The Unwanted (11 page)

“I—I’m sorry about your mom,” Eric said when they were a block away from the Winslows’ house.

Cassie said nothing for a few seconds, then smiled shyly at Eric. “Would you think I was weird if I said I’m not really sorry she’s dead?”

Eric frowned, and cocked his head. “But she was your mom, wasn’t she? I mean, you have to be sorry your mom died, don’t you?”

Cassie bit her lip. “I don’t know. I guess I am, in a way. But I … well, I just don’t really miss her. It’s kind of strange. I don’t think she ever really wanted me in the first place.” She hesitated, then went on. “I always had this neat fantasy that I had another mother—that maybe I was adopted.”

Eric was silent for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice was very low, as if he were afraid someone would overhear what he was saying. “I wish … sometimes I wish I’d been adopted too. At least if you’re adopted, you know someone wanted you.”

Cassie stopped walking and turned to face Eric. “That’s a funny thing to say. Don’t your folks want you?”

Eric shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I guess maybe my mom does, and my dad says he does, but I don’t believe him. He’s always putting me down, telling me I’m no good.”

“And he beats up on you, too, doesn’t he?” Cassie asked.

Eric stared at her for a long moment. “H-how did you know that?” he asked finally.

Cassie was silent for a long time. There was something she’d never told anyone before, something she’d been determined to keep secret forever. But there was something about Eric—she’d felt it that first moment she’d met him—that was different.

Finally she turned to face him, looking deep into his eyes.

He looked back at her steadily, his blue eyes clear and open, ready to accept whatever she might say.

She made up her mind.

“I knew because it happened to me too,” she whispered. “Only it wasn’t my father. It was my mother. Every time something went wrong, she used to beat me up …” Her voice quavered slightly, but she was determined to finish. “It didn’t matter if I hadn’t done anything. She did it anyway. She just … sometimes she’d just start hitting me! I hated her for it. I really hated her!”

During the rest of the walk to school, neither Cassie nor Eric said anything else.

The first thing Cassie noticed was how small Memorial High was.

At home the high school had spread out over several city blocks, with separate gym buildings for the boys and girls, and so many students that on the days when she decided to skip her afternoon classes, the odds were good that she’d never even be missed. Here there were only two buildings: a large frame structure, three stories tall, capped by a steeply pitched roof with a bell tower on top; and next to it a low building that she knew must be the gymnasium, since it faced a playing field that covered the rest of the block on which the school sat.

There couldn’t be more than a couple hundred students in the whole school, she thought, and turned to Eric nervously. “How many kids are there in our grade?”

“Fifty-three,” Eric replied. “Fifty-four, including you.”

Cassie frowned. “And everyone knows everyone else, don’t they?” she asked, her voice reflecting her sudden nervousness.

“Sure they do. We all grew up together.”

“What … what if they don’t like me?”

Eric looked at Cassie curiously. “Why wouldn’t they like you? There’s nothing wrong with you, is there?”

Cassie hesitated, then shook her head. “But I’m new. And at home whenever someone new came in, everyone … well, everyone just sort of ignored them at first. You know what I mean?”

Eric shrugged. “I guess. But nobody’s going to ignore you. I know everyone, and I’ll introduce you around. Who’s your homeroom teacher?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to go to the principal’s office to find out.”

“Right. It’s on the main floor, on the left. There’s only two classes in our grade, so if you’re not in my homeroom, I’ll see you at lunch. Okay?”

Cassie nodded, and started up the steps toward the front doors of the school, threading her way through the groups of students chattering among themselves before their first classes began. As she passed among them, they all fell silent around her, as if her very presence had silenced them. Then she stopped, her back tingling once again with the eerie sensation of eyes watching her. The memory of the crowd in front of the church the day before was still fresh in her mind, and when Cassie turned, she wasn’t surprised to see the same blond girl staring once again, her angry eyes fixed coldly on her. She was a little smaller than Cassie. When Cassie met her gaze, the other girl quickly looked away, then moved over to Eric Cavanaugh, and slipped her arm through his.

Suddenly Cassie thought she understood. The other girl must be Eric’s girlfriend, and she must have thought Cassie was trying to cut in on her. But before she could go over and say anything, the first bell rang and the students on the steps
began pushing through the front doors. Eric, with the blond girl still clinging to his arm, disappeared into the building.

