by Maddie Louise
Cassie’s hands are numb. Little cylindrical icicles grasping for her suitcase as she wanders
through the train station. The whip of winter greets her at the platform. Aside from a weary
couple slunk toward each other and a man crumpled against the city map, Cassie is the only one
there. With all her effort, she lumbers to a concrete bench and waits. Over the horizon, the
too-early morning runs down the sky like broken egg yolks. She can’t believe she is going home.
Had she not wasted all her tears on Andrea, she could cry.
“You,” Dalia said, pointing a breadstick at Cassie. “Come here.”
It was their weekly sorority dinner at the house and all the sisters mingled in the living
room waiting to be served. The formalities of the evening were mostly finished. The ceremonial
bylaws had been followed, the announcements had been made, the talking points had been
discussed. Now, the twenty-two of them paced around a small folding table of breadsticks and
red wine, waiting for the girls on chef duty to call them into the dining room.
Cassie was glued to the red wine, itching for a beer.
As time ticked on, she was desperate to leave. She had plans with Andrea, but she
couldn’t afford another “partial attendance” fine so she stayed with the sorority. Cassie snatched
a half-empty bottle of wine off the folding table and went to join Dalia on the couch.
“It’s your anniversary with Andrea tonight, isn’t it?” Dalia cooed, putting down her
breadstick and reaching for Cassie’s hair. “Let me fishtail braid your hair.”
Cassie groaned and swatted her sister’s hand away. “Please don’t.”
Dalia balked. “You’ll look pretty.”
Cassie rolled her eyes. “I’m not a doll.”
When Dalia backed off, Cassie snuggled into the arm of the couch and downed the rest of
the bottle, smug.
Satisfyingly, Cassie was unlike her sorority sisters. She prided herself on her snark and
her rebellion, basking in her sisters’ stares when she turned up to formal events with something
new shaved, pierced, or dyed. She liked to see how many sisters flinched when she spoke up,
how many she could get to retreat into silence when she brought up things way outside of their
wheelhouse, like capitalism and heteronormativity. Most of the girls kept their distance from
Cassie, which didn’t bother her at all. She preferred their caution, the way it radiated off their
clear, lace-like skin, and their branded outfits.
She had only joined the sorority her freshman year in a panic to make friends. She had
hated the thought of not having anything to do on the weekends, arriving to parties alone, losing
any minute of her four precious years in college to loneliness. When she showed up to rush, she
recognized the flock of girls immediately; emblems of every brood she had attached herself to
since middle school, giggling, and gossiping, sorting through the mechanics of dating men. She
forced herself to join, unfazed by the feeling that her shoulders were made of corners, just as
they had felt her whole life, but now, as the wine pooled in her veins, warming her like a slow
fire, she reveled in all that was different.
She daydreamed of Andrea waiting for her at the house with her smoke-colored eyes
pressed like a teddy bear’s against her freckled skin. They met only three months prior in a
Women’s Studies class. When Cassie first spotted her, she scooted day after day through the
middle seats of their lecture hall to be near her, drawn by something unnameable. It took barely
any words, and even less touch, for Cassie to realize that around Andrea, her shoulders were just
shoulders. Quickly, Andrea became the magnet Cassie had been after for so long, tucking Cassie
in close and pulling her away from everything she thought she had to be.
One day Cassie would get around to dropping the sorority, and the old her altogether. But
she enjoyed this newfound power, surprising everyone with who she was meant to be, watching
them cower with questions they didn’t know how to ask, stammer at her forwardness, finally
being the ones to have corners for shoulders. They hardly ever knew what to say to her and
Cassie didn’t blame them. Their worlds were all tradition: boys and dances and diamond rings.
Fathers walking them down the aisle and white-picket fences and lots of little kids at their feet.
It made Cassie laugh, the antiquity of it all. “You know it’s a trap, right?” she’d challenge
them, but they’d only blink at her, creased lines at their forehead, which Cassie would bring back
to Andrea. “It’s like they can’t comprehend it being true. They’re so brainwashed.”
With her buzzed head leaned against the weathered frame of her house and her tattooed
legs stretched out down the porch steps, Andrea had a way of peering down the bridge of her
pierced nose, just one eyebrow raised, that made Cassie immobile. She would smile and tell
Cassie how much she loved her growing mind, making her glisten with the expanding sun.
Cassie, for one, would not be brainwashed.
Sometimes Cassie even still joined the girls at fraternity parties just to scare them, just to
make them wonder what she would do around a house full of straight men. Would she collapse?
