disgust. “God, I’m so tired of hanging around children. I’m practically a teenager, for God’s sake.”
I ask Mom if twelve is a teenager. “I think twelve is what they call preteen,” she says. “You’ll be there before you know it.”
“Cassie is eleven going on thirty,” Dad says. I hear discomfort and pride in his voice.
+
Cassie receives paperwork from the Junior Miss Pageant. Two days later, a catalog called Pageant Perfect arrives in the mail. I flip through the glossy photos at the kitchen table; all of the models wear the same war-paint blush and aerosoled hair. Idiots, I think, and go outside to play kickball. Anthony Dello Russo from across the street is running bases with some kids from our block.
I often watch Anthony from the living room window as he shoots basketballs in his driveway. He has olive skin and thin limbs, long eyelashes, gooey brown eyes. Some people in my class have boyfriends or girlfriends, but I don’t see the point. Anthony is a year older, in Cassie’s grade, and I worry that he sees me as a kid or something. Plus, pining from a distance is more romantic.
“Can I play?” I ask Anthony.
He squints for a few seconds. “Yeah, you can be on my team. Where’s Cassie?”
“Looking at some dumb pictures. She still thinks she’s going to be a beauty queen.” I had already made fun of Cassie’s dream to Anthony.
“My cousin Alex? She entered one of those pageants once.”
“Did she win anything?”
“I think she was runner-up.”
“Oh, yeah? I know the feeling.” I run off to cover second base before he can answer.
When I get back home, Cassie is still glued to her bed. I hate all of this time she’s spending inside lately, especially since we share a room. Our parents wanted to teach us some kind of lesson about compromise. We mostly learn about how to avoid each other from two feet away. “Sarah, I’m glad you’re back.” Cassie sits up and looks at me. “Ew, you’re filthy!”
I pick up the Stephen King book from my nightstand and open to the bookmark on page six. My English teacher lent me some books to read over the summer, but they seemed to be written for kids. I spend a lot of time in the adult section of the library.
“It says here that contestants are judged according to appearance, personality, and poise,” she says. “What’s poise mean?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m trying to read.”
“Since you read so much, you should know the word.” All of the books in our room are mine, and Cassie plucks a dictionary from the bookshelf. “‘Poise,’” she reads. “I think this is what they mean. ‘Easy self-possessed assurance of manner.’” Her bottom lip sticks out. “I don’t get it.”
I get up and take the dictionary from her. “Sounds to me like confidence,” I say. “And you could ask before taking my book.”
Cassie goes back to her papers, and I look at the dictionary page she just read. The word underneath poise is poison: a substance that inhibits the activity of another substance or the course of a reaction or process. I wonder if the words are related. “I’m sure you will have plenty of poise,” I tell her. She doesn’t look up when I speak.
+
Cassie watches A Chorus Line on our new cable TV and decides that for the pageant’s talent competition she will dance. She begs my parents to enroll her at the dance studio near our house, then quits after her first lesson. “Ballet is too old-fashioned,” she says. “I want to do something more modern.”
She choreographs her own dance instead, a hip-hop-style routine that involves a lot of kicks and whirling spins. She wears leg warmers at every practice, even in the heat of summer.
My father watches her sometimes from the kitchen, his bony daughter throbbing to a minute-and-a-half-long snippet of booming bass and synthesized drum beats. “You call that dancing?” Dad asks her. “Looks like you’re trying to shake a lobster out of your shorts.”
“Daddy!” Cassie squeals. “This is the style now.” She rewinds the cassette tape and assumes start position.
Dad looks at Mom with a slight smile, eyebrows raised. Mom shrugs and says, “That’s what the kids are into nowadays.”
“Not even music.” Dad gets up to smoke his nightly cigar outside.
Mom puts her hand on his forearm and speaks quietly. “Just be glad she didn’t want to go ahead with those lessons. We’re talking expensive.”
I often overhear my parents’ low-spoken speech—either they just don’t notice me standing there, or they think I’m mature enough to hear everything without repeating it. I stay quiet, blend in, a slow-moving planet to Cassie’s shooting star. She shines brighter, but I have more weight, more variety of life. I think I remember learning in science class that stars are balls of fire, constantly exploding, and burn out quicker the brighter they shine.
