~ The Reaping – Part Five ~

The days grew shorter. Twilight came earlier and earlier. Mornings were difficult to wake to. The trees grew barer daily. The birds flew in a southerly direction, and even the squirrels stopped chirping and chattering. The days were dull, and my solitude became more normal. I was happier than I’d been in a while. Occasionally, just to break up the monotony of my world, I’d go outside to the swing nearest the gazebo where people gathered to gossip and little dramas played out.

One time, I sat in the office with my favorite dorm parent just to keep her company and one of the girls was all but having sex on one of the picknick tables.

“Miranda stop that,” Mrs. Barner yelled out the window. “Oh God, that child is laying on the picknick table with James between her legs. Cassandra, go down stairs and tell Miranda to get her butt back in the dorm this instant.”

I found myself kind of awed by Miranda’s audacity. Didn’t she even think not to do something like that right under Mrs. Barner’s window? I would never have been so brave, but I never had considered myself courageous.

As winter break neared, I stayed in a constant state of introspection. Who did I want to be? I kept asking myself. I realized I didn’t much care for the girl the people around me talked about. Had I really treated people bad and took my mood out on them? Did Ireally try to be someone different for whomever I was with at the time? Did I hurt people’s feelings without compunction? Now, that was one of the things I’d over heard someone saying about me I just couldn’t believe of myself. No, the girl they’d whispered about and pointed fingers at wasn’t who I wanted to be. 

Even Mrs. Barner told me I needed to start behaving like a lady, not that I necessarily understood what she meant, but I wanted to be better in her eyes. I admired her and in my own way, I loved her. She was like a second mother to me when my own couldn’t be around. Even when I was moved to the down stair’s dorm, I often went upstairs to visit with Mrs. Barner. I adored her. She was my refuge even though she didn’t know what I was going through or what hurts I’d sustained.

As fall moved forward and we got closer to thanksgiving break and my birthday, I spent several days on the swing under Mrs. Barner’s window having philosophical thoughts and deciding who I wanted to be. There were things about me that I truly enjoyed and liked. I loved reading and learning. Well, except for math. I hatedmath with an inspired passion. So, I decided to keep reading, learning new words, using them in sentences, and finding out what was fiction and truth in the books I read. I liked being known as the girl who’d read all the books in our little school library to the point where I had to get a library card at the public library off campus. I liked staying out of trouble. I could often be found in my room, my nose in a book, and my music quietly playing from the stereo my father had bought me in a fit of guilt for being a deadbeat dad. I rarely went outside, but when I did, most of the time, I was on that swing thinking my deep thoughts, or spying on the happenings in the gazebo.

I found it interesting how events played out in life. Even now, I saw that girl I was. The Cassie of old, and wonder why I’d been so clueless, but I was. My mind had been in the clouds majority of the time, I guess.

It was the Thursday eveningbefore all the students at the Carnegie School for the Blind left to go home for Thanksgiving week. Unlike the kids in regular school, we got a week off because we were being shipped home on busses as close as Jacksonville, Florida, which is where I was from, to Homestead, Miami, and the Florida Keys. The girls and boys were allowed to eat dinner together that night. The dining room was full of teenagers and a mixture of light sopranos, altos, tenors, and deeper baritones. All around me everyone gossiped, shouted, laughed, jeered, or whispered. The dorm parents stood in their clusters and the students pushed tables together to sit in their own clicks.

I found a lone table, where I could eat in peace. I didn’t sit with anyone. I didn’t want someone to be targeted because of me, nor did I want to sit with people who’d talk down to me the whole time I tried to eat. I’d found that I held all my fear, anxiety, and most of my negative emotions in my stomach. I either ate in peace or didn’t eat at all. I was actually hungry for once, so I opted for the ladder.

Over the months of mistreatment and ostracism, I still hadn’t figured out my crime, so to speak. I still wanted to know. Who wouldn’t, right? 

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so eager to learn of my crime because the answer not only floored me, but it broke me.

I stood in the lobby after dinner, wishing Ms. Humphry would let me go back to the dorm. I just wanted to get out of there. I’d had a run in with my ex-boyfriend earlier. My stomach churned, and I was a little nauseous from the encounter. Maybe, I shouldn’t have eaten after all, I kept thinking, as Morton walked up to me. 