Would she explode? Would she cause a rapture? Not that she ever stayed long. She couldn’t
stomach the obvious displays of heterosexuality for extended periods. She only stayed long
enough to get buzzed on the free beer, swiping a few cans on her way out, which she’d crack
open with Andrea later that night as they laughed about her hustle.
“An inside job,” Andrea liked to say as they shared the stolen, frat beer on her porch.
Andrea lived in a big, old house with five of her friends. The rooms were filled with
stolen road signs, furniture picked up and dusted off from the curb, and ongoing, unfinished art
projects. Unscrewed smoke detectors sat on the coffee table, bong water stains littered the carpet,
and a heap of empty, unrinsed beer bottles made up a makeshift mantle. Day in and day out, the
house was filled with queer folks. No matter what time Cassie was there, the living room was
packed with people hanging out, attempting to study, debating readings, passing joints, painting
each other’s faces, tinkering with unstretched canvas, trading playlists, shotgunning beers.
Drama started and ended at Andrea’s house. Couples were made, one-night stands were had,
break-ups were mourned. School breaks were spent there, holidays were celebrated, angry phone
calls home were made. The big, old house was a mainstay for Andrea’s circle and Cassie adored
being there, feeling as though she was balancing on the tip of a wave, with the best view in the
world. Somehow, she had made it there, and all she wanted was to stay.
“You’re the best trick in the world,” Andrea liked to say, which Cassie doodled over and
over in the margins of her Sociology notes like she was still in high school. “When people look
at you, they see a feminine straight girl who wants a husband and a million kids and a house in
the suburbs to decorate.” They had been at a brewery on their road trip to Santa Cruz when she
first said this, and Cassie could remember hearing the waves clawing at the shore.
“But the joke’s on them,” Andrea declared. “‘Cause you’re on me every night.”
Cassie laughed, almost spat out her beer. She wouldn’t have said those exact words, but
wasn’t it true? She was the queerest she had been in her whole life. Finally free from what
everyone expected her to be. No, she didn’t want to wear makeup, or flirt with that guy from the
basketball team, or get asked to prom with a big poster, or watch straight porn, or describe her
perfect wedding dress, or pick out kid names, or have house envy.
She wanted strangers to look at her sideways.
“Give them something to stare at,” Andrea would say. “So what? Ruin their days.”
Cassie soaked in this permission to be bold, to dare people to ask her: who exactly do you
think you are?
The train car smells like burnt rubber. It attaches itself to Cassie’s clothes. She finds a seat by the
window and rests her tired brain against the cool window. She looks out at the tiny Downtown
Davis station and tries to settle in; the ride will take close to ten hours.
“Tickets!” the conductor calls, banging through the connecting door.
Cassie bends to look through her blue duffle, and pauses with her face over the floor. The
blood rushing to her face feels good, weighs her down, reminds her of gravity.
“To Los Angeles?” the conductor asks, scanning her ticket. “You have a while.”
Cassie can only nod. Yes, back home. Returning her ticket to her bag, she wishes she
could stay buckled over forever.
“What did you do last night?” Dalia was usually the one to pry. The other sisters lurked in the
periphery, also wanting to know, but never willing to admit it. It was Cassie’s favorite thing to
hesitate when they asked about Andrea, a secret smile at her lips, making them wait for her
stories from the other world.
“Oh, you know,” Cassie eventually responded as nonchalantly as she could muster. “Just
smoked. There was some coke going around, but I wasn’t in the mood. We’re thinking of going out to Sac for the protest this weekend. Shauna’s trying to get her hands on some lighter fluid.
They always listened with rapt, cautious attention.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Dalia sometimes said. “I could never keep up.”
It made Cassie swell up with pride that she, by way of Andrea, could keep up, but it
nagged at her, how long she would be able to. The truth was that Cassie sometimes feared she
could never change the world like Andrea. Perhaps she wasn’t outraged enough. She certainly
didn’t have the same volume of opinions that she did, at least none that were spectacular enough
to rewire someone’s whole brain. Whenever she thought about adding her two cents around
Andrea and her friends, she usually just shut her mouth, telling herself it was okay. It was okay
to be the one that just emphatically nodded, agreeing with everything that went around the room,
the opinions and drugs alike. Though Cassie would never let on, not while her sisters waited for
more stories. Their eyes big like they were staring into the other side of a portal. At least with
them, she never faded into the couch scratching at an itch that was beneath her skin.
With them, she was something much better than fitting in: she stood out.
“It’s just who I am,” Cassie always ended up saying, to which her sisters looked on,
silent.
