Mosaic

I woke up this morning to a goodbye text. I think everyone has at some point. It was short and sweet, to the point. 

I love you, Ionna. 

Thank you for being my best friend. 

If it had been any of my other friends, I wouldn’t have panicked. We all go through things, and I’ve always been the go-to when people need to talk. It wouldn’t be the first time someone like Jenna or Naomi sent me a similar message. But it wasn’t them. It was Cassie. 

Cassie had never once acted afraid, not in the twelve years we’d been friends. When we met at the top of the slide in kindergarten, she had this fearless look in her eye. She was lying down backwards, her head towards the ground, the way the teachers had told us not to go down. 

“You can’t,” I told her, but my concern was overcome with curiosity. She only smirked and kicked off, hurtling skull-first towards the ground. 

Since then, she has spent every day scaring me. Jumping off the swings at the highest point, waiting to study until the morning of an exam, crashing her used car into someone’s trashcan. But even so, she’s never done this, never expressed this darkness to me. 

I blinked blearily at my screen for a second, questioning if I read the text wrong. Eleven words. 

what? 

cassie what are you talking about 

I hit the call button.

Five rings, then voicemail. 

“Hey! This is Cassie’s phone. Don’t leave a voicemail ‘cause I’m not gonna check, just text me.” 

My fingers shook as I hung up and redialed. Five rings again, then voicemail. This time, I waited for the tone. 

“Cassie, I know you don’t check these, but on the off chance you do, please call me back. You’re worrying me.” 

I tried to text her again. Distantly, I noticed that it was early in the morning, almost five. cassie pick up the phone 

please 

youre scaring me seriously pick up 

im going to drive over there if you dont respond i swear to god 

CASSIE 

I finally kicked off my blankets and rolled out of bed, my breathing picking up as I pulled on my pajama pants. The pre-dawn light seeped through my blackout curtains, providing just enough light for me to find my slides. I almost tripped over my bookbag, thrown carelessly onto the floor yesterday afternoon before my midday nap and completely untouched since. Now, I kicked it aside in my haste. 

Just in case, I sent a text to my mother. I could hear her still snoring in the next room. Hey momma, don’t stress but I’m running over to Cassie’s really quick to check on her. I’ll be back ASAP. Love you!

I paced down the hall as quietly as I could, trying not to wake my sleeping family for what was probably just my anxiety. Maybe that was what I was trying to convince myself. It was a miracle the floorboards didn’t creak and groan under my weight like they had my entire life. 

I remembered Cassie and I sneaking through the house like that when we were in middle school, trying not to wake my mom up during a midnight snack run. We had begged and pleaded all week for the sleepover, and we started scheming immediately after it was approved. First, I would squirrel away snacks and junk food in one of the unused cabinets for most of the week. Then, when my parents went to bed and my brother was distracted by his video games, Cassie and I would sneak out of my room, through the dark house, and gather our hard-won prizes. My mom told me later that she had absolutely heard us, but it wasn’t worth it to ruin our excitement. I wondered if she could hear me then, creeping through my childhood home like a shadow. 

I practically tore my keys off the rack when I reached the door. They jingled at what seemed to be a deafening volume in the sleepy silence of my home. I paused for a moment, listening intently for movement. 

Nothing. 

My parents didn’t have to be up for another two hours, and my brother hadn’t woken up before noon since he graduated last fall. 

I eased the front door open, and then shut it behind me once I had crept through. My slippered feet hit the concrete like a drum, pounding through my body and fueling the worry sliding like ice in my veins. When I reached the driveway, gravel crunched under my feet, surely loud enough to give me away. I wasn’t present enough to care as I manually unlocked the driver’s side door to avoid the noise caused by the key fob. Before I hopped in, I sent off a final text.

im on my way 

cassie if youre playing with me im going to kill you 

i really hope youre playing with me 

please just be ok 

I slid my key into the ignition with numb fingers, starting up the car without any thought for the noise level. At that point, there was no consideration for anything but Cassie and her safety. 

When we were sixteen, Cassie and I got our driver's licenses on the same day. Her mom took us both to the DMV and told me to calm down after I almost had a panic attack. Cassie went first. I remember her pale face turning almost green when the instructor called her name. She scored almost perfectly on the driving portion, and didn’t do half bad on the written part either. She always said she basically blacked out when she did the test; she was so nervous about it. When I went, I was the opposite: hyperaware of everything. They made us parallel park first, which Cassie and I had practiced together endlessly in her cul-de-sac. I like to think it was because of our joint practice that we both passed on our first try. A week later, she hit someone’s trash can and had to spend two hours picking up all of their garbage. 

As I drove down the dim street, I tried not to do the same. It was that hour of morning where the sun isn’t quite up yet, but light enough for streetlamps to be put out. It wasn’t so much the light level I was worried about, but rather the fog covering my mind. The anxiety was like a cloud of locusts: slow-moving but inevitable, razing the rational thoughts of my mind until nothing was left but an animal sort of panic.

Realistically, the drive wasn’t long. Cassie and I had always lived ten minutes apart, which is part of the reason she didn’t want to move out with her dad when her parents divorced. It felt like an eternity. Every stop sign felt like it was out to get me, every change in the speed limit felt like a slight. 

