But I have to be careful. If I seem like I’m losing it, he’ll make me go upstairs for good. He might even tell Karen to leave before I find out what’s going on. And I need to know. Even after everything that’s happened between us, even though this isn’t exactly my first-ever Cassie-related emergency, I still care about what happens to her. I always will.
I can tell by the look on my dad’s face. He wants to wrap this up ASAP and send Karen on her way. He’ll do that, too, no matter how much he likes Karen and Cassie. Since the accident, he’s drawn a lot of new lines in the sand—with my grandparents, teachers, doctors, neighbors. Anything to protect Gideon and me. More me, it’s true. Gideon has always been the “more resilient” one. That’s what people say when they think I’m not listening. And if they’re my grandmother—my dad’s mom—they even say it to my face. She cornered me at the house right after my mom’s funeral and told me all about how I should really try to be more like Gideon. That was right before my dad asked her to never visit again.
The truth is, my grandmother never liked me. I remind her too much of my mom, who she also never liked. But she was right about Gideon. He does bounce back more easily than me. He always has. Feelings, especially the bad ones, roll right off him—probably something having to do with that huge computer brain of his—while on me they get stuck, forever trapped in my gooey, inescapable mess. Don’t get me wrong, Gideon’s definitely been sad. He misses our mom, but he’s mostly stoic like my dad. I’m more like our mom. Except if her feelings were always cranked up to full volume, mine have blown out the speakers.
“Okay, water, fine,” I say to my dad, who’s still eyeballing me. “I’m going.”
Cassie and I became friends in a bathroom. Hiding in the bathroom of Samuel F. Smith Memorial Middle School, to be exact. It was December of sixth grade and I’d headed to the bathroom, planning to crouch up on a toilet through all of homeroom if I had to. It didn’t occur to me that someone else might have the same idea when I banged hard on the door in the last stall.
“Ow!” came a yelp when the not-locked door swung back and banged into someone. “What the hell!”
“Oh, sorry.” My face flushed. “I didn’t see any feet.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of the whole point.” The girl sounded pissed. When she finally opened the door, she looked it, too. Cassie—the new girl, or newish girl—was squatting up on the toilet, fully clothed, just like I had planned on doing myself. She stared at me for a minute, then rolled her eyes as she shifted to the side, freeing up some of the seat for me. “Well, don’t just stand there. Come on. Before someone sees you.”
Cassie and I knew of each other—our school wasn’t that big—but we weren’t friends. Cassie didn’t really have any friends yet. And I felt bad about the way some kids picked on her. It was her snug sweatpants or her short, knotted curls or the fact that she was bigger than the other girls—both her boobs and her belly. No one cut Cassie a break because she was a sports star either. She might have single-handedly made our soccer team decent for the first time that fall, but all they cared about was that she didn’t look the part. I did feel bad, but it wasn’t like I could be Cassie’s defender or something. Not when I was barely hanging on myself.
“So what brings you to the bowl of shame?” Cassie asked once our knees were touching over the open water of the toilet.
There was no way I was going to tell her anything. Except then suddenly, all I wanted was to tell her everything.
“All my friends hate me,” I began. “And they’re all in my homeroom.”
“Why do they hate you?” Cassie asked. I was glad she hadn’t tried to talk me out of them hating me straight off the bat. People love to talk you out of your bad feelings. (Believe me, I am an expert in this phenomenon.) Instead, she just seemed curious. “What happened?”
And so I told her all about how Maia, Stephanie, Brooke, and I had been a foursome since we were eight years old, but lately it had felt like the rest of them were in on some joke that was mostly about me. I’d still been hoping it was my imagination, though, right up until that Saturday night at the sleepover when they started interrogating me about my therapist. Maia’s mom volunteered in the school office and must have seen the note about me having to leave early for my first appointment with Dr. Shepard. And then had apparently decided to tell Maia, which I still couldn’t believe.
“Come on, Wylie. Tell us,” they’d chanted.
By then I was sweating already. Suddenly, the room began to spin. And then, it had happened.
“I didn’t even realize that I’d thrown up until after I’d heard the screams,” I said to Cassie. And I could still hear them ringing in my ears: “Oh my God!!” “Ew!!!”
“Oh, that sucks,” Cassie said. Like what I’d told her was important, but not really that alarming. “My basketball coach showed me his stuff yesterday. You know, Mr. Pritzer. He drove me home after practice and then he just whipped it out. And unfortunately, he’s my homeroom teacher.”