The train plugs down the coastline of tent cities and graffitied bridges and heaps of trash that
could fill an ocean. Cassie has several hours until Los Angeles, but she knows she won’t be able
to sleep. All she can think about is what she’ll tell her parents when she shows up at their door
unannounced, all of their questions lingering in the air like bacteria. They will want to know
what happened with Andrea, but mostly they will want to wrap her up and do what they think is comfort her, assuring her that that world was never meant for her anyway.
It was somewhere in the midst of spring quarter when Dalia approached Cassie, nervous to
speak.
“You have the most fines of everyone,” she eventually said. This was Cassie’s official
warning. She had broken so many rules in the sorority, she was in danger of being swapped out
for a waiting pledge. Cassie shrugged, told Dalia not to worry about it.
“You don’t care?”
“I care,” Cassie said though she was already coming up with how she was going to tell
Andrea. She couldn’t wait to scoff about it with her, remind her of her growing mind.
“We hardly see you anymore.”
“It’s just been busy.”
It was true. Cassie had never been busier. Plans from morning to night. If she wasn’t
doing the bare minimum with the sorority, she was with Andrea and her friends at the house.
When Cassie thought about what she was actually doing, she couldn’t make a list. Still, her days
were always filled. Time moved differently when she was in bed with Andrea, when she was
high at the house, when she was listening to Andrea’s friends talk, paying attention to anything
other than the red exclamation point in her school account notifying her of her academic
probation. It had struck Cassie, at first, when she realized how far she was slipping under the
required GPA. She had been a straight-A student since freshman year of high school. Even in her
tougher college classes, she had done well. But Andrea had soothed her.
“It’s just another way to classify people,” she had pointed out. “What does it really mean
to have ‘good grades?’ No one in the real world will ask you for your grades, and if they do, why
should you want to be part of that bullshit?”
Cassie nodded assuredly at the time, needing to hear that.
But since she had been notified, she hadn’t been able to sleep. At night, when she lay
beside a snoring Andrea, it haunted her. The loans her parents had taken on for her. The years of
their lives they would be paying off interest for a degree she never got. The blinding space on her
resume. If she didn’t get her grades up and didn’t finish her degree, what would it have all been
for? What kind of job would she get? How would she support herself? How would she build a
family? Travel the world? Retire her parents?
Sometimes Cassie feared she was already too much a part of the “bullshit” that Andrea
talked about. That there was no way of getting out. Cassie kept these thoughts to herself, went on
groggy from the sleepless nights, unable to confront the fact that perhaps the life Andrea thought
so little of was the exact one Cassie wanted.
Cassie does sleep on the train, but only in spurts. Around Santa Barbara, she wakes to a text from
her sister.
You good? Got your calls.
Cassie tries not to flinch at how cursory the message is. She scrolls up through the dozens
of messages her sister has sent over the past few months, increasingly less enthusiastic the more
Cassie left them unanswered. Her sister lives in San Diego, married to a guy she met in the
dorms, trying to get pregnant with their first child. Or, that’s the latest Cassie has heard. It gives
her pause, the thought that her sister could be pregnant at this point and Cassie just doesn’t know.
She flips through to her call history. She made four calls to her sister at two in the morning last night, none of which she remembers. All she remembers is leaving for the gay club in Sacramento at midnight on an impulse and waking up that morning, dehydrated, aching for something familiar.
Cassie shoves her phone in her pocket. She knows she should respond to her sister, but
what is there to say? They aren’t of the same world anymore. Not like they used to be, before
Andrea. Her sister wouldn’t understand how far Cassie has come. She would only say that she
didn’t recognize Cassie anymore, and how could Cassie face the mirror she grew up with, the
one who knew her when she was little and unwarped by the demands to establish herself as this
or that, when she was already everything she was meant to be, and make herself admit that she
didn’t recognize herself anymore either?
Cassie arrived late to the mandatory brunch. The table was elaborately dressed with pitchers of
mimosas and platters of pancakes and dishes of sausage links. As the president made
announcements from the head of the table, Cassie silently slipped into the chair beside Dalia,
startled by her own wake of vodka mixed with rose-scented perfume. This time, no one said
anything about her tardiness or marked her down for a fine.
Cassie flashed Dalia a wobbly smile. Dalia looked away.
The night before, Cassie stayed too long at a fraternity exchange. It was the first one she
had been to in a long time. It was supposed to be a breather. A break from the arguments, from
the sex. She didn’t know how much longer she could tell herself that it was just the grit Andrea
was built on. The way they fought, the way they made up. Andrea liked it intense, and Cassie did
too, at first. It kept her on her toes, sent an adrenaline rushing through her, reminded her that she
was not only loved, but craved. She had never experienced a passion quite like it.
