The Outliers

“Wylie, can you get Karen a glass of water?”

My dad is staring at me. He’s worried about this—whatever it is—upsetting me. The last thing I need is to be more upset; it’s not a totally unfair point. So he’s dismissing me for my own good. As if keeping me from the room could ever keep me from worrying about Cassie now. I’ve already heard enough.

“Water would be great,” Karen says, but like she couldn’t want anything less. She’s just following my dad’s lead. “Thank you.”

“Wylie,” my dad presses when I stay put, staring at the carpet.

But I have to be careful. If I seem like I’m losing it, he’ll make me go upstairs for good. He might even tell Karen to leave before I find out what’s going on. And I need to know. Even after everything that’s happened between us, even though this isn’t exactly my first-ever Cassie-related emergency, I still care about what happens to her. I always will.

I can tell by the look on my dad’s face. He wants to wrap this up ASAP and send Karen on her way. He’ll do that, too, no matter how much he likes Karen and Cassie. Since the accident, he’s drawn a lot of new lines in the sand—with my grandparents, teachers, doctors, neighbors. Anything to protect Gideon and me. More me, it’s true. Gideon has always been the “more resilient” one. That’s what people say when they think I’m not listening. And if they’re my grandmother—my dad’s mom—they even say it to my face. She cornered me at the house right after my mom’s funeral and told me all about how I should really try to be more like Gideon. That was right before my dad asked her to never visit again.

The truth is, my grandmother never liked me. I remind her too much of my mom, who she also never liked. But she was right about Gideon. He does bounce back more easily than me. He always has. Feelings, especially the bad ones, roll right off him—probably something having to do with that huge computer brain of his—while on me they get stuck, forever trapped in my gooey, inescapable mess. Don’t get me wrong, Gideon’s definitely been sad. He misses our mom, but he’s mostly stoic like my dad. I’m more like our mom. Except if her feelings were always cranked up to full volume, mine have blown out the speakers.

“Okay, water, fine,” I say to my dad, who’s still eyeballing me. “I’m going.”

Cassie and I became friends in a bathroom. Hiding in the bathroom of Samuel F. Smith Memorial Middle School, to be exact. It was December of sixth grade and I’d headed to the bathroom, planning to crouch up on a toilet through all of homeroom if I had to. It didn’t occur to me that someone else might have the same idea when I banged hard on the door in the last stall.

“Ow!” came a yelp when the not-locked door swung back and banged into someone. “What the hell!”

“Oh, sorry.” My face flushed. “I didn’t see any feet.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of the whole point.” The girl sounded pissed. When she finally opened the door, she looked it, too. Cassie—the new girl, or newish girl—was squatting up on the toilet, fully clothed, just like I had planned on doing myself. She stared at me for a minute, then rolled her eyes as she shifted to the side, freeing up some of the seat for me. “Well, don’t just stand there. Come on. Before someone sees you.”

Cassie and I knew of each other—our school wasn’t that big—but we weren’t friends. Cassie didn’t really have any friends yet. And I felt bad about the way some kids picked on her. It was her snug sweatpants or her short, knotted curls or the fact that she was bigger than the other girls—both her boobs and her belly. No one cut Cassie a break because she was a sports star either. She might have single-handedly made our soccer team decent for the first time that fall, but all they cared about was that she didn’t look the part. I did feel bad, but it wasn’t like I could be Cassie’s defender or something. Not when I was barely hanging on myself.

“So what brings you to the bowl of shame?” Cassie asked once our knees were touching over the open water of the toilet.

There was no way I was going to tell her anything. Except then suddenly, all I wanted was to tell her everything.

“All my friends hate me,” I began. “And they’re all in my homeroom.”

“Why do they hate you?” Cassie asked. I was glad she hadn’t tried to talk me out of them hating me straight off the bat. People love to talk you out of your bad feelings. (Believe me, I am an expert in this phenomenon.) Instead, she just seemed curious. “What happened?”

And so I told her all about how Maia, Stephanie, Brooke, and I had been a foursome since we were eight years old, but lately it had felt like the rest of them were in on some joke that was mostly about me. I’d still been hoping it was my imagination, though, right up until that Saturday night at the sleepover when they started interrogating me about my therapist. Maia’s mom volunteered in the school office and must have seen the note about me having to leave early for my first appointment with Dr. Shepard. And then had apparently decided to tell Maia, which I still couldn’t believe.

“Come on, Wylie. Tell us,” they’d chanted.

By then I was sweating already. Suddenly, the room began to spin. And then, it had happened.

“I didn’t even realize that I’d thrown up until after I’d heard the screams,” I said to Cassie. And I could still hear them ringing in my ears: “Oh my God!!” “Ew!!!”

“Oh, that sucks,” Cassie said. Like what I’d told her was important, but not really that alarming. “My basketball coach showed me his stuff yesterday. You know, Mr. Pritzer. He drove me home after practice and then he just whipped it out. And unfortunately, he’s my homeroom teacher.”

And she said it like her getting flashed wasn’t so terrible either, just kind of unfortunate.

“Oh,” I said, because I couldn’t think of what else to say and it made me embarrassed just imagining Mr. Pritzer doing that. “Ew.”

