I was right. I could see my mother’s face darken when I recounted the history, as if she looked at her daughter and realized I wasn’t the kid she’d always believed me to be. She didn’t say anything in particular, nodded, but I could tell that the story of me and Cassie playing at the asylum that long-ago summer unsettled her almost as much as Cassie’s current story. On some level, in some unsayable way, my mother didn’t care that much about Cassie anymore. She was relieved that Cassie had been found, and was safe, but beyond that, she didn’t need to know. I was what mattered to her; and when, for so many years, Cassie had been a part of me, she had been important to my mother. But my mother had written Cassie off, long before. To my parents, she was what’s commonly called “bad news,” the sort of kid for whom muted pity is the most optimistic possible response.
This wasn’t only true of my mother. It was just the truth of it. On Monday, in school, the principal gathered an all-school assembly in the gym to announce that Cassie had been found and was in stable condition in the hospital, and in the loving care of her family, so we could all rejoice; he used the word “rejoice,” peculiar to me. He loomed at the podium, thick-thighed in his tight suit with his careful coif, looking like an aging rocker at a wedding, and he said, would we all please give Cassie and her family (her family? Anders Shute?) their privacy, at which comment I could hear some enraging titters behind me in the crowd; and then he said this was a personal matter only, we did not have any reason to discuss it further, so please not to speculate or spread rumors. Then he dismissed us to our classrooms, and of course in the hallways nobody spoke of anything but Cassie.
“Hey, Julia.” A tenth grader named Ollie who had never spoken to me before sidled up close. “We hear you were in on it, helped her hide out.”
I didn’t reply, kept going, looked at the ground.
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Jodie said for me.
“That girl was a slut,” one of Ollie’s friends offered. “Don’t you remember last fall at AJ’s party? She was totally wasted.”
“And I suppose you weren’t, fuckboy?” I was surprised, because I knew Jodie thought Cassie was a slut too. But Jodie hated the boys’ hypocrisy most of all.
“Well, I don’t know,” the guy kept pushing, “I didn’t end up half-naked in a room with a bunch of girls, did I?”
“Only in your dreams,” Jodie replied, pulling me away by the elbow.
“Call your mom,” she suggested. “Head home. Take the day, and maybe tomorrow. This will quiet down.”
“It might not.”
“Believe me, it will.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because,” Jodie said, “it’s like before, when you kept thinking Cassie was cool. You can’t see the truth because you care too much about her. It distorts your vision. The truth is, she was way more interesting to people when she was missing. Now they know the ending to the story. It’s over. And the ending isn’t as exciting as everything they’d imagined: she could have been a teenage prostitute in Times Square. She could have found a sugar daddy in Florida. She could have been abducted. She could have been murdered and chopped up and bits of her scattered along the beach at Plum Island. Any of those things would have made her special, and remembered. Someone might have made a movie about her, or put her on the news. There might have been a trial. But it turns out she’s just another kid who had a huge blow-up with her mom, and went to sleep a couple of nights in an abandoned building.”
“She stole drugs from her mom’s medical kit. She tried to kill herself.”
“Okay, she gets a couple of interest points for that; but nobody at school knows that yet. And it would’ve made a better story if she’d actually succeeded.”
“Wow. Harsh.”
“Think of it as a speech team story, if you had to write it up. The happy ending is no ending. Nobody particularly wants the happy ending when they care more about the story than the person.”
“How can you be so mean?”
“I’m not being mean,” Jodie said. “I’m just telling it like it is.”
I went home that day and I took off the next day, the Tuesday, and went back to school on Wednesday. A few people seemed to look at me and whisper, as if saying Yeah, she’s the friend who found her; and Cassie’s new friends, Alma and a girl called Justine, sought me out in the cafeteria and asked me what had happened. I didn’t tell them the details—not about the vomit, or the vodka, or the pill bottles—I just told them she’d gone to hide out in the asylum and I’d guessed she might be there because of when we were younger. I heard through the grapevine that Alma, at least, went to visit Cassie, not in the hospital but at home, before they left.
Not to me, but around, people told all kinds of stories. I heard them eventually. They said that Rudy Molinaro had been her boyfriend, and that they’d shacked up at the asylum together for days; that Bev had hustled Cassie out of town to keep her from Rudy’s clutches. They said that Cassie had threatened to leave for good unless Bev dumped Anders Shute. They said that Anders Shute had been abusing Cassie and her mother only found out when she ran away. They said that Cassie’s dad wasn’t dead after all, and had invited Cassie—no, Cassie and Bev?—to come and live with him. They said that Cassie’s dad wasn’t dead; in fact, Cassie’s dad was Rudy Molinaro, and she’d been ready to leave her mom for him—no, that they were having an affair and then they only later realized it was incest, that they were father and daughter. They said that she’d tried to kill herself because she was flunking out of school, because she had a drug problem, no, because she’d been gang-raped by a posse of seniors from the lacrosse team. They said that she’d apparently dyed her hair—no, shaven her head?—while on the run. They said she’d had a psychotic break and didn’t know where she was when they found her at the asylum. They said that she and I were secret lovers; they said I was jealous of her relationship with Anders/Rudy/Peter and had lured her to the asylum to try to kill her, but had felt remorse just in time. They said that what had really happened was a mystery and none of us would ever know.
I said nothing at all—not even to Jodie—and neither did Peter. I thought it was the one gift of friendship I could properly, if belatedly, give Cassie: to keep to myself the story that I knew, or thought I knew. Let them say what they wanted.
The town, for a while, speculated, analyzed, calculated, imagined. Everybody wanted a story, a story with an arc, with motives and a climax and a resolution. The story that they wanted—no matter what shape they gave it—made Cassie into some sort of victim: a victim of addiction, or abuse, or of her mother’s, or of Anders’s, or of Rudy’s, or even of mine. A corpse would have made the best story, the headliner, and we could all have been devastated, and shocked, and remorseful, and—too late—loving.
Then, only then, relieved of her carnal, sinning self, could Cassie have been immortalized, apotheosized, duly cleansed and elevated. If she’d been murdered, we’d remember her as sweet Cassie, injured Cassie, neglected Cassie, beautiful Cassie, of the azure eyes and fire-white hair, a Cassie purged by suffering. The town of Royston would have claimed and redeemed her.