First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text © Kimberly McCreight 2017

Cover illustration ©

Kimberly McCreight asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008115081

Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780008115098

Version: 2017-06-24

For every girl who’s been told she’s too sensitive.

For every woman who’s taught herself not to be.

EPIGRAPH

Life is a dream. ’Tis waking that kills us.

—Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Acknowledgments

Read More

Also by Kimberly McCreight

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. The things that you read here did not happen. At least, not yet.

PROLOGUE

I STAND IN THE DARK, barefoot and cold on the edge of the sharp rocks, staring out over the long stretch of black water in front of me. And I wonder if I really can make it all the way to that small light on the dock in the distance. It seems so impossibly far away, the water so frighteningly still like it’s just waiting for someone fool enough to try.

I am not a very strong swimmer, or not nearly strong enough. I’ve never made it that kind of distance. Not fully clothed, not in the darkness. Across unfamiliar water, with all the tricks a pinprick of light on the horizon can play, who knows what could go wrong? But we have no choice. They are coming for us. For me, actually. They are already here. Voices in the distance, creeping closer. It’s only a matter of time.

But the real crazy thing? These bad facts notwithstanding, deep down I do believe I can swim the mile or more to that dock. I know it, actually. Maybe that’s all that matters. Because if I have learned anything in these past weeks, it’s that strength is just another word for faith. And true courage lies in holding out hope.

And right now, it’s just me and my doubt at the water’s edge anyway. I know not to let that get the better of me. Instead, I need to trust my instincts.

So I take one last deep breath before I step forward and set my gaze on that faraway horizon. And then I start to swim.

1

I AM IN OUR FOYER staring at the text from Jasper. At that one word: Run.

For a minute. For an hour. Forever.

My heart drums against my rib cage as my eyes stay down. The six agents say things. Their names—Agent Klute and Agent Johansen and Agent something else and something else. Run. Don’t run. Run. Don’t run. They say other things: Department of Homeland Security. Ruling out a domestic security threat. The rest is just buzzing.

Run. Don’t run. Run. Don’t run.

Run.

I spin toward the steps, phone gripped like a hand grenade. Run first. Questions later. Quentin taught me that.

“Wylie?” my dad shouts after me. Stunned. Confused. Worried. “Wylie, what are you—”

Voices, jostling behind me as I pound toward the steps. Don’t look back. Don’t slow down. On and up the stairs. On and up. That’s what I need to do.

But why up? Shouldn’t I run out the back door and not deeper into the house? The upstairs bathroom and the slanted, notched part of the roof. That must be it. A way out. I grab the banister when my feet slip.

“Ms. Lang!” one of them calls. So close I can almost feel his breath.

“Stop! Leave her alone!” My dad sounds so angry I barely recognize his voice. Many more voices shout back at him. Gasping, thudding, a struggle. “You can’t just barge into our house!”

“Dr. Lang, calm down!”

“Hey! Stop!” The voice behind me again. Even closer now. I lunge forward as I hit the upstairs hall.

The bathroom. That’s where I need to go. Focus. Focus. Faster. Faster. Before he grabs me. The door isn’t far. And I’ll only need a second to open the window and crawl out. After a quick slide to the ground, I’ll do then what I have done before. Run. Like. Hell.

Down the hallway I pound, loud feet still just a stride behind me. “Wylie!” the man calls out, but stiff like he doesn’t want to admit that I even have a name.

“This is our house!” my dad shouts again. He sounds closer to the steps.

“Dr. Lang, you need to stay here!”

My eyes are locked on the bathroom door at the end of the hall. It seems so far away. The hallway endless. But I need to get to that door. Window up. Slide out. One step at a time. As fast as I possibly can.

“Ms. Lang!” The voice again, much closer. Too close. And nervous. He is near enough to grab me but is too afraid of hurting me. “Come on! Stop! What are you doing?”

Past the first door on the right. Two more left to go.

But then my foot catches on the carpet. I manage to get my hands up at the very last second so that it’s my wrist that cracks hard against the wall, and then my shoulder instead of my face. Still, the shooting pain makes me feel dizzy as I hit the ground. I think I might vomit as I roll into myself, cradling my arm against my stomach. I’m afraid to look down. Terrified the bone might be poking through.

“Jesus, are you okay?” The agent has stopped in front of me. I can now see he’s the short one with the overly muscular arms that stick out stiffly from his sides. And he is definitely as nervous as he sounded. But also annoyed. He looks up and down the hall like he’s checking for witnesses. “Damn it. I told you not to run.”

A FEW MINUTES later, I am sitting on the slouched couch in our small living room as my dad wraps an ice pack around my throbbing wrist. The pain is making my brain vibrate. The men have silently positioned themselves so that they now block the door and the stairs and the hallway toward the back. Each and every one of the possible exits. They look even bigger inside the compact frame of our old Victorian home than they did outside. There is definitely no way out now.

“I don’t think it’s broken,” Agent Klute announces, peering at my arm. But not nearly close enough to make that kind of assessment.

My dad, on his feet in front of me, turns around and gets right in Agent Klute’s face. He looks so tiny by comparison, like a little boy.

“Get the hell out of my house,” he snaps, pointing toward the door. “Now, I mean it. All of you out.”

Like he will try to remove Klute by force if he has to. My dad’s fury has made him blind to their difference in size. He would die trying to protect me, I can see that so clearly now. I wish I had known it before. I’m not sure what it would have changed about what happened at the camp. Everything maybe.

“I’m afraid we can’t leave, Dr. Lang.” Klute lowers his head. “Not until Wylie answers our questions.”

He is trying to appear unthreatening. Apologetic. It doesn’t work. Especially because he doesn’t feel sorry. I can tell. I can read his feelings well enough to have no doubt. Actually, Agent Klute feels so very little. It’s chilling. My dad steps closer, his anger rising.

“You can’t just barge into my home and chase after my daughter. She is the victim here,” my dad says. “Even if she was a criminal, you need a warrant to be in someone’s home. It’s not legal. God help you if her wrist is broken.”

“To be clear, Dr. Lang, your daughter ran from federal agents. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”

My dad almost laughs. Then he presses his fingertips to his mouth, as if in prayer. I have never seen him this angry before. Rage has changed the shape of his face. But I can feel him trying so hard to stay calm. To do what needs to be done.

“Get out. Get out. Get out,” my dad says—slow and quiet and steady. Like a drumbeat. “Right now. Or so help me God—”

“As I said, we can’t do that.” Agent Klute is still so freakishly calm. “Wylie is a material witness to a multiple homicide that could be linked to domestic terrorism. We need her to come with us now and answer some questions. That’s all.”

“Ha!” my dad huffs. “I’m calling a lawyer.”

What lawyer? I think as my dad grabs for his phone and dials. And yet he seems so confident as he puts the phone to his ear. Time stretches out as we stand there, waiting for someone to answer his call, for my dad to speak. I can feel Agent Klute staring at me. I try not to look back at him, but I cannot help myself.

Sure enough, his cold, black eyes are locked on me, his mouth hanging open a little so that I can see his huge white teeth. I imagine them biting into me. But I don’t sense any of the hostile feelings I would expect to be coming from him—no annoyance or suspicion or aggravation. There is only one thing: pity. And, it turns out, that is so much more terrifying.

I cross my arms tight as my stomach balls up. Maybe I should just answer their questions. Maybe that would make this all go away faster. Except I also have the most awful sense that—no matter what I say—this is the beginning of something and not the end.

Breathe, I remind myself. Breathe. Because the room is narrowing, the floor beginning to shift underfoot. And this is definitely not the time to black out. I’ve been an Outlier for thirty-six hours, but I know I am still capable of totally losing it.

“Hi, Rachel, it’s Ben,” my dad finally says into the phone. “I need you to call me back as soon as you can. It’s an emergency.”

Rachel. Right. Of course my dad would call her. Rachel was my mom’s friend. Or ex–best friend. After years of her and my mom being out of touch, Rachel appeared out of nowhere at my mom’s funeral. Ever since, she’s been like some kind of rash we can’t get rid of. She wants to help. Or so she claims. My dad says it’s probably her way of coping with her grief. If you ask me, what—or who—she actually wants is my dad. Regardless, the whole thing is weird. She is weird, and I don’t trust her.