Cassie tried to be understanding when it went places that made her tense. After all, she
hadn’t grown up like Andrea had. Cassie hadn’t been bullied like her, thrown through the halls
and spat on, defended by no one, not even the teachers. Cassie’s dad never made fun of the
register of her voice, her mom never told her if she kept dressing like a man, she would send her
to her aunt’s house. At most, Cassie had been shaped by her world’s reticence of her, unsure how
it worked to be feminine and gay. But Andrea was built on outrage. She said it herself.
Everything she did had to prove a point.
It was beautiful. It was normal. It was love.
Lately, Cassie had a hard time reminding herself of it. When their bodies were pressed
roughly against the bed frame, amidst the biting and the scratching and the slapping that left her
sore, when it was a knee-jerk reaction for Cassie to push away from Andrea’s groping hands and
cover herself until she got the message. The nights they’d fall asleep next to each other,
half-naked, Cassie breathing deeply until the adrenaline cooled.
Cassie could only think to tell Andrea that she needed to spend more time with her
sorority or she was going to get kicked out. It wasn’t untrue, but mostly she needed the space to
sort out her thoughts. She hadn’t done laundry in weeks, couldn’t remember the last lecture she
had sat all the way through, hadn’t been able to get a proper shower in to scrub off the perpetual
feeling that she was lathered in something.
The night at the fraternity was their first night apart in months.
Cassie had taken four shots too many. The party was at its peak when a now faceless, nameless guy asked for her number. It set Cassie off like a bomb. She hadn’t meant to yell like she did, but it came up involuntarily like vomit.
“I’m gay! Can’t you leave me alone? I’m gay!”
She had meant for it to come out with conviction. To brush him off like he was just
another part of a toxic society she had no interest in. But somehow, it ended with her sobbing
hysterically as Dalia ushered her out of the party and into an Uber.
It’s the vodka. I never drink vodka, she remembered pleading to Dalia, hoping she
wouldn’t judge her. But the tears wouldn’t stop, not in the car, not on the precarious walk up the
stairs to her apartment, not when Dalia laid down in bed with her and told her she’d stay until she
fell asleep. The last thing she remembered was crying into her pillow.
When she woke up, cheeks crusted from her tears, Cassie was immediately nauseated by
the patchwork memories of the night before. Her chest tightened with shame. She wished she
had blacked out so she didn’t have to remember the humiliation, or Dalia’s scared, pitied face as
Cassie unraveled in front of her.
“That’s why I stick to weed,” Cassie whispered to her at the brunch table, laughing and
rolling her eyes like it could happen to anyone. Dalia didn’t seem convinced. When the president
was done speaking, Dalia turned to Cassie and asked, “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, of course. That guy was just getting on my nerves last night.”
Dalia’s brown eyes drooped. “Are you sure?”
Cassie reached for the pitcher of mimosas and nodded. She wished Dalia would stop
asking. She could tell the sisters sitting near them were listening in, but pretending not to. These
were not the stories Cassie wanted them to wait on her for. All of them reconsidering Cassie. Was she really as bold as she came off to be?
“When you were falling asleep, you kept saying…” but Cassie didn’t let Dalia finish. She
stood abruptly from her chair and said she wasn’t feeling well, then hurried out the restaurant’s
front door. She knew what Dalia was going to say. That was part of the patchwork she
remembered, her head buried into her pillow, snot running from her nose, repeating until she was
out of breath, I wish I weren’t this way.
The sun blisters through the train window and Cassie blinks awake again. This time she sees Los
Angeles as the train pulls closer to Union Station. Bumper-to-bumper traffic, smog collecting
over the hoods, drivers resigned to how much of their life they’ve given to the devil.
“Union Station, coming up!” the conductor announces as he ambles down the aisle.
Passengers around her start rummaging for their bags, putting on their jackets, texting
their rides that they’re arriving. A panic rises in Cassie’s chest. How did she get here so fast?
She stops the conductor. “When is the next return train?”
“Top of the hour.”
