Dear Cassie Part 26

"What does that mean?" I asked, trying to keep my tone even. If anyone else had said what Nez had just said to me, she would be nothing but a stain on the bed she was lying on.

"Oh, Ca.s.sie, I never took you as naive," she said.

I listened to the water in the shower, the noise like the static on a TV, like the roar in my ears as the medicine took effect at the clinic.

"I am so not naive," I replied. If anything, I was jaded. If anything, I had been through a h.e.l.l of a lot more than most seventeen-year-olds had. I certainly knew the world wasn't ice cream and unicorns and fake swear words.

I knew that even a boy's kiss wasn't enough to make everything okay for more than just a moment.

"You're gullible," Nez said, her head propped up on her hand. "It's the same thing."

She was right, even though I wasn't sure how she knew. I had believed that Aaron had liked me, that Ben was like me. I was stupid. I was gullible, but what the h.e.l.l did that have to do with her?

"Just answer my question so I can stop talking to you," I snarked, pulling at a string on my jeans, freshly washed-they felt tight after wearing the uniform for so long. "Will you tell anyone about me?"

"I can't," Nez said. "I don't know anything." She shrugged.

"What?" I couldn't believe it. She didn't know anything. What the h.e.l.l was all that about in the woods?

What the h.e.l.l was all that about the morning of the wildfire?

"What?" Nez mimicked, like she didn't owe me an explanation, which I guess she really didn't.

I could feel my mouth open and close. She didn't know. No one did. Nez had fooled me. But worse than that, I was speechless. Gullible, weak, stupid, speechless-was this the new Ca.s.sie? Or had I always been this way and been able to hide it with mean words, fists, and raging anger?

"Oh please," Nez said, putting a fluffy white pillow between her legs, like a cloud against the branches of a tree. "Of anyone, you should know that what people say doesn't mean p.o.o.p. Maybe you have a file," she said, "but I've never seen it. I just figured there had to be something majorly wrong with you or you wouldn't be here."

"You just figured," I said, my mouth finally able to make words.

"Yeah," she said, "I mean there's something majorly wrong with me," she said. She pointed at the bathroom door. "And there is definitely something majorly wrong with Troyer."

"What's majorly wrong with you?" I asked. I needed to know. Maybe she didn't really know my secret, but I needed to know hers. As far as I was concerned, she seemed pretty together, aside from her need to pounce on everything with a p.e.n.i.s.

"I lie. Can't stop lying," she said. "Apparently it's 'compulsive,'" she added, making air quotes.

"You're kidding," I said, thinking back to our twenty-seven days together, wondering if anything she'd said was true, and then remembering Ben's answer when I asked if he'd really been with her. Nez is f.u.c.king crazy. I guess she really was.

"I never had s.e.x with Stravalaci or Ben. I've really never had s.e.x with anyone." She shrugged. "I wrote all the letters I got myself, except for one. I sent them right before I left. I knew I wouldn't have mail, or enough to make people think I had that many guys who liked me."

"But why?" I asked.

"Do you need the definition of compulsive?" she asked, looking at me like I was an idiot.

"No, I mean, why do you do it?"

"Does it matter?" she asked, her coal-black eyes filling with what might have been tears, if she'd let them fall.

I watched her. Nez was just like me, majorly messed up and too afraid to admit why. Like Troyer, like everyone here, I guess, except Ben.

"No," I said.

"Whatever your deal is," Nez said, sitting up and putting the pillow on her lap, "your secret is safe with me, because I don't know what it is."

I should have been really p.i.s.sed off at her-and I was-but I also couldn't help thinking that Nez was no worse a person than I was. Sure, she had lied to me, she'd made a disease out of lying, but who hadn't I lied to?

"So what's your name anyway?" I asked.

"Ca.s.sie," she said, her face as empty as a starless sky.

"You've got to be f.u.c.king kidding me," I said.

She shrugged. "Wynona," she said.

"Are you still lying?" I asked.

"Not right now," she said, her eyes flicking to the closed bathroom door. The shower had stopped.

"Nice to finally meet you, Wynona," I said.

"Nice to finally meet you, Ca.s.sie," she said.

"Sorry about your nose," I said.

She touched it, like she had forgotten. "I guess I sort of deserved it."

"You did and you didn't," I said.

"Story of my life," she said.

I laughed. "Mine, too."

Troyer exited the bathroom, pink-cheeked. She sat on the bed next to me and started to comb through her hair, which looked like cooked spaghetti. She turned to me and Nez like she could tell something had happened, but like the friend she really was, she didn't ask what.

Rawe entered the room and threw granola bars at us. She was wearing her uniform, even though we were all back in our civilian clothes. I guess it was hard for her to let it go.

"So is this what we're doing today?" Nez asked, crunching on her granola bar.

It was something I would usually have asked, and I hated this middle-ground person I had become. It reminded me of Amy, someone who let other people talk for her because she was so afraid to talk for herself. But unlike Amy, I wasn't afraid. I was just filled up with other s.h.i.t, my thoughts making it hard for me to be as quick with a comeback as I used to. That was what I decided to go with instead of the apparent truth that being able to write down my feelings, feel my feelings, actually made me lose the need to lash out as much.

"What did you have in mind?" Rawe asked.

Honestly, what was she going to do? Hike us around the parking lot in a circle? Have us canoe in the indoor pool? Make us chop up our headboard?

