Beck stopped just outside the open window of the van and dropped her phone on the seat, offering the music app as a truce.
“Thanks.” Cassie’s voice drifted up from the middle seat.
Cassie had said she didn’t want to put her family through losing her again, but what did that mean for Beck and Vivian? Beck could already feel the distance Cassie was putting between them, and it felt like she was doing it on purpose, giving them space before she was gone for good. They could see her so clearly now, and that shadow on Cassie’s head had grown darker. Cassie could move objects with ease. She’d even thrown a sock at Vivian’s head the other night.
But Cassie was still there. And Beck was terrified of the moment they’d lose her altogether.
On Vivian’s front steps, Beck stopped to find the key Cassie said they kept in a potted plant. Her fingers brushed the paint as she unlocked the door, and came away wet. They must have just missed the bastards doing it.
Inside, Beck went upstairs and knocked softly on Vivian’s bedroom door.
There was rustling inside, and the sound of Vivian swearing, and then the door opened, just a crack.
“What?” Vivian asked. “Is Cassie okay?”
“Well, I don’t know what’s up with her tonight, but she’s there. Being ghostly. Haunting the hell out of my van.”
Vivian smiled, but it was weak.
“Can I come in?” Beck asked, pressing against the door.
Vivian seemed to genuinely debate the answer for a second.
“Fine,” she said, swinging the door open.
Beck gaped at the room.
Vivian’s wall, the one she’d filled for years with awards and certificates and running trophies, was stripped, already half bare. And on the floor was a garbage bag, half full.
Vivian was throwing away everything.
“Vivian,” Beck began, but Vivian held up her hand.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “You can help me, or you can go.”
Vivian returned to her wall, ruthless. She was tearing down every last bit of her old self. And putting it in the trash.
Beck sank to her knees by the trash bag.
“Vivian, what is this?” She pulled out a letter, addressed to Vivian. “This is from your school.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Vivian said, breathless, standing on her desk chair to try to reach her highest shelf.
“Vivian, this says they’re giving you another scholarship. Since you can’t run track for them anymore. This is a full academic ride. Jesus, V. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because, even with the scholarship, we are drowning in my medical bills,” Vivian said, more harshly this time. She couldn’t reach the shelf. “So. It. Doesn’t. Matter.”
Vivian fell.
And took half the wall down with her.
The shelf tore off its nails, the plaster under it breaking and crumbling onto the floor, coating everything in dust.
Beck moved to where Vivian had landed, offered her a hand.
“Can you stop now?” Beck asked.
“No,” Vivian said. “I can’t stop. I need it all out of here, Beck.”
“Why?”
“Because it doesn’t mean anything anymore. It meant everything to me. And now it doesn’t.”
Beck didn’t say another word, but she started to help Vivian.
She picked up all the trophies. She swept up the piece of wall and the plaster dust.
“You can’t hide here forever,” Beck said. “Our real lives might have been put on hold when Cassie . . . last spring. But they’re not over. You are still gonna be a doctor. You are still going to do all those things you worked so hard for. It doesn’t mean nothing. The meaning just changed.”
“Why can’t I hide here? Isn’t that what you’re doing?”
Beck wanted to correct her. Tell her she was pushing herself, too, pushing past this debilitating grief that she’d been stuck in. Not just since she’d lost Cassie, but longer. Since she’d lost her parents.
But she hadn’t gotten that job yet. She didn’t know if she had a future outside of Bell.
So she said nothing.
Beck took the bag with her. She was afraid Vivian would walk it right down the street to the dumpster outside the gas station if she left it behind. And she knew Vivian would want these things back eventually. Maybe not for a while. But she’d want them someday.
Beck grabbed a bucket from Vivian’s kitchen. Found some gloves in the cupboard. She couldn’t find alcohol but grabbed soap and hydrogen peroxide. If Beck knew anything, she knew paint. She’d find a way to get it off that door.
It took her an hour to clean the front door, and when she got back to the van—back to Cassie—that song was playing. The same one. It was always that song now. But Beck didn’t say a word about it. She reached down and turned the volume up and sang along.
When Cassie joined in singing, unable to resist, Beck smiled.
Her friends might be hurting, scattered, and aimless. But that was Beck’s specialty. They’d spent the last decade holding Beck down, keeping her from flying apart in grief and fear.
She had to do the same for them now.
She had to finish what they’d started.
Cassie
Betty is parked on the edge
of Beck’s grandpa’s property,
behind the barn
and right up against
the Warrens’ sunflower fields.
