Please look into this before it is too late for her. I am sure you and the school authorities can help her. It won’t take you long to see that I am right.
A worried friend.
I wrote Mrs. Mills’s name on the envelope. I knew just when and how I could slip it under her office door at school. I put it into my book bag along with my gloves to wear when I took it out and delivered it. Even if nothing came of this, I thought, I would feel better having tried to help rather than doing what Ginny had suggested and forgetting about Cassie and thinking more of myself.
Besides, if Uncle Wade was right and I had the third eye, I had an obligation to use it. That thinking helped me persuade myself to go through with it. When I saw Cassie in school the next morning, I immediately realized she was even more standoffish and meeker than she had been before the party. Both Danny and Peter seemed to have the same impression and said so. She wouldn’t talk very much and avoided the three of us before lunch hour. I noticed two additional black-and-blue marks on both her wrists, the marks I had seen on myself when I’d had that extraordinary vision experience.
Later, just at the start of lunch when I knew the hallway in front of the administration offices was emptier than at other times, I approached the nurse’s office. Careful not to be seen, I put on my gloves, dug into my purse to pluck out the envelope, and slipped it under Mrs. Mills’s door. I fled instantly, my heart thumping. I almost forgot to take off my gloves before entering the cafeteria. I was a little behind everyone else in my class. Ginny and the girls were already seated, and they all looked up at me when I entered. I saw that Danny and Peter were sitting with Cassie, but she looked so afraid I thought she might burst into tears and charge out of the cafeteria.
It was very hard for me to do it, but I went to sit with the girls rather than with them. It occurred to me that the more I was seen with Cassie right now, the more chance there was that the nurse would be able to accuse me of writing the note. For a moment or two, I felt sorry for Danny and Peter. They would come under suspicion more than anyone else, just because they were befriending her, but their denials would be credible because they were truly innocent. What’s more, unless Cassie was telling them the ugly truth, which I very much doubted, the entire idea would be shocking to them. Anyone would be able to see that they had no knowledge of anything similar to what was happening to her.
“Glad you’re coming to your senses,” Ginny said when I brought my tray to the table with her and the other girls. Mia moved over quickly to make a place for me.
“We had a bet that you would go sit with the losers,” Darlene said. “I was the only one to have it right. See? I still believe in you.”
“Why did you spend so much time with them at Ginny’s party?” Kay asked.
“They’re not so terrible,” I said, buttering my bread and then looking at Ginny. “Actually, Danny and Peter are pretty intelligent. I think some of you know that more than others,” I added. “Just ask Ginny.”
Her eyes widened and brightened with indignation. “They have big mouths,” she said. Everyone looked at her and then at me. I continued to eat.
“What?” Darlene asked her.
“They helped me with some homework,” Ginny muttered. “Big deal.”
“And tests,” I added.
She sent fire at me through her eyes but then shrugged. “God helps those who help me,” she muttered, and laughed.
“Oh, so that’s why you invited them,” Mia said. “We were all wondering.”
“One hand washes the other,” I muttered.
“What?” Darlene said. “Where do you come up with these expressions?”
I shrugged. “Reading, I guess. It’s something you do with a thing called a book.”
“Very funny,” Mia said, but she was sincerely smiling. “I think I heard my grandmother say that,” she added.
“My grandmother is a fanatical Rolling Stones groupie,” Kay said. “She’d rather be caught dead than show her age.”
“The Rolling Stones aren’t kids. She is showing her age,” I offered.
Mia laughed again.
“What’s with Cassie Marlowe? You must know more about her than anyone in the school. You spent all that time with her. Why did her mother leave her and her father?” Ginny asked.
“I don’t know all that much about her,” I said defensively. “I didn’t get too personal with her. At your party, she looked like she would shatter if I did.”
“Second that,” Kay said.
“Have you ever seen her father?” Darlene offered. “He looks like Boris Karloff.”
“Who’s Boris Karloff?” Kay asked her. I think she knew but was teasing her.
Everyone turned to Darlene.
“An actor who was in lots of old horror movies,” she replied.
“Showing your age!” we all cried together, and then everyone laughed.
It really was fun being with them. I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking they had almost given up on me right from the beginning. Would it always be this way for me? Would I always have to struggle more than anyone else to have friends? Could I blame it all on my parents? Or was there something about me, something I hadn’t fully realized yet myself, that made close friendships impossible? I knew I was timid about looking too far into anyone’s future, and maybe that was why I was always going to be just a little outside, a little too standoffish.
“Anyway,” Ginny said, “let’s stop talking about them. There’s more important news.”
“What?” Kay asked.
“Jason thinks he’s going to have his house free this Friday night. His parents and his younger brother are going to Albany to his grandparents’.”
“Why isn’t he going?” I asked.
“They think he is, but Friday afternoon, he’s coming down with a head cold,” she said, smiling. “Look, we know you’re on a tighter leash than the rest of us. We’ve all been through something like that, when we were younger. You tell your parents we’re all meeting at the mall and going to a movie and then pizza afterward. We’ll figure it out this week. Jason won’t have the party unless you can come,” she added.
