The Outliers

I’m sorry, it reads in Cassie’s bubbly letters. You were right. About everything, I just wasn’t ready to hear it. But I’m ready now. For whatever happens. Xoxo C

For whatever happens? I read the words again, my fingers gripping the paper. My heart is thumping in my chest. I do not like the sound of that—like Cassie has made peace with something. Like people do before they—Cassie wouldn’t do something to herself, would she? No, I don’t think so. In the past few months, I’ve thought about putting an end to things, an end to me. But Cassie is not like me. She’s like a giant rubber ball. She always bounces back. It’s what defines her as a human being. She’s just out having one too many Smirnoff Watermelon Ices again. She has to be.

My stomach twists tighter as I read the words again. What was I “right” about exactly? That Cassie needed to stop drinking, put on some weight, take better care of herself? That Jasper wasn’t a person she should trust? That he would hurt her eventually? I don’t want to be right about any of those things anymore. Not when me being right could mean something awful for Cassie. And the truth is, I don’t know what she’s capable of anymore.

I pick up my phone to send Cassie yet another text. It might be worth saying I’m sorry, too. I was right to try to get her to stop drinking. I had good reason to be worried. But I did mix that up with other things that didn’t matter nearly as much, like the Rainbow Coalition and Jasper.

Just got your note. I’m sorry too. I should have been a better friend. Come home. Please. Whatever is going on, we’ll fix it together.

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I’m still staring down at my phone, willing a response from Cassie, when there’s a knock at our front door. Or did I imagine it? I’m hoping I might have when it comes again. Cassie? But the knock is harder and louder even than before with Karen. A bigger fist maybe, a heavier hand? Keep the doors locked. But I have to at least check to make sure it’s not Cassie.

I make my way over carefully to the foyer. I can hear the shower upstairs. Gideon can’t hear a thing. Not even if I scream. I suck in some air, tucking myself to the side so I can peek out the window without being seen.

There on our porch, with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, huge shoulders hiked up toward his perfect ears, is the very last person I want to see: Jasper Salt. He has on one of his trademark skintight T-shirts—short-sleeved, despite the cold—and slouched-just-right jeans. He’s staring down at his black Nikes, rocking back and forth like he’s freezing, but pretending it’s all good, man. Because that’s the way Jasper talks. Even though no one talks like that, not even in Long Beach, California, where Jasper’s from.

Jasper was already a sophomore when we started at Newton Regional High School, and he stood out from the start. There was the inhuman way he looked, of course, like he just walked out of a Gap ad, with glowing skin, bright-green eyes, and six-pack abs that you could detect even when he was wearing one of his baggy football or ice hockey jerseys.

The first time Cassie and I saw him was in the cafeteria at his usual table with all the other football players, all wearing their stupid jerseys for the first game. They were huge and loud, deliberately trying to draw attention to themselves. All except Jasper, their starting quarterback even as a sophomore, who never moved fast or raised his voice. He didn’t make threats, or hassle anyone. He was the calm and quiet sun around which the rest of them revolved.

But there was this energy underneath all that calm, tight and wound. Like inside he was a coiled spring no one wanted to see snap. Or snap again. Because Jasper had exploded at least once already. With that one legendary punch.

All the freshman girls couldn’t have cared less about Jasper’s supposed assault and battery, though. Actually, I think it might have made them love him even more. “He’s from L.A.,” they said. “I heard he has a movie agent.” “I heard his whole family moved here so he could play ice hockey.” “I heard he slept with twelve girls last year. All of them seniors.”

Twelve girls. One punch. What an asshole. That’s what I’m thinking as I step over to the door. Because I already know that Jasper showing up on my doorstep isn’t some kind of accident. It’s proof enough for me that he had something to do with what’s going on with Cassie. Where she is. What she’s up to. Or maybe why she left.

But I hesitate once my hand is on the doorknob. Maybe he’s here fishing for what other people know. I should play dumb. See what Jasper says first, let him dig himself a hole deep enough I can kick him into it later.

“Oh, hi.” Jasper looks surprised when I finally open the door. And, annoyingly, up close he is even better-looking than I remembered. He’s not my type, too pretty and too perfectly imperfect. And thinking about it now, I can only imagine how Cassie must feel with his attention fixed on her: special. The way she always wanted to feel. “I didn’t, um, think that anybody was home.”

Jasper’s eyes flick up to my hacked hair then. They snap right back down. He’s pretending not to notice the disaster that is the top of my head, which, I guess, is one tiny point in his favor.

