“I don’t think so,” said Dad. He hated counselors—he said the ones in the Navy were worse than the people shooting at you, that they just wanted you to write down what happened to you over and over again so that you were always reliving it, always scared, always in pain. Yeah, I sometimes felt like saying. Because pushing it all down and basically going around with untreated PTSD is working so well for you.
“Well, Cassie, you call me if you’d like to talk to someone,” said Horowitz, gliding over Dad’s death stare, which made me think there was steel underneath his smiles.
Dad blinked and took my hand to lead me out of there.
Kennedy passed Dad a card with his pudgy fingers. “Call us if she thinks of anything else.”
I thought: I’m right here.
As I was thinking it, Horowitz caught my eye and rolled his, mocking his colleague, it seemed like. I laughed.
“What?” said Dad.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Shock,” said Horowitz, straight-faced. “A tub of Ben & Jerry’s. Helps every time. Take it from me.”
I’ve just realized I never told you my real name is Cassandra. You probably figured I was just Cassie.
It’s kind of a screwed-up name, isn’t it? I mean, if you know your Greek myths, which of course you do.
Cassandra: doomed to give true prophecies about the future but have no one ever believe her.
It’s not a name, it’s a curse.
Me, I have never been able to see the future. If I could, I would have left Oakwood that day, for sure.
Deep breath.
So this is when something really important happened, and I need you to bear with me with all this stuff because, not to sound overdramatic or anything, but what we’re getting to now is pretty much the whole reason I hurt you and the whole reason I’m having to write this e-mail to explain what I did.
To explain what I am.
I was alone in the police station bathroom, the stall doors all open. I looked at myself in the mirror, hating my freckles and dinky nose.
That was when I heard the voice.
It was a woman with a New Jersey accent, and this is what she said: “You’re disgusting. You leave the house like that?”
This time I did do exactly what a person in a film would do: I whirled around to see who was behind me. There was no one. Nor beside me, nor in the stalls—I checked. No one standing on the toilets or hiding behind the main door or anything.
“I’m talking to you, ugly ****,” said the voice. “You ever think of coordinating? Or brushing your hair?”
“What? Who are you? Where are you?”
Silence.
In the mirror, my eyes were liquid with fear. “Your little prank isn’t funny,” I said. “Wherever you are.”
Still nothing. My heartbeat started to slow again. I figured there was a camera or something, one with a speaker that enabled someone in another location to speak to me.
“Hello?” I said.
No voice.
I glanced at the mirror again before leaving the bathroom. Here’s the thing: the voice wasn’t wrong. I’d left the house without thinking about what I was wearing; I had on old, saggy sweatpants and one of my dad’s T-shirts, the green of which really did not go with the pink of the pants. I hadn’t brushed my hair.
Stupid kids, I said to myself. Though right at the back of my mind was the thought, already, that it was weird they had somehow managed to get a woman to join in with the prank. I mean, it was definitely a woman’s voice, not a girl’s. Anyway, I didn’t want to give them any satisfaction, whoever they were, so I smiled at myself and walked out, trying to make my gait casual, though of course that’s impossible to do when you’re thinking about it.
That was the first time I heard the voice, but even though it made me angry, it didn’t scare me. That came afterward in the car with my dad.
We were in the black Dodge Ram, Dad’s pride and joy. I had been almost surprised to see that it was dark out when I left the station through the revolving doors. The lights on the instrument panel were glowing as Dad drove, and there were goose bumps on my skin. I wished I had a sweater.
Thinking about that brought back an echo, not the voice, but the memory of it. “You ever think of coordinating?”
I shivered, and tried to think of something else. I don’t think I was aware of how badly my mind had been—and this is the proper word—disturbed by finding the foot. Tilted, like a spinning top, gyrating wildly, wobbling from side to side.
“You should be at the restaurant,” I said to Dad. Everything, the inside of the car, the signs—24/7 LIQUOR ASK ABOUT OUR WINE BOXES—seemed so there, so present, that it shimmered. A white seagull flashed past in the dark sky, like a comet.
“I get a call saying my daughter’s with the cops, I’m gonna come.”
“I’m okay,” I said.
He didn’t answer that. “You shouldn’t have gone out,” he said, his eyes on the road over the steering wheel, driving past what seemed like the same streetlights we had already passed a block back, this faceless chain-store sprawl on the outskirts of town like a cartoon background the animators were recycling, using the same frames again and again. “I can’t keep you safe out there.”
“It’s the beach,” I said. “In daytime.”
“Dusk.”
“Daytime, dusk, whatever. It’s safe.”
“It’s a murdered young woman is what it is.”
“What is?” I asked.