Cassie nods, staring down at her hands.
“She brought up sending me off to that ‘therapeutic boarding school’ again—a.k.a. prison—and I freaked out and called her the C word.” Cassie nods. “And then she flipped out. She was totally screaming at me. And I’d just had it. I took the bus to school, but I didn’t go in. I went downtown instead. I was just minding my business, sitting on this bench, when this guy came out of nowhere and said my mom sent him. He wasn’t dressed like a cop, but he flashed some badge and I figured maybe he was some kind of undercover truancy officer.” She looks at Jasper. “Anyway, I had to go with him because I couldn’t risk, well, you know …”
She glances from Jasper over to me. And you know about me and the police, Jasper, that’s the look.
“I told Wylie you got arrested,” Jasper says, crossing his arms. It’s quick and matter-of-fact, like he’s pulling off a Band-Aid. “Sorry, but with everything else—I had to tell her.”
“Oh,” Cassie flicks her eyes my way, then down into her lap. “Well, once we were in his car, he said that he was actually from the school my mom was shipping me off to, and I had to go with him or he would turn me in to the police.” Tears rush into her eyes again. She blinks them back and looks up at the ceiling. “It’s not like those places take no for an answer. They’ll throw a bag over your head if they have to. And I thought about running, but I was scared it might make things worse for me.”
“And so that’s what this is?” Jasper asks, looking around at the run-down cage of a cabin. “It’s some reform school?”
But that does not seem right to me, not right at all.
“Yeah, I mean, I thought so until we actually got here and they locked me in one of these piece-of-shit cabins.” She sounds mad instead of sad, and it’s a relief. “I mean, obviously this isn’t any kind of school, not even one for crackheads. So I started freaking out, screaming my head off.”
Crackheads. Kind of a coincidence after all the talk of meth. And this story still doesn’t feel like the truth. Cassie is leaving something out. Like maybe she wasn’t just sitting on that bench minding her business when this guy came up to her.
“So this doesn’t have anything to do with drugs?” I ask. I can’t help it.
“Drugs?” Now Cassie shoots Jasper a look: see, this is what I meant, she’s judgmental. “Why? Because I bought pot once?”
“That’s not why,” Jasper says, defending me. But kind of reluctantly. “The police in town said that meth is the only reason people come up here.”
“Meth?” Cassie laughs angrily as she looks from Jasper to me, and back again. “So now the two of you think that I—”
“The police thought that,” I say. But unlike Jasper, I just sound defensive. “And you wouldn’t tell us anything. What were we supposed to think?”
“How about not the worst?” Cassie’s voice cracks. “Sometimes, Wylie, you really are just like my mom.”
Ouch. The worst part? She’s not even totally wrong. Am I really more willing to believe some version of events that includes Cassie using meth than I am this boarding-school/boot camp story? If Karen did get Cassie into this mess with some therapy school gone wrong, she might even lie to my dad about it when she came to ask for help.
“So that’s it?” Jasper asks. “They haven’t told you anything else?”
“There is this other guy, not the jerk who drove me and not the freak on the door,” Cassie says. “He was pretty nice. He said that they didn’t want me to worry. That I’m here because I’m in some kind of danger, but not from them, from someone else. I don’t understand what that has to do with them being some therapy school …” It’s obvious she knows this doesn’t make much sense. “But it’s like they’re protecting me.”
“Protecting you?” I ask. “From who?”
“Myself, maybe? That’s the only thing that makes sense, right?” She shrugs. “I have no idea. He said that was all he could tell me.”
“Why wouldn’t your mom tell us?” I ask.
“I’m sure she feels like an asshole. There’s no way she expected the place to be like this. I saw the brochures.”
“Why didn’t you tell us any of this when you were texting?” I ask.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”