All the girls looked at me like I might spoil their fun.
“Unless I come? Why?”
“How come you are so smart about everything but yourself?” Kay asked. “He has a thing for you. You know what a thing is, right?”
Everyone was smiling at me.
“I’ll try,” I said. “I mean, I’ll really try.”
“Good.”
Everyone looked up when Mrs. Mills entered the cafeteria. I had forgotten that she sometimes ate her lunch in her office and not in the faculty room. I was lucky she hadn’t seen the envelope slipped under her door instantly and seen me walking away. She panned the room. Some of the students quieted down, but most didn’t pay much attention to her.
“What does she want?” Kay asked. “Someone need a tampon?”
“I hope someone else in this school isn’t pregnant. When that happens, my mother goes ballistic every time I go out,” Darlene said. “And Todd isn’t exactly Donnie Osmond.”
“Who?” Kay teased.
Everyone but me smiled, especially when Mrs. Mills’s gaze fell on Cassie. It was clear that was who she was looking for. She started quickly toward her, Danny, and Peter. She was all smiles, but she said something to Cassie that made her nod and lower her head quickly.
“Maybe she has some contagious disease,” Ginny said. “We’ll all have to be inoculated since I had to invite her to my party. Damn. I’ll blame my mother.”
Mrs. Mills walked out. I watched Cassie carefully. She didn’t finish what she had to eat, but Danny said something to her that pleased her, and she rose, gathered her books, and left the cafeteria.
“I forgot to tell you guys,” Mia said when everyone returned to eating. “I think we’re getting a new student.”
“Boy or girl?” Kay asked.
“Definitely a boy. I only saw him for a few seconds
, but he looked like he was auditioning for GQ or something. He was wearing a dark blue sports jacket and a light blue tie. He had ink-black hair as long as Jason’s but not stringy and wild. It was styled. He had the cutest dimple in his left cheek and wore a very expensive-looking gold watch.”
“You saw all that in only a few seconds?” Kay asked her.
“When it comes to great-looking boys, I have a photographic memory,” she bragged.
“Well, how come he’s not here?” Ginny asked, gesturing at the students in the cafeteria. “Maybe you didn’t see that well. Maybe he’s one of those student teachers we get sometimes from the teachers’ college.”
“I don’t think so,” Mia said, but I could see she wasn’t positive, and the possibility was upsetting her.
“If he dresses like that and he’s not a student teacher, he’ll be persona non grata with the boys in this school,” Ginny said.
“Excuse me? Persona what?” Darlene asked her.
“Persona non grata. Someone not welcome.”
“Who taught you that expression?” Kay asked, turning her suspicious gaze on me.
I shook my head. “Sounds like something Peter Murphy might have taught her,” I offered. They all looked at her for confirmation.
She laughed. “One hand washes the other,” she said, winking at me. “See? I can come up with Granny expressions, too.”
Was that really how I sounded? How did I keep my unexplainable memories from shaping and coloring who I was? Or was that who I truly was, some combination of the old and the new, someone who would never fit in? Right now, I didn’t want to think about it. There was a bigger concern.
On the way out, I caught up with Peter and Danny.
“Why did Mrs. Mills come looking for Cassie?” I asked them.
“Something about her health records that might not be correct. No big deal.”
“She looked upset,” I said. “Was she upset?”
They looked at each other.
“No more than usual,” Danny said. “I spent most of lunch hour helping her with the math homework. She said she had forgotten to do it. I couldn’t get it all done before she left with the nurse, but I told her I would have it for her before math class.”
I nodded. That was what I had told her father when he wanted a reason for my calling, our math homework. Did he make such a big deal out of it that she had deliberately avoided it? Maybe she thought if she got a bad grade for not having it done, she would make him regret forcing her to hang up on me. I could easily imagine the games she had to play to get him to give her room to breathe.
Just thinking about that brought new disturbing images into my mind. I saw him coming in on her while she was taking a bath and insisting that he wash her back but intending to do more. Every lock on every inside door in her house was inoperable. She had no privacy anywhere, anytime. Some nights, he made her sleep with him naked.
All of this flashed before me as I walked through the hallway, half listening to Peter and Danny argue about the meaning of Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan.
It didn’t occur to me until after I entered my classroom that according to Uncle Wade, I had just used Coleridge’s quill in an attempt to save Cassie Marlowe. Coincidences didn’t exist to Uncle Wade’s way of thinking and were starting to disappear to my way of thinking, too. Everything was meant to be, had a purpose and a design.
After the flow of those disturbing sexual images I had envisioned, it was difficult for me to concentrate on the lesson in history class. I kept looking at Cassie’s empty desk and anticipating her entrance any moment, but it never happened. My curiosity and concern grew stronger. Did she become hysterical when Mrs. Mills asked her about her black-and-blue marks? Did she reveal anything, or was she so terrified of what her father might do that she went into shock? Did they have to take her somewhere else, to a doctor? Could it be that they called the police?