Beck let me choose the spot,
and from here I can see the
flowers reaching up,
like children standing
on their tiptoes,
faces tilted to the sun.
But not all the flowers
are blooming.
Instead some shrink on their stems
and the soil beneath
darkens with rot
and when you look closer,
maggots.
Days pass and I watch
the rot spread,
one sunflower to the next.
I don’t know if it
was always there
weaving its death through
patches of flowers.
I wasn’t ever looking
at the earth beneath them,
I was so fixated on the blooms.
It’s hard to notice
changes when they are subtle,
and it’s even harder when they
so maybe I missed it before.
The same way I missed Nico’s
grip squeezing tighter
each time he held my hand,
until it was so hard it hurt.
The way his compliments shifted,
began to contain threats.
Your voice is beautiful
became
You should only sing for me.
I’ll love you forever
became
Whether you like it or not.
Be mine was not
like the hearts on valentines
that we dropped
into decorated shoeboxes
every February.
And maybe we shouldn’t
teach children
that love and possess
are synonyms.
The sunflowers remind me
to look closer now.
At the fields.
At the town.
I am realizing now
the danger was always
right there, right in front of me
but I was raised to fear
strangers, not boyfriends.
It was too subtle for us to see
until it was too late.
Too late for me,
and for the sunflowers.
Their stems cracking open
while they’re still drinking up sun.
Bell looks different now.
For a while I thought
it was me,
bei
ng dead and all of that.
But the longer I stay,
And the closer I look,
The more I see it.
My eyes are on the roots now,
and the roots are rotten.
Because this is a place
that in its own subtle way
decided long ago
the company comes first.
This place is a dog
that’s run away from me
and come home again.
I want to greet it,
arms wide open,
this thing I missed.
But its eyes are a little wild
on approach
and when I step too close,
it bares its teeth at me.
It is something possessed,
not loved.
And now it is rabid.
And as good as dead to me.
We Can Be Heroes
Season 2: Episode 17
“The Editor”
MERIT LOGAN: Welcome back, listeners, to We Can Be Heroes. Let’s get right into it. Earlier this week, Congresswoman Maria Roberts went on public radio to talk about guns getting into the wrong hands, and she referenced Cassie Queen and the Bell murals.
[Audio clip]
“It’s great that our youth care. That they’re using their voices and their art to send messages about gun violence. That burden shouldn’t be on their shoulders. We ought to have addressed these issues long ago. But we can act now. I’m inspired by those murals, and Cassie Queen, and I’ll be introducing some new legislation in response to these important conversations around violence.”
MERIT LOGAN: Just yesterday the Bell Review, the local newspaper, published an opinion piece that targeted Vivian Hughes, the eighteen-year-old student who was wounded but survived the school shooting. Joining me today is the editor of the Op-Ed department at the Bell Review, Ryan Ripley.
MERIT: Mr. Ripley, thanks for answering some questions today.
RIPLEY: Happy to do so.
MERIT: Can we talk about this piece you just published, the one about Vivian Hughes?
RIPLEY: The author of the story found evidence that Vivian Hughes wasn’t in school the morning of the shooting. That seemed like relevant information to me.
MERIT: Don’t you think that another piece of relevant information might be . . . I don’t know . . . the medical records that show that Vivian spent that entire week in the ICU being treated for a gunshot wound to her upper leg?
RIPLEY: Of course that’s relevant, too. That just wasn’t in the op-ed.
MERIT: Mr. Ripley, do you think it was a bit dishonest, to print only the first part of that information?
RIPLEY: I do not. Our readers have every right to verify the news they read in our paper. And we didn’t print a lie. Vivian Hughes’s card was used that morning, at the precise time of the shooting. The writer of the op-ed merely raised a question. One of importance in this lawsuit that could bankrupt a business employing half the town. Besides, health records are protected by privacy laws, so we couldn’t have confirmed those details anyway.
MERIT: Do you think Vivian could face retaliation for what was printed in your paper?
RIPLEY: No, I don’t. And even if she did, I can’t see how the actions of individual readers could in any way be our fault.
MERIT: Even though you printed false information?
RIPLEY: Again, there were no lies in that piece.
MERIT: Only misleading, incomplete truths.
RIPLEY: Opinions, Ms. Logan.
MERIT: Opinions posed as truths, Mr. Ripley.
RIPLEY: The stakes are very high in this lawsuit, Ms. Logan. We’re merely relaying information. Our readers have the right to form their own conclusions about it.
MERIT: Your readers or your advertisers?
[Extended silence]
RIPLEY: I don’t understand the question.
