Dear Cassie (27 page)

Troyer’s blond hair was almost as light as a cobweb in the sunlight.

“Troyer,” I said. “Laura,” I corrected, “what are you doing here?” I didn’t sit down right away. Mostly because I wasn’t sure she wanted me to. I still wasn’t sure what had happened to her the day before, and I’m sure she wasn’t, either.

I expected her to shrug, to pull out a pad, but instead she spoke, her voice so quiet it was almost like it wasn’t there. So quiet it was like a woodland fairy flying out of her mouth.

“I don’t know,” she said. It was so strange to hear her talk, but yet, it felt familiar. She was no different, just louder.

I could have asked her why she was talking, but the big deal I’d made about it yesterday didn’t seem like it had gone over very well. Yesterday? Fuck, it seemed like weeks ago.

“Aren’t you going to get in trouble?” I asked, still not sitting. Maybe it was really because I didn’t want her to get comfortable. Fucking up Nez’s face and Ben having probably gotten busted for staying last night were about all my overflowing conscience could handle.

“I’m gathering wood with Eagan,” she said, looking up at me. That was what she was supposed to be doing, but instead she’d come here.

“Don’t punch him in the nose,” I joked, even adding a laugh, but it was stupid. It made me wish I couldn’t talk, like Troyer hadn’t been able to until yesterday. I kind of understood. If you kept your fat trap shut, you didn’t say stupid shit you would regret. You could keep other people from saying regrettable stupid shit in order to keep up with the regrettable shit you kept saying, which meant you wouldn’t have to hear their stupid shit replaying in your mind like a song on repeat.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I sat down next to her on the cool ground.

“So are you talking again?” I finally asked. I’d decided it was weirder not to mention it. If any part of this could have gotten weirder.

“Not really. I guess only to you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I could have taken the time to explain, but I hoped she understood. I was sorry for opening the dam that had held her words safe. It had been my fault and now she was struggling to put them back in, like bunnies jumping from a cardboard box.

“It’s okay,” she said. Maybe she knew. Or maybe she didn’t want an apology from me.

I got that, too.

An apology from me probably felt like a fly buzzing in her ear. It would have been like getting an apology from Nez. One from Nez would be one I felt like swatting away. One I felt like smashing under a magazine. I had much bigger apologies to deal with.

She looked at me and waited. The skin on her arms was so pale, it reminded me of a peeled pear.

I felt the words behind her lips. The words she wrote in her Assessment Diary, that she thought were like her own song on repeat. Just like me.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said, still staring at her arms, wanting to look anywhere but at her face.

“You either,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. You would have expected it to be clear and bright from being rested for so long, but it was the opposite. Her voice was a rusty bike that squeaked when you rode it for the first time after the winter.

“I can’t anyway,” I said, pulling my knees up to my chin. I guess she could see the words behind my lips, too. I guess everyone could. I probably didn’t hide them as well as I thought.

She nodded. She knew all about not being able to say things. In that moment I saw her as epically strong. The restraint it had taken her to stay silent for so long, it really was incredible. Swearing and yelling and saying words to cover up the words I couldn’t say, that was weak.

“It’s not the same without you at camp,” she said, pulling her knees to her chin like mine.

“That’s because Nez is a bitch,” I said.

Troyer turned to me and did something I didn’t expect: she laughed, long and hard. Her laugh was deep, beautiful. It made me hate whoever it was who made her feel like she had to hide it. It made me hate me for not having laughed like that since I’d been here—since the clinic. It made me hate myself for wondering if I could ever laugh like that again.

“Ben told me he came to see you last night,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows.

I guess he hadn’t been busted. There was that at least.

“You like him, don’t you?” Troyer said.

“No,” I said quickly, instead of being a smart-ass and saying
Who?
like I usually would. It made me wonder if the answer wasn’t really no, wasn’t as easy as no. It was complicated, that was for sure.

“So, you okay?” Troyer asked.

“Yeah.” I looked around. “Rawe said I’d get into the solitude.” I pushed my hands straight out, like a surfer guy trying to balance after catching a wave.

“Rawe’s kind of an idiot,” Troyer said. “Not in a mean way, in a regular way.”

“Most people are idiots,” I said. “I’m kind of an idiot.” I was honestly surprised I was admitting it. But my time at Turning Pines had made me realize that. Only idiots let themselves get in fucked-up situations with horrible boys that made it hurt to breathe when they thought about it.

Only idiots let that situation keep ruling their lives.

“Ha,” Troyer said, “that’s true.”

If anyone else had agreed I would have throttled them, but Troyer agreeing with me felt right. She deserved to agree.

“What else did Ben say?” I asked. I thought about his diary. I shouldn’t have read it. I shouldn’t have even looked at it. That was another thing that made me an idiot.

She shrugged.

Of course,
now
she was silent.

“I came here because I want you to understand,” Troyer said.

“You don’t have to tell me.” I understood that better than anyone.

“I have to tell someone,” she said. Her face was so small, like a softball with a wig on.

“Okay,” I said, breathing in. I don’t know what I was expecting. Her deepest, darkest secret? The reason she was here?

Was it worse than the reason I was here?

The real reason?

It didn’t matter. I would listen. I could at least give her that.

“I don’t talk because people take your words and do what they want with them,” she said, looking at her feet. “When I got in trouble before I came here I had a lot of people try to tell me what I meant when I said things. What I was really saying. I had people try and take my words and throw them back at me. So I stopped talking. No words, no confusion.”

It made sense. It made more sense than anything I had done that hadn’t worked yet. Maybe I needed to try keeping my mouth shut for once.

“I guess it seems stupid now,” she said.

“Not to me,” I said.