"I don't know," Nez said. "Anything other than stare at this cottage cheese ceiling."

"You are still under my supervision. You are not free yet," Rawe said.

What I thought but didn't say was, I will never be free. Not until my secret isn't a secret anymore. What I knew but couldn't believe was, I really never was.

"The calls will come soon," Rawe said.

I looked at the phone. Would the calls about our flights come before I could tell my secret? Did I want them to?

"We could talk," Rawe said, looking right at me when she did. I guess she was still trying, and that said something about her. She had more faith than the rest of the girls put together. She was like Ben. She didn't give up.

"Sounds like just what I want to do," Nez said. "I hate Ca.s.sie and Troyer doesn't speak . . ."

"I hate you, too," I said. Even with my new, easier silence I wasn't able to let that one go. Nez admitting she was as messed up as I was certainly didn't make us best friends, but I guess it did make us best enemies. We'd come to an understanding, but that didn't mean we liked each other.

Rawe chewed on her granola bar. There was no way she was going to fix Nez, or any of us, in the next forty-eight hours. Whatever had started at Turning Pines wouldn't be complete just because we weren't there anymore. We were messed-up cases, sent here because they didn't know what else to do with us. People who were normal didn't stop talking, or lie all the time, or hate themselves so much that it was easier to just hate everyone else.

"Fine, turn on the TV," Rawe said.

Troyer grabbed the remote and clicked it on. She moved through the channels quickly, letting each one get a word out, like she was trying to have the TV say a sentence for her.

Rawe looked at me and shook her head. I suppose she pictured each time she'd tried to talk to me, how I'd turned her down cold. Like she'd said, she can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. But what about someone who needs to be?

2 f.u.c.king Days Left N o one left today. The phones stayed silent. We fell asleep with the TV on, wrappers from the vending machines covering our beds like shed coc.o.o.ns. I woke up and saw the light on in the bathroom with the door ajar. I found Troyer on the white tile floor with a watercolor set and papers with muted paintings all around.

"Close the door," she whispered.

"What are you doing?"

"What's it look like?" she asked, like I was stupid.

She had really turned into quite the smart-a.s.s since she'd started talking again.

"Grab a brush," she said, pointing to where they were piled next to her on the floor-black sticks, like the kindling we'd used to start our fires.

"You took all this from the art cabin?" I asked.

"I didn't know how long we would be in the woods for." She shrugged. She was painting a sky-a sunset, full of oranges, purples, and reds.

I sat against the tub. It felt cold, clammy on the back of my arms. "I'm not in the mood to paint," I said.

"When are you in the mood to do anything?" she asked, not looking up from her paper.

"You've really f.u.c.king gotten your voice back, haven't you?"

"Sorry," Troyer said, turning to me, her skin almost colorless in the overhead light. "It's just been a long time since I've been able to tell someone to do something." She smiled. "I kind of like it."

I picked up a brush and put a piece of blank paper in front of me on the floor. I was all ready to go for the red, but Troyer covered it with her hand. "Use a different color. It's time for you to use a different color."

I didn't fight her; she was right. If I'd learned anything in the woods, she was right.

I knew which color I needed to pick, but I also knew what picking it would mean. I stared at it and waited.

"Go on," Troyer said.

I dug into the blue, painting a wash over the paper at first, then I pointed the back end of the brush to stipple dots on top, all the tears from the day in the infirmary-small tears, big tears, falling down the page like rainwater, soaking through to the white tile.

"What is that?" Troyer asked, pointing at my painting.

"Sadness," I said, without even thinking about it.

"That's a lot of sadness," she said.

I nodded. It was.

"Is it yours?" she asked.

Troyer was newly confident and I could do nothing but applaud and surrender. "Yeah," I said. It was and there was more. Coming from the red I never thought would end, now there was blue. But the red had ended. Maybe the blue would, too.

I looked at Troyer's painting. It had transformed from a sunset to a beach scene, complete with a cottage, chairs, a striped umbrella.

"Our summer house. My favorite place," she said.

I looked down at my painting. Why couldn't I paint my favorite place, or a flower, or a f.u.c.king sky full of birds that looked like spastic Ws? Why did I paint blood, tears, the colors that coated me like a constant cloud?

"You okay?" Troyer asked.

"No," I said, the tears starting to come in real life.

"Why are you so sad?" Troyer asked.

"I'm not. I mean, I don't know what I am," I said, wiping my face, but they still came. I couldn't stop them.

"You should flush it," Troyer said.

"What?" I asked.

Troyer waited-strong, solid. "Your sadness," she said, picking up my painting and dismissing it. "Flush it down the toilet."

"That's not going to make it go away," I said, even though I didn't have any better ideas.

"It's symbolic, Ca.s.sie," she said.

I looked at her, Troyer, back and talking, in her real-world jeans and paint-splattered light blue T-shirt-such a different Troyer than she was when I first saw her. Such a different me than I was when I got out of the van that first day.

"You really are the daughter of psychologists," I said.

"Unfortunately, yes," she replied.

I wiped my eyes and caught my breath. The room looked fuzzy. My body felt bare, like someone had picked it clean of my organs. I had thought I was empty at the clinic, at the motel after, and then in the infirmary. But now I knew being empty would mean finally being free.

"Do it," she said.

"You're serious?" I asked.