“Well, here I am,” I say. I force myself to loosen my grip on the doorknob, hoping it might help relax the rest of me. “What’s up?”

“Can I come in?” Jasper asks, looking around behind him like there might be someone out there in the dark, watching him. “I’d rather explain inside.”

No. But I can’t say that while pretending I don’t know why he’s here.

“All right.” I step to the side but keep him blocked into the foyer. “What?”

I don’t want him any farther in the house, or my life. I just want him to tell me what he knows about Cassie and then be on his way. Because the longer Jasper stays, and the more it seems like he’s stalling, the tighter my chest is getting. And I am really not interested in having one of my episodes in front of him.

Jasper crosses and uncrosses his arms, lifts his shoulders even closer to his ears. Now he officially looks guilty. I press my lips together and swallow hard. He didn’t do something to Cassie, did he? I am not a member of the Jasper Salt fan club. I think he is a bad influence with a mean streak that everyone, for some reason, pretends doesn’t exist. But when I told Cassie’s mom that I didn’t think he would hurt her, I meant it.

“Cassie’s missing,” he begins finally. “And I, um, got a call a couple hours ago from her mom asking if I’d talked to her. But I haven’t since yesterday.” Well, there’s lie number one: Jasper told Karen that he’d texted with Cassie this morning. “Oh, wait, I mean, I guess we texted this morning.” Okay, fine. Back to zero lies, that I know of. But we are just getting started.

“She wasn’t in school?”

Jasper somehow walks right past me, uninvited, into my living room. That’s the kind of guy he is: convinced that he’s welcome everywhere.

“I don’t know for sure. We were in a fight,” he says, and kind of defensively. “I texted her this morning, but I was still kind of pissed. So I dodged her at school. Later Maia told me Cassie must have bagged school anyway. Have you seen her, or heard from her or anything?”

So the Rainbow Coalition lied to Karen about seeing Cassie in school.

“I haven’t talked to Cassie in days,” I say. And he must know that. “Why would you think I’d have heard from her?”

“Because I got this.” Jasper digs his phone out of his pocket and hands it to me. There’s a text from Cassie open on the screen: Go to Wylie’s house. That’s it. That’s the whole message. “You have no idea why she’d tell me to come here?”

“Me?” It actually sounds like he thinks I’m the one who’s hiding something. “I have absolutely no idea. Did you tell her mom that you got this?”

“I was about to, but then—” He motions for his phone back and moves his finger up a little on the screen before handing it back to me. “I got this one.”

Don’t tell anyone you heard from me. Especially my mom.

“Okay, but—”

He reaches for the phone again, tapping in search of yet another message. He holds up the phone a third time.

I messed up again. If you call my mom, she’ll call the police. And you know what will happen. Please, just go to Wylie’s. More soon.

“What the hell is going on?” I ask, and I sound angry. At Jasper. But I am sure this is somehow at least a little bit his fault.

“I have no idea what’s going on. I came here because that’s what her text said to do,” Jasper says, and now he sounds angry at me. “But who knows? Cassie has been acting weird lately.”

“What does that mean: ‘weird’?”

“Are you asking me the definition of the word ‘weird’?”

I just glare at him. At least it’s obvious now. He doesn’t like me either.

“Like distant or whatever,” he goes on. “I don’t know why.”

“And what does she mean about the police: ‘you know what will happen’?”

“I can’t tell you,” Jasper says.

“So you can come here and pump me for information, but not give any away?”

“It’s just—she was really embarrassed about some stuff that went down,” he says finally. “She wouldn’t want you, of all people, to know.”

Fuck you, Jasper Salt, I want to shout. You don’t know anything about me. And you don’t know anything about the real Cassie, the awesome person she was before you helped destroy her. But I can’t tell him off yet, not when he knows things that I don’t. Things that might help find Cassie.

“Trust me, I know lots of embarrassing things about Cassie,” I say. “We have been friends a really long time.”

And there are definitely secrets I know that Jasper does not. Things that Cassie would have been way too embarrassed to tell him. For instance, maybe Cassie peed her bed again, but this time her mom caught it. She did that after one of her first “hangouts” with the Rainbow Coalition before she and Jasper started talking.

She was really freaked out about it, especially because she’d also blacked out at the party. Didn’t even remember getting home. Blacking out had been one of her dad’s signature moves. Cassie was convinced he didn’t remember half the messed-up things he’d done. It was how Cassie managed not to hate him. Anything he didn’t remember didn’t get held against him. But even blacking out didn’t scare Cassie straight the way I’d hoped it would. Instead, the next time it happened, she decided it was funny.