But like her or not, Rachel is a criminal defense attorney. She would know what to do in a situation like this. And Rachel might be a totally shitty person—the details of their falling-out were never something my mom would share, but even she always said that Rachel was the person she’d call if she ever found herself in real trouble, because “Rachel could keep a bragging serial killer out of prison.” And my mom didn’t mean it as a compliment.

“Dr. Lang, if Wylie has nothing to hide, it shouldn’t be a problem for her to talk to us,” Agent Klute says when my dad hangs up.

“Maybe it would be less of a problem if you hadn’t tackled me,” I say, because it seems like my dad could use some help.

“Hey, you fell!” the short agent pipes up. “I didn’t touch you.”

That’s true, of course, but it hardly feels like the important point.

Agent Klute frowns at me. None of this is going the way it was supposed to. And now he is aggravated, but only a little. Like he’s just gotten a small drop of soup on an otherwise dark shirt. “I can assure you, Dr. Lang, we have extremely broad authority to question witnesses in cases of suspected terrorism. And we don’t need a warrant. Wylie is not under arrest. At least not yet.”

“After that”—my dad points to me, my arm specifically—“the only way we’re answering your questions is if our lawyer tells us we have to.”

Agent Klute takes a breath. “Fine. When will she be here?”

“I don’t know,” my dad says, trying to sound like this gives him the upper hand. Though he knows that it does not. And he’s worried about where this situation is headed. I can feel that loud and clear.

Agent Klute stares blankly at my dad. “We’ll just wait for your lawyer then. For as long as it takes.”

FOR A WHILE after, a half hour maybe, my dad and I sit in silence, side by side on the couch. The agents stand as still as statues in each corner. Agent Klute is the only one who moves, pacing as he sends texts. He’s getting more agitated with each one, our floor creaking eerily under his heavy feet.

I want to text Jasper, but who knows what he will say? And if the agents do bring me in for questioning, they could easily take my phone. It’s safer to wait to talk to Jasper until after they are gone.

My dad calls Rachel two more times, but both calls go to voice mail. And so we wait some more. Thirty more minutes go by. Then an hour. I cannot believe how uncomfortable our living room couch is. I don’t think anyone has ever sat on it that long, definitely not me. Eventually, I need to use the bathroom, but I can’t bear the thought of someone going with me. And I am sure they will.

I’m just beginning to think I’ll have no choice but to bear bathroom babysitters when Agent Klute’s phone vibrates loudly in his hand. “Excuse me, I need to take this call,” he says, nodding at the other agents, letting them know they are temporarily in charge before stepping outside the house.

As the front door closes behind Agent Klute, my dad’s phone finally rings. “Rachel,” he answers, desperate and relieved. He’s quiet, listening for a minute. “Well, not great to be honest. Could you come over? It’s kind of an emergency. No, no, nothing like that.” He pauses and takes a deep breath as he stands. But he doesn’t actually go anywhere. He just hovers there in front of the couch. On his feet, he seems so unsteady, like part of him is disintegrating. “There are some federal agents here, and they want to interview Wylie and I’m just—she’s been through a lot, and I want to schedule it for another time.” Silence again as Rachel responds. “I did. They refused. They said because this has to do with domestic terrorism and Wylie’s not a suspect …” More silence. “Yeah, okay. Okay. Thank you, Rachel.”

He seems better, more hopeful when he turns back to me. “What did she say?” I ask.

“That we’re doing the right thing,” he says. “We should just wait here. She’s on her way.”

MY DAD STILL has the phone in his hand when Agent Klute steps back inside the house. “We’ll be in touch soon, Dr. Lang,” Klute says matter-of-factly. As if this is an extension of a conversation we were already having. As if this was already agreed upon. “We’ll schedule another time for that interview.”

But why? Because I am not buying that Agent Klute is taking off because he’s afraid of some lawyer he’s never met. He doesn’t even know Rachel finally called back. Klute nods in the direction of his men. No, they are leaving for their own reasons. Bad ones.

“Where are you going?” I ask though I would probably be much better off not saying a word. It’s not as if I want them to stay.

When Agent Klute looks at me, I feel it again: pity. And it’s worse this time. So definitive and deep. He nods again. “We’ll be in touch.”

I watch as Klute and his men gather together and disappear out the door. And I imagine it like that eerily quiet moment when the tide gets pulled out to sea, right before a tsunami crashes back to shore. Silent and astonishing and totally terrifying.

2
Six weeks later

I OPEN MY EYES TO DARKNESS. My bedroom. The middle of the night. Jasper calling. Without checking, I already know it is him. But I don’t reach for my phone. Sometimes he only calls once and hangs up. And tonight, for the first time in a long time, all I want to do is sleep.

Ever since we got back from Maine six weeks ago, Jasper’s late-night calls have become an everyday thing. Jasper is on his new phone, of course. Because it hadn’t been him who sent the text telling me to run that day all those weeks ago when the agents were standing at my door.

As soon as Agent Klute and his friends had left our house, I called Jasper back—wanting to be sure he was okay, wanting to know why exactly he had told me to run. But he hadn’t answered his phone. After two more hours of calling and being unable to track down a landline number for Jasper’s family, I’d insisted—over my dad’s strong objection—that we drive over to Jasper’s house and check on him.

Jasper had been completely fine when he’d finally answered the door—sleepy and confused, but fine. He didn’t even have his phone, hadn’t seen it since Quentin had taken it from him at the camp.

The local police had found my phone in the main cabin and had returned it to me that morning during one of the many interviews at the rest stop. But Jasper and I were being questioned separately then. I had just assumed he had gotten his back, too. Actually, I hadn’t thought about it at all. But the officers had never found Jasper’s phone.

Someone had told me to run at the exact right moment, though. And to what terrible end I could only imagine. Maybe they had been hoping that running would get me killed.

My dad did contact Agent Klute later when we realized the message hadn’t come from Jasper. Klute had agreed to look into the text and then sometime later proclaimed the whole thing to be some kind of prank. We did press him for details. A prank didn’t make sense. But Agent Klute stopped returning our calls. And it was hard to object to that when we also never wanted to hear from him again.

My phone chirps again now and I feel around for it on the nightstand. Think again about how I should change it to some less jarring ringtone. But then, I’ll stay jumpy regardless of my ringtone.

It’s a big achievement that I was asleep at all. Neither Jasper nor I have slept much since we got back from Maine—too much regret, too much guilt. Instead, we survive the endless nights on the phone, talking about everything and nothing. And I lie on my bed, staring at the old photos that line my bedroom walls, thinking I should take them down because they remind me of my mom. Knowing that is the reason I never will.

Jasper and I try to keep our conversations light, to help blot out the darkness. Maybe that’s exactly why it doesn’t work. The “what-ifs” of the choices we made that night as we drove north—“what if” we’d told Cassie’s mom right away, “what if” we’d ignored Cassie and had gone to different police earlier—are way too loud and angry by comparison. But all the talking has made Jasper and me closer. Sometimes I wonder how long it will last or how real it can be, this friendship born out of so much awfulness. Other times, I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to think too hard about anything. There are too many questions I don’t know how to answer.

In her usual therapist way, Dr. Shepard has said she doesn’t think it’s a good idea for us to rehash too much, and neither do I. Jasper can’t help himself, though. We both have our what-ifs, sure, but it was Jasper who straight-out blamed Cassie for getting us locked in the camp. I say the same thing every time he brings it up: No, it is not your fault, Jasper. Cassie is dead because of Quentin, not you. And that is what I think.

Jasper doesn’t believe me, though. Sometimes when I look in his eyes, I feel like I am watching someone slowly starve to death. And I am standing right there, my arms filled with food.

Not that I am totally fine now by comparison. I still have horrible nightmares, and every day I cry at least once. Normal signs of grief and trauma, Dr. Shepard says. My anxiety didn’t disappear the second I was told I was an Outlier, either.

But these days there is less oxygen fanning the flames. I am working on separating out other people’s emotions from my own anxiety. There are little differences, it turns out, in the way each feels. My own anxiety is colder, deeper in my gut, while other people’s feelings sit higher in my chest. And now Dr. Shepard’s breathing exercises and her mindfulness meditations and her positive self-talk—things she has always advised—are actually starting to work, probably because I am more willing to believe they will.