Morton was CSFB’s equivalent to a village idiot. I’d heard the whispers. I’d felt the glances my way, and I figured they were putting him up to something. It didn’t make it easier not to punch him in his ruddy face and break his freaking nose when he opened his mouth and that annoying thick southern accent started to roll out in a nasal voice.

“Hey, Cassie, I heard that you had sex with Leo in the back of Hannah’s van. Is it true?”

Morton had super red hair that went in every direction. He wore a perpetual smile. His face was always a weird shade of burnt orange. His lips were a cherry red as if he’d been born with lipstick on. He had squinty eyes and a bulbous nose. It took everything in me not to punch him in that prominent protrusion. I was so angry, but it wasn’t Morton’s fault they’d used him. He’d smiled, gave a little chuckle, and looked back over his shoulder to make sure he’d done his part to humiliate and embarrass me. I couldn’t even speak as I turned away to ask Ms. Humphry if I could go sit outside to wait to go back to the dorms. I didn’t even realize I was crying until a trio of seniors came through the door.

“Are you okay, Cass?” one of the girls asked.

I still couldn’t speak past the lump that had formed in my throat. Is that what everyone thought of me? They thought I’d not only sleep with someone that wasn’t my boyfriend, but that I’d do something so private in such a public space. I was trying to understand the question and break it down into smaller pieces and hadn’t even noticed the tears were streaming down my face.

I wondered why I was so distraught. I should have known it was something so preposterous that it shouldn’t have even had a half-life on its own, but Liz had started the ball rolling, and apparently Hannah had pushed it down the hill with Leanna and the others backing it up. The snowball effect was inevitable. And, was I that oblivious? Or, had I been obtuse? No, I really hadn’t known what the rumor was. My ex’s remarks from earlier came back to me, and I think that was when I started sobbing and the seniors offered to walk me to the infirmary for headache medicine.

“Hey, Sampson, why don’t you let Cassie put that whip-appeal on you?” Stone asked.

I just shook my head and kept walking toward my solitary seat. I’d gotten up to go to the bathroom and had to walk near the popularcrowd. It was nauseating to listen to them fawn all over each other. Stone’s voice, deep and full of laughter had taken me out of my annoyance only because it wasn’t the only suffocatingly fawning comment, I’d heard so far.

“Naw man, she already put that whip-appeal on somebody else, right Cass?” Sampson sneered at me.

I hadn’t answered. I’d simply kept moving toward my abandoned tray. I looked down at it. Half of the food was gone and that would have to do for now because my stomach was starting to cramp from the words Stone and Sampson shared. How had I gotten in the middle of that conversation? I wondered if my just being somewhere made me a conversational gambit. I didn’t want to find out anymore. That was when I’d moved to the lobby, hoping to find a spot to read my book until the dorm parents were ready to leave. The dorm was locked and no one was allowed back in until the dorm parents were ready to go back. Thank God I’d thought to bring a book. I’d stood in the little alcove between the stairs where I thought I’d go unnoticed. I hadn’t. Morton had confronted me there, in my hidey hole, with vile allegations, but they hadn’t been hisaccusations. I doubted Morton had even been privy to the rumors going around about me until the popular kids needed him to find out my side of the story. 

Well, I didn’t have a freaking side. And even though I did, I’d never give them the satisfaction of knowing it. Screw every one of them, I thought, as I walked back from the infirmary alone. I’d convinced the three seniors to leave me with the nurses. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to even think about the lies that had been spread about me. 

All I heard in my mind with every step and every breath were Aubrey’s words in her soft confident voice on repeat, “you’ll reap what you sow.” And, I had.

Thank you for joining me this week for this installment of Cassie‘s story. I apologize for not being available to post this installment last week. In this segment, Cassie is beginning to learn who she is, and deciding who she wants to be. Has there been a time in your life when you felt you had to figure out who you are? How did you do it? What methods did you take? Let us know in the comments below. As usual, I look forward to sharing with you and hearing from you.

Until next we meet, stay well and keep creating!

CSA