What We Owe To Each Other

“Sierra, open up!” she pleads, pounding at the door once, twice, five times. “I know you don’t have to work today.” The gentle autumn shower drips over her glasses, but she can still see a shadow make its way across the living room window.

The door pulls back just as she starts pounding again, her fist falling through the open doorway. 

“God. Finley. What is it,” Sierra moans, and then squawks when Finley pushes her way inside.

“She fucking escaped, Sierra, like fucking James Bond or something.” Finley uses her sleeve to wipe away the raindrops on her glasses. “The rehab place called her parents an hour ago. We need to go find her.”

Sierra follows after her, yanking her hood up and flopping back onto the couch. Finley recognizes the marching band hoodie from their last high school competition, four years ago. There’s a matching one crumpled somewhere in Finley’s dorm.

“Okay,” Sierra says, too casually, like she didn’t hear what Finley just said.

“Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

“Fin, I’m a little busy here." Finley steps carefully to avoid the flurry of textbooks and packets all around them, coating the floor, the glass table, even the stairs. There was the faint clammy smell of a room that hasn’t been cleaned in a while. Sierra snatches a packet off the floor, so Finley can only catch a sliver of words: letters of recommendation.

“She could be halfway to Dennis’ place by now, c’mon Sierra,” she urges.

Sierra scoffs. “So maybe he’ll give her a ride back.”

Finley stares, unbelieving. Sierra stares at her packet, but has the sense to look a little ashamed. That’s more than Dennis could say. After the red-blue flashes of the ambulances carrying Cassie’s vomit-covered body away last month, after the police took their testimony, after they had to let Dennis go because he flushed every gram of evidence down the toilet, after Finley had screeched at him, “She’s your fucking girlfriend, you jackass,” all Dennis could do was scoff and mumble, “It’s not my fault Cass doesn't know her limits.”

There wasn’t much to say after that. Not until her parents had made the cross-country drive to their university, too terrified to keep tabs up from the Midwest.

Finley turns on her heel and heads straight for the kitchen. The clinkering and clattering of things makes Sierra call out, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She comes back with a set of keys dangling by her fingers and whips them at Sierra. It nails her square in the chest. Sierra looks at her like she’s grown a tail.

“I know you just gassed up the car. We’ll only look for an hour or two, tops.” The shower has launched into a torrential force. The patter makes her imagine Cassie, alone, squinting through the raindrops to find Dennis’ house. And that topples another memory, landsliding out of her control. Their freshman year, when Cassie had dragged the two of them to their first college party.

“You’re such homebodies!” she had complained. Sierra had just shrugged. Finley was more malleable, willing to follow the beam of Cassie’s smile over a cliff if she could. 

People talk about love like it can sustain anything. They talk about heartbreak like it’s temporary. But when Cassie had ditched them at the party, only to show up three hours later holding Dennis’s hand, looking at him as if he’d hung the stars, Finley had known better. 

She hadn’t been expecting anything, really. Cassie had no obligations to her. There was no future to their relationship beyond this cherished friendship. She was not ungrateful. But to be shown the stark reality of its impossibility was still a quiet annihilation. A thickness had burbled in her throat, stealing her voice. 

Cassie had smiled and said, “I’m gonna go home with Dennis, okay?”

Although she suspected Dennis was bad news, with the dirty scruff of his beard and the way his eyes constantly darted around the room, Finley could only swallow through her inner humiliation and mumble, “Okay. Text me when you get back.” What else was there to do with the smoking embers of her crush, other than to suffocate it, to kick sand on it? 

Finley let Cassie walk off, and now she was here, paying for it.

Sierra says, “I’m busy.”

“Sierra.”

“If she wanted to stay in rehab, she’d be in goddamn rehab. Why are we suddenly her orderlies, or whatever the hell they have in that place.”

“Sierra—”

“Yes, Finley,” she grumbles, “I know my own goddamn name. You don’t need to keep reminding me.” 

Finley takes a long breath in, then out, then in again, blows the air past the bite of Sierra’s words.

“You know she needs this.”

“Okay but does she know she needs this? She’s been there less than a fucking month.” Sierra says, still scanning over the packet in front of her. Finley has yet to see her flip to the next page. “How bad could it possibly be in there anyways.”

“You’d know if you went to visit her.”

“And why would I do that? So she can spit in my face and try to steal my car?”

Cassie, shockingly, had not taken the surprise intervention well. She had walked into this very same house with that smile, the one that men fought each other for, and a baggie hidden in her hand. Two hours later, she had ran out, tear-soaked and desperate, to the driveway with Sierra’s keys clutched in one hand. Whiteness dusting her clothes. She was still struggling to unlock the door when her father had grabbed her, pleading with her, her mother sobbing, the neighbors peeking through the blinds.

“Stuff like that is why she needs to be in there and you know that.”

“The only thing I know is that NC State’s deadline is in two days and that my personal statement is still shit.” She fishes out her laptop from the paper mountain next to her, white light flooding the sharp planes of her face, and starts typing away. Finley flops down next to her, suddenly exhausted. Every second of time that passes grates like coarse sand against her nerves.

Sierra sighs. The clicking of her keys stops, then sputters up again. “How’s it going with NYU?” she mumbles. Finley looks back to the window. The wind rocks a gnarly tree branch back and forth, waving like the hand of an old friend.  

“It’s going well.” Just well. Not great, not amazing, not life-changing the way the graduate programs at West Virginia Tech were. Their applications were due a month ago, but then Cassie, and the police, and, well, yeah. 

Sierra scoffs, as if she’s following the same train of thought. “What?” Finley challenges, but is it directed to Sierra or herself? “NYU is great, actually. It could be amazing, life-changing!” 

“You said that about West Virginia.”

“Yeah I know, but shit happens! Life happens!”

“No, Cassie happens!” Sierra bursts out, slamming her laptop shut. “This is exactly what I mean. You can’t keep letting her do this to you. We can’t run our lives if we keep running after her like this!”

Finley stands up from the couch, walks to the window because she’s not sure if she can stand to see Sierra’s looking at her like that, like she’s some idiot.

“I know you didn’t ask for this—” Finley starts.

“No one would ever ask for this—”

“—but this is what we get, Sierra. This is what we owe to her.”

“Okay and what do you owe to yourself, Finley?” Nausea swims up. She tries not to let that hit as hard as it does, instead holding on to Cassie, out there in the storm. Cassie stumbling towards Dennis’s house. Cassie screaming in the driveway in her father’s arms, the red-blue of the ambulance as it takes her away, the neighbors whispering do you think that was a corpse?

Sierra’s breath rumbles behind her. The soft punches of rain against the glass become louder, harsher.  Finley takes a breath for strength, then another, and then another. “I’m gonna start searching for her. You can join me if you want.”

“Fin—”

She’s already out the door, into the ravages of the wind and blinding rain. The world goes blurry once again. First, she’ll comb through the streets around Dennis’ place, then work backwards. Monroe St., and then Cathedral Avenue. Those embers flare up again from underneath their shallow grave, smoldering with the visions of Cassie, of someone who needs her. Finley is warm and shivering, all at once. 

She gets three blocks away when someone honks from behind. A pair of headlights pulls up slowly, Sierra leaning out of the driver’s side window. 

“One hour. Tops.”

Finley smiles, her chest getting even warmer, and climbs in.