Finally, I lay my hands on my phone, almost knocking it to the ground before I answer.

“Hey,” comes out garbled. I clear my throat. “What’s up?”

“Shit, were you sleeping?” Jasper asks. He sounds almost hurt, betrayed by my lack of insomnia.

“Um, not really,” I lie. “I was just—what’s up?” Then I remember why he’s probably called so late. Because this is late, even for him. “Oh, wait, the dinner with your mom. How was it?”

Jasper was supposed to tell her that he’s having second thoughts about playing hockey for Boston College. And by second thoughts, I mean he’s totally changed his mind. The summer camp for incoming freshmen starts in a few days, and he doesn’t plan on going. And BC isn’t going to pay his way on an athletic scholarship if he isn’t playing hockey. No hockey, no Boston College.

But Jasper is totally okay with this. Completely. He isn’t even sure he wants to go to college anymore. In fact, talking about bagging Boston College is the only time Jasper sounds remotely happy these days. Though I am fairly sure that’s because never playing hockey again is his own punishment for what happened to Cassie. Because as much as Jasper’s mom pushed him into the sport, he also loves it. Turning his back on it is a way to make himself suffer.

“Dinner was okay,” Jasper says. But he sounds distracted, like this isn’t at all why he called.

“What did she say?” I push myself up in bed and turn on the light.

“Say? About what?”

“Um, the hockey?” I ask, hoping my tone will bring him back around. “Are you okay? You sound really out of it.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.” It’s totally unconvincing. “The thing with my mom didn’t go well. But, I mean, it’s not like I thought it would.” He doesn’t sound upset either, just totally flat. I wait for him to get into details, but he stays quiet.

“Is she going to let you drop out?” I ask as my eyes settle on my photograph of the old woman and her plaid bag and all those crumbs. The one that Jasper called depressing that first time he was in my house, the day we raced off in search of Cassie. I wonder if he’d see it the same way now.

“Define ‘let,’” he says, and then tries to laugh, but it’s wheezy and hollow.

My body tightens. “Jasper, come on, what happened?”

“Oh, you know, kind of what I expected,” he says. He’s trying to rally, but I can hear the effort in his voice. I can feel it, too, even over the phone. “Except worse, I guess.”

“Worse how?” I ask, though maybe I should be distracting him instead of pressing for details. As usual with Jasper these days, I feel totally out of my depth.

“My mom said if I don’t play hockey—go to the camp and whatever—I can’t live under her roof.” He pauses and sighs. “Listen, it’s not like she was going to change into this totally different person because I almost died.” I’m not sure if he means this as a joke. But the weird tightness in his voice is pure sadness. It makes my own chest ache.

“I’m sorry.” I want there to be something else to say. But anything more would be a lie and I know what those feel like. Jasper deserves better.

“Maybe she’s got a point.”

“So you’re thinking of playing after all?” I sound too hopeful. I can’t help it. I don’t like Jasper’s mother, but I agree that he should go to Boston College and play hockey. He’s too lost right now to cut himself free from the one thing that still brings him joy.

“No way,” he says, like that’s the most absurd suggestion ever. “I’m definitely not playing.”

My heart has picked up speed. Yes, there is a line between me reading Jasper’s bad feelings and me being anxious, but it is still super blurry. All I can say for sure is that this conversation is making me really worried.

Whether that’s because of my feelings or Jasper’s feelings is still up for debate.

“SO I MADE it to your actual office,” I said to Dr. Shepard in our first face-to-face meeting a week after the camp. I was fishing for praise. All that trauma and there I was, getting myself out of the house.

She nodded at me and almost smiled, looking as pretty and petite as she always did in her big red chair. Still like Alice in Wonderland shrunk down to nothing. I was relieved that hadn’t changed.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Dr. Shepard said.

It wasn’t exactly the job-well-done parade I was hoping for. But that was Dr. Shepard’s style: don’t make too much out of anything. Not the good or the bad. She wanted me to have expectations for myself, but she wanted to be sure I knew she didn’t have any of her own.

We chatted then for a while: how was I spending my days, how were things at home? But there was only so much dancing around what had happened at the camp that we could do.

“You know, I felt less anxious while I was going after Cassie,” I said, finally diving into the middle, probably a little too aggressively. “Shouldn’t that have made me more anxious? I was having a hard time leaving the house. Wasn’t leaving the house actually.”

“Anxiety is variable, Wylie. No two people manifest it in exactly the same way. There are no ‘shoulds.’ Even for one person anxiety can change over time depending on life events—your mother’s accident certainly made your anxiety worse to the point that you were unable to go outside for a brief period. The adrenaline of being called upon to help Cassie likely camouflaged your own anxiety temporarily,” she said. “For once the alarm bells going off inside you matched the actual danger of your situation. It’s not surprising that your anxiety would be less noticeable.”

“So that’s my cure? To be in some crazy emergency all the time?”

Dr. Shepard’s mouth turned down. She was never a fan of sarcasm. “People do go through intensely anxious periods and come out the other side. Others have good and bad periods cyclically throughout their lives. With anxiety, there are no one-size-fits-all explanations or predictions, Wylie. No absolutes. The unknown can be frustrating, but also encouraging. You’re here now. Perhaps we should start there.”

“Do you believe my ‘Heightened Emotional Perception,’ this ‘Outlier’ thing”—I hooked quotes around the word and rolled my eyes in a totally transparent attempt to show I wasn’t taking it very seriously—“could be the whole explanation for what’s wrong with me?”

My dad had called ahead to explain to Dr. Shepard what had happened at the camp and its link to his research, including his newly coined “Heightened Emotional Perception,” or “HEP,” which I think he felt had the benefit of heading off any eventual comparison to ESP. He had also told her I was an Outlier and what that meant. It was a relief not to have to go into the details, especially about me being an Outlier, which I found one part thrilling, one part confusing, and two thousand parts terrifying. It was like learning that for years you’d been carrying around some kind of enormous benign tumor in your belly. Sure there was good news: you weren’t sick and you’d lose eight pounds when the watermelon-sized thing was removed. But you still had to contend with the daunting sense that you’d been invaded, occupied. Worse yet, you’d had absolutely no idea.

“Wrong with you?” Dr. Shepard asked. “Right and wrong is not an effective way to frame a discussion about anxiety.”

“You know what I mean,” I said, though how could she? I wasn’t even sure what I meant. I wanted certain answers (how anxious was I really?), but wanted to avoid others (what did being an Outlier really mean?). I wanted to off-load my anxiety without taking on being an Outlier, to cherry-pick my truth. “Do you think it’s possible that I’m not actually anxious at all?”

Dr. Shepard stared at me and I felt with troubling clarity the moment she decided to play it straight, instead of opting for the good old therapy bob and weave. It wasn’t necessarily comforting, this being able to see through people so easily. It made everyone so much weaker, their gifts so much more ordinary.

“I believe awareness is a powerful thing, Wylie. Do you understand?”

I nodded. But then reconsidered. “No, actually, I don’t understand at all.”

“This Heightened Emotional Perception could have exacerbated your anxiety, certainly. It’s possible that in some instances you have mistaken the emotions of others for your own. However, I’d say that it is highly unlikely that being an Outlier is the explanation for all your anxiety. Let me ask you this. Do you feel anxious now?”

I tried to pull in some air. It wasn’t easy. And there was that cold heaviness in my stomach for sure. “Yes, definitely.”

Though my anxiety did feel a little more separate now that I could pick out its peculiar chill. More like a backpack I was wearing than one of my internal organs.

“I can at least assure you that the anxiety you are feeling right now is yours, not mine, Wylie. Bottom line: I think the answer is yes, you are anxious, and, yes, you have this Heightened Emotional Perception. Where the line is will be something for you to figure out.”

But that was the problem. In those first hours after Jasper and I escaped, still reeling from what had happened to Cassie, being an Outlier felt like it might be the answer to everything that had ever been wrong with me. The secret to my freedom. But so quickly “being an Outlier” turned into a bottomless box filled with questions and more questions. So far I had decided to close the lid and lock it up tight. Knowing that I alone reserved the right to use the key.

