“But what if—”
“You can’t make a case on ‘what if,’ ” he said, more certain now. “My mom’s a lawyer, and she always says that. Unless Cassie tells you something—or me, which doesn’t seem likely—then it’s conjecture. Which is to say, it’s nothing at all. Don’t go repeating that idea to anyone, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Not to your mom, or Jodie, or anyone. It’s not a joke.”
“I know.”
I didn’t take it lightly. But once I had it in my head, I couldn’t entirely get rid of it. It felt logical, somehow. I read the papers. I watched TV. That kind of shit went on all the time, almost in plain sight. He was essentially a stepfather, wasn’t he? And if wicked stepmothers had the worst rap in all fairy-tale history, stepfathers had the worst rap, as far as I could tell, in real-life history: they had all the power of a father, without the constraints. And if not Anders Shute, what was making Cassie into a half moon?
THE NEXT TIME she came to my house after school was in late January. A snowstorm blew in in the late morning, earlier and stronger than had been predicted: classes and practices were cancelled from one o’clock onward. Bev and Anders were still working, and Cassie had no way to get home, so I suggested that she come to my place. She asked a couple of other people before she agreed, but they lived farther away. So we walked back through the snow, the wind biting at our noses and cheeks.
I reminded her of our best sledding winter, when we were eight or nine, and of the snow fort we’d built in my yard with my father’s help—a real igloo, nicely packed smooth—how we’d crawled inside with hot chocolate my mother made us and my sparse bag of leftover Halloween candy. We loved the igloo so much, wanting to pretend we weren’t freezing, that we stayed there until we couldn’t feel our toes. Afterward, we’d taken a steaming bath in the big Victorian claw foot, half laughing, half crying at the burn in our thawing extremities. It was probably the last time we’d been fully naked together. Even then I’d been slightly shy, aware of being a big-boned giant in the porcelain tub.
We were almost conspiratorial, remembering. When we got to my house and my mother was out, we made hot chocolate for old time’s sake, and sat on the barstools in the kitchen to drink it. The snow came down in fast little flakes, almost sideways in the wind, the kitchen illuminated by its white light. Our faces tingled from the heat after the cold—“a healthy glow,” my mother would say—and I could see Cassie’s scalp pink through her snowy hair.
We felt so close, kicking our feet against the cabinets under the island, sticking our noses in the hot-chocolate steam.
“What’s going on with you?” I asked. “I mean, really?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I only get the sunny side, nowadays. You may not notice it, but it’s true. And I know there’s stuff going on.”
“You do?”
“C’mon, Cass. How long have we been friends?”
“Are we still friends?”
“Aren’t we?”
Her face was suddenly serious. “We’re friends, of course we are. Remember the Girl Scout song?”
“Sure I do.”
“So you’re my gold friend. My goldest friend.”
“But?”
“But what?”
I looked away. “But nothing,” I said, and turned back to her, and smiled a good fake smile.
PART THREE
CASSIE DISAPPEARED in early April of ninth grade. She disappeared not once but twice, although from the outside, the two incidents seemed like one.
Some things I wrote down in my diary. I know that on the ninth of April, about a week after Easter, people were talking about it at school. It was a Tuesday. Cassie had gone missing on the Friday night or Saturday, apparently, but Bev and Anders didn’t report it, not straightaway. There’d been an argument—she’d broken curfew on the Friday night and didn’t come home until two in the morning—and Anders, according to Peter, who heard it from Cassie in the brief moment she was back, threatened to throw her out of the house for good.
“Out of my house!” Cassie had said to Peter, red-eyed and still wild about it. “Can you believe that? Standing in my kitchen in his Jockey shorts at two in the morning, that pimply white chicken breast with his wispy chest-hair goatee between his tits, standing there telling me I’ll lose my right to my own fricking house?!”
Bev, apparently, remained up in their bedroom while Anders yelled at Cassie. “My own mother doesn’t give a shit?” she said to Peter, incredulous even days later. “After all I’ve put up with, day after day of it, over two years now, biting my tongue every single day, all for her, and she can’t be assed to drag herself downstairs for me?” And again: “I half wondered—no, fuck it, I totally wondered—if she’d sent him. Do you know what I mean? Can’t you see it? Fluffing her hair with her fingers, all flirty, like ‘Oh, Cassie, she’s so out of control, I can’t handle it, Anders honey, off you go!’ All that bullshit about how we were a team! All my life, ‘Just you and me, Cassie! We can do anything as long as we’re together, Cassie! You’re my one and only, Cassie!’ That fucking lying fat cunt! All bullshit, all lies. From the get-go.”
Cassie had come to Peter, she told him, because he was the one friend she could trust. He was beyond surprised when she showed up—they hadn’t hung out in ages—although he told me that after only a few minutes it felt like no time had passed. She told him that she knew he loved her—I rolled my eyes at that one, we all did; he hadn’t gone out with any other girls after Cassie—and she knew that he was strong and sane. Peter told me he felt relieved, in a way, that at last it seemed like she could see him clearly. Peter wouldn’t try anything, she knew, she said, and he didn’t. But still, when Peter tried to put his arm around her—just as a friend, he told me, just consolingly—she flipped away fast and angry and lay on his bed facing the wall. She was that upset.
He couldn’t say anything and he couldn’t touch her. He listened to her staggered snotty breathing, and they waited, she and he, quiet like that, like she was an animal injured in a trap, and he watched the light fading at the window, the stillicy blue dusk, her eyes writ in the sky, and he sat on the floor with his knees up and his back against the side of the bed, and he waited, and waited, and eventually the breathing evened out and she was asleep.