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In a letter to a friend dated January 4, 1997, Cassie wrote: ..."I think [my parents] have completely blown this whole thing out of proportion. I'm not addicted to alcohol or cirgarettes. I'm not a pot-head but basically I'm really lonely and depressed and hate my parents".
How we managed to muddle through the next weeks I'll never know. Brad remembers: "She would cry and scream and yell, 'I'm going to kill myself! Do you want to watch me? I'll put a knife right through my chest.' I would try to calm her down by talking with her, or hold her tight and tell her how much her mother and I loved her."
After Cassie's death, we came across an uncanny reminder of those terrible days: a spiral-bound notebook in her bedroom with a description of that difficult period, written more recently in her own hand. Dated January 2, 1999, it seems to be part of an unsent letter: "...I cannot explain in words how much I hurt. I didn't know how to deal with this hurt, so I physically hurt myself. Maybe it was my way of expressing my sadness, anger, and depression... I would lock myself in the bathroom and hit my head on the counters. I also did this on the walls of my bedroom. Thoughts of suicide obsessed me for days, but I was too frightened to actually do it, so I 'compromised' by scratching my hands and wrists with a sharp metal file until I bled. It only hurt for the first couple minutes, then I went numb. Afterwards it stung very badly, which I thought I deserved. I still have scars."
We decided Cassie should transfer to a private Christian school, and told her that she couldn't have any contact with anyone from the old crowd.
Eventually, she even made new friends. Jamie, a fellow freshman, was one of the first. She had short, bleached blond hair, big chains, and metal beads around her neck, and grungy attire- definitely not my idea of a nice Christian girl. Still, there was something striking about her warmth and her unselfconscious manner. In the weeks after Cassie's death, I contacted Jamie and was glad to find out several things I hadn't known about their relationship.
Jamie remembers: "When I first met her, she was really closed off, really bitter, and hopeless... A few times we talked about God, but she told me that she had, like, given her soul to Satan through one of her friends. She said, 'There's no way I can love God.' I would tell her, 'That's not the way it has to be.'"
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