Not yet, though. I had politely declined to engage in any of my dad’s “follow-up testing” and had taken a pass on him teaching me to “do more” with my Heightened Emotional Perception or “reading” ability. I’d even intentionally avoided learning where my dad’s research was headed. I knew only his two main questions: the “scope” of the Outlier ability (what could we do if we practiced) and the “source” of the Outlier ability (where did it come from).

After he had accidentally discovered the three original Outliers—me and the other two girls—my dad had done additional “exploratory” studies using a handful of volunteers, but nothing that could have been published. It was during these exploratory studies that he had noticed the Outliers were all girls, and only teenagers. All of that was before what had happened up at the camp. Now, my dad had been spending most of his time on applications and proposals to get the money he needed for a proper, peer-reviewed study that would prove the existence of the Outliers. Then, and only then, would he be able to move on to the more complex issues of source and scope. For now, as far as the scientific community was concerned, it was like nothing had even happened.

“And what if I don’t want to be an Outlier,” I said to Dr. Shepard, my throat pinching unexpectedly tight.

“You may not be able to choose whether or not you are an Outlier, Wylie. Or, for that matter, whether or not you are anxious.” Dr. Shepard leaned forward and looked at me intently. “But you can decide what you do with who you are.”

I BREATHE IN to the count of four, trying not to exhale into the phone still pressed hard to my ear. “Jasper, what do you mean, that your mom ‘has a point?’ A point about what?”

“About the not living with her,” he says. “Maybe I’ll just hit the road or something. You know, freedom and all that. Figure it out as I go along.”

“Figure what out?” I snap, my fear rising.

“Figure out everything,” he says. “I’m sorry I woke you, Wylie. It was good you were asleep. We can talk about my mom and everything later, or tomorrow. Or whatever. That wasn’t even why I called. I was awake and wanted to say hi. That’s all.”

This is a lie. Even through the phone I can feel it.

“I’m up now. You don’t have to go.”

We are silent then in a way that I hate.

“You were right, you know,” Jasper finally goes on. “When you said it was my fault that Cassie got so out of control.”

I wince. I did say that—before we even got to Maine—maybe more than once. And, my God, did I mean it at the time. It’s hard now to even remember how much I had blamed Jasper for everything.

“I never should have said that, Jasper. I was afraid it was my fault for being a bad friend. Cassie getting messed up wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t my fault.”

“Even if I liked that Cassie was so messed up?” Jasper says. And I can see now how deep his guilt is. He doesn’t even need to blame himself for what happened in those last moments in the cabin to make himself responsible for Cassie being gone. He sees himself as the one who set the train loose down the tracks. “That way I could keep on saving her over and over again.”

My stomach twists, deep and cold. My feelings, not Jasper’s.

“Who doesn’t like being the hero?” I offer, scrambling for the right thing.

“Yeah,” Jasper says. “But people don’t usually end up dead because of it.”

The awful flatness to his voice is back.

“Why don’t I come over?” I say. “You don’t sound like you should be alone.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“It’s no big deal. I don’t mind.” Already, I’m getting out of bed. My dad will take me to Jasper’s even if he’s not going to be thrilled.

“No, Wylie,” Jasper says, louder this time. “I’m serious. Don’t come. I don’t want you to.” He takes a breath. “I—it’s my mom. She was on a double shift at the hospital, and she just got home. She’ll freak out if anything wakes her up, and she’s already pissed enough at me.”

“Are you sure?” I ask. “Because I feel like—”

“Yeah, I’m sure. If you come here right now, it will make everything worse,” he says firmly. “Listen, come over in the morning. We can take a walk or something. Talk it out.” His voice is softer, warmer. More convincing. Sort of.

“A walk, yeah,” I say.

“Listen, I’m fine. When my mom works second shift, she usually gets up around ten. You want to come by then?”

“Only if you promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“That you will be okay.”

My throat tightens around the words and I have to swallow hard. Jasper is so broken. And he isn’t supposed to be. Despite his messed-up dad and a mom who loves him only for what he can do, he is still the optimist. I’m supposed to be the broken one.

“Definitely,” Jasper says, the flicker of brightness in his voice an obvious cover for how he agreed too quickly. “Now, you have to promise me something.”

“Definitely.”

“Don’t come over without calling first.”

3

I WAKE TO THE SMELL of Saturday pancakes and bacon, and a few sweet seconds of amnesia. Then it all comes rushing back: Jasper, his house, ten a.m. The pit in my stomach from the night before. I turn to look at my clock; not even seven thirty a.m. Going back to sleep will be the best way to pass the time without letting my mind twist about Jasper.

But then I hear voices downstairs. Gideon and my dad. And they are not happy. I put a pillow over my head to muffle their voices, but it’s no use.

WHEN I GET downstairs, my dad is standing over the stove. His jaw is clenching and unclenching like he’s trying to eat his teeth.

“So that’s it?” Gideon snaps, rocking back in his stool at the kitchen island. My twin brother is once again ready for a fight. He’s hungry for it.

I can read that loud and clear. I might have avoided my dad’s follow-up testing and training, but since that first post-camp session with Dr. Shepard, I have made strides at perfecting my Outlier skills on my own. It was my box. My key.

I started practicing at home, reading Gideon’s and my dad’s feelings until I could do it with near-perfect precision. It wasn’t pleasant. Gideon’s anger can be so toxic that it feels like my skin is being burned and my dad’s sadness is totally smothering. It was also pretty much all they felt. Eventually, I knew I needed to branch out: more people, more practice.

At the Newton Public Library I learned that it’s hard to read people’s feelings when they’re mixed up with the characters in the books they’re reading. So I moved on to restaurants, which is where crap gets real—people break up, they confess, they promise, they argue, they apologize. And they stick around long enough that you can watch the fallout. It was there I learned Outlier Rule #1: Eye contact helps in reading people. And Outlier Rule #2: Crowds make it harder to read people. And before long there came Outlier Rule #3: You get better at reading with practice. Because when I started at the restaurants, all I could make out were the basics—happy, sad, angry. Five weeks later and I can now divide shame from regret, joy from contentment.

The better I’ve gotten at reading, though, the less I want anyone to know. And the fact that my dad has worked so hard to respect my boundaries, not to push or interrogate, has come as a shock.

But then again, maybe it’s not such a surprise to him that I have to learn this whole Outlier thing on my own. I learned to swim in the same stubborn, lonely way. Gideon ran right up to the pool and jumped in. He almost drowned before my dad rescued him and then showed him how. Meanwhile, it took me weeks of walking back and forth across the shallow end until I could catch even a few strokes. But swim I did, eventually. And all by myself.

“Hi, Wylie,” my dad says when he notices me in the doorway. He smiles, relieved that I have appeared. “Do you want some pancakes?”

Gideon huffs in disgust.

Disgusted that my dad is trying to change the subject. Disgusted by the sight of me. No, that’s not right. Disgusted is too mild. Gideon is enraged by me this morning. It rocks me back on my heels.

And this is partly why I still have not embraced this whole Outlier thing. Who wants to risk knowing what anyone is truly feeling about them? Also, I’m aiming for normal at the moment. Being an Outlier means accepting the fact that I am never going to fit in.

My dad puts a huge plate of pancakes down in front of me as I climb up on a stool next to Gideon, trying to ignore the anger pulsing my way. I wish I hadn’t come downstairs.

“Good news! Looks like the NIH might fund Dad’s official Outlier study!” Gideon shouts. As if this is the final comeback in some long argument we’ve been having.

And in a way maybe it is. Gideon’s own test results were average. My dad couldn’t lie about that. Which means his nonvisual, nonauditory emotional perception was normal and fine when the auditory and visual limitations were each tested separately, but he—like the vast majority of people—has no HEP. He’s not an Outlier. And Gideon might have been able to accept that if there’d been some hope of changing it. But my dad insists that Gideon cannot be an Outlier because the Outliers are only girls. He may not know why yet, but that has not made him any less certain of this crucial fact.

At first, Gideon outright rejected the whole “only girls” thing, convinced that my dad had made some small but critical miscalculation. But when my dad refused to waste energy confirming the gender disparity, it sent Gideon into a rage spiral. Like how dare all males be denied.

It makes me want to point out all the other things boys get the better part of the deal on: like height for instance or running speed or being able to procreate without their bodies being ripped apart. Or, I don’t know, having only the most remote chance of getting raped when girls have to think about it every time they walk out the door.

