Chapter Three.

CHAPTER THREE

↠ Cassie

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."

― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

EVERYTHING reeked.

The supermarket where I'd worked the morning shift that summer, located on the corner of Saint Louis Street, nicknamed the Up & Leave Area for its high cases of prostitution and armed robberies, reeked of bleach and dirt.

My co-worked Lucy Everdeen, who had a nasal laugh, a boyfriend addicted to porn, and three entries at the reception of an abortion clinic, reeked of cheap perfume. Nick the Manager had the unpleasant smell of several bodily odours fused together.

He was a man of plump build who styled his greasy ginger hair in a low ponytail every day without exception. He had a swastika tattooed on his upper right arm and his pants slid dangerously low whenever he sat down.

He had worked at an arcade throughout his early thirties, and how he had been allowed to work around children was beyond me.

The place reeked of collective poor choices. It was called Gordon's Market, and because it was local and in an underprivileged neighbourhood of Rue only basic decency could be expected from its employees. To ask for a clean criminal record or extraordinary services would be asking for entirely too much.

I used to have a bit of a superiority complex while working in that place, but then my own conscience would unkindly remind me that if I were to be better off than the rest of these people then I wouldn't be working at Gordon's Market with them.

Nick stepped out of his office at the end of my Friday morning shift and studied the surrounding areas. I knew it was me he was looking for. "Cassandra," he called, moving his index finger to motion me over. I already knew I was about to get fired.

A robust middle-aged lady had told me to go back to my country the previous day after I had informed her that a sale on flour had ended four days prior. I tossed the change back to her in retaliation and a single coin hit her across the cheek. She acted as if she'd been on the receiving end of an open-handed slap. Her complexion quickly turned red and she did a bit of rolling around on the ground like an oversized toddler. I'm surprised I wasn't fired right then and there.

I walked into Nick's office after him and saw the stack of porn magazines next to his desk that I presume he'd forgotten to put away before calling me over. There was a funny smell lingering in the air but I didn't want to think about it too much because I knew the possibilities would only traumatise me.

It was then that I realised this wasn't that big of a loss.

The call centre in which I worked the afternoon shift reeked of tobacco and ink. I considered quitting the very second I was hired. The pay was not worth the four hours of emotional abuse I had to endure at the hands of grumpy middle-aged people who found the mere sound of my voice an inconvenience. Those who were not trying to scam me were blaming me for their lost packages as if I was responsible for delivering them to their fucking door.

I was their prized diversity token along with Eloho Omeili, a Nigerian woman. We both had to model for the company's marketing campaign just to really get the team's diversity out there even though my boss thought I was middle eastern the entire time I worked there. The place was full of depressed university students whose dreams had been crushed and only had half of their souls left in their bodies.

The Parker family from Church Street had two children that I babysat at nighttime from Wednesday to Friday so that Mr and Mrs Parker could go to the casino. At first, they'd told me that my services were required because Stephen Parker's mother was in critical condition. That was a lie. They were just trying to spare themselves the shame of having to admit they were addicted to gambling. They were both highly religious and thought they were sinning by playing roulette. Both kids smelled funny but little Sue Parker called me her best friend in the entire world so I guess that made it alright.

My apartment carried the distinctive smell of bad memories. It was on the ninth floor, and at some point, the stairs had begun to feel as if they dragged on for an eternity. I was still a fully-abled young woman, without any pains in my flesh or bones to limit my range of movement, but every time I came home my body felt heavy and my back stiff. My feet dragged over the steps, one at a time, without a rush. I made it past the eighth floor, past Etienne's apartment. I knew he was out partying with his friend group of choice. No harsh feelings. At least one of us was living.

I turned the key and kicked the door open. If I could have set this place on fire I would have a long time ago, but unfortunately, that would've been a safety hazard for far too many people. And I didn't want to ruin anyone's life. I kicked off my shoes and immediately went to open a bottle of wine that had been gifted to my mother by an ex-lover who'd been trying to win her back. My goal was to stay off drugs, not stay sober.

A turntable in the corner of the room played soft jazz tunes that I could not name. I sat cross-legged on the carpet that covered the limited living room space. I had a closed sketchbook resting on my lap, the cover a navy blue colour with worn-out edges that I dreaded opening. A pencil in one hand, the wineglass in the other. Like every other gravely sad person who relies on the beauty of melancholy to survive, I was a fairly good artist. And like every other artist, I found every shape drawn inside of that book to be absolutely grotesque.

Somewhere in an opposite corner of town, Etienne was probably having sex with a pretty blonde in someone's parents' bedroom and the scent of her perfume would inevitably cling to his clothes long enough for me to smell it if he were to visit me. But he wouldn't. He'd already told me about all of the fun activities he had lined up for the last weekend before our return to school.

Everyone my age was out partying tonight, enjoying their last moment of freedom before they were incarcerated by the school system for yet another year. I had the feeling that everyone's lives were moving except for my own. Every day a new thing, a new course of action, a new train of thought. But not for me. Never for me. I was bad at life. It ate me away. Anxiety came suddenly, it came with the ticking sound of a stopwatch. I tried to find meaning where there was none, and that, I believe, was the biggest sign of my desperation.

