What I Thought Was True (25 page)

shades of gray, or mention that the wind seems to be picking

up. I could remember the poised, distant boy who climbed

into the Porsche and say “no way.” Instead I say, “Around six?”

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“Hi, Mrs. Castle!”

I’m changing in my room (for only the second time—

progress!) when I hear Cass’s deep voice. Followed by Mom’s

uncertain one.

“Oh. Cassidy. Another tutoring session? Gwen’s just shower-

ing. Come in! Do you want a snack? We have . . . leftover fish.

I could heat it up. I’m sure Gwen will be out in just a minute.

Here, come in, have a seat. How are your hands?”

I grimace. Obviously I come by my babbling genetically.

“Or are you here for Emory? How’d you say your hands

were, honey?”

The smile in Cass’s voice reaches through my closed door

like sun slanting through a window. “They’re fine. Better. No

snack. Thanks. I’m not here for Emory. Or tutoring. I want to

take Gwen out.”

“
Our
Gwen?”

Shutting my eyes, I lean back against the door.
Nice, Mom.

“Oh! Well. She’s . . . in the . . . I’ll just call her. Guinevere!”

She shouts the last as though we live in a mansion and I’m

hundreds of rooms away instead of about six yards.

I emerge from the bedroom, mascara on. My hair is wet

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from the shower, dripping a damp circle on the back of my

shirt. But he looks at me like . . . well, like none of that matters, and then, of course, it kinda doesn’t.

“You don’t want the fish?” Mom asks. “Because I could

wrap it up. It wouldn’t be a big deal at all. Must be hard to

be living on your own without a home-cooked meal. I mean,

you’re a growing boy and I know all about teenage boys and

their appetites.”

She did
not
just say that. Note to self: Strangle Mom later.

“What?” Cass says, his eyes never leaving me. “Sorry, Mrs.

Castle. I’m, uh, distracted. Today was long. Ready, Gwen?”

Flustered and flushed, Mom says, “You sure you don’t want

some cod?”

“No cod, Mom,” I say tightly.

“I’m sure it’s delicious, Mrs. Castle,” says the king of good

manners.

Finally, fortunately silent, Mom watches us leave.

Cod?

God.

“Sorry about that—she gets—um . . . well . . . I mean, she’s

just not used to me going on a date. Not that that’s what this

is. I mean . . .
Should
I go back and get my copy of
Tess
? We’ve only done it once. Tutoring, I mean.” I feel my face go hot.

“How are your hands?”

He’s laughing again. “Gwen. Forget my hands. Forget
Tess
.

Let’s just . . . go to the beach and . . . figure it out from there.”

All these questions crowd into my mind. Figure
what
out?

Why am I doing this again? Or is it different now? But for

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push it all away. I focus on the pull of Cass’s hand. Let myself be pulled. And say, “Okay.”

As we head down the hill, the clouds that were gathering seem

to have hesitated in the sky, moving no farther in. The breeze is

sharp and fresh, only faintly salty. High tide.

Cass says, “I finished it. Last night.
Tess
. Still hate it. I mean . . .

what was the point of all that? Everything was hopeless from

the start. Everyone was trapped.”

As his “tutor,” I should argue and say that Tess’s choices, and

Angel’s inability to forgive them, doomed them, that it wasn’t

really a foregone conclusion, things could have gone another

way. But the reason I hate the book is just that—that from the

start, everyone is hopeless, even the family horse, who you

just know is going to drop dead at the worst possible moment.

“You know what I hated most about that book?” I offer. “The

line that made me want to pitch it off the pier?”

“I can think of a lot,” Cass says.

“Tess moaning that ‘my life looks as if it had been wasted

for want of chances.’ I mean, I know she’s unlucky, but she

feels so sorry for herself that you stop caring. Or I did at least.”

“The one that got
me,
” he says, his voice low, “the only one that did, and that wasn’t sort of overdramatic, dumbass drama,

was that paragraph about how you can just miss your chance.”

“‘In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of

things,’” I quote, “‘the call seldom produces the comer, the

man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.’”

“Yeah.” He exhales. “That. Bad timing with what could’ve

been a good thing.”

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Well.

That statement hangs there in the air like it’s been written

in smoke.

I clear my throat.

Cass kicks some gravel off the road. Then he laughs. “I can’t

believe you have it memorized.” He glances at me, and I shrug,

my cheeks blazing. “Actually, yeah,” he says. “I can.” He smiles

down at the ground.

We’re quiet again.

“I thought maybe I was wrong, just not getting this book,”

he adds finally. “Half the stuff I read doesn’t stay in my head.

Maybe more than half. I can’t write a paper to save my life. The

words—what I want to say—just get jumbled up when I try to

put them down on paper.”

“You know exactly what to do with Em, though,” I point

out, seizing on the change of topic like a life raft. We’re nearly to the beach, walking so close together that I keep feeling his

rough knuckles brush against my arm.

“It’s no big deal, Gwen. Like I said, that’s my thing. I might

have started working at Lend a Hand—that camp—because of

my transcript—and because Dad got me the job, like he’s got-

ten me every other job—but I really got into it. Swimming’s

always been big for me. Figuring out how to make it work

with different issues—that I can do. And Emory . . . he’s easy.

Not autistic, right?”

I shake my head. “We don’t know what he is, but that’s not it.”

“Yeah, I could see he was different with the water. When

you teach kids with autism, a lot of times there’s this sensory

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get all the way into the water right away with them instead of

going slowly, like Emory.”

I slow, glance at him, fall in step again. “How do you know

this?” A side of Cass I’ve never seen.

