The Outliers

“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.”

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.

“Why are you even touching that!” my dad shouted. And so loud. “Put it back outside!”

“It’s not contagious, honey.” My mom smiled her beautiful, mischievous smile and raised an eyebrow. She was going to let the shouting go, apparently. She’d been doing that a lot lately—letting everything with my dad go—but I could tell she was starting to get annoyed. “You’ve got to keep your sense of humor, Ben. You know that.”

And my dad did used to have a sense of humor. He used to be really, really funny actually. In a way, that was even funnier, because of his whole stiff science-guy thing. But these days, he was so wound up. First, because he’d been working around the clock at the university trying to finish his study, then I guess his results were kind of disappointing. It wasn’t going to be officially published until February, but it was already finished. The icing on the cake, though, was him having to fire his favorite postdoc, Dr. Caton, because—according to my dad—he’d let “personal bias cloud his judgment.” Whatever that meant. We’d never met Dr. Caton—my dad wasn’t big on socializing—but from the day he hired him, he’d talked about the supposedly very young Dr. Caton (twenty-four and already with a PhD) like some kind of precious, unearthed jewel. I didn’t care, but it drove Gideon—our other resident science boy wonder—totally crazy. He was delighted when Dr. Caton got the ax.

My mom shrugged as she stepped over to pick up her half-eaten toast. She took another bite, the doll still gripped in her other hand, then placed the toast back down delicately, brushing the crumbs from her fingers as she walked back toward the foyer with the baby. She opened our front door and calmly tossed the doll outside. We all heard it go thud, thud, thud down the front steps. Gideon and I giggled. So did my mom. My dad did not. Instead, he headed for the phone.

“Who are you calling?” my mom asked.

“The police,” he said, like this should have been self-evident.

“Come on, Ben,” my mom said, crossing over to where he was standing. “I can give you one definite. You calling the police is exactly what they want: attention.”

“I can’t deal with this, Hope,” my dad said quietly, sad almost, as my mom took the phone from him and hung it up. Then she wrapped her arms around him and whispered something in his ear.

“You don’t have to deal with it,” she said as they separated, but loud enough that it seemed like she was saying it for my benefit. And weirdly, she did not even seem mad at my dad for making something that had happened to her all about him. “That’s why you have me.”

After my dad and Karen are gone, I sit on the living room couch in the dark, staring out our large bay window overlooking Walnut Hill Road, waiting for the lights from Gideon’s ride home from track practice. Neither of us even have our learner’s permits yet, though we’ve both been legally allowed to for two months now. Nothing like your mom dying in a car accident to kill your thirst for the open road. Gideon will probably learn to drive eventually. Bur I already know that I never will.

I peer again down the road for any sign of headlights. What is taking Gideon so long? He should have been home—well, just a few minutes ago, but still. Tonight, a few minutes feel like hours. It’s weird to be waiting on Gideon. His company is so prickly lately. But right now, I’d choose anything over being alone.

I did lock all the doors after my dad and Karen left, then checked them twice. And then a third time. Because you don’t have to tell me twice to worry. I checked the locks and then I checked anything and everything else that could even potentially jump out, burn up, or otherwise turn on me.

I’ve also checked my phone a dozen times for an answer to one of my texts to Cassie. I’ve sent four so far, and called her twice. But there’s been nothing. I would have sent more texts, but each one that goes unanswered makes me feel worse. Makes me more worried that this time, Cassie has finally gotten herself sunk into something so dark and deep that even I won’t be able to yank her back out, no matter how hard I try.

“Why are all the lights off?”

A voice behind me. When I spin around, heart racing, there’s Gideon, coat and backpack still on. He’s wearing sweatpants, his blond, shaggy hair damp against his forehead as he chews on what’s left of a Twizzler.

“Why did you do that, Gideon!”

“First of all, calm down.” He takes another bite. “Second of all, do what?”

“Sneak up on me, you stupid jerk!”

“Um, wow.” He holds up his hands like I’m pointing a gun at him, the half-chewed Twizzler flopping around in his fingers. He loves to point out whenever I’m acting nuts. Which, let’s face it, is most of the time lately.

Gideon is perpetually annoyed at me because he thinks it’s unfair that he gets less attention for being more normal. Like with the home tutor, for instance. Gideon is an insanely smart kid (though even he would admit I could easily crush him on any math test anywhere, any day), but he hates school even after moving to Stanton Prep so they could better accommodate his über-genius science needs. He thinks he should get to opt out, too. My dad had shut him down so fast, it had made my head spin.

“Did Stephen drive you home?” I look back out the window. Did I somehow miss the car? Am I now not seeing things right? “I didn’t see him.”

“We came the back way. We stopped at Duffy’s for fries with some of the other guys.” He shrugs: hanging out like all the normal kids with lots of friends do. That’s what the shrug says. He so bad wants to be that kid. But I know that only Stephen is Gideon’s friend, sort of, and that the rest of the guys on the track team mostly put up with him because he’s willing to run everyone’s most-hated race, the two-mile, without complaining. Friends have never come so easily for Gideon, maybe because of how smart he is. Maybe just because of how he is period. “I came in the back door.”

