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CLOSURE
How My Childhood Friend’s Brutal Death Straightened a Roundabout Path to Feeling
Soothing loss, bravely as bear hunters
She’d wanted to be a teacher, Cassidy Senter — my friend from Mrs. Gilmore’s third-grade class at Garrett Elementary. She had dimples and a long, strawberry-blond pageboy cut. I liked her call-out sense of humor. She wasn’t afraid of much.
I slept over at her house one night. Walking home from the bus stop alone was Cassie’s M.O., but as we walked to her home together on the gravel shoulder of the small highway she lived along, I started to understand that not everybody lived a cul-de-sac life or ran through sprinklers on a cared-for lawn at a babysitter’s.
To say she was whip-smart would be lame. Cassidy was sharper than that, and her scolding our pregnant teacher for having stood on a chair to reach for something “in your condition” showed me she was more grown-ass than I would be in ten years’ time. Smart, especially for a girl with few age-appropriate bedtime stories or learned dads at home. She knew her times tables lightning-speed and got a gold star for it, even though nobody read her The Wind in the Willows or We’re Going on a Bear Hunt at night, or patiently told her how little seismic activity there was here in St. Louis, at 1:00 am, when she’d had nightmares about volcanoes.
The man of her house wasn’t Cassie’s dad. I figured it out when I called him “Mr. Senter” the night of our two-kid slumber party and he cryptically shook his head — “Oh, I’m not Mr. Senter!” — and laughed with a cigarette voice. Not-Mr.-Senter dropped us off at the cavernous roller rink across town the next morning, a Saturday, for several hours of unsupervised fun. We were eight.
All kidnappings are atrocious. It should not have been shocking, though, that Cassie S. was vulnerable.
I wrote to Cassie’s mother once, about five years ago. Found her email on a long-neglected site that was made in Cassie’s memory. In my note, I tried to tell her what I remembered about her late daughter, the kind of friend she’d been before her picture was all over the news and on Oprah. The email bounced back and I wished I’d stayed in touch with other classmates who knew Cassie, long before she died…
