Cassie had a hard time sleeping that night. It felt as though she had something hard in the pit of her stomach. Maybe one of those spiky metal balls at the end of a mace. It was guilt, she supposed, but did guilt have to feel so physical? Maybe she was coming down with something. That would only be appropriate – a punishment for all the pleasures of the flesh she had so heedlessly enjoyed.
Now she was thinking like a Victorian. Devin would have loved it.
The problem was that there was still a part of her mind that insisted she hadn't done anything wrong. Yes, maybe she had treated Charlotte rudely, but what did she expect, after years of condescension and petty punishments? It wasn't fair, how someone could just decide they were your mother and that you owed them all of your daughterly love. Her father had consented to the marriage, of course, but nobody had ever asked Cassie whether she was willing to take on a new awful mother and an even worse sister.
And Charlotte had always expected to be her mother. In those early months, when Cassie was still willing to give her a chance, she had taken her out every weekend on what she called "excursions", but were actually hopelessly dull trips to fabric stores and wineries in towns even smaller than theirs. She tried to start a conversation, but was ignorant of politics, out of touch with culture, and had a terrible sense of humour. She had nothing to talk about but supposedly funny stories of the scrapes Mindy had gotten into when she was a toddler. Cassie, meeker then, had spent weeks staring out the window uttering passive murmurs. It all ended when Charlotte had proposed the two of them joining a mother-daughter choir, and Cassie had flatly refused.
Later on, she realized that her mother was trying to teach her femininity – not the sexy kind she saw on TV, but the middle-aged country kind of crafts and dinner parties and frumpy despair. Maybe she was trying to straighten Cassie up, or at least teach her how to pass. This realization made Cassie resent her stepmother even more. Who was Charlotte to judge that she wasn't enough of a girl?
That had been the start of the resentment, then, which had blossomed into open hostility. And somehow it had got to the point where Cassie saw her every word as an assault, every instruction as something to rebel against. It must have been hard for Charlotte, Cassie admitted. But it was her fault too! All of the little demeaning remarks, the constant interrogations about her whereabouts, her college plans, the state of her room, the unpleasant vulgarity of her friends... Charlotte had made sure that this small-town house had never felt like home. And worse, she had never stepped in when Mindy had blatantly insulted Cassie, had always given her the TV or the car or the money for new clothes over Cassie, and had never made secret who she loved more.
Well, that was just fine with Cassie. Charlotte could love who she wanted to love, as long as she didn't demand love from Cassie. She and Mindy deserved each other.
It was easy to come to this conclusion, and it felt good to draw upon that store of pent-up frustration that she constantly visited. But it didn't make Cassie feel any better. She spent the night staring at her clock, rolling that spiked ball around in her stomach. When the sun came up, she was trying to figure out if she had slept at all. There were a couple of hours she couldn't account for, but she didn't feel rested at all.
Cassie decided to get up, no matter how bad her body felt and how stormy her mind was. She wasn't getting to sleep with the sun streaming through her window. She got dressed and headed downstairs, hungering for some cereal or toast or maybe both. Hunger was another unpleasant side effect of insomnia.
Charlotte was sitting at the kitchen table. Cassie was surprised – it was still before seven. Charlotte was still dressed in one of her tacky pink bathrobes and was sitting at the table looking over a book. As Cassie got closer, she saw that it was a photo album.
When Cassie entered the room, Charlotte's head snapped up. She looked like she had been caught shoplifting. "What are you doing here?"
"Breakfast and coffee," said Cassie. "Chill." She could feel herself easily slipping into those old tendencies, trying to skewer every word that Charlotte said, and tried to stop herself.
Cassie not-so-surreptitiously looked over Charlotte's shoulder, resting her hand on the back of the wooden kitchen chair. The pictures had that washed-out look of the 90s, but the figure in them was very 80s – a buxom blonde in a tight teddy with huge hair. She was hot, Cassie had to admit, but she wasn't sure why her stepmother would be looking at an old cheesecake photo.
"Who's that?"
Charlotte looked at her strangely. "That's me, a couple decades ago."
"Really?" For once, her tone wasn't sarcastic – just shocked.
"Well, a couple decades and about twenty-five pounds," Charlotte smiled to herself. "I was really into beauty pageants and all that. I wanted to be Miss America, but I never got anywhere near that far. I guess I ended up doing some sleazier stuff, but as long as there was an audience looking at me I didn't care."
"What happened?" said Cassie.
"Nothing happened. I just woke up one morning and was twenty and nobody wanted to tell me how beautiful I was any more. And then I met one guy who would, and next thing I knew I was pregnant and he had skipped town."
Cassie sighed. "That Mindy. Always causing trouble."
"She was actually the best thing that ever happened to me," Charlotte said. "Taking care of a baby, I had to think about more than boys and beauty. The practical concerns of getting food on the table every day stopped me from getting into trouble."