And all the while, this sinking, numb feeling settled in my gut. Cassie had never ignored my texts, and certainly not my calls. We had a sort of sixth sense for when we needed each other, which I guess is how I woke up. Sometimes, I used to wake up seconds before she even called out of some weird intuition. 

The only stoplight between her house and mine mocked me by turning red right when I approached. We called it the time-out light when we were little because it always seemed to take forever to change, much longer than the other lights downtown. The streets around me were empty, giving the impression of a ghost town. Cassie enjoyed dawn for that reason, the same reason I enjoyed midnight: it was peaceful. Now, though, it was simply frustrating; the light refused to turn for me, even as I remained the only vehicle with anywhere to be. 

When it finally changed, I basically slammed my foot onto the gas pedal, startling a woman walking her dog down an adjacent alley. I couldn’t really find it in myself to care. All of my feelings and logic seemed to be frosting over, replaced by this all-consuming determination. I’m sure I went over the speed limit, because when I finally arrived in front of Cassie’s modest townhouse, the ten-minute drive had only taken me seven. 

I tore my keys out of the car as soon as I parked, tossing them forgotten into the passenger seat as soon as they were loose.

Then, a wave of calm washed over me. I forced myself to breathe and examine the house, the place that had slowly become like a second home to me. All the lights were dark, except the pink glow of the nightlight in Cassie’s younger sister’s room; she refused to sleep without it. The house was hushed and quiet, clearly not awake yet. 

And still, I couldn’t shake the nagging dread in my stomach, which had slowly but surely overtaken the misleading tranquility. I checked the time on my dashboard clock: 5:06. Cassie always got up at five to shower and start her makeup. It was unlikely that her light would still be off. 

A tiny part of me still tried to excuse it. Maybe she had just slept through her first alarm. It wouldn’t be the first time. I tried to call her phone one last time. 

Five rings, then voicemail. I left another, just for posterity’s sake. 

“Cassie, if I’ve driven all the way here at five in the morning and you’ve just overslept your alarm, I’m going to genuinely strangle you. This is your last warning,” I huffed, then ended the call. As soon as I did, my throat began to close up. 

I struggled with my doorhandle for a second, then flung the car door open and vomited onto the pavement. The sound of it splattering across the driveway would have made me spill my guts had I not been doing so already; I had always been a reactive puker. Anytime someone in elementary school threw up, I was always quick to follow, so much so that Cassie had taken to keeping barf bags in her backpack for me. Her mom was a flight attendant up until high school, so they gave her the surplus. 

I wiped the bile away from my mouth with the back of a shaky hand. I felt cold and wrong and embarrassed. In a daze, I popped open the hand sanitizer in my center console and

squeezed some into the palm of my hand. The scent of lavender was a welcoming one, soothing my senses, even if momentarily. 

On unsteady legs, I stepped out of the car and onto the concrete outside. Making contact with the ground made everything feel more real. I had to take a minute to lean against the car, both recovering from my puking spell and steeling myself to enter the house. I gazed up at the quaint brick building, the one I had known all my life. I had never dreaded entering it until then. 

Sidestepping my own vomit, I forced myself to walk past the porch and around the far corner of the house until I reached the laundry room window. Cassie always left it unlatched in case I needed something, even though her mom had told her off about it when she found out. For a moment, the window stuck in place, and I worried I would have to go home or bang on the front door. I imagined Cassie’s mom coming to the door, bleary-eyed and annoyed, to tell me to run along before she called my mom. Mercifully, the bottom pane slid up under my palms, and I clambered inside. 

The house was as silent as it looked outside. Distantly, I could hear air conditioning units running and the nature noises Cassie’s mom couldn’t sleep without. Foreign birds tittered to one another in a far-off jungle, unaware of the fear plaguing me. I turned to softly close and latch the window behind me, trying not to step on the floorboards I knew were creaky. 

The trip to Cassie’s room was not a long one, but it began to feel like a lifetime. In my mind’s eye, smaller versions of me ran up and down this path; me at nine during a sleepover, me at twelve hauling pillows downstairs for a fort, me at sixteen crying on Cassie’s stairs over a breakup.

My footsteps beat a heavy drum in my heart, each one bringing me closer and closer to tragedy. As I crept past Cassie’s sister’s room, her pink moon nightlight momentarily extended its comfort to me. 

Maybe I was completely overreacting. Maybe I would find Cassie fast asleep in her bed with dried tear tracks on her cheeks, the evidence of an unforgiving night. Maybe I could catch her just before she did something she would regret, cradled by the manufactured darkness of her room. 

I almost convinced myself. 

My slippered steps became more confident as I approached the door at the end of the hall. As kids, when life had seemed like an eternal summer, Cassie and I had taken a bucket of paint to her door. We had painted malformed butterflies and bluebells, the smudges of color all part of an elaborate work to rival the Sistine Chapel. Now, the sun-bleached colors stared back at me, begging me not to open the door and ruin my own life. They weren’t enough for her, but maybe they could be for me. We should’ve painted with brighter colors. 

I twisted the heavy brass doorknob and shouldered my way into Cassie’s room. Whenever I fall asleep now, I always find my way back there. Back to the precious ten minutes I had with my cold best friend before her mom started wailing. 

I think I knew what I would find before I even woke up. 

I think she needed me to find her first.