Cassie kept Googling the weather in Bangor, looking up photos of the downtown streets in different seasons; trying to picture what life there might be like. She told no one. She didn’t want anybody’s opinion, certain that her guardian-angel father still guided her steps, watched over her, would make sure she’d take the right path. She didn’t set her heart on flight—she was okay with keeping this relationship with Bangor in her mind, for a while—but then came the blow-up with Anders at two in the morning, and she didn’t feel, suddenly, that she had much choice but to go. The angel’s voice spoke in her ear, and said, “Baby doll, it’s now or never.”
The irony about the fight with Anders was that Cassie wasn’t late because she’d been partying, or fooling around with a boy. Peter said she was particularly upset about this—that Anders Shute wanted to punish even her good deeds, maybe especially those. She’d been with a girl named Alma, a new friend from the high school, talking her through her breakup with her boyfriend. Alma felt that life wasn’t worth it, and Cassie had sat in her overheated, ill-lit kitchen on the other side of town drinking Diet Coke for hours, listening and cajoling, trying to help Alma look to a better future, to see the light. Alma’s mom was an aide at an assisted-living place in Lawrence, on the night shift; and the girls were alone until Alma’s older brother Ugo came home well after one in the morning and offered Cassie a ride back to her house. By then she’d listened a long time to Alma cry and lament and then seem to pull herself together only to break down again. Cassie didn’t know Alma all that well and wasn’t even sure she liked her that much, but she was proud of her own behavior that night. She’d gone home feeling strong and patient and generous and good—and pleased too, that Ugo hadn’t hit on her, which all too many older brothers were disgustingly ready to do—until Anders loomed thinly before her in the dimly lit kitchen, waggling his long finger altogether too close to her face and condemning her as selfish and un-Christian and “beyond the pale,” and threatening to kick her out. He implied she was a slut, though he didn’t use that word exactly. And the way he looked at her—those narrowed eyes, the line of his mouth, the pulsing vein in his temple, the utter surreality that this ugly stranger behaved as though he had rights, like he was her boss, or her father—you can only take so much, she told Peter, and then you have to stick up for yourself.
With her school backpack crammed with clothes, a hand towel, a rolled-up sheet, a box of Wheat Thins and an apple, Cassie left the house on her bike at 4:40 a.m., and arrived at the Dunkin’ Donuts by 5:10, which was still night. Nobody else was there besides the guy behind the counter, bleary and dirty-haired with wispy fluff on his chin. She ordered a large regular coffee—I can taste it, toothache sweet—and two glazed crullers, and she hunched at the back table against the wall with her hood up, peering at the odd customers who came through. I can feel the plastic table under her fingers, and hear the slight screech of the built-in chair when she swivels in it. The bus lurched into the lot right on time, in the still-dark, its lights beaming into the coffee shop; and as she climbed the steps into its hissing pneumatic maw, the money for the ticket crumpled in her fist, it occurred to her only fleetingly that she could stop, and go home, and begin the day as if this plan had never existed. Her bike was carefully hidden in the bushes at the back of the DD parking lot, chained to a sapling. She’d left a note on the kitchen counter that just said “Back in a few days.” That way, she told herself, they’d know she was okay. It didn’t mean they wouldn’t chase her—Anders Shute was that spiteful; her mother that controlling—but that was their problem, not hers. If she floated above herself, then it seemed like a strange thing she was doing, an irresponsible thing, maybe even a dangerous one; but when she stood in her skin and felt the cold greasy metal of the bus at her fingertips, and the dig of the backpack straps through her parka, and saw the sulfurous glimmer of dawn on the horizon as the car lights flashed past on Route 29 . . . in her skin, Cassie had no doubts at all, and no fear either.
The journey to Bangor took the better part of a day. She thought everything through as she went along: she bought round-trip tickets to be sure she wouldn’t run out of money and get stuck. After the tickets, she had still almost $200, money she’d earned babysitting and helping Mrs. Aucoin tidy up their basement. She put $50 between her left sock and her shoe, so that even if she lost her wallet or, God forbid, got mugged, she wouldn’t be destitute. Before she got on the Boston bus, she remembered to turn off her cell phone—by then, even she had an iPhone, and of course her nosy mother had the Find My Phone app, and while Cassie didn’t mind them knowing she’d got on the Boston bus, putting them on the wrong scent, she didn’t want to be traced beyond that. She knew her hair was noticeable—her hair had always been a beacon, not just for me—so as soon as she got off the bus at South Station, she went to the nice bathrooms in the train station next door, where she pinned her white blondness inside a knitted beanie so you couldn’t see a single strand—“like I was Orthodox Jewish,” she told Peter, “or maybe Muslim”—and then she put on a pair of slightly damaged sunglasses from the sale bin at the CVS. She didn’t return to the bus terminal until it was almost time; she knew that runaway kids hang out in bus terminals, and that bad things can happen to them there. Careful not to look aimless, she read a magazine intently at one of the tables in the train station food court while waiting for her bus—she had several hours to kill—and made her McDonald’s fries last a very long time, waiting minutes between bites, so that she mostly ate them cold, their floury grease coating her tongue.
When she bought the Bangor tickets, she used the machines and didn’t make eye contact with anyone, and strode purposefully to the right bay at the right time. The Maine bus, on a Saturday afternoon, had a fair number of customers, and although she’d hoped for a seat by herself, she saw it wouldn’t work out. She chose to sit next to a college-aged girl with glasses and a violin case, because of all the options, that person seemed least likely to strike up conversation. Tired of pretending to read, and unable to listen to music because she didn’t want to risk turning on her phone even with the cell service off, Cassie decided to pretend to sleep. She didn’t have to pretend for long. When the violinist got off at Portland, nobody replaced her; so Cassie slipped to the window and slept the rest of the way, her skull in its woolly cap bouncing uncomfortably against the glass, and her tailbone sore.