There was a certain kind of sense to that. But Cassie couldn't help thinking about how sad it was – a beautiful young woman, reckless and fun just like the girls she liked, transformed into this nattering maternal creature who spoke only in groundings and bills. Maybe if Cassie were straight, and just as promiscuous, this would have happened to her. And despite her words, Charlotte seemed sad. Cassie found herself squatting down beside her stepmother and putting her arm around her.
"I'm sorry," said Cassie. "I know I've been really snappy with you sometimes."
There was a faint smile on Charlotte's lips. "Is that all?"
Cassie rolled her eyes. "Okay, I've been a bitch. Happy?"
That seemed to melt the ice between them. "I should probably apologize too," Charlotte said. "I can't force you to love me like you did your mother. And I think sometimes I get mad about that and take it out on you."
There was a pause. Cassie saw an opportunity, and seized it. "So, am I un-grounded?"
Charlotte had to laugh at her mercenary approach. "One-track mind, huh? Well, I really shouldn't... but you're an adult. I'm not going to chain you to the bed for the next month and a half." Maybe Cassie really did have a one-track mind, but the phrase 'chain you to the bed' sounded distinctly sexual to her. She decided not to say anything.
"Good to hear," said Cassie. "And I can't promise I'll love you like a daughter. But I'll try to think of you as..."
"A friend?" said Charlotte.
"Let's start with 'a roommate'," said Cassie.
"Deal," said Charlotte. And, already in her stepdaughter's embrace, she leaned over and kissed her on the lips. It started out as a friendly peck, but then it persisted. Charlotte's lips were surprisingly soft, and even a little sweet. They quivered against Cassie's, and for a moment she could almost feel tongue slipping through.
Then Charlotte broke away. She wiped her lips with her sleeve and smiled. "Well, I should get to work. I'm going to be swamped today." And she walked off, as if nothing had happened.
Cassie tried to calm herself. She needed to stop seeing every kiss or touch from another woman as a come-on. After all, outside her weird perverted world of lesbian threesomes, girls hugged and kissed each other all the time, although such intimacy had always confused and excited her. It was just a motherly kiss.
Even if it had lasted for what felt like forever, and even if it felt like Charlotte has been pressing her body up against her. Her stepmother was definitely not trying to make out with her. That would be gross.
Or would it be?
Her grounding rescinded, Cassie decided to bike over to Rainey's house. She had spent much of the past four years over here, telling her dad she was studying while getting up to whatever stupid shit amused their bored minds. She thought that it would be a good place to get her mind off her increasingly weird relationship with her stepmother. Of course, she was beginning to have an increasingly weird relationship with Rainey, but she tried to put that thought away.
The Park family lived in a starter-house brownstone that was entirely too small for the two parents, four children and one grandmother that lived there. Usually Cassie spent her time there tripping over one of Rainey's three younger brothers or worried about her grandmother spying on them. (This had happened in the past.) But today, the house was pretty quiet.
Rainey ushered her in at the door. She wasn't wearing much more than yesterday, and her two-sizes-too-small tank top exposed her midriff while sticking tightly to her bust. Cassie could see two of Rainey's brothers – Raymond, 14, and Jimmy, 11 – playing video games on the couch. "Halmoni is on vacation, my parents are at work, and Hap is at soccer camp," Rainey rifled off. "Or maybe it was music camp. Some kind of camp, anyway." After Rainbow, her parents had seemed to learn a lesson about normal American names, before eventually disregarding it and naming their younger son Happy Park. He probably would have been picked on were he not the biggest kid in his class.
"Wow, you almost have the place to yourself," said Cassie.
"No almost about it," Rainey said. She walked into the living room and pulled two twenty-dollar bills out of her pocket. "All right you numbskulls. If I give you some cash, will you find something to do outside the house for a few hours? Cassie and I want to watch a movie."
Jimmy looked up in disbelief at the money dangling from Rainey's hand. "But... Mom and Dad said not to leave the house without an adult."
"And do you always do what Mom and Dad say?" Jimmy had no answer for that, and the appearance of some precious spending money had already quieted whatever reservations Raymond might have had. The two brothers left quietly, each taking a twenty. "Just make sure you get home by six, and they'll be none the wiser."
"I feel like I missed something by not having siblings," said Cassie, after Raymond and Jimmy had left. "You get to be rude to them all the time, and everyone expects it from you." Then again, that was sort of how Rainey treated everyone.
Rainey settled down onto the couch. "You have a sister."
"A stepsister," said Cassie. "And she's more like an occupying army than anything else."
Rainey snorted. "How do you think I feel about the boys? Anyways, pick a bad movie to watch. I've got the latest SyFy original downloaded."
"Nah, they're trying too hard now," said Cassie. "Let's just watch Plan 9 again."