But I know how Gideon would take that: as a declaration of war. And who wants to go to battle with a lunatic?

“The NIH response to our funding proposal has been encouraging,” my dad says. “But nothing is guaranteed.”

“Aren’t you going to tell her the rest, Dad?” Gideon goes on. “I mean, it is her brain after all.”

My eyes fly wide open. “Tell me what?”

My dad takes a loud breath, then looks up at me and forces a totally unconvincing smile. “Everything else is very preliminary. But there is a neuroscientist from UCLA who thinks she might be onto something on the source question. It sounds promising, but it is very early days.”

Already, my heart has picked up speed. Here it is, sooner than I thought: the dread final diagnosis. I am not prepared. I can maybe accept that I am an Outlier, and I can almost have a little fun learning what that means. But I am still afraid to know why. There is something too permanent about that. I have the urge to put my hands over my ears. It’s only the thought of how much this would please Gideon that keeps them balled at my sides.

“So tell her,” Gideon says. “Tell her what the neuroscientist thinks.”

“Gideon, if Wylie wants to know those kinds of details she can ask me,” he says sharply. My dad turns to me. “And you should take your time.”

“Spoiler: your brain isn’t normal,” Gideon hisses in my ear.

“Gideon, that is not helpful!” my dad shouts. He takes a breath, trying to calm himself down. “It’s also not true. ‘Normal’ is a meaningless word.”

“Meaningless?” Gideon shouts, pushing away his plate and jumping off his chair. “Oh, wait, I get it! The more messed up Wylie is, the better she is. Wow, and here I am trying to do the things I’m supposed to do, and all the while what you want is a freak show like her.” Gideon shakes his head. “Except you and I both know, Dad, if I was the Outlier, that would make me damaged, not special.”

“Gideon.” My dad clenches his jaw tighter and stares down at the counter. “You are special exactly as you are.” My dad is trying, but he is so mad it doesn’t even sound believable. “And Wylie, Gideon is upset at me so he’s taking it out on you. There is nothing wrong with you.”

“Unless that other guy is right, and it’s some kind of illness,” Gideon says, resting a hand on the back of his chair like all of a sudden he has no plans to go anywhere. “Then, technically, there would be something wrong with her.”

My dad closes his eyes as his nostrils flare—he is really angry now. It’s obvious he told Gideon something, probably offhandedly, that he now is regretting.

“What illness?” I ask. I have no choice. My anxiety isn’t going to let a whole “illness” thing just go.

“I’ve spoken with numerous experts,” my dad does on, all calm rationality now. “And I’m glad because I think it has given me a more complete picture. However, there is one very persistent immunologist who seems set on convincing me that HEP is the result of a disorder that is itself the result of an infection.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“There are a few viruses that could theoretically cause psychological symptoms, and in my exploratory studies some of the Outliers I found had various mood disorders. Not only anxiety, but a whole range of issues: addiction, anorexia, cutting, depression, antisocial and criminal behavior.”

“You’ve finally found your tribe, Wylie,” Gideon says, pointedly eyeing the remnants of my hacked hair. It’s grown out, but not completely. “Sick, and sick in the head. And by the way, this immunologist Dad is trying to blow off is a professor at Cornell.”

“Yes, Dr. Cornelia has been associated with Cornell and he is on staff at Metropolitan Hospital in New York,” my dad says. “But, to be clear, his entire premise is suspect. It was by no means all of the Outliers in my exploratory study who exhibited behavioral or psychological difficulties. Not to mention that the other two original Outliers had no such issues whatsoever. So there may be some relationship between mood disorders such as anxiety and being an Outlier, but that relationship is certainly not straightforward cause and effect.”

I think this is supposed to make me feel better. It does not.

“Dr. Cornelia from Cornell?” is all I can think to say.

“Yes, it is a bit ridiculous. Dr. Cornelia from Cornell also has a very controversial book out about bioterrorism that he is actively trying to promote as well as a career in dire need of a restart.”

“Bioterrorism?” I ask, but Gideon and my dad are fixated on each other now.

“Still, it’s not like Dr. Cornelia is some random guy.” Gideon turns and looks at me. “And unlikely isn’t the same thing as impossible. Right, Dad? She could still just be sick, right?”

Gideon is trying to hurt me. The stupid part is how much it is working.

“No, not right. Dr. Cornelia’s theory does not adequately explain the HEP.” My dad slides the last pancakes off the griddle and onto a spare plate. Then he holds his spatula upright against the counter like some kind of staff. “Would you rather I lie and pretend that you are an Outlier, Gideon? Or that you could be? Because that seems insulting to your intelligence.” My dad exhales, hard. “Wylie is an Outlier, and you are not. Period. This does not mean that I love you any less. Or that you are any less special. You are simply special in a different way than Wylie is. That’s the truth, Gideon. What else do you want?”

“I want you to admit that she’s the only thing that matters to you now.” Gideon’s pointing at me. But at least he’s not looking at me, so I don’t have to feel the full force of his hatred. “Your kid and your research all in one place. What do you even need me for anymore?”

My dad winces. “Gideon, you know that’s not the way I feel.”

“No, Dad, I don’t know anything about the way you feel.” Gideon’s voice is quiet now, devastated. “That’s Wylie’s specialty, remember?”

My dad closes his eyes and lowers his head. As he passes out of the room, Gideon knocks hard into my shoulder, almost shoving me off the chair. I push myself back up as he storms to the foyer. My dad and I both flinch as the front door slams shut behind him.

4

WHEN MY DAD FINALLY OPENS his eyes, he tries again to smile. It’s no more convincing than it was before.

“That went well,” he says quietly, then motions to the dozen pancakes now stacked on the plate in front of him. “Please tell me you’re hungry.”

Without waiting for me to answer, he picks up the plate, walks to the garbage can, and presses the trash open with his foot. He reconsiders, though, letting the lid slam shut. Instead, he pulls out some plastic wrap and sets to covering each pancake, then stashing them in small groups inside the freezer. It’s amazing how fast this seems to buoy him. He may have no idea how to fix things with Gideon, but we now have enough pancakes to survive a nuclear winter.

“So this guy from Cornell who thinks being an Outlier is a sickness …” I begin, and then stop. Open-ended is more likely to get an honest answer.

My dad looks me right in the eye. I can feel him willing me to know that he is telling the truth.

“Dr. Cornelia is just looking to inject himself into something that he thinks will get him attention from the press.”

“What press?”

Despite all of us bracing for an onslaught of reporters and television cameras after what happened at the camp, the only real coverage was a thumbnail of an article in the Boston Globe, mostly about Cassie’s violent death at the hands of a cult. (The police had also officially deemed Cassie’s death a homicide, not that there was anyone around to prosecute anyway.) The article mentioned my dad’s research only vis-à-vis its connection to Quentin, who was described only as a “cult leader,” associated with The Collective, which—it turned out—was a national organization with various beliefs and branches, most of which did not appreciate being called a cult. They made that pretty clear in the online comments on the article. No one seemed to care about the Outliers or HEP, maybe because there had been no official, peer-reviewed study on the topic yet, maybe because science wasn’t as sexy as the word “cult.”

The only actual interest in my dad’s research came from one blogger—EndOfDays.com—who identified himself only as a “centrist” member of The Collective and who laid the blame for the deaths at the camp squarely at my dad’s feet. EndOfDays had decided that the Collective members were innocent victims caught in the deadly crossfire of scientific recklessness. My dad didn’t want us reading the blog. And so I hadn’t. Gideon, of course, couldn’t get enough.

“IT IS ONLY the maniacally egotistical who believe that they should insert themselves between man and the will of God,” Gideon was reading from his laptop at the dining room table. “It is an abomination to interfere with this sacred covenant.”

“What the hell is that?” Rachel asked. She was in the kitchen with my dad, helping with the dinner dishes. Since what happened at the camp, she’d been glued to us even tighter. It was aggravating, no matter how genuine her intentions (and I still wasn’t convinced). “Actually, forget I asked. I don’t care what it is—stop reading it.”

