Kimberly McCreight - The Outliers

“Couldn’t Cassie just still be out then?” my dad asks. “It’s only dinnertime.”

“She was supposed to be home,” Karen says firmly. “She was grounded this whole week. Because she—well, I don’t even want to tell you what she called me.” And there it is. The tone. The I-hate-Cassie-a little-bit, maybe even more than she hates me. “I told her if she wasn’t home, I really was going to put a call into this boarding school I’d been looking into—you know, one of those therapeutic ones. And no, I’m not proud of that threat. That we’ve sunk as low as me shipping her off. But we have, that’s the honest truth. Anyway, I also found this.”

Karen fishes something out of her pocket and hands it to my dad. It’s Cassie’s ID bracelet.

“She hasn’t taken that bracelet off since the day I gave it to her three years ago.” Karen’s eyes fill with tears. “I didn’t even really mean it about that stupid school. I was just so worried. And angry. That’s the truth. I was angry, too.”

My dad looks down quizzically at the bracelet looped over his fingers, then at Karen again. “Maybe it fell off,” he says, his voice lifting like it’s a question.

“I found it on my pillow, Ben,” Karen says. “And it wasn’t there this morning. So Cassie must have come back at some point and left again. It was meant as a sign—like a ‘screw you, I’m out of here.’ I know it.” Karen turns to me then. “You haven’t heard from her, have you, Wylie?”

Back when things were still okay between us, Cassie and I wouldn’t have gone more than an hour without at least texting. But that’s not true anymore. I shake my head. “I haven’t talked to her in a while.”

It’s been a week at least, maybe longer. Being at home, it’s easy to lose track of the exact number of days. But it’s the longest stretch since the accident that we’ve gone without talking. It was bound to happen eventually: we couldn’t be pretend-friends forever. Because that’s all we were really doing when Cassie came back after the accident: pretending.

The accident happened in January, but Cassie and I had stopped talking the first time right after Thanksgiving. Nearly two long months, which, let’s face it, might as well be a lifetime when you’re sixteen. But the morning after the accident, Cassie had just showed up on our doorstep. My eyes had been burning so badly from crying that I’d thought I was seeing things. It wasn’t until Cassie had helped me change out of the clothes I’d been dressed in for two days that I began to believe she was real. And it wasn’t until after she’d pulled my hair out of its ragged, twisted bun, brushed it smooth, and braided it tight—like she was arming me for battle—that I knew how badly I needed her to stay.

I don’t know what Cassie has told Karen about our best-friend breakup and our temporary get-back-together. And it ended anyway a few weeks ago. But I can bet it’s not much. The two of them aren’t exactly close. And it’s not like the reasons we stopped talking reflect so well on Cassie.

“You haven’t talked to Cassie in a while?” my dad asks, surprised.

My mom knew about Cassie and me having a falling-out back when it first happened. She apparently just never told him. It is possible that I asked her not to—I don’t remember. But I do remember the day I told my mom that Cassie and I weren’t friends anymore. We were lying side by side on her bed, and when I was done talking, she said, “I would always want to be your friend.”

I shrug. “I think the last text I got from her was last week? Maybe on Tuesday.”

“Last week?” my dad asks, eyebrows all scrunched low.

The truth was, I really wasn’t sure. But it was the following Thursday now. And it was definitely at least a week since we’d spoken.

“Oh, that long.” Karen is more disappointed than surprised. “I noticed that the two of you hadn’t been talking as much, but I didn’t realize …” She shakes her head. “I called the police, but of course because Cassie’s sixteen and we’ve been fighting they didn’t seem in a big rush to go after her. They filed a report and they’ll check the local hospitals, but they’re not going to start combing the woods or anything. They’ll send a car out looking, but not until the morning.” Karen presses her fingertips against her temples and rocks her head back and forth. “Morning. That’s twelve hours from now. Who knows who Cassie will be with or what shape she’ll be in by then? Think of all the horrible— Ben, I can’t wait until morning. Not with the way she and I left things.”

I’m surprised that Karen seems to know even partly how out of control Cassie has gotten. But then, without me to help cover for her, Cassie was bound to get busted eventually. And this scenario Karen has in her head—Cassie well on her way to passed out somewhere—isn’t crazy. Even at that hour, just before seven p.m., it’s possible.

“Nooners,” the kids at Newton Regional called them. Apparently getting totally wasted in the middle of the day was what all the cool kids were doing these days. The last time I rushed out to help Cassie back in November, it was only four or five in the afternoon. I had to take a cab to pick her up at a party at Max Russell’s house, because she was way too drunk to get home on her own. Lucky for her, my mom had been traveling, my dad had been, like always, working at his campus lab on his study, and Gideon was still at school, working late on his Intel Science Competition application. I slipped out and we slipped back in with no one ever the wiser, Cassie bumping into walls as she swayed. After, I held her hair back over the toilet when she threw up again and again. And later I called Karen to say she had a migraine and wanted to stay the night.

I told Cassie the next morning that she needed to stop drinking or something terrible would happen. But by then I wasn’t her only friend. I was just the one telling her the things she didn’t want to hear.

“Are you okay, Wylie?” My dad is staring at me. And he’s been staring at me for who knows how long. I realize then why. I’ve got myself pressed hard up against the back wall of the living room like I’m trying to escape through the plaster. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I’m fine,” I say. But I do not sound fine.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” Karen looks at me, seems again like she might cry. “The last thing all of you need is my, is our—” She forces a wobbly smile, looks even closer to falling apart. I stare down. If I see her really start to lose it, I will too. “Cassie will be fine, Wylie, I’m sure. The police are probably right that I’m overreacting. I can have a bit of a short fuse for this kind of …”

She doesn’t finish her sentence. Because of Cassie’s dad, Vince, that’s what she means. Cassie’s parents were already divorced when we met, but Cassie told me all about life before. And Vince was never a quiet drunk. Fights with neighbors at summer barbecues, calling home to be rescued from whatever latest bar he’d been tossed out of. But the final straw was the second DUI, the one where he’d crashed his car into a mailbox downtown. Karen is as afraid of Vince’s history repeating itself in Cassie as I’ve been. When I glance up from the carpet, my dad is still looking at me.

“I’m fine,” I say again, but too loud. “I just want to help find Cassie.”

“Wylie, of course you want to help,” my dad starts. “But right now, I don’t think you—”

“Please,” I say, willing my voice to sound determined, not desperate. Desperate is not my friend. “I need to do this.”

And I do. I don’t realize how bad until the words are out of my mouth. Partly because I want to prove to myself that I can. But also, I do feel guilty. I didn’t agree with the things Cassie was doing, was scared about what might happen to her if she didn’t stop. But maybe I should have made more sure that she knew I’d always love her no matter what mistakes she made.