The Outliers

“Anyway, I did speak to Maia and the other girls,” Karen goes on. “They said they last saw Cassie in school, though none of them could seem to remember exactly when.”

“Have you talked to Jasper?” I ask, trying not to sound like I’ve already decided that he is—in spirit if not in fact—100 percent responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened to Cassie.

Karen nods. “He exchanged texts with Cassie when she was on the bus on her way to school, but that’s the last time he heard from her. At least, supposedly.” She squints at me. “You don’t like Jasper, do you?”

“I don’t really know him, so I’m not sure my opinion means anything,” I say, even though I think just the opposite.

“You’re Cassie’s oldest friend,” Karen says. “Her only real friend, as far as I’m concerned. Your opinion means everything. You don’t think he would hurt her, do you?”

Do I think that Jasper would actually do something to Cassie? No. I think many bad things about Jasper, but I have no reason to think that. I do not think that.

“I don’t know,” I say, being vague on purpose. But I can’t even half accuse Jasper of something that serious just because I don’t like him. “No, I mean. I don’t think so.”

“And Vince hasn’t heard from her either?” my dad asks.

“Vince,” Karen huffs. “He’s hanging out with some new ‘girlfriend’ in the Florida Keys. Last I heard he was going to try to get his private detective’s license. Ridiculous.”

The insane part is that Cassie might actually call her dad. Cassie is crazy about Vince, despite everything. They email and text all the time. It’s their distaste for Karen that unites them.

“You should probably try to reach him,” my dad suggests gently. Then he heads over to the counter, picks up his wallet, and peers at the little hooks on the wall where we hang our keys. “Just in case. And you and I will go out looking for her.”

Karen nods as she looks down at her fingers, still working them open and closed around the mostly shredded tissue.

“He’s going to blame me, you know. Like if I wasn’t such a hateable hardass, Cassie would still be—” Karen clamps her hand over her mouth when her voice cuts out. “And he’ll be right. That’s the worst part. Vince has problems, but he and Cassie—” She shakes her head. “They always connected. Maybe if I—”

“Nothing is that simple. Not with kids, not with anything,” my dad says as he finally finds his keys in a drawer. “Come on, let’s stop back at your place first. Make sure there’s no sign of Cassie there. We’ll call Vince on the way. I’ll even talk to him if you want.” My dad steps toward the front door but pauses when he notices Karen’s feet. “Oh, wait, your shoes.”

“That’s okay,” she says with an embarrassed wave of her hand. Even now, trying to reclaim a small scrap of perfect. “I’ll be fine. I drove here this ridiculous way. I can get back home.”

“What if we end up having to stop someplace else? No, no, you need shoes. You can borrow a pair of Hope’s.”

Hope’s? So casually, too, like he didn’t just offer Karen a sheet of my skin. Of course, it’s not like he can offer Karen a pair of my spare shoes. After a panic-fueled anti-hoarder’s episode after the funeral, I only have one pair of shoes left. The ones I’m wearing. But it’s the way my dad said it: like it would be nothing to give away all my mom’s things.

Sometimes I wonder if my dad had stopped loving my mom even before she died. I have evidence to support this theory: their fight, namely. After an entire life of basically never a mean word between them, they had suddenly been at each other constantly in the weeks before the accident. And not really loving her would definitely explain why he hasn’t seemed as broken up as me in the days since she died.

Don’t do it, I think as he moves toward the steps for her shoes. I will never forgive you if you do. Luckily, he stops when his phone buzzes in his hand.

He looks down at it. “I’m sorry, but this is Dr. Simons.” Saved by my dad’s only friend: Dr. Simons. The one person he will always drop everything for. That never bothered me before. But right now, it is seriously pissing me off. “Can you take Karen upstairs, Wylie? See if there’s something of your mom’s that will fit her?”

I just glare at him.

“Are you okay?” he asks, when I still don’t move. His face is tight.

“Yeah,” I say finally, because he’ll probably use me being angry as more proof that we shouldn’t be helping Karen. “I’m awesome.”

But the whole way upstairs, I still try to think of an excuse not to give Karen the shoes. One that doesn’t seem crazy. One that my mom would approve of. Because my mom would want me to give Karen whatever she needs. You can do it, she’d say if she was there. I know you can.

Soon enough, Karen is behind me in my parents’ room as I stand frozen in front of their closet. We’re only lending them, I remind myself, as I pull open the closet door and crouch down in front of my mom’s side of the closet. I close my eyes and try not to take in her smell as I feel around blindly for her shoes. Finally, my hands land on what I think are a pair of low dress boots that my mom only wore once or twice. But I feel sick when I open my eyes and see what I’ve pulled out instead. My mom’s old Doc Martens, the ones she loved so much she had the heels replaced twice.

“I know Cassie misses you,” Karen says while I’m still bent over my mom’s Doc Martens like an animal protecting its last meal. “Because I still know how she really feels. Even if she thinks I don’t. And I know that right now, Cassie’s totally lost and what she really needs is a good friend. A friend like you.”