When Cassie entered the principal’s office a few minutes later, a friendly looking woman of about forty peered up at her over the tops of horned-rimmed half glasses and smiled cheerfully.

“Good morning. I’m Patsy Malone, and you must be Cassandra Winslow.”

Cassie’s head bobbed. “H-how did you know?”

“You’re the only new face I’ve seen in seven months,” the woman replied. “Besides, your stepmother called us last week. You can go right on in—Mrs. Ambler is waiting for you.”

For the first time, Cassie noticed the door to an adjoining office;
CHARLOTTE AMBLER
was neatly stenciled onto the opaque glass set into its upper half. She hesitated, then twisted the knob without knocking. As she slipped inside, though, she could feel Patsy Malone still watching her.

Charlotte Ambler looked up from the papers on her desk, then removed her reading glasses and let them drop. They were fastened to her neck with a heavy gold chain, which was the only jewelry she ever wore. The glasses came to rest on her ample bosom; she had grown so used to having them there that she rarely noticed them anymore, sometimes searching her desk for several minutes before she remembered where to find them. Once, to her chagrin, her secretary had caught her unconsciously putting the glasses on in an effort to make the search for them easier. Though the secretary had said nothing, Mrs. Ambler noted that she was unable to keep from grinning. The next day she’d brought an extra pair of glasses to her office. “So I’ll have something to find when I start hunting,” she’d explained. As Charlotte hoped, by the end of the day the story had spread through the school, and her carefully nurtured reputation for being just a little vague had grown a little larger.

Charlotte Ambler, though, was anything but vague, and as she rose from her desk to greet her newest student, she used the two seconds to size up the girl who stood nervously next to the door.

“Troubled” was the first word that came to Mrs. Ambler’s mind, but she quickly dismissed it. Given Cassie Winslow’s
circumstances, it would be remarkable if she looked anything but troubled. “Is it Cass, or Cassie?” she asked.

“Cassie.”

“Good,” Charlotte replied, smiling warmly. “Cassandra’s a lovely name, but a bit formal. And Cass is too short. Why don’t you sit down?”

Cassie moved across the small office and lowered herself into the wooden captain’s chair next to Charlotte Ambler’s desk. “Well, what do you think of things so far? False Harbor isn’t much like California, is it? And I guarantee you that our school is different from the one you went to at home.”

Cassie’s eyes widened in surprise. “How do you know about Harrison?”

“I don’t, really,” Mrs. Ambler admitted. “But according to your records, you were ranked fifty-fifth in a class of over four hundred. That makes your class alone twice as large as our entire school. It’s got to be different.” As she spoke, she opened a thick folder on her desk and put her glasses back on.

“What’s that?” Cassie blurted out, and Mrs. Ambler glanced up once more.

“Your records. Harrison’s computer transferred them to ours on Friday afternoon. Amazing, isn’t it? It used to be that you couldn’t count on records arriving at all. Now they send you more than you could ever want. Sometimes I wonder if computers are really a blessing at all.”

As Charlotte Ambler went back to the file on her desk, Cassie sat perfectly still. She stiffened as the principal’s brows rose slightly at something she’d read in the file, but the woman said nothing, merely flipped through a few more pages then leaned back and smiled at her. “Well, it doesn’t look as though you and I are going to be spending too much time together,” she said. “According to these, you managed to get through almost three years at Harrison with no problems at all. Mind telling me what your secret was?”

Cassie felt her face flushing. “I—I guess I just never had time to get in trouble,” she said. “I just went to school, and then went home and studied.”

Charlotte Ambler cocked her head. “Then you were something special,” she remarked. “The way I hear it, most of the big schools are having all kinds of problems now. It
seems some of the students only come to school about half the time,” she added pointedly.

Cassie said nothing, but her heart sank. Apparently someone
had
noticed all those afternoons she’d cut.

Though she’d been careful to keep her tone light, the principal had watched Cassie’s face carefully as she spoke, and she was certain her words had struck home.

Cassie said nothing. After a few seconds of silence that seemed to her to go on forever, Mrs. Ambler finally spoke again.