On Friday nights, after having spent a morning at the supermarket and an afternoon at the call centre and the early hours of the night with little Louis and Sue Parker, I did not like to grant myself the luxury of being a human being. I wanted my existence to be diminutive, negligible. There was a world out there that was ever-moving, and I did not want to be a part of it.

That's what I did. I existed. Often unapologetically but never entirely happy. It was fine. I never strived for happiness, or sobriety, or for anything that would give my life some purpose. I think they call that depression but I didn't feel comfortable throwing that word around. Until the knocking came, this time to announce a genuinely unexpected arrival. And it was then that I was reminded that I was a character in at least one other person's story.

Etienne stood on the opposite side of the door with a smug grin curving his naturally rosy lips. He had two bags of takeout food piled over his arms. I didn't know what to take in at first. His presence, the reason behind it, or how my heart enlarged at the sight of him.

"You do not smell of perfume," I noted, feeling how my features contorted to display confusion. It was the first thing I noticed. I could smell his own cologne behind the contained arrangement of Chinese food. He was dressed far too casually to have been participating in any of the other corners of his social life now that I noticed.

"Why would I?" he asked as he walked past me to place the food down on the coffee table with a natural air of nonchalance that he carried everywhere.

I stared at him dumbfounded, watching as he expertly manoeuvred around the place. "I thought you said you weren't coming," I said, evidently amused to have him here. I often wondered what would have been of my life had Etienne not constantly dragged me back into the spotlight of my own story.

He tilted his head to the side. "I never said that," he uttered before disappearing into the kitchen and reappearing a couple of seconds later with napkins and forks in hand.

"You did. Yesterday. You told me you had a list of things you and the boys were planning on doing this weekend."

"Right." He dragged out the word and nodded his head slowly, trying to remember the precise words that had been exchanged the previous night.

"You never mentioned coming over," I pointed out.

His eyebrows were slightly furrowed as if he couldn't understand why I was looking so much into his exact words. He arranged our little sitting area, placed what was left of my wine aside and replaced it with the strawberry lemonade they sold in cute little jars over at Fortune House. He wanted me to be sober but didn't like having to lecture me on it. "Well, I don't have to, ma chérie. It's just what I do, isn't it? I come and I save you from eternal damnation. Now eat."

Etienne's paternal grandmother had been French, and although he hadn't been allowed around his family for most of his life, his father had made sure he became fluent in the language. He picked up on that term, ma chérie, from one of the two times he'd met his extended family. It's what his grandfather called his grandmother, and what he went on to call me.

Sometimes I wished he wouldn't. It fell from his lips with too much ease and it made me feel more important than I probably was.

Etienne and I enjoyed consuming crime documentaries. We would watch at least one murder-related video a day. I think Mary Rhodes' death played a big role in our fixation. We ate our food whilst watching a case about a family murdered in Essex and then went up to the rooftop afterwards. It was a surprisingly clean and habitable space despite the rest of the building being in shambles. He took a blanket so that we could lay on top of it and I took the bottle of wine for the both of us.

We did this often, successfully disregarding that my dad had taken his life up here.

I've never been one to romanticise my life in any way. Maybe everything would've been a little bit better if I did, but I've made a plethora of mistakes that never really left room for it. There's nothing to be glamorised about addiction, and I was a sad little woman outside of it anyway. There was simply no way for me to paint a pretty picture out of my excessive sweating and constant nausea and inability to sleep. Because things like that are not meant to be pretty. They're ugly truths, and I had a lot of them.

But it was the little moments with Etienne that gave me back my sense of self, and in them, I found that I could be infinite and beautiful and much more than I was making myself out to be. He made me feel like my story was worth telling because maybe, just maybe, I wasn't that much of a lost cause.

In life, I was either imperceptible or the main character in a coming-of-age film, and only he had the power to change that script.

"What did you tell your friends?" I asked him, taking a swig of wine straight from the bottle before handing it to him without even looking in his general direction. I'm sitting nearer to the edge, admiring the town below me. Rue could be quite enchanting whenever it wished to be and if you looked at it from the right angle, but God did it look depressing from up here. "They probably found it odd that you left so early on a Friday night."

"I told them I had plans to meet with a girl," he responded. "Not entirely a lie."

"Did you not?" I asked. He did not understand the question. I asked again, this time looking back at him over my shoulder. "Did you not have plans to meet with an actual girl?"

He chuckled, with that beautiful dimpled smile of his lifting the corner of his lips. "Then what would that make you, Cass?"

One thing that I always took the pleasure of noting was how phenomenally good-looking Etienne was. I never held back from voicing my thoughts on his appearance, mostly to him personally, just for him to become flustered before urgently stumbling to change the subject. He was a force to reckon in matters of allure. He commanded attention and relished in it too. It was a bittersweet quality of his.

