I don’t look over at Mrs. Ellington. Nor do I have to. Her I told you so is loud and clear.
“Like for another sail?” I squint dubiously at the sky, where thunderhead clouds are moving in.
“Or . . . a walk . . . or whatever?” Cass slides his hand to the back of his neck, pinching the muscles there, shakes his hair out of his eyes. “Maybe kayaking?”
I could point to the gathering clouds in their deepening shades of gray, or mention that the wind seems to be picking up. I could remember the poised, distant boy who climbed into the Porsche and say “no way.” Instead I say, “Around six?”
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Chapter Twenty-eight
“Hi, Mrs. Castle!”
I’m changing in my room (for only the second time— progress!) when I hear Cass’s deep voice. Followed by Mom’s uncertain one.
“Oh. Cassidy. Another tutoring session? Gwen’s just shower-ing. Come in! Do you want a snack? We have . . . leftover fish.
I could heat it up. I’m sure Gwen will be out in just a minute.
Here, come in, have a seat. How are your hands?”
I grimace. Obviously I come by my babbling genetically.
“Or are you here for Emory? How’d you say your hands were, honey?”
The smile in Cass’s voice reaches through my closed door like sun slanting through a window. “They’re fine. Better. No snack. Thanks. I’m not here for Emory. Or tutoring. I want to take Gwen out.”
“Our Gwen?”
Shutting my eyes, I lean back against the door. Nice, Mom.
“Oh! Well. She’s . . . in the . . . I’ll just call her. Guinevere!”
She shouts the last as though we live in a mansion and I’m hundreds of rooms away instead of about six yards.
I emerge from the bedroom, mascara on. My hair is wet 286
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from the shower, dripping a damp circle on the back of my shirt. But he looks at me like . . . well, like none of that matters, and then, of course, it kinda doesn’t.
“You don’t want the fish?” Mom asks. “Because I could wrap it up. It wouldn’t be a big deal at all. Must be hard to be living on your own without a home-cooked meal. I mean, you’re a growing boy and I know all about teenage boys and their appetites.”
She did not just say that. Note to self: Strangle Mom later.
“What?” Cass says, his eyes never leaving me. “Sorry, Mrs.
Castle. I’m, uh, distracted. Today was long. Ready, Gwen?”
Flustered and flushed, Mom says, “You sure you don’t want some cod?”
“No cod, Mom,” I say tightly.
“I’m sure it’s delicious, Mrs. Castle,” says the king of good manners.
Finally, fortunately silent, Mom watches us leave.
Cod?
God.
“Sorry about that—she gets—um . . . well . . . I mean, she’s just not used to me going on a date. Not that that’s what this is. I mean . . . Should I go back and get my copy of Tess? We’ve only done it once. Tutoring, I mean.” I feel my face go hot.
“How are your hands?”
He’s laughing again. “Gwen. Forget my hands. Forget Tess.
Let’s just . . . go to the beach and . . . figure it out from there.”
All these questions crowd into my mind. Figure what out?
Why am I doing this again? Or is it different now? But for once, for once since that no-thinking night at Cass’s party, I just 287
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push it all away. I focus on the pull of Cass’s hand. Let myself be pulled. And say, “Okay.”
As we head down the hill, the clouds that were gathering seem to have hesitated in the sky, moving no farther in. The breeze is sharp and fresh, only faintly salty. High tide.
Cass says, “I finished it. Last night. Tess. Still hate it. I mean . . .
what was the point of all that? Everything was hopeless from the start. Everyone was trapped.”
As his “tutor,” I should argue and say that Tess’s choices, and Angel’s inability to forgive them, doomed them, that it wasn’t really a foregone conclusion, things could have gone another way. But the reason I hate the book is just that—that from the start, everyone is hopeless, even the family horse, who you just know is going to drop dead at the worst possible moment.
“You know what I hated most about that book?” I offer. “The line that made me want to pitch it off the pier?”
“I can think of a lot,” Cass says.
“Tess moaning that ‘my life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances.’ I mean, I know she’s unlucky, but she feels so sorry for herself that you stop caring. Or I did at least.”
“The one that got me, ” he says, his voice low, “the only one that did, and that wasn’t sort of overdramatic, dumbass drama, was that paragraph about how you can just miss your chance.”
“‘In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things,’” I quote, “‘the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.’”
“Yeah.” He exhales. “That. Bad timing with what could’ve been a good thing.”
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Well.
That statement hangs there in the air like it’s been written in smoke.
I clear my throat.
Cass kicks some gravel off the road. Then he laughs. “I can’t believe you have it memorized.” He glances at me, and I shrug, my cheeks blazing. “Actually, yeah,” he says. “I can.” He smiles down at the ground.
We’re quiet again.
“I thought maybe I was wrong, just not getting this book,”
he adds finally. “Half the stuff I read doesn’t stay in my head.
Maybe more than half. I can’t write a paper to save my life. The words—what I want to say—just get jumbled up when I try to put them down on paper.”
“You know exactly what to do with Em, though,” I point out, seizing on the change of topic like a life raft. We’re nearly to the beach, walking so close together that I keep feeling his rough knuckles brush against my arm.
“It’s no big deal, Gwen. Like I said, that’s my thing. I might have started working at Lend a Hand—that camp—because of my transcript—and because Dad got me the job, like he’s gotten me every other job—but I really got into it. Swimming’s always been big for me. Figuring out how to make it work with different issues—that I can do. And Emory . . . he’s easy.
Not autistic, right?”
I shake my head. “We don’t know what he is, but that’s not it.”
“Yeah, I could see he was different with the water. When you teach kids with autism, a lot of times there’s this sensory stuff. You have to hold on to them really tight. And it’s easier to 289
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