Hun, are you all right?

Yeah, I’m . . . Sorry.

You still not sleeping?

I was really not on my usual form. I apologized again, and she told me cut it out with the sorrys. She leaned over, placed a hand on my knee, and told me I looked like crap. I told her I felt like it. I always trusted Cass to tell me how it was. A lot of the other staff found her loud and abrasive, and she was, but I was drawn to women who took up space; I came from a prodigious line of them. Cass lived bigger. Why wear two colours when you can wear five; why smile when you can laugh; why diet when you’re going to die. We first met working together on a production of Into the Woods in my second year at the school. I was the director, and she, being the school’s music teacher, was the musical director. It almost killed us. We had big blowouts, even in front of the students. We had creative differences over everything—casting, blocking, costumes, lighting; things that had nothing to do with her remit. She had seen the show ‘done in New York’ and wanted to remain ‘faithful to its original spirit,’ whereas I wanted to gender-swap some of the roles, and have a very minimal set, which she claimed was ‘too arty by half.’ But I simply refused to give all the juicy roles to half-committed, tone-deaf boys when there were a legion of more capable girls, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to fill the stage with a papier-mâché forest, or whatever aesthetic horror she was advocating, I can’t even remember now. At any rate, we survived the collaboration and emerged out of it as friends, and have proceeded to subject ourselves to staging four more musicals since then including one that Cass herself wrote about Amelia Earhart, which we do not speak of.

Together with our friend Nadia, we were each other’s emotional pit crew. Nadia worked in the special education department at our school before she moved across town. When Cass was going through chemo, Nadia and I kept her fridge stocked with casseroles, soups, pies. After Nadia’s mother died, Cass and I took her to a Janelle Monáe concert on edibles. They were my big sisters, both a decade older. They had survived abusive childhoods, abusive first marriages, remarried Christian guys with goatees, and now drew a lot of strength from their faith, especially Cass.

Listen, she told me, as we walked out of the staff lounge at the end of the lunch hour, I’ll cover your afternoon class.

No, what?

I have a spare now. Go home. Sleep. I’m serious.

That’s—

Shush. Woman. Get your little Fjällräven Kånken and go.

You just wanted to say that.

I’ll walk you to your class; you can fill me in on the lesson plan.