+
My birthday is nine days before Cassie’s, in late July. Mom and Dad take me to Red Lobster and give me a gift certificate for the bookstore and a red leather diary with a gold-colored lock on the front. I am ten pages in—writing often about boys I like, mostly Anthony—when I come home and find the little-kid lock broken open. I wonder if a page has been torn out; the book seems to weigh less.
The next day, I rummage through Cassie’s drawers and shred her favorite jeans with kitchen scissors. Cassie wails and cries half the night, but I don’t feel like the winner. Mom only goes out and buys her a new pair, and now I don’t want to write down anything that she could use to embarrass me, which seems to kill the whole purpose of keeping a diary.
Cassie’s twelfth birthday party is attended mostly by family members. She doesn’t have many friends at school since a crew of cool kids started calling her Princess and sometimes spit on her in the hall. Dad grills hot dogs and hamburgers and tells Cassie that this will be the first and last party he will ever throw her. Aunt Janie asks about the Junior Miss Pageant, a month away, and gives Cassie a fake-fur-collar sweater that she gets all googly-eyed over and prances around wearing in the yard, as if it isn’t ninety degrees outside. A couple of relatives bring birthday cards for me because they were too busy to send them on time.
Anthony comes over and Mom offers him a hot dog. I watch him from across the lawn as he sits in a folding chair and eats, ketchup crusting at his mouth corners. Cassie sits down next to him, and I sit up a little straighter. She usually ignores Anthony. She’s wearing a plastic tiara. “I’d better get used to wearing these,” she told Mom the week before.
Mom smiled and patted her head. “I hope so, dear.”
Cassie leans in to speak to Anthony. They look over at me and I jerk my head toward the trees. “I have a stomachache,” I tell Mom and spend most of the party inside, reading in bed.
Every time I peep from the window, the party looks the same: adults sipping beer, the air above the grill wavy with heat, Cassie practicing her fake pageant smile and petting her new sweater. After dark, I hear a commotion from the backyard. Cousin Jimmy just graduated from high school and enrolled in the Navy, and someone came up with the idea to shave his head right then. “Initiation time!” Uncle Ralph yells. He’s Jimmy’s father, usually the one at parties who grows the loudest the later it gets.
Dad comes inside and rustles in the cabinets under the bathroom sink. I hope no one will come in to check on me. No one does. The shaver’s buzz drones; I turn out my bedroom light and watch from the window as Jimmy’s lumpy egghead is revealed by Uncle Ralph. I think I see the outside light catch a glint of blonde hair flying through the yard. The adults are still admiring the buzz cut when Cassie rockets through the door of our room, flips on the light switch and flutters inside.
“You’ll never guess!” she tells me. Her cheeks are flushed in patches, her breath short.
I move away from the window. “I don’t care,” I say. “What were you telling Anthony about me?”
“Sarah, he kissed me! In the garage. I can’t—”
The air around me shimmers like air over the grill, or blacktop baking under the sun. Cassie’s mouth keeps moving, but it’s like my brain has pressed the mute button. I push her out of the way and run out to the trees next to our house. Doubled over against a trunk, I hear the vague sounds of old rock music and the family whooping over Jimmy’s newly shaved skull.
+
Cassie does not place in the Junior Miss Pageant that September. Everything comes easy to her, so we all assume she’ll get discouraged and give up the princess quest. Instead, she makes up a new dance routine that also incorporates singing, because that was what the first-place winner did. She begins to practice telling lies in front of the bathroom mirror: “My name is Cassie Gold”—our last name is Gould, but she pronounces it “Gold”—“and I’m twelve years old. If I could change anything about the world, I would wish for no more wars or fighting….” I don’t tell her that “wars or fighting” is repetitive.
The weather turns cold. Anthony stops shooting hoops in his driveway, and every time I ask him to come outside he says he’s playing Nintendo. He acts shy around Cassie, who ignores him again. In December, Cassie gets her first period and stays home from school for two days. Mom coos and blushes over her, brings her cookies in bed. The night before she returns to school, a bird flies into our sliding glass door at dinnertime. We hear the unsettling thunk of beak against glass.