MERIT: There is a lot at stake. But I pulled some information on the Bell Review. Steven Bell pays for a great deal of ad space, both in the physical paper and online. In fact, Bell Firearms has been the paper’s most consistent advertiser for as long as the paper has existed.
RIPLEY: I don’t see what that has to do—
MERIT: I’m merely relaying information for my listeners, Mr. Ripley. They have the right to form their own conclusions about it.
Mural 5
TITLE: CIRCE
LOCATION: THE OLD MILL
Cassie
Tonight I see Beck
before she sees me.
She’s drawn her legs up
under herself
in Betty’s driver’s seat.
Her wild red curls are
barely contained
in her usual loose knot,
a messy bun
on the top of her head.
Her illegal-midnight-
mural-painting uniform
includes:
an old tee,
overalls,
and a flannel shirt,
despite the heat.
One of her sketchbooks
is open in her lap.
Instead of a drawing,
Beck makes a list called:
“People Who Killed Cassie Queen.”
There are many
who would say
that the list had only one
true, rightful name.
The person whose finger
found a trigger
and pulled.
But Beck adds his father,
his mother, the sheriff,
and that deputy, the young one,
who took my statement
that first time at the police station.
Beck writes her own name last.
Underlines it.
Circles it.
Goes over and over the marks
that make her name
until you can’t even read it,
scoring the page with her pen until
it tears through, and
the ink bleeds onto the next page.
I don’t know why
Beck blames herself
for my death, but
I do know Beck.
And the only person
who can forgive her
is herself.
When she turns the page again
Beck sketches out her
mural for tonight.
Our subject: Circe.
When women in the myths
were born or cursed with gifts—
extraordinary gifts,
ones they could even
use in self-defense—
they became something new.
Not heroes, never the heroes.
They became something to blame.
Medusa had her snakes
to disguise her beauty,
eyes to turn men into stone,
if and when they refused
to respect her boundaries.
Circe had her island,
and her magic.
If I were alone on an island,
I think I might
curse strange men landing
on my shores, too.
I wouldn’t have made Nico
a pig, but sometimes I think
he’d have made
a fine mosquito.
I’d want him small,
small enough to crush
on the palm of my hand.
Beck’s style for the mural
is the same as the others.
Bold, dark lines.
Simple, clean shapes
form an island with
dark blue waves all around.
Circe stands in the center,
willowy like a tree.
Beck gives her
my ink-dark hair
and ocean-blue eyes.
Circe’s arms are full
of the flowers she’s gathered,
the island’s treasures,
to hide from the men
who c
ame to steal them,
the men she transformed
for their trickery.
Beck fills in the island,
pink,
adds sharp black lines
to form a sea of snouts
and ears,
and round bellies.
Pigs all around,
surrounding Circe,
trapping her in
her very own home.
On the side of the mural,
Beck adds words rising out
of the sea.
Collige Virgo Rosas.
Gather, girl, the roses,
while you still can.
Gather them all,
before angry gods,
and sullen kings,
and jealous men,
and ravenous monsters
(but I repeat myself)
come to take
them from you.
Beck
“YOU’RE NOT AS SNEAKY AS YOU think you are,” Beck said to the ghost in the back seat of her van.
Cassie appeared in the rearview mirror.
“Can you do that when you want to now?” Beck asked, and Cassie smiled at her, proud.
“I guess haunting takes practice.”
“Well, you’ve got the time,” Beck said, and she didn’t like the way Cassie’s eyes dropped at the words. “Don’t you?”
Cassie didn’t answer, and then Betty’s passenger door was wrenched open.
“Almost ready?” Vivian asked.
Tonight’s mural was going on the old mill, at Grandpa’s suggestion. Of course, that was before the reward. The added attention and the added risk. Before Grandpa asked them to stop for a while, and let things cool off, and Beck had only given it a few days. She wanted to wait longer, but the reward wasn’t going away, and the op-ed and the paint on Vivian’s door had made her more determined than ever.
There had always been risk in this plan of theirs. That wasn’t enough for her to stop. And this wasn’t just for Cassie, but for Vivian, too. Grandpa didn’t know about the red paint streaked across Vivian’s door. The trophies and awards tossed into a garbage bag. The scholarship that would go to someone else, all because Vivian couldn’t escape the nightmare that Nico Bell had thrown her into.
Beck had to fight for her friends. She had to.
None of that reasoning made Beck feel less guilty for going behind her grandfather’s back to keep painting. Beck turned, looking up at the farmhouse. At dinner tonight, he’d thanked her. For taking a step back from everything. “I know it’s not easy for you to sit on the sidelines, even for a few weeks.”