In my heart of hearts, even though I wanted the police to get involved, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her and what she would go through. Of course, I wondered if I had done the right thing. And then I wondered if my letter wasn’t magical after all, if somehow my words became more than words. Maybe they became images like they did for me. Maybe they empowered Mrs. Mills so she could picture the horror Cassie was enduring. If that happened and I had succeeded, I wondered if I should ever tell Uncle Wade how his quill lived up to what he had promised. Would he be happy I had that third eye, or would he worry more about me and tell my parents, who would then be enraged that I had kept another secret?
Cassie didn’t attend the next class, either. Just before the last period of the day, Kay hurried up to the rest of us entering the room. She was flushed with excitement and looked like she would burst if she didn’t get her words out quickly.
“Cassie Marlowe was taken out of school by a social worker and a policewoman,” she reported. “Something really weird is going on.”
“Something was always really weird about her,” Ginny said. She looked at me. “Right?”
“There have to be reasons for why she is like she is,” I said.
“What reasons?”
The bell rang for us to be in our seats.
“Reasons,” I replied cryptically. She smirked, and we all sat. I was the only one whose mind was a million miles away when we were told to open our textbooks.
Cassie would be saved from her horrific situation at home, I told myself. That was good, but really, how did I do it? Why was I able to do it? Why hadn’t her teachers, the nurse, and other administrators been able to see what was happening to her? Why just me? Sometimes I’d thought Uncle Wade was teasing me with all those references to the mystical third eye, but maybe it was true.
How should this make me feel? I wondered. Did I want this power? Did I want to be so different from everyone else? I was already different from every other girl in my class because I was adopted. I honestly didn’t believe anyone thought less of me because of that. Once my classmates got over the initial typical questions like whether I knew who my birth parents were, they never mentioned it again. If there was any complaint about me, it was similar to the complaints I had heard from Ginny after her party. I was too conservative, acting too old for my age. Even Uncle Wade had accused me of that.
That was something I could blame on my adoptive parents. All my life, they had made me so self-conscious about anything I had done that could be thought extraordinary, whether describing some of my visions or asking too many questions. I grew up with my parents expecting me to show signs of misbehavior and my mother especially pouncing on the slightest indication. Why shouldn’t I have turned out too conservative for my classmates? How could I overcome that? Go out and do something absolutely forbidden, deliberately get into serious trouble? Would that finally satisfy them?
It wasn’t until nearly dinnertime that I learned anything more about Cassie. Someone, perhaps one of the secretaries in the administrative offices, told Kay Linder’s mother why Cassie had been removed from school and taken off in a police vehicle. Probably nanoseconds after Kay learned about it from her mother, she was on the phone or texting the other girls. Ginny wanted to be the first to tell me. There was a note of remorse in her voice. Like most everyone else, she had condemned Cassie too quickly, too eagerly, and now felt guilty about it.
“Cassie has been sexually abused by her own father! Did you know about it?” she asked me after she rattled off the headline.
“She didn’t tell me, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yeah, but you seemed to know more. When I said there was something weird about her, you said there had to be reasons.”
“People can be shy, but Cassie was more than just shy,” I said.
“One of these days, you’re going to have to tell me why you’re so much wiser than the rest of us. The truth is, everyone thinks there’s a lot more mystery to you than you reveal. Did you have different parents before the Healys?”
“Only my biological ones, whom I have ne
ver met,” I said.
“Did something really dramatic happen to you at your old school? Is that why your parents transferred you to ours?”
“I’m not a veteran of anything that would give me more insight into someone being sexually abused by her own father, Ginny. Nothing like that happened to me.”
“Sorry, but we’re trying to find out how Mrs. Mills found out about it. Kay’s mother didn’t know.”
“Maybe she was just doing her job well. If anyone should have the ability to spot something like this, it would be Mrs. Mills, don’t you think?”
“Maybe,” she said, but not with much confidence.
“What’s the difference, anyway? Who cares how Mrs. Mills realized it? The main thing is that Cassie’s been saved.”
“As much as anyone can be after all that. She’s going to be in some special therapy. She won’t be at our school anymore. Maybe they’ll find her mother, and her mother will take her back. I wish I would have known. I would have . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Done something. Let’s try to forget about it,” she added quickly. “It gives me the chills. Her father looks like a cross between a frog and a snake. Thinking about him makes me want to vomit up lunch. I hope they . . .”
“Burn him at the stake?”
“What? Yeah. Something like that. Stop talking about him.”
I laughed. “I’m not. You are.”
“Concentrate on the weekend and the party at Jason’s. Start working on your parents. Say we’re all going to a movie and for pizza.”
“What movie?”
“Oh. Wait a minute. Let me look on the Internet,” she said, and after a minute came back. “Ruby, the one about the Cajun girl who’s a twin. I actually want to see that. I have the novel. I’ll give it to you so you’ll know something about the story.” She paused. “You’re not too good at lying about stuff, are you?”
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