“When I’m interested, I get focused.” He kicks a rock away

from the road, hands in pockets, not looking at me.

I’m trying to decode his mood, which seems to keep shift-

ing like the wind coming off the water, both of which now

have a sort of electricity. There’s a storm coming. I can feel it.

When we get to the beach, Cass reaches into his pocket and

pulls out a loop of keys, unlocking the tiny boathouse, which

smells both damp and warm, flecks of dust swirling in the air.

The dark green kayak is buried under several others, so there’s

a lot of shifting around and rearranging and not very much

conversation for a bit.

He hands me a double-handed paddle after we drag the boat

down the rocky sand. “Want to steer?”

“I’ve never even been in a kayak before,” I tell him.

“Bet you still want to steer,” Cass says, grinning slightly as

he trails his paddle into the water and heads into the inlet near

Sandy Claw.

We snake around turn after turn in the salt marsh. I keep

sticking my paddle in too far, flipping it out too fast, so sprays of water flip up, soaking Cass. The first few times he pretends not to notice, but by the fourth, he turns around, eyebrow lifted.

“Accident,” I say hastily.

“Maybe we should just use one paddle. You’re potentially

more dangerous with this than the hedge clippers. Let’s switch

places.”

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Holding on to the side, as the kayak rocks precariously in

the shallow water, I wedge myself around him. He settles back,

then lowers his hand, gesturing me to sit. I sink down. There’s

water in the bottom of the boat and it seeps into my bikini bot-

tom. Cass takes my paddle out and rests it on the kayak floor,

lifts one of my hands, then another, situating my palms on the

two-sided paddle, under his. “See, you can still have control. I

know how you are about that.” His voice is so close to my ear

that his breath lifts the stray strands of hair that curl there. “Dig deep on one side, let the other drift on this turn up here.”

I do as he tells me, and the kayak slowly turns, snagging

briefly in the sea grass, then moving on.

We’re only a few bends in the inlet from the beach when the

clouds finally break and fat raindrops begin scattering around

us, plopping, into the water, splattering onto my shoulder. At

first just a few and then the sky opens up and it’s a deluge, as

though someone is pouring a giant version of one of Emo-

ry’s buckets onto the kayak. We both start paddling like crazy,

but I’m trying to pull the paddle back and Cass is moving it

forward, which stalls us till he again shifts his hand on mine,

tightening his grip, says, “Like this,” dipping the paddle in the

right direction, so we’re in sync at last.

Finally, we reach the beach and get out. Cass hauls and I shove

and soon the kayak is at the door. He shouts, but I can’t hear

him above the rain. He hooks his toes under the kayak, flipping

it upside down so it won’t fill with water, then kicks the door

open and pulls me inside the boathouse, yanking the door shut.

“I could have planned this a little better!” he shouts, over

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the barrage of rain pounding on the roof like drumsticks.

I could have pointed out that I knew it was going to rain.

Which I totally knew.

And ignored.

We’re both drenched. His hair’s plastered to his forehead

and cool rivulets of water are snaking down my back. There are

no lights in the boathouse; only two tiny windows and a dirty

fly-specked skylight. Outside, all you can see is a gray wall of

torrential water and, suddenly, a flicker of lightning.

“God’s flicking the light switch,” I say.

Cass shoves his hair out of his eyes and squints, assessing my

craziness level. Which of course means I keep talking. “Grandpa

Ben used to say that, when Nic and I were little and scared of

storms and you know, hurricanes and stuff. Lightning was God

flipping the switch and thunder was God bowling and . . .”

He’s now cocking his head, smiling at me bemusedly, as

though I really am speaking a foreign language.

I trail off.

“Um,” I say. “Anyway. What are you thinking?”

“That I’ve gotten you wet and cold again.” Cass lifts the bot-

tom of his T-shirt, squeezing water out of the hem, then pulls it

entirely off. Sort of like detonating a weapon in the tiny, warm,

confined space.

I shiver, glancing around the boathouse for something to

dry us.

There are a few old tarpaulins piled in one corner, but they

look mildewy and rough and smell musty and are probably full

of earwigs and brown recluse spiders. There’s another flicker of

lightning with a loud crack to follow, like a giant is splitting a 292

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huge stick over his knee. The rain seems to pause for an instant

as though gathering strength, then an angry grumble of thun-

der rolls out.

“What d’you know?” Cass says, bending down and pulling

something out from behind the Hoblitzells’ dinghy, named

Miss Behavin
’. He tosses it toward me. A pink towel, which lands neatly at my feet.

I pick it up. “You can’t get warm if you put the dry clothes

on over wet ones,” I quote, wondering if he’ll remember say-

ing that.

He grins at me. “As a wise man once said.”

“Man?”

“You’re questioning
man
? I was betting you’d go for
wise
.”

“Which would be more insulting?”

He picks up another towel and sets his fingers and thumb

at the back of my neck, urging my head down, then starts rub-

bing the towel through my hair to dry it.

He’s just drying my hair. With a towel. This should not feel

so . . . amazing.

“Insulting each other, Gwen? Is that what we’re doing

here?” His voice is low, so close to my ear.

I don’t know what we’re doing here.

Or maybe I do. He stops, dumps the towel to the ground,

says gruffly, “I think you’re good.”

“Yes, totally.” I back up, pull my soaking T-shirt up over my

bikini, drop it to the floor with a squelch. Cass freezes. The

atmosphere inside the boathouse suddenly feels more electri-

cally charged than the storm outside.

We’re only a few feet away from each other.

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“You’ve got, um—” He makes this gesture with both

thumbs under his eyes, which I can’t interpret.