The train comes to a stop and the doors open. She watches as the car empties. There is a
stake in her telling her to stay right where she is. She is completely sober, but the heaviness in
her eyelids harken back to the late nights with Andrea and their slurred fights, Cassie too
exhausted to keep resisting Andrea’s grip, too drained to find another excuse to leave, too worn
out to do anything but wait until Andrea was asleep beside her in the sheets she’d pissed on and
Cassie could sneak out into the night to her dry, lonely bed at home. Cassie rubs her eyes. They
remind her of the even later nights like the night before, after they finally broke things off, when
she found herself in the dark rooms in Sacramento, bleary past the point of having eyesight,
flinging herself around the dance floor hoping to stumble into someone that would take her
home, tell her she was beautiful, hold her until the room stopped spinning, promise to build a life
with her. All those nights willing a romance to sweep her off her feet and make her complete,
and always waking up to mornings alone, accompanied only by a wicked hangover and a text
from a friend, asking for Uber money.
“Last stop. You gotta get off,” the conductor tells her.
She disembarks, moving with the tide of the crowd toward the lobby, trying to work out if
she should just grab another ticket straight back to campus. If she showed up at home, what
would she tell her parents? Would they believe her if she told them that it was just a big
misunderstanding? That that world was meant for her, she just needed to settle into her place
within it. That actually she was fine and not heartbroken and not disgusted with herself. No, she
wasn’t as worried about her drinking as her sisters were when they asked her to take a break
from the sorority and no, she wasn’t afraid of being one failed exam away from getting kicked
out of school. She had simply been in the throes of despair the night before when she called her
sister at two in the morning to ask if she had attained some unloveable status and when she
decided to book a train ticket home just so she could remember what it was like to go somewhere
where she was wanted.
With the lobby just in sight, her eyes misted with the sinking fear that she had failed. That
the world she was so sure she belonged in was simply an illusion and that all good things she
once had were exactly that–once had. How could she return home to a life that assumed she was
someone she was now certain she wasn’t? She felt sick. Was it the imagined look on her parents’
face, or the voice in her head that said it all: who exactly did you think you could be?
“The train goes along the coast, doesn’t it?”
The question falls on deaf ears. Cassie is too dumbfounded by this chance encounter to
respond. It’s a sweltering Sunday in July, and she’s standing in the bread aisle of a Ralph’s in
Mid-City. In her head, she counts the years. It’s been nine since she last saw Dalia. It was in
passing during their last finals week as they both waited in line for burritos. They had caught up
briefly, talked about their plans for after graduation. Dalia was headed to Long Beach for a job
with the same company she interned for during school. Cassie was moving back home while she
looked for jobs. The conversation had been awkward and stilted, leaving Cassie to feel like she
would never be able to maintain a friendship again
Now, here Dalia is, grinning at time forgotten.
Her hands are over her swollen belly, one eye on her husband as he ambles down the aisle
looking at jams. “Beautiful views,” Dalia says about the train. “I miss that ride.”
Cassie hasn’t thought about the coastline train in so long it feels like something she saw
on TV once. Taryn, her partner of four years–though time doesn’t quite define it–has gotten
them into this conversation, as she tends to do with people she’s only known for a few seconds.
Standing beside her a head taller, Taryn talks breezily with Dalia, delighted by this sneak peek
into Cassie’s past life.
Two jams in hand, Dalia’s husband strolls by to remind her that they have a doctor’s
appointment to get to, to which Dalia flutters about saying her goodbyes. She pulls Cassie into a
hug.
“So good to see you,” she says so genuinely that when she turns and walks down the
aisle, it about makes Cassie cry.
In the parking lot, Taryn is smiley, commenting on how nice Dalia was. Taryn spends most of her life pleasantly surprised–by bird sounds and nice interactions with baristas and a stranger’s stunning strappy boots–a quality Cassie finds peaceful.
“I wish I knew you in college,” Taryn says, loading the bags into the trunk. “Seems like
you hung out with cool people. I think we would’ve gotten along.”
Cassie feels the urge to cup Taryn’s chin and laugh gently at her naivety.
“It’s good we met when we did,” Cassie says. “I needed to get some kinks out.”
Taryn smiles. “I could say the same for me.”
They get in the car and start the drive home.
“Funny to think about the things we did back then,” Taryn muses with lightness in her
cadence. “Who did we think we were?”
Cassie jolts at the question she forgot she had been asking after all these years: who
exactly do you think you are? For the first time, she realizes it’s in the air around her. It’s the car
she sits in, the time that passes, the body she holds, the shared molecules they breathe. She
searches her memory bank for the moment this answer arrived and she didn’t notice. She
watches the freeway clog as they go home and she shivers, overwhelmed by the grace of time.
About the Author:
Maddie Louise Silva is a queer writer based in Costa Rica and Los Angeles with work featured in Feels Blind Literary, The Timberline Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine, among others. In her free time you can find her playing tennis, going out and about, and staying caffeinated. She can be contacted at maddielouise.com.