Dad observes the bird on the ground, its stiff little body like a seashell in sand. A minute ago, the bird could have flown away from us and—I can tell—still wants to. “Don’t touch it, girls,” he says. Mom bends toward the ground.
“Will it be okay, Daddy?” Cassie whispers.
“It’s just a little banged up,” he says. “Probably in shock.”
“What if an animal comes and eats it before it can fly away?” I ask. The bird seems frozen, unnatural.
“It’ll be fine,” Dad says. “Won’t be modeling for any Audubon calendars this year, is all.” He puts his hand on my shoulder.
“What would you do if your face got ugly?” I ask Cassie that night before bedtime. “No more pageants. What would you do?”
“I’d still be prettier than you, so don’t worry about it.”
“Yeah, like I’d really want to dance around wearing a pound of makeup and hardly any clothes.”
“Like you have anything to show off anyway.” Cassie bought her first training bra a few weeks back, though nothing much is growing yet.
“What I have to show isn’t on the surface,” I mumble. I don’t think Cassie hears me.
The next day, the bird is gone. I hope it flew away.
+
Cassie places first in her third pageant that spring, the month she graduates seventh grade. The judges ask her, “What quality do you like most about yourself and why?” She has by now perfected the earnestness of her delivery—wide eyes, fluttering lashes, chest-out posture—and the subject is her natural favorite. She wins $400 for her college fund, which I tell my parents would be better spent on my education, since Cassie is the type to marry a rich man right out of high school.
“Where does she learn these things?” Dad says.
“All those books she reads.” Mom turns to me. “You just keep your grades up, and you can get your own scholarship to college.”
Cassie and Mom go to the mall. I pluck one of the red roses from Cassie’s pageant collection of flowers and, over an hour of reading, slowly tear it to bits. I barely notice my hands moving until I slice my thumb on a thorn.
When my father rolls out the grill for Cassie’s congratulatory pageant-winner picnic—no more parties, sure—Mom and Cassie are arguing in the living room. I try to ignore them.
“Why on earth would you want to wear a sweater in the dead of summer?” Mom asks. “It’s eighty-five degrees outside.”
“But this is my favorite sweater!” I already know what Cassie is clutching: her birthday present from Aunt Janie, with the fur collar. The fabric is stretchy and shimmery, lumpy from too many washes. Cassie wore it a hundred times all winter and still hasn’t quit.
Cassie wears the sweater. Dad pulls on his summertime cotton plaid shorts and hikes up tube socks almost to his knees. Aunt Janie drinks cans of Schlitz and complains that the beer goes warm and flat too quickly. I run through the sprinklers, mix Kool-Aid with too much sugar. Nobody there is around my age except Cousin John, who wears glasses and always asks me and Cassie to play “lights out” with him. Anthony’s house seems deserted. I consider going to my room even before they serve the food. But then Dad bangs his metal tongs against the grill and calls for attention: a speech. My dad speaks little. I stay to hear.
“As you all know, we’re so happy about our Cassie’s first-place finish in the recent Junior Miss Pageant.” His voice sounds halting and unprepared. The relatives offer a weak scatter of applause and whistles. “She is a very talented and beautiful girl who is, I guess, not going to be a girl for much longer—she turns thirteen in a few weeks, and of course to kids that’s like an adult.” Dad laughs in a sad way. “So I would like to ask her to do the honors of helping out as we throw the first food on the barbie at our picnic.” Everyone claps again, louder this time. We’re all hungry by now.
Uncle Ralph squirts clear liquid from the bottle of lighter fluid. Time starts to move quickly and helplessly, as it does in all moments of tragedy. Cassie, sweating in the July sun, picks up the matchbook. She strikes and leans over the grill to make sure the match ignites. A fireball shoots up from the charcoal. The sweater’s fur collar catches immediately. My mother screams. I watch from across the lawn. Cassie starts spinning around in circles, our little star burning. Be careful what you wish for pops into my mind, but I don’t know if the voice is talking to Cassie or me. Now nobody will look away from her face ever again.
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Tracy Morin is a Mississippi-based writer and editor who has been a hand model, rock-and-roll drummer, and boxing ringside reporter. Her work has previously appeared in The Rumpus.