Looking for Cassandra Jane (The Second Chances Novels) by Melody Carlson

a training bra. I think my long mane of black hair may have turned a few heads as well.
    The funny thing is, I didn’t fully realize this at the time. It’s only in retrospect that I have truly begun to understand such things. To be honest, at the time I mostly saw myself as a social reject who wore secondhand clothes and had a nose that was overly large for her face (of course by then I had started to idolize the likes of Cher, Joan Baez, and rocker Janis Joplin—for whom I also grieved deeply a couple years later when she overdosed on drugs). Suffice it to say that, at the time, in 1968, a lot of these things went right over my head.
    When Pete’s friend Kurt Laurence asked me out I flippantly agreed, but at the same time I felt completely terrified. Why, I was only fourteen. I knew that good girls didn’t date at that tender age (especially not boys who were going to be seniors in high school!). But I had that tough exterior so polished by then that I’m sure Kurt never suspected what was truly going on inside me. In fact, I doubt he even knew that I was only fourteen.
    As I recall, we went to a drive-in movie, although I can’t remember what was playing. My memory is somewhat blurred due to the fact that Kurt smoked a joint, or maybe two, in his ’64 Ford Mustang. He offered me a drag, but for some reason I still can’t quite put my finger on, I declined. Nonetheless I believe his secondhand smoke most assuredly affected me, at least somewhat. Unfortunately for Kurt, it didn’t affect me enough to get him what he wanted. And when he dropped me off at home (we were living in a little rental house on Oak Street by then) he seemed a little put out. Needless to say, Kurt didn’t ask me out again. But that certainly didn’t mean that he told any of his buddies that our date was a failure. No, of course not. What seventeen-year-old boy would admit such a thing?
    My daddy wasn’t overly thrilled that I had gone out with a high-school boy, and it was about this time that I began to fear my guilt trips were wearing a little thin on him. So in an effort to preserve what was actually turning into a somewhat tolerable lifestyle, I decided to lighten up on him a bit and, in essence, clean up my act.
    As it turned out my behavior (whether good or bad) had little effect on his, because he eventually fell off of the wagon anyway. His first plunge occurred late that fall. I was in ninth grade and acting somewhat mature and responsible at the time. But as a result of his drinking, I soon returned to my old ways of creeping around, sneaking in late after he’d passed out on the couch, and trying to remain invisible to avoid any unnecessary unpleasantness. But I knew I was living on borrowed time. I needed a better survival solution, or at least a friend I could turn to in a time of need.
    By then Joey Divers was little more than a far-off childhood memory for me, and besides he was already in high school—another world, it seemed. I longed to be in high school too. I felt I was too mature for the shallow superficiality of junior high, where girls like Sally Roberts and Cindy Shelton lived for “game days” when they got to wear their blue-and-yellow cheerleading uniforms and bounce down the halls like celebrities who owned the school (which, in most ways, they did).
    I felt there must be something more to life than popularity and cliques, and certainly I wanted something more. Or so I tried to make myself believe. I suppose in all honesty this might’ve simply been my way of protecting my constantly wounded ego. Because if the truth had been known (and believe me, I would rather have been tortured and died a thousand deaths than to admit this back then) I secretly longed to be one of them. And I knew I could’ve pulled it off, too, if only they’d have given me the chance—which would never have happened in a billion years.
    Sometimes, when I was alone and safe from prying eyes, I would imagine myself actually dressed