She leaned into me. Her breath smelled like peanut butter. It made me remember I hadn’t eaten in hours, yet I wasn’t hungry at all. “When I stopped talking they said it was because I couldn’t steal anymore. They said it was like I was stealing my own words. Isn’t that crazy?” she asked.

It honestly made sense, not like I had the guts to tell her. “Who are ‘they’?”

“My parents. They’re psychologists,” she said, flattening the word.

“And they sent you here?” It seemed like there were way better places they could send her.
Way
better places.

“When your kid won’t talk and you make your living talking, I guess it freaks you out enough to get drastic.”

“Here is drastic,” I said.

“No—
here
,” she said, patting the ground below us, “is drastic.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said.

“You don’t have to lie to me,” she said.

I knew she wouldn’t believe me. I was learning that Troyer was wise in ways I hadn’t yet realized. “I know,” I said, “I guess I’m kind of lying to myself.”

“When you’re ready to tell me, you will,” she said. I could tell she was talking about more than me being out here alone. She was talking about everything.

If it was anyone else I would have scrunched up into an angry ball and told them I would never fucking be ready to tell them anything, but for some reason I couldn’t say that to Troyer—having her offer to listen, I felt a wash of relief.

She stood up and grabbed something out of her pocket, putting it in my palm. “Here,” she said.

It was a pack of matches: so small, so flammable, so my pilfered cigarettes’ BFFs.

“Where did you get these?”

“It’s better if you don’t know,” Troyer said, standing. Then she sort of bowed and walked into the woods. I watched the back of her white-blond head moving back toward camp, a ghost floating in the trees.

I looked at the matches. I could smoke whenever I wanted. I could start a fire if I dared to. I could do
anything
. One thing I’d learned in my time here was that in the wilderness, fire was power.

But beyond that, Troyer would listen when I was ready. Even without the matches, she had given me power.

4 Fucking Days Left

I
woke up to the sound of rustling leaves and cracking branches outside my tent.

Ben.

I didn’t know what time it was, but the absence of light and the sound of only crickets and owls aside from Ben’s boots let me know that as far as time was concerned, we had progressed past midnight and into the next day. I would take that. It meant I was hours away from not having to be by myself anymore.

I unzipped the tent and stepped into the night before Ben could say anything. I wondered why. It wasn’t like me, and I felt like a total asshole, but it’s tough to play hard to get when you’ve been in solitary confinement for the last ten hours.

“You came back,” I said, my mouth, along with my body, doing stupid, girlie things that made me feel like an asshole. Rawe was right: being in solitude was changing me. It was turning me into a total drooling dork.

“I told you I would,” he said, his flashlight buzzing past me and over the inside of the tent like an angry bee. “Where’s my pack?”

“It’s inside,” I said, pointing behind me.

His flashlight finally landed on his pack and he reached around me to pick it up.

“Do you need to get back or something?” I asked. He seemed anxious, which was my only guess as to why, unless Nez had poisoned him with the terrible truth about me.

He reached inside his pack, like he was trying to make sure everything was there.

“I didn’t steal anything, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said. I thought about the note in his Assessment Diary,
I knew you liked me
. It made me step back from him.

Maybe when he got here he was expecting me to jump into his arms and say,
I
do like you, I do
. Maybe that’s what he was all worked up about, but I didn’t think any amount of solitude would bring me there, even if I was sort of thinking it.

Ben pulled out his notebook and shook it at me. “Did you read this?”

“No,” I said, probably too quickly.

“I would have read yours,” he said, balancing the notebook in his hand, his lips turning up at the corners.

There was his smile.

“Well, I’m not you,” I said, not giving in that easily.

“You
did
,” he said, moving his face closer to mine. “I can tell.”

“How?” I laughed. Having him that close made my neck feel hot. Made my hands feel cold. “Did you memorize the way the pages were folded over?”

“No,” he said, “it’s the way you’re looking at me. The way you acted when I first got here. You’re being nice to me.” He tilted his head back like he’d figured something out, like he’d figured me out.

I felt my whole body tense. I had been nice to him. I had wanted to see him. “Oh, so that’s why you were acting like a dick,” I said, hoping he didn’t notice that I paused before I said it.

“I was acting like you usually do,” he said. “So yeah.” He smiled. “I guess that makes me a dick.”

“Seriously, Ben, fuck you,” I said, keeping my arms tight at my sides, afraid if I moved them I might touch him. “I’m not being nice to you.”

“You were. For you, that was nice,” he said.

He was right, but there was no way in hell I was about to admit it. “By the way, you didn’t let me win anything. I beat you. I know it’s hard for your macho brain to accept.”

He smirked; the realization that I had seen his note made him stand inches taller.

“Like it’s hard for your macho brain to accept that you like me,” he said, stepping closer, so close that I could feel the heat off his skin. “That I like you.”

Words caught in my throat. I looked out into the woods behind him. The trees were like black skeletons in the dark.

He was still so close to me. “I think you owe me a secret.”

I looked at him. If Nez had gotten to him he already knew my secret—the only secret that mattered. There was nothing I could tell him that would surprise him, except maybe that I did like him. But considering he was within millimeters of me and still had both his balls, that might not be a secret at all.

“I don’t owe you shit,” I said, my lips tight.

“If you don’t want to tell me, you can show me your notebook,” he said. He pointed at the tent. “I know it’s in there.”

“Forget it,” I said, strengthening my stance, letting him know the only way he was getting into my tent was in a body bag. There was no chance I would show him my notebook. I had been stupid and had put everything into it. Had vomited my words all over it, the things I wanted to keep from everyone and the one thing I was still denying to him. That I did like him. Even if he had all the evidence he needed that it was true.