“I’m putting you into Mrs. Leeds’s class for your homeroom, and as it happens, we were able to work in most of the same classes you were taking at Harrison, except for Advanced Art. I’m afraid we’re just not big enough to offer anything past Art Two, and that’s only for seniors. We can either give you a drama class or a study hall.”

“Study hall,” Cassie said immediately. This time there was no mistaking Mrs. Ambler’s frown.

“Drama might be a better way to get acquainted with people,” she suggested, but Cassie only shook her head. Charlotte Ambler hesitated, then decided not to push the issue. She made a note on an enrollment card, then handed it to Cassie. “Just give this to Mrs. Malone and go on along to room 207, upstairs at the other end of the hall. Mrs. Leeds already knows you’re coming.” She stood and started around her desk to walk Cassie to the door, but Cassie was already on her feet. Clutching the registration cards in her hand, she hurried out of the office.

Charlotte Ambler waited a few seconds, then sat down at her desk again and reopened Cassie Winslow’s file. Slowly, wanting to miss nothing, she read it through for the third time.

All she could see were the records of a very bright girl whose only problem was that she had never truly applied herself to her schoolwork.

“Highly imaginative,” “very creative mind,” and “potential beyond her performance” were the phrases her teachers had most often used to evaluate Cassie. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for her lackadaisical attendance record, Charlotte assumed that Cassie would have been at the very top of her class.

Then why was it that the moment Cassie had come into
her office, all the instincts Charlotte had developed over the years immediately set her antenna to quivering?

“Troubled” was the word that had come instantly to the principal’s mind. And now, as she sat alone in her office, reflecting on Cassie Winslow’s arrival in False Harbor, the idea still hung in the atmosphere. For some reason Charlotte Ambler couldn’t quite put her finger on, she was certain that Cassie Winslow was going to cause trouble.

Cassie paused in front of room 207, then pulled the door open and stepped inside.

The room was small, and looked old-fashioned. Instead of the green chalkboards she was used to at Harrison, the walls at Memorial High were covered with old-fashioned slate blackboards. Dark-stained wainscotting rose four feet up from the floor; above, the walls were painted a stark white. The wood-framed windows, double hung from the wainscotting to the ceiling and running the full length of the eastern wall, were covered with ancient venetian blinds, and the old student desks were solid wood, their surfaces deeply carved by the knives and ballpoint pens of generations of students.

Mrs. Leeds sat at a large wooden desk at the front of the room, severe-looking in a dark blue suit and high heels. At home Cassie’s teachers had dressed almost as casually as the students themselves, but there was nothing casual about Mrs. Leeds.

As the door closed behind her, the rustling of papers in the room suddenly stopped as one by one the students swung around to gaze curiously at the new student. Cassie did her best to smile under the scrutiny of her classmates, but almost immediately she spotted the girl who had been staring at her that morning. She was sure that the blonde, whoever she was, had already been talking about her to the rest of the kids.

After what seemed an eternity to Cassie, Mrs. Leeds finally spoke. “There’s a seat next to Eric Cavanaugh. Why don’t you sit there?” Cassie saw Eric nodding to her, but beyond him she could also see the blond girl, her eyes flashing wrathfully. Cassie quickly scanned the room for another vacant seat, but there were none, so she reluctantly
moved up the aisle and slid into the seat. As she did, she saw the blonde lean over and whisper something to Eric.

“I’m afraid you’ve arrived in the middle of a test,” Mrs. Leeds went on. “Of course, I won’t expect you to take it—”

“What’s it on?” Cassie asked without really thinking.

The teacher hesitated a moment. “History,” she said finally. “The Vietnam war.”

Once again Cassie found herself speaking without intending to. “I don’t mind taking the test,” she said, and in the silence that followed, she felt the class scrutinizing her again.

“All right,” Mrs. Leeds agreed. “But if you don’t do well, I won’t count it.” Her eyes left Cassie and swept the rest of the class. “That doesn’t go for the rest of you, so you’d better get back to work.” She approached Cassie’s desk and handed her four sheets of paper stapled together in the upper-left-hand corner. “Don’t worry about finishing. There’s only twenty minutes left. Do you have your registration card?”