Karen comes over and kneels next to me. I feel her look from me to the boots and back again. Then she leans forward and reaches into the closet herself. A second later, she pulls out a pair of bright-white, brand-new tennis shoes. The ones that my grandmother—my dad’s mom—gave to my mom years ago, probably because my mom always hated tennis.

“What about these instead?” Karen asks.

Yes, I would say if I wasn’t so afraid my voice would crack. Those would be much, much better.

“Do you think Cassie at least knows how much I love her?” Karen asks, rocking back to sitting, her eyes still on the sneakers. “Because things haven’t been easy between us lately. Let’s face it, they’ve never been easy. And I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I could have done so many things, so much better. But I was always trying. And I really do love her. She knows that, right?”

Cassie has said so many awful things about her mom—selfish, self-involved, fat-shaming, judgmental, superficial. But the thing that Cassie said most often was that she didn’t think Karen loved her. Not in the way a mom should.

“Yeah,” I say, before I wait too long and it sounds like the lie that it is. “Cassie knows that, definitely.”

“Thank God.” Karen sounds so relieved that it kind of breaks my heart for her. “That’s really—that’s good.”

Karen puts the sneakers down, then reaches over to take my hand in hers, rubbing my knuckles in a mom-ish way that makes my throat squeeze tight. Her other hand moves to the hacked remains of my wavy brown hair, her fingers drifting away before they reach its most jagged ends.

The night before I’d glimpsed myself in the hallway mirror and for a second—one fucked-up second—I thought I was her. My mom. That she was there, warm and alive and well again. With my hair longer, I was starting to look exactly like her. And last night I needed not to. I needed to know I’d never again mistake myself for her. Never again would I believe for one awfully beautiful moment that she had come home.

So I grabbed the scissors and leaned over the bathroom sink to cut my hair. So that it, that I, looked nothing like her. I nailed the different part. That’s for sure. I’d been avoiding mirrors ever since, but I could tell it was bad from the freaked-out look that had passed over my dad’s face when he first saw me. But even worse, actually, was the way Gideon—always up for making me feel bad—didn’t say a word.

When I look up at Karen, she smiles, her eyes glistening as she wraps a hand gently around my head and pulls it to her neck. And I’m pretty sure it’s because she needs to be holding someone. Even more, maybe, than I need to be held. She strokes my hair. Don’t cry, I tell myself as my eyes start to burn. Please don’t cry.

“You’re going to be okay, you know,” she whispers. “Not now, but someday.”

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When Karen and I get back downstairs, my dad is just hanging up the phone. But instead of putting it down, he keeps it gripped in his hand, so tight his fingers are white at the edges. Something is wrong. Something new. Something bad on top of whatever is wrong with Cassie.

“What did Dr. Simons want?” I ask, because it was the conversation with him that freaked my dad out apparently.

Dr. Simons was my dad’s professor at Stanford. He’s a psychologist and a professor like my dad, but he studies peer pressure, not EI. Similar enough, I guess. And he has no family of his own anymore, so my dad is like his surrogate son. He’s always off teaching this place or that—England, Australia, Hong Kong—which is why we haven’t seen him since we were super-little kids. Lack of geographical proximity is probably part of what my dad likes about Dr. Simons. They are as close as two people, forever thousands of miles apart, can possibly be.

“He was just calling back to answer a question, something about my new data.” My dad waves a hand: nothing for you to worry about. And I so want to find that believable. But it is not. At all. My dad forces a bigger, even less convincing smile as he turns to Karen. “We ready? Wylie, just be sure to lock up once we’re gone, okay?” He says it casually, like it’s an ordinary, everyday request.

“Lock up?” I ask.

My dad has never thought to lock a door in his entire life. If it hadn’t been for my mom, he would have left for our annual two-week vacation on the Cape with our front door hanging wide open.

“Wylie, please,” my dad snaps, like he’s fed up with me and my obsessing, and fair enough, I guess. “Just lock the door. Until we know what’s happened to Cassie, I just—we should exercise all due care.”

That explanation would be a lot more believable if he didn’t look so freaked out. He hasn’t looked that spooked in ages. Not since the day the first baby came.

We were at the breakfast table a couple of days after Halloween when my mom found the first one. It was sitting there on our front porch when she went out to get the newspaper.

“I guess they get points for creativity,” my mom said as she came inside, holding up a plastic baby doll. Her nose crinkled as she peered at the red splattered all over it, which one could only hope was paint. “Much more vivid than the usual emails. I guess that’s the price you pay for page one. I should probably call Elaine and see if she got one, too.”

Elaine was the journalist my mom had been working with on a story about a coalition bombing in Syria. It had run that day on the front page of the Sunday Times, and it was my mom’s photographs of a bombed-out school that had stolen the show. She had always gotten her fair share of hate mail. A couple of times even left at our house. But nothing like a plastic baby.