Rachel often used that overly familiar way with us like she was a member of our loud, no-holds-barred family and she was allowed to shout because it was all out of love anyway. Except we were not loud, and whenever she used that tone, it set my teeth on edge. As annoyed as I was at Gideon for torturing my dad by reading that blog, I was even more annoyed at Rachel for talking to him that way. I had a hard time imagining she ever could have been my mom’s friend.

Rachel and my mom had met in the third grade in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and somehow had managed to stay best friends for years, through different high schools, separate colleges, and then different graduate programs. When they finally got their first jobs, they had been thrilled to land in Boston together. Rachel was my mom’s maid of honor, and there were countless pictures of Rachel holding Gideon and me as babies.

Then, suddenly, Rachel was gone. Out of our life. Once, when my mom had been trying to comfort me about the distance between Cassie and me, she had said that she and Rachel had grown apart, too. But their separation had been so sudden and complete. I could tell even then—long before I knew that I was an Outlier—that my mom was leaving out important details. When Rachel reappeared after my mom’s funeral I had thought about asking my dad what had really happened between them, but he’d been so overwhelmed and sad that it had felt stupid and wrong to care. And there was a tiny part of me that had felt comforted being around someone who had even once upon a time been so close to my mom.

“It’s Dad’s stalker,” Gideon said of the passage, obviously enjoying Rachel’s reaction. “EndOfDays. He’s in The Collective, and he blames Dad for basically everything.”

“What?” Rachel asked as she handed my dad another rinsed plate for the dishwasher, then dried her hands on a towel. “What is Gideon talking about, Ben? What stalker?”

“A guy with too much time on his hands. To be honest, I don’t think he knows what he wants. He’s angry, that’s all. No one reads it anyway.”

“You mean, except the 3,523 people who commented,” Gideon said. “But who’s counting?”

“Ben?!” Rachel shouted. “Have you talked to the police? That doesn’t sound like something you should ignore.”

“They did look into it. The guy lives in Florida somewhere,” my dad said, waving a hand. As though Florida was the same thing as Mars. “Anyway, Agent Klute is not concerned.”

“The same Agent Klute that ran Wylie down?” Rachel asked, eyes wide. “No offense, Ben, but I think you better wake up a little here. You need to protect yourselves.”

I watched my dad’s nostrils flare. “Don’t you think I know that?” He was angry but hurt, too. He turned and dumped his glass of water into the sink. “Thank you for coming by and bringing dinner, Rachel. But I’m tired,” he said. “I think it’s time for you to go.”

“I’m sorry, Ben. I didn’t mean to—I’m just, I’m trying to help.” Rachel smiled at him apologetically as she crossed the room. Her mouth was stiff, and I could feel how badly she wanted to cry. “I promise next time I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“YES, WYLIE, THINGS have been quiet in the press so far,” my dad goes on. “But if I can convince the NIH to fund a full-scale study of the Outliers and get peer-reviewed publication that will change, and quickly. There’s already some Senator Russo, from Arizona. He’s on the Intelligence Subcommittee and he’s insisting on a meeting. Somehow he got wind of my funding application. My guess is he’s worried about protecting some secret research the military has been doing.”

“Secret research?” Fear surely shows on my face.

My dad grimaces, then holds up his hands. “I just mean, in the way everything the military does is secret. They’ve been looking into how to use emotional perception in combat for decades,” he says. “They haven’t succeeded, but I’m sure they’re not thrilled about competition, or about not being able to control the flow of information.”

My dad’s phone pings then with a text. I feel worry jolt through him as he looks down at the screen.

“What is it?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”

“No, no, nothing—it’s not about the research,” he says.

He hands me his phone. I look down at the text: Accident file for Hope Lang will be available for review at 9 a.m. today. Sincerely, Detective Oshiro.

I have to read the message three times before I fully understand its meaning, like it’s coming out of nowhere, even though I am the one who has called Detective Oshiro pretty much every day since I got back from Maine, asking to see my mom’s accident file. I feel surprisingly foolish, too, now that I have gotten what I wanted. It’s because of what Quentin said—that my mom’s death wasn’t an accident—that I got so obsessed. It’s not as if anything else that Quentin claimed up at the camp turned out to be true, but knowing that hasn’t loosened my grip. Even my dad admitted that he had considered the possibility that my mom’s death hadn’t been an accident, though he backpedaled hard as soon as he could tell I was fixating.

“I am only going to say this once, Wylie.” My dad’s voice is quiet and firm. “And I am saying this as your father, but also as a psychologist and because I don’t want to see you hurt any more than you already have been. Looking in your mom’s accident file could be extremely traumatic for you. Extremely. There might be photographs or details that are far more upsetting than you can possibly anticipate.”

It is true that I have thought a lot more about getting my hands on the file than about what it would be like to actually look in it. It seemed so unlikely I ever would. Detective Oshiro had said that he needed clearance, higher-up approval, permission. Case closed or not, they didn’t ordinarily have the families of victims coming by to rifle through their files.

Jasper. I want to talk to him about this. Maybe I need to, the way the thought of him just popped into my head. He has listened to me go on and on about my mom’s accident ever since we got back from the camp. He gets how much I have wanted to look in that file. But he will also understand how not sure I feel about finally getting what I want. Jasper’s single best quality, I have learned, is his ability not to judge. But it’s not as if I can have that conversation in front of my dad.

“If I can’t handle it,” I say. Because I can’t show doubt, not to my dad. “I’ll stop.”

My dad’s shoulders sag. “Okay,” he says quietly as he turns around, head hanging low as he starts to clean up the dishes.

“Dad,” I begin, though I don’t even know what it is I want to say. “If you don’t want me to go …” I can’t even get myself to fully make the offer though. I’m too afraid he might take me up on it.

Instead, he turns to look at me. He crosses his arms and presses his mouth tight. All I feel now is love, his love for me—so pure and simple and complete. And for the first time ever—being able to feel that so clearly—I am grateful for being an Outlier.

“Well, you shouldn’t go down there on an empty stomach,” he says, motioning to my plate. “Eat something and I’ll drive you.” He looks at his watch. “It’s not long until nine.”

I look up at the little clock over the stove: 8:34 a.m. I’ll try to call Jasper on the way, see if I can come earlier if I finish up with the file before ten. It’s not the same as talking to him now, but it’s something. The station isn’t far from his house. If I can’t reach him, I’ll go to his house at ten a.m. like we agreed.

And maybe after we’re done gluing his loose pieces back into place, we can spend a little time on mine.

“Can we just go, um, now?” I ask.

My dad nods slowly.

“Yes,” he says finally and with some effort. “We can go now.”

5

THE POLICE STATION IN THE center of downtown Newton is a tidy redbrick and white stone cube on a block next to several other municipal buildings and a bunch of trees. I’ve never had a reason to be inside. Even after the camp, they drove us straight home, then the agents arrived. But looking at the building from the outside now, it looks a lot like a brick version of the Seneca police station—if the Seneca police station had taken up the entire building.

But once we’re inside, any similarities disappear. The Newton station is much larger and more modern, not to mention busier than the one in Seneca. It’s actually way busier than I would have imagined. With the low crime rate in Newton, I can’t imagine why so many people are at the police station.

There are a dozen desks lined up in a large room behind a railing to the left. At a tall desk in front sits a tired-looking uniformed officer doing intake. He has thinning gray hair and rumpled eyes and he is dismissively sorting people into a second set of lines: complaints to be filed, summonses to be paid. It all seems seriously bureaucratic and super boring.

My dad and I take our places at the back of the line, and I listen as people register their complaints. One man’s apartment was broken into, a woman’s car was vandalized. And on and on. It’s 9:05 a.m. by the time we are next in line. I called Jasper twice on our way to the police station and he didn’t answer. And now, not only do I want to talk to him, but I’ve also got a bad feeling about him not answering.

“Yes. Hello!?!” It takes me a minute to realize that the officer behind the tall desk is finally talking to us.

“Wylie?” My dad puts a concerned hand on my arm. He’s taken my hesitation as a sign. “You don’t need to do this.”

“Yeah. I do,” I say, meeting my dad’s stare as firmly as I can.

Reluctantly, he nods and we step forward. “We’re here to see Detective Oshiro,” my dad says. “We have an appointment.”

“Wait over there.” The old guy points toward the railing in front of the desks without looking up at us, then picks up the phone.