He was a young man with eyes the right shade of blue that possessed a deep-seated sultriness to them. His hair was of a dark dirty blond shade that rested over his head in disarrayed waves that somehow still managed to look neat. With pink soft lips that never truly conveyed happiness when they curved, but in the absence of happiness, there was a savoury smugness that was both inviting and inhospitable. I could not think of a worse mixture.

He had a muscularly lean and tall physique that came with little effort, making his body appear beautifully balanced with his broad shoulders and narrow hips. His skin was not pale like everyone else's. He was golden. All of this together made him a story of success amongst women of all ages.

He was, without a doubt, the most handsome boy in all of our school. Possibly top ten in all of Rue. I'm talking classically handsome. He possessed the type of beauty that could not be debated. Even if you did not personally find him attractive, you could not deny that he was good-looking.

I fell extremely flat next to him, so it didn't surprise me that he didn't really acknowledge my existence out in the open. People like us were meant to exist separately. To the outside world, he was the perfect boy. They never got to see the cracks that I grew up seeing. He was tall and handsome and got in the right kind of trouble for a young man like him. I was short and uninspiring to look at and got in the wrong kind of trouble.

"I don't know. I just don't think I'm in the same category as the rest of them," I responded sincerely. I was very aware of the type of girls that captured Etienne's attention. I studied them excessively just to come to the conclusion that they were quite simply pretty. Effortlessly pretty. Delicately pretty. The kind of pretty that makes you sigh, that you find enchanting instead of alluring.

The kind of pretty I was not.

"You're not. And that's a good thing." His reply had been quick and it had proclaimed the very first words that had appeared in his mind.

There were a million ways for me to misinterpret that. It had tons of negative and positive connotations. I held back the groaning, but I already knew I was bound to spend the rest of the night trying to decipher the exact meaning behind those two sentences. I probably shouldn't have clung to his every word the way that I did, but I was obsessive and I needed to keep my mind busy to keep it from going back to the fact that I missed doing drugs and was very much still a perpetually sad woman.

I laid back over the blanket, changing my view for that of the night sky. The stars were not putting on their best display and it angered me for some reason. I felt anxious and misplaced, which is a feeling that had haunted me ever since I'd been clean. A feeling that made me feel guilty. Guilty and frustrated, because I could not comprehend why it felt so wrong to do the right thing. I should've been hopeful and excited to start a new chapter in my life, but no, I felt anxious and misplaced.

"I just remembered I got fired from Gordon's Market today," I blurted out, nibbling on my nails, trying desperately to stop feeling like a stranger inside of my own skin.

"You have to be a special kind of bad to get fired from that place," Etienne muttered, lying down next to me. We both giggled because it was true. I was fired while the swastika-bearing bastard managed the place.

"I think Nick wanted to bend me over his desk and fuck me from behind."

Etienne's head quickly snapped in my direction. "Why do you think that?"

"Because he told me. Not directly. He implied it. He said that, even though I'm no longer working there, I could still stop by and help christen his desk."

"That sounds pretty fucking direct to me," Etienne said, releasing this weird noise that sort of sounded like a wheeze as he rubbed his face with exasperation. He'd been telling me to keep my distance from Nick for a while now because he seemed to be, and I quote, dangerously horny. This just confirmed it. "Quit the other two jobs. Now that we're going back to Ridgeway it's gonna get too overwhelming for you."

His voice was sweet and gentle as he said it. It wasn't a command as much as it was a thoughtful consideration. But bringing forward the subject of Ridgeway always caused me immediate distress. My hands were already shaky by the time I ran them over my face only a couple of seconds later. Nothing but horrible things were waiting for me at Ridgeway. Incessant bullying, talks about my overdose, and losing Etienne were all likely probabilities of what my immediate future held.

"How much you want to bet that Mrs Reed is going to make fun of me for nearly dying of an overdose?" I asked, feigning humour to hide my nervous tension.

He slithered a bit closer to me, sensing how my body was shutting down. There was a silent message in there. He was assuring me that he was there for me without bringing too much attention to my discomfort so that it could pass us by. "Oh, I'm with you on that one."

"Do you know she likes you?"

"I suppose she does."

"No, I mean she fancies you."

"I mean, yeah, I think I have noticed that she tends to lean forward a little too much when she's explaining something, but I thought maybe that was just wishful thinking."

"Ew."

He scrunched his nose, let out an airy chuckle, and said, "Yeah."

I turned to look at him, taking full advantage of his proximity because I've always found his eyes to be extremely soothing. They were the shade of blue that reminded me of the better things in life—of a passing storm that lingered over a calm ocean more than anything.

"Would you do her?" I asked bluntly.

He quirked an eyebrow. "She has a husband and two sons, ma chérie."

"That's not what I asked."

He rolled his eyes but his smile betrayed him by admitting he actually found me amusing. "Oh my fucking god, Cassie, no wonder you have no friends."

"Eat shit."

We laughed again. Etienne would have to say something repulsively offensive to hurt my feelings, I didn't mind the little digs at each other that might have seemed rude to an intruder. They weren't to us, and so we laughed and he wrapped his hand around my wrist before moving on to a different topic. I never understood why he did that.