“Yeah, ew.” Cassie frowned and nodded. Now she looked sad.

“Did you tell your parents?”

“My mom won’t believe me.” Cassie shrugged. “That’s what happens when you lie a lot.”

“I believe you,” I said. And I did.

“Thanks.” Cassie smiled. “And I’m sorry you lost all your friends.” She nodded, pressing her lips together. “Good thing you’ve got a new one now.”

Out in the kitchen, I move fast, not waiting for the tap to run cold before sloppily filling a glass of water for Karen. The truth is, I’ve been waiting for a long time for the “big one” to happen where Cassie is concerned. Rescuing her has always been a thing—playing a human shield so she didn’t get beat up for talking shit about some huge eighth grader, bringing money down to the Rite Aid so she didn’t get reported for shoplifting a lipstick (Cassie doesn’t even wear lipstick). Harmless, stupid kid stuff.

This fall, though, things did take a dark turn. Cassie’s drinking was the biggest problem. And it wasn’t just how much (five or six beers in a single night?) or how often (two or three times a week?) that got me worried. That was kind of excessive for anyone, but for someone with Cassie’s genes, it was a total disaster. Once upon a time, she said herself that she should never drink. Because she loved her dad, but the last thing she wanted was to end up like him.

But then it was like Cassie decided to forget about all that. And boy, did she not like me reminding her. By a couple months into this year, our junior year, she was unraveling so fast it was like watching a spinning top. And the more worried I got, the angrier she became.

Luckily, Karen is still talking when I finally get back out to the living room. I might still catch some details that matter.

“Yeah, so …” She glances up at me and then clears her throat before going on. “I came home to see Cassie after school and she wasn’t there.”

The glass is definitely warm as I hand it to Karen. When she takes it, she doesn’t seem to notice. But she does finally notice my hair. I see the split second it happens. In her defense, Karen recovers pretty well, steadies her eyes before looking all the way shocked. Instead, she takes a sip of that bathtub water and smiles at me.

“Couldn’t Cassie just still be out then?” my dad asks. “It’s only dinnertime.”

“She was supposed to be home,” Karen says firmly. “She was grounded this whole week. Because she—well, I don’t even want to tell you what she called me.” And there it is. The tone. The I-hate-Cassie-a little-bit, maybe even more than she hates me. “I told her if she wasn’t home, I really was going to put a call into this boarding school I’d been looking into—you know, one of those therapeutic ones. And no, I’m not proud of that threat. That we’ve sunk as low as me shipping her off. But we have, that’s the honest truth. Anyway, I also found this.”

Karen fishes something out of her pocket and hands it to my dad. It’s Cassie’s ID bracelet.

“She hasn’t taken that bracelet off since the day I gave it to her three years ago.” Karen’s eyes fill with tears. “I didn’t even really mean it about that stupid school. I was just so worried. And angry. That’s the truth. I was angry, too.”

My dad looks down quizzically at the bracelet looped over his fingers, then at Karen again. “Maybe it fell off,” he says, his voice lifting like it’s a question.

“I found it on my pillow, Ben,” Karen says. “And it wasn’t there this morning. So Cassie must have come back at some point and left again. It was meant as a sign—like a ‘screw you, I’m out of here.’ I know it.” Karen turns to me then. “You haven’t heard from her, have you, Wylie?”

Back when things were still okay between us, Cassie and I wouldn’t have gone more than an hour without at least texting. But that’s not true anymore. I shake my head. “I haven’t talked to her in a while.”

It’s been a week at least, maybe longer. Being at home, it’s easy to lose track of the exact number of days. But it’s the longest stretch since the accident that we’ve gone without talking. It was bound to happen eventually: we couldn’t be pretend-friends forever. Because that’s all we were really doing when Cassie came back after the accident: pretending.

The accident happened in January, but Cassie and I had stopped talking the first time right after Thanksgiving. Nearly two long months, which, let’s face it, might as well be a lifetime when you’re sixteen. But the morning after the accident, Cassie had just showed up on our doorstep. My eyes had been burning so badly from crying that I’d thought I was seeing things. It wasn’t until Cassie had helped me change out of the clothes I’d been dressed in for two days that I began to believe she was real. And it wasn’t until after she’d pulled my hair out of its ragged, twisted bun, brushed it smooth, and braided it tight—like she was arming me for battle—that I knew how badly I needed her to stay.

I don’t know what Cassie has told Karen about our best-friend breakup and our temporary get-back-together. And it ended anyway a few weeks ago. But I can bet it’s not much. The two of them aren’t exactly close. And it’s not like the reasons we stopped talking reflect so well on Cassie.

“You haven’t talked to Cassie in a while?” my dad asks, surprised.

My mom knew about Cassie and me having a falling-out back when it first happened. She apparently just never told him. It is possible that I asked her not to—I don’t remember. But I do remember the day I told my mom that Cassie and I weren’t friends anymore. We were lying side by side on her bed, and when I was done talking, she said, “I would always want to be your friend.”

I shrug. “I think the last text I got from her was last week? Maybe on Tuesday.”

“Last week?” my dad asks, eyebrows all scrunched low.

The truth was, I really wasn’t sure. But it was the following Thursday now. And it was definitely at least a week since we’d spoken.