“You should go take a shower.” I turn back to the window. I want him to go, leave me alone, not pick a fight.

“Who died and left you in charge?” When I look back at him, he puts a hand over his mouth and opens his eyes wide in fake shock. “Oh snap. Get it? Who died? You gotta admit, that was pretty funny.” I scowl at him. Gideon always tries to make jokes about our mom being gone. It makes him feel better. And it makes me feel worse. My mom was right, we really are opposite twins. Forever repelling each other, like the wrong sides of a magnet. “Come on, it was.”

“It wasn’t funny.”

“Fine, whatever.” Gideon shrugs as he turns toward the stairs. Does he actually look hurt? It’s so hard to tell with him, but I know there’s a heart in there somewhere. And these days he’s just trying to survive. We both are. “When is Dad going to be back? I have to ask him something about my chem homework.”

Having exhausted all of Stanton Prep’s AP offerings, Gideon now takes science classes at Boston College. I don’t know if he really likes science or if it’s just a way to get closer to our dad. It’s not the worst call. One surefire way to get more attention from our dad is to somehow get mixed in with his work. I wouldn’t say our dad loves his work more than us, but sometimes it does feel like we’re neck and neck.

“I don’t know, maybe a couple hours,” I say.

I should have been more vague. Since the accident, our dad never goes out that long. It’s only going to lead to more questions. And I don’t want to talk to Gideon about Cassie. He’ll end up saying something rude. Gideon has never liked Cassie. Or, more precisely, he has always really liked her, but she never gave him the time of day. So he decided to hate her instead. Right now, I can’t take him insulting her down to a more manageable size. Or worse, trying to make me worry more just for the fun of it.

“A couple hours? Where did he go?”

“To help Karen.”

“Help her with what?”

Ugh. Too late. He’s already too interested. “She doesn’t know where Cassie is.” I shrug. No big deal.

For a split second, Gideon almost looks worried for real. But then his mouth pulls down into his fake-thoughtful frown. “Huh. Now I get it,” he says.

I hate it, but I’m going to have no choice but to play his game. “Get what, Gideon?”

“Why Cassie was acting all freaky when she came by here,” he says, like I should know what he’s talking about. “I mean I don’t know exactly why. But it makes sense that she’d be acting weird if she was about to take off.”

“Wait, Cassie came here?” My heart skips a beat. “When?”

Gideon rubs his chin, then looks up at the ceiling. “Um, I think it was—let’s see.” He counts on his fingers like he’s measuring the days or even weeks. “Yesterday. Yup, that’s it, in the afternoon.”

Jerk.

“Yesterday?” I say, trying not to get mad. Gideon wants to get under my skin, that’s the whole point. “Why didn’t you tell me she was here?”

“She didn’t want me to.” He shrugs. “She just wanted to drop off the note.”

“What note, Gideon?” I’m up off the couch now. “You didn’t give me any note.”

“Huh,” he says again, nodding. Like he’s confused, even though he obviously isn’t. Then he starts patting around his sweatshirt pockets and digging in his jeans. “Ah, here it is.” He pulls out a folded page and holds it up into the air, pulling it farther away when I grab for it. “Oh wait, now I remember why I didn’t give it to you. I knocked on the bathroom door to tell you about it, and you yelled, ‘Go away, jerk!’”

He’s right. I did that. Screamed it, actually. Since the accident, my anxiety has been back with such Technicolor vengeance. Each day is mostly a thing I survive. But some are even crappier than others. And yesterday was one of the super-crap ones. By the time I got into the shower, hoping it would help me calm down, all I wanted to do was scream—at myself, at the world. I definitely couldn’t deal with Gideon. If I thought apologizing to him wouldn’t just make things worse, I would have. And I am kind of sorry. Deep down, Gideon doesn’t mean to be a jerk. But the sweet part of him is buried so deep these days, it won’t be able to keep the rest of Gideon from kicking me when I’m down.

“Give me the note, Gideon. Please.”

He lifts his hand and the note even higher in the air. I’ve always been on the tall side, but Gideon is pushing six feet. There’s no way I can grab it. “Maybe I should read it,” he says. “You two aren’t even really friends anymore. Probably because Cassie got tired of everything being all about you and your problems all the time.”

“Gideon, if you don’t give me that note, I’m going to tell Dad I saw you smoking pot with Stephen the other day.”

It’s true—out in our small square of a backyard, next to the shed. From the look of it, it was Gideon’s first time. He’s got his issues, but drugs aren’t one of them. But even if it was just a one-off, I’ll still use it if I have to. The color has gone out of Gideon’s face. And there’s this look in his eyes. Like now he really, really hates me. I want not to care. But I do. I always do.

“Whatever,” he says finally, throwing Cassie’s note at me. It hits the wall over my head and drops to the floor. “But if I was stuck with a messed-up best friend like you, I’d run away, too.”

And with that, Gideon turns and walks out of the living room, headed for the steps. I wait until he’s gone before I pick up the note.

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.

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.