We aren’t waiting long when I see Detective Oshiro heading our way. I’ve only met him once, and I’d forgotten how tall and imposing he is. Broad shoulders, crisply pressed shirt, and fashionable tie. Good-looking and young. Not too young, but younger than my dad. And way younger than the rumpled old detective I had in mind before he turned up on our steps the day after the accident.

That day, Detective Oshiro was calm and kind and exceedingly competent. Firm, too, in laying out the facts of my mom’s accident. That it was an accident. He never wavered on that—there was nothing to lead investigators to suspect otherwise. It was simply the way the car had impacted the railing in the area of the gas tank that had caused it to burst into flames. There was no evidence of foul play.

“There is something you should know, Wylie,” my dad says suddenly. His voice is rushed and tight, like this is his very last chance to make something right. “They think your mom had been drinking the night of the accident. She was upset and I take responsibility for that,” he says. “Anyway, it doesn’t change anything. I just didn’t want you to be surprised if you saw some mention of it in the file.”

“Drinking?” He actually feels relieved confessing this. Me? I’m furious. “What the hell are you talking about?”

And here I thought he’d been trying to protect me from grief. Was this—this thing that makes no sense whatsoever—what he was trying to avoid me knowing? My mom had the occasional glass of wine and that was it.

“Wylie, I know—”

“That is not true,” I snap. But I sound like a ridiculous little kid, refusing to accept that the tooth fairy isn’t real.

“Dr. Lang, it’s nice to see you,” Detective Oshiro says before my dad can respond, but he is wounded. I can feel that much. And I am glad. My dad and Detective Oshiro shake hands and then the detective turns to shake mine. “If you want to come back through here, I’ve got you guys set up in a conference room in the back. That way you can take as much time as you need.”

Detective Oshiro has made peace with this. He didn’t want us coming down and going through the file in the first place, but now that we are here, he’s not going to be anything but professional.

I expect the other detectives in the room to stare at my dad and me as Detective Oshiro leads us toward the conference room, for some kind of hush to descend. They’re here. They’re about to find out everything. But they don’t even look up from their desks. Because they do not care. Because there is no great secret about to be revealed. At least not one that is going to turn back time and bring my mom back, not something that will make all this Outliers nonsense go away. Is that why I’m actually here? Am I putting my dad through this trauma for that, a distraction?

“I can go in myself,” I say to my dad as Detective Oshiro stops about halfway down a row of doors. I am still pissed at him for dropping this whole “drinking” bomb on me, but now I feel ashamed, too. “I feel bad I even made you come down here.”

My dad turns and smiles at me, sad but also grateful. “I’m not sure I can handle looking through anything myself, but I’ll stay in the room with you.” He reaches down and squeezes my hand. “I know that none of this has been easy on you, Wylie.” And he means all of it—the Outliers, the camp, Quentin, my mom’s accident. “I want you to know that the way you’re handling all of it—I am so proud of you.”

THE ROOM IS plain and windowless, but clean, with floor-to-ceiling glass between it and the main room where all of the detectives are seated. It is surprisingly quiet inside, like maybe it’s soundproofed. There is a small table against the wall, two chairs on one side, a single chair on the other. A rectangular cardboard box—long, about the size of three regular book boxes—sits in the center of the table. Looking at it, I feel my heart catch.

“I’ll be right outside if you need me.” Detective Oshiro points to a desk that is only a couple steps away. “Please don’t remove anything from the evidence bags, and nothing can be taken from the room. If you see anything of value in your mother’s personal effects, let me know. I’ll make sure you leave here with it today.”

“Okay, thanks,” I say, checking my watch: 9:15 a.m. “I’ll be fast.”

Detective Oshiro nods and then closes the door after he leaves. I take a deep breath as I stare down at the box. Suddenly, this feels like a mistake. And I may not know exactly where that feeling is coming from, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

“You should take your time, Wylie,” my dad says. “We’re here now, and I don’t think you’re going to get another chance.”

He’s right. As much as I want to get this over with, I need to be thorough. It’s now or never.

I keep my eyes on the box itself for a minute. It looks brand-new, the top crisp, the label clean and clear. Name: Hope Lang. Date: February 8. Description of Matter: Automobile Accident. The ordinariness is both a relief and a disappointment. A tiny part of me did hope it might say Murder somewhere. Another part of me was dreading that, too.

As I lift the long lid from the box, I turn my head away, allowing a moment for the most awful of the ghosts to escape. I rub my palms against my jeans then to dry them and suck in some air as I turn back to the open box, bracing myself to see something truly horrifying, like my mom’s charred bones. But it’s just an ordinary box divided into two sections, one with hanging file folders, the second with a stack of evidence bags.

The bag on top holds something small and black and silver, like a hardened lump of mixed clay. It isn’t until I look closer that I realize it is a car key. Or what was once a car key, melted now beyond recognition. My stomach inches up into my throat. My dad was right—this is more awful than I thought it would be. Because now all I can think about is my mom liquefied. And Cassie, too. Everything and everyone I have ever loved reduced to a puddle—and then hardened into a shapeless rock.

I turn away from the evidence bags and toward the files, glancing over at my dad to see if he is watching me. I have a faint hope that something in his face will give me a real reason to stop. But his eyes are on his phone, reading something, an email or a text. His brow is furrowed as he begins to type. He is not going to rescue me from my own terrible idea.

I turn back to the box. I wanted to come here. I need to trust that I had a good reason. And I need to get it over with, fast. The first file contains an accident investigator’s report, notes from the interviews that Detective Oshiro conducted with my dad, Gideon, and me. I pull out the notes from my dad’s. They go on for several pages that I have no stomach to read but for this: “Husband reports Lang departed the home in a state of agitation, though husband has no reason to suspect self-harm.”

Gideon’s interview is much shorter. I can remember him sitting there on the steps that night. No tears, only stunned and silent. But in its few lines the report contains: “Son states his mother left the house at approximately nine p.m. He does not have a specific recollection of her mental state.”

I can remember they asked me something like that, too. They were so focused on my mom’s mood. Because they thought there was a chance she’d killed herself, I realize now. One car, a fatal accident. Ruling out suicide is probably standard. I don’t recall how I answered, but when I scan the notes from my interview, I discover that apparently I decided to lie: “Daughter reports that mother went out for milk. Mother was in a good mood.”

I wonder who I’d been trying to protect: My dad? My mom? Myself?

The next thing I pull out is the autopsy report. It’s a single page that shakes in my hand as I try to keep my eyes toward the top of the page, likely home of the most innocuous details. Name, height, weight. But even that is not entirely safe. There is the word “estimated” behind both my mom’s height and weight. After all, a fractured and scorched skeleton hardly reveals such details. I squint down the page until I get to the notes at the bottom, to the cause of death: Blunt-force trauma. Manner of death: Accidental. I let go of the breath I’ve been holding. At least she was already dead when her car caught on fire. It is such a pathetic relief.

The next folder looks empty until I tilt it and an envelope slides out. I peer inside with my head pulled back and catch a glimpse of photos of the blackened and mangled front of my mom’s car. I close my eyes and swallow hard, hoping that will keep me from throwing up as I jam the envelope back in the file.

“Are you okay?” my dad asks. When I look up, he is watching me.

“Are you?” I ask, deflecting. “You’ve been tapping on your phone nonstop.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry.” He always falls for distraction mixed with guilt. “The assistant from Senator Russo’s office emailed a minute ago. Apparently if I go right now to DC, I can meet him and someone from the NIH this afternoon.” His tone is dismissive as he shakes his head. “And this meeting is now a prerequisite before they’ll even consider my funding. And if I don’t go to this meeting I will now have to wait until September for anything to happen because the senator is off for summer recess. Feels like they’re trying to create a situation where I’m the one who can’t make it. I’m not even sure a senator is allowed to get involved in NIH funding.”

“There’s no way you can get there?” As much as I’ve been avoiding information myself, I don’t want his pride to be the reason he doesn’t find out something important.

He checks the time. “If I go right now to the airport, I guess I could be down there in time for a late afternoon meeting and then back home for bed.” He thinks doing this would be kind of absurd, though. I can feel it. Insulting to snap to it because they’ve told him to. But hesitation is also tugging at him like he is afraid of something slipping through his fingers.

“But maybe you should go?” I ask. Because that seems to be the way he feels.

