Peter told the police what he knew. Someone said they’d seen a girl in a blue parka getting into a car on Route 29, on the shoulder, about half a mile north of the Burneses’ place, at about the right time. The car, white or silver they thought, a sedan.
By Friday morning, Cassie’s photo was up on the LED billboard near the Lotus Garden, smirking down at every driver and every passenger on Route 29, and the police as far as Boston were on the lookout for a near-albino runaway, 5'3" and 104 pounds (she wouldn’t want her weight out there, I knew), wearing a sky-blue puffer, the thin-tube kind, skinny jeans, and a pair of black Nikes on her feet. The official description said nothing about the gap between her teeth, or the lopsidedness of her smile, and I couldn’t help but think that she’d have changed her coat and dyed her hair by the time they issued the description—it was pretty basic, wasn’t it? Even I would know to do that.
Had Bev really let her daughter, her one and only precious, beautiful daughter, run out the front door when only just retrieved from the abyss, almost returned from the dead, without trying, at least, to stop her? Why hadn’t she pursued her, driven up the road even a few minutes later? There had to have been a considerable lag between the moment Cassie bolted and when she climbed into the front passenger seat of the light-colored sedan, not three minutes but more like ten or fifteen, and how could it be that her mother, in those minutes, did absolutely nothing to save her?
By Friday we heard of sightings reported everywhere—in Haverhill, of course, in Newburyport, but in Portsmouth too, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, even in Provincetown, although nobody I knew believed in that one. At school, everyone had their own ideas. I kept expecting someone to ask me what I knew, because I knew Cassie better than anybody; but Peter was the only one. It didn’t occur to people that I’d have anything to say, because our friendship had been “over” since the beginning of middle school. Two years—two and a half, maybe—but it wasn’t like we didn’t speak at all. Never mind that we’d been conjoined all our lives, Siamese twins until the Evil Morsel. Never mind that we were sisters under the skin. But Peter understood. He sought me out and told me all he knew, and all he’d told the detective. He told me what her friends were saying—they thought she’d made a beeline to New York, that was so obvious. They said she’d talked about being a model there—this was Mason, Cassie’s friend for all of six months, dumb but gorgeous, in a rotating collection of Lululemon from the outlet mall up in Kittery—and that Brianna’s cousin Jae might have heard from her, even: he’d had calls from a Massachusetts cell number that he’d thought at first were random, but it might have been her, right? Another of her friends, Alma, the girl she’d got in trouble for, thought she might be on her way to Florida—spring break still down there, if she’d hitched all the way, and then if you just hooked up with the right guy, you could be set for a long time.
Luckily I didn’t have to hear these girls spout this idiotic stuff. They told Peter, ever-patient ally or frank double-agent, and Peter repeated it to me, and that Thursday afternoon we walked out of school and sat on the climbing structure in the playground down the road—the playground they’d been rebuilding that long-ago summer when Cassie hurt her hand at the animal shelter. A raw breeze insinuated itself under our jackets, the kind that makes you turn your collar up, and the metal platform froze my butt through my cords. Peter wasn’t wearing a proper jacket, just a sweatshirt—COLBY on it in big white letters—and he bunched his fists underneath it against his belly for warmth, so he looked pregnant. Another time, I might have made a joke about it.
“You don’t think she’s in Florida or New York City,” I said.
He shook his head. We pushed our backs against the bright metal poles of the structure, up high, our legs tucked up in front of us. We could see out through the trees—branches, mostly, their imminent leaves still tight buds—to the road, where occasional cars swished mournfully by. I felt as though we were in a story about ourselves, the story that was, at last, adult life; and I didn’t want to be there. We sat in silence for a minute; I pulled on a thread at my knee, the edge of the hole in my professionally holey jeans, the ones I’d promised my mother I wouldn’t wear to school.
“You don’t think—” I said.
And then I stopped. I couldn’t say what I thought we were both thinking.
“A lot of shit can go wrong in this world,” Peter said. “But we don’t have any evidence that anything has. Right?”
“I guess.”
“No, that’s the truth. All we know is that we don’t know.”
“That doesn’t help much.”
“You’ve gotta start somewhere,” he said. I looked at his hands, his long fingers with their clean, square nails. Sometimes I still couldn’t believe he didn’t desire me back. Even then, there, I could anticipate his every movement, as if he were surrounded by a force-field, so compelling it almost repelled. Surely he was aware of it? But was he not saying: all we know is that we don’t know; and if this was true about Cassie, was it not also true about everything, every uncertain action to which we attribute such certainty?
“Look,” he said, the tip of his bony nose and the rims of his nostrils reddening in the cold, “until she showed up in my room—literally in my room—on Tuesday, we thought she might be dead, right? Until she just appeared, it seemed like she’d fallen off the planet.”
“True.”
“We didn’t know whether to believe what Bev and Shute were saying had happened. You can’t say we didn’t wonder if she was under a pile of leaves in the woods behind their house.”
“In the Encroaching Forest,” I said, though only Cassie would have understood. I tore at the skin on my lip with my front teeth until I tasted blood. How important it had been in those few days not to allow that thought—that image—not to articulate it to Peter or my parents, and not to myself. But it was true: you couldn’t say we hadn’t wondered, looking at Shute’s eyes and thin lips, at the grimace of supposed anguish that could easily have been a smirk; and at Bev, whose abundant flesh had always made her seem jolly but who now seemed potentially dark.
“She wasn’t in danger then,” Peter said, “so why should she be in danger now?”
“Because before, she left a note, and took her bike.”
“But this time she took her coat.” We lapsed again into silence.
“Do you think she knew where she was going?”
Peter shook his head slightly, looking out through the trees. “She’s not in a good way,” he said. “This whole Clarke Burnes thing has messed with her head.”
“This whole Anders Shute thing,” I said, “or Bev thing.”