The bad feeling I’ve got could be nothing. All the time it’s nothing. But when you’re worried about everything, eventually you are going to be right about something.
“I guess,” Jasper says, but he’s not listening. He’s not worried that finding that ruler makes us too lucky. His eyes are still locked on it and the screws like he’s about to grab it back from my hands.
“I mean, like suspicious?” I stop working the screw and look up at him.
Jasper nods, shrugs, still staring down at the plywood. When he reaches out a hand, I think maybe he agrees that we should wait a second and think this through. But instead he just takes the ruler and gets back to work on the screws. Even faster this time.
Refreshed from his short break, Jasper gets the next couple screws out quickly. With all of them off on one end he’s even able to pull the plywood back a little. Not much, five or six inches. He nods toward it.
“See it if goes all the way through,” he whispers. Meaning he wants me to stick my hand through.
I do not want to do this. There are countless reasons why. Mostly, I am convinced something terrible will happen when I do. Best-case scenario is that someone will grab me. But Jasper is waiting. And he worked so hard to get us this far. The least I can do is help. He’s pulling back the wood. You can do this, Wylie, I try telling myself. Do it.
Finally, I nod and step forward. I suck in one last mouthful of air before jamming my hand through. I hold my breath, wait for teeth in my flesh, my hand being sliced in two. But there’s just the cold and the damp and something stringy getting caught in my fingers. It takes me a minute to realize that it’s probably tall grass growing alongside the cabin.
“It goes all the way through,” I say relieved.
There’s a sound at the front of the cabin then—the lock sliding, the door opening. I go to yank my arm back inside, but my bunched-up sleeve gets hung up just as Jasper lets go of the plywood. It snaps down hard as I drag my arm the rest of the way out, and Jasper and I lunge toward the center of the room, as far away from the plywood as possible.
My arm is on fire as the door swings open, my eyes filling with tears from the pain. So many tears that it’s hard for me to see. Hard for me to believe my eyes, when someone finally steps inside. I blink hard and pray that I’m not seeing things.
Because there she is. In one living, breathing piece. Cassie.
As soon as Cassie shuffles inside, the door slams shut behind her.
She looks terrible. Her skin is chalk white, her dark-brown curls tangled and flecked with twigs and leaves. Like she’s been dragged by her feet across the ground. Her hands are filthy and so are her knees, bare in her short skirt. But the worst part is how stunned she seems. And the way she’s moving, stiff and awkward, like her entire body is burned.
But she’s alive. She is alive. It’s not until that moment that I realize how terrified I was that she might not be.
“Cassie!” Jasper rushes over and grabs her up in his arms. “Thank God you’re okay.”
She doesn’t resist him, doesn’t yelp when he goes to touch her. But she stays rigid, arms out over his like a crucifix. I think about Cassie’s underwear on the floor, about how it might have gotten there. There are no good reasons for a girl and her underwear to be separated.
“Are you okay?” Jasper asks, pulling back to look her in the eye.
I drift closer to look myself. Cassie doesn’t have any obvious bruises or cuts. But I wish she would speak. Say something, anything. Instead she just shakes her head. No, not okay? Or no, not hurt? Suddenly she turns and clutches on to me.
“Shhh.” I rub a hand over her head as she sobs against me so hard she sounds like some kind of animal dying in my arms. “You’re okay now. Everything is going to be okay.”
But I feel so ashamed for saying something like that. Something I know is a lie.
“Cassie, what happened?” Jasper asks when her sobbing slows to sniffling. “What is this?”
“I don’t know,” she says, finally letting me go. She drops herself down on the couch.
Jasper and I turn to look at each other. She doesn’t know? Maybe she was slipped something at some party or some bar she never should have been inside in the first place. She could have blacked out and woken up here.
I walk over and move the boxes out of the way so that Cassie’s underwear is in plain sight again.
“Are you hurt?” I ask, motioning to it when she looks at me. “Did somebody mess with you?”
“No, no.” She sniffles some more and wipes at her face with the back of her hand. “They haven’t done anything to me, except not let me leave.”
They. I do not like the way she says it. Like we are outnumbered. I go to sit next to her on the couch. “Karen came to our house. She said you guys got into a bad fight and then you left for school. How did you get here?”