“There are other ways to get the research funded, Wylie.” He frowns as he stares at the floor. Then he nods. “But I suppose I should go, yes. I’ve never been willing to play this politics game, which is probably why it’s taken me so long to get my research this far. But it’s too important now not to be willing to put up with some politics.”

And I know what he means by “now.” He means with me so directly involved.

I nod. “Then you should go.” Though I feel a deep pang of regret once I’ve said it out loud. I just wish I knew what it was exactly that I regretted.

“I don’t want to leave you here.” He motions to the box. “Doing this.”

“I’ll be fine,” I say, and while this does not feel entirely true, it also does not feel like a complete lie. It’s a reason for him to go—a good one. He should take it. It’s bad enough that I’ve put him through this whole thing with the file when I’m not even entirely sure why I’m doing it. “I’m supposed to see Jasper when I’m done anyway. I promised him I’d come by his place. I can walk from here.”

“Oh,” my dad says, failing to hide his concern. “‘Promised’ sounds serious.”

He likes Jasper well enough, but he worries about the same thing Dr. Shepard does: Jasper pulling me down. And it’s much harder to argue with my dad. He’s seen the state that Jasper is in—the circles under his eyes, his way of staring off into space randomly when you’re right in the middle of a conversation. I get why my dad is worried. I’m worried. But ever since my dad said his piece about Jasper shortly before Cassie’s funeral, he’s tried hard to keep his mouth shut about our friendship. Rachel, on the other hand, took the funeral as an invitation to jump right into the fray.

“HALF THOSE GIRLS will end up pregnant by the end of college, if they go to college,” Rachel muttered to me, motioning to Maia and the others. We were at the reception at Cassie’s house, which followed her funeral. Maia and her friends had been buzzing around Jasper from the start, “attending” to him in a way that was gross and also pointless because he was so out of it. “And, I mean, are they serious with the short skirts and the shaking their butts in his face? It’s his girlfriend’s funeral.”

I turned to look at Rachel, not sure whether to be pissed or grateful—for her being there in the first place, for weighing in on Maia and her friends, for trying to act like my mom. Because that’s what she was doing. That’s what she had been doing ever since I got back from Maine. And maybe that’s what made me angriest: her pretending that she could ever live up to who my mom had been.

“They are serious,” I said flatly, trying not to watch. Trying even harder not to care. I already knew enough about Jasper to know that their attention was making him feel worse. Like less of a person. Or more like a terrible one.

Maia and her friends had sniffled at Cassie’s service, and there’d been some running mascara. But I had been near enough to feel that underneath all of that, there wasn’t much more than a collective: ugh, crap, that totally sucks, but Cassie was kind of a disaster.

“Well, I think you should stay away from Jasper, too. I mean, look at him,” Rachel went on. “He’s a total mess. And this is exactly the kind of situation where—well, I could see how things between the two of you could—”

“Stop it,” I snapped at her. “I mean it.”

How dare Rachel pretend she had some special insight into Jasper and me? After everything we’d been through, Jasper and I were friends, but that was all. Of course, I would have much preferred if Rachel hinting otherwise didn’t bother me quite as much as it did.

Maybe I didn’t want a reminder about how someone “normal” would be feeling in this situation. Maybe normal was like Maia and her friends: ready to turn Jasper from friend into boyfriend at the first hint of the light turning green. I cared about Jasper. I cared about what happened to him. But not like that. No. I did not.

I was much better off steering way clear of all those kind of complications—and that wasn’t denial or whatever Rachel might think. It was what I wanted: none of it. Trevor—my one real foray into the world of romance a year ago—had been right to dodge the responsibility that was me. I would definitely never wish me on Jasper. Not now. Everyone was so worried about him dragging me down, but who knew how far or how fast I might fall? Or how deep I’d take him with me.

“Sorry.” Rachel held up her hands, then tucked them under her armpits. She wasn’t sorry, though. I could feel how badly she wanted to say more about Jasper and our “relationship.”

“Why are you even here, Rachel?” My face went hot as the floodgates opened. “I mean, seriously?” My voice was too loud; people were starting to stare. “You were my mom’s friend. And she’s dead. If you think you’re helping me, you’re not. So why don’t you go find something else that will make you feel better?”

Rachel blinked at me, stunned. But instead of storming off or telling me I was being rude, she nodded. “You’re right.”

Then she stepped closer and wrapped her arm around me. And, of course, I started to bawl. Couldn’t help myself. I didn’t stop until I felt someone’s hand on my back. My dad, I assumed.

“I’m so sorry, Wylie. I know how much she meant to you.” A man’s voice, not my dad. And from the look on Rachel’s face, she did not approve of his hand on me.

When I turned, it was Cassie’s dad, Vince. His hair was chin length now, his face softer with his new beard. This was the hippie Key West version of Vince. Sober for nearly a year, he had opened a kayak rental place and otherwise totally cleaned up his act. He had also gotten super New Agey weird, Cassie had told me once, but with a kind of pride. At least he wasn’t drinking anymore.

Vince had delivered the eulogy and it had been beautiful—moving and eloquent and thoughtful. It managed to bring out all the best qualities of Cassie while putting her death in a meaningful context. So perfect I would have expected to feel differently about Vince the next time I talked to him. But here he was—and there I was—thinking what I always did: that he was totally full of shit.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” I said.

He smiled then in a way that looked kindly and spiritual, but felt, in every way, the complete and total opposite. “Well,” he said, and that was all.

I waited for him to go on. To say all those things people do: it was no one’s fault, we all know how much you loved Cassie, blah, blah. But he stared at me instead. Like he was waiting not so much to hear whether I blamed myself, but to enjoy how much I did.

“Um, take care,” Rachel said finally, dismissing him.

But he just smiled at her. “It is both a tragedy and a gift that Cassie will be missed by so many.” He turned back to me. “Be sure to tell your dad that I’m sorry for his loss, too.”

Then he squeezed my arm in a way that should have been warm, but felt creepy. And what loss? My mom? He’d seen my dad so many times since then, hadn’t he?

“What a dick that guy is,” Rachel said when Vince had gone. “I know he lost his daughter and all, but I bet he was a dick way before that.”

“He’s a minister now,” I said. “Or something like that.”

“He can still be a jerk.”

“Is there anybody here that you do like?” I asked, even though I couldn’t argue with her assessment of Vince.

She smiled. “You.”

BY THE TIME my dad finally leaves—after much hemming and hawing and him saying that he’s worried about me, and me saying he doesn’t need to be, and lots and lots of details about where he’ll leave his itinerary—it is almost 9:40 a.m. I try Jasper again, but once again the call rings and rings before finally heading to voice mail.

My stomach has officially started to churn.

I move fast through the rest of what’s in the box, turning to the evidence bags. Luckily, there isn’t much that survived the fire, which is why we never received anything in the way of personal effects. Nothing my dad had wanted, anyway. The things in the evidence bags must have been thrown from the car when it hit the guardrail. A set of headphones I imagine tangled in a nearby tree. There’s one of my mom’s blue clogs, too. I always hated those shoes. I’d been trying to convince her to throw them out instead of getting them fixed again. The force it must have taken to rip the shoe off her foot and hurl it away from the car. What was she doing wearing clogs in the middle of winter anyway? I lift the shoe, only a tiny bit. But as soon as my hands are on it, I know it’s a mistake. Don’t touch the shoe. It will make you cry. When I drop it, there is an odd, hollow thump.

I move the plastic bags around until my hand lands on what’s under the shoe. Smooth and hard and kind of flat inside its bag. When I pull it from the very bottom of the box, it’s a bottle. An empty vodka bottle. A small one, the kind you’d hide in your purse, or even in a big-pocketed jacket.

“Your dad says that it would have been out of character for her to have been drinking in the car,” Detective Oshiro says from the doorway.

My cheeks burn. “How about fucking impossible?”

I look down. I shouldn’t be swearing at a police officer, not like that. But Detective Oshiro is unfazed.

“It’s possible that it was on the road where she had the accident and got mixed with—well, the scene was chaotic. There were no fingerprints on it.”

But I can tell he is only saying that to make me feel better. Or not to make me feel worse. I squeeze the cool glass tighter as I peer at the label. Vodka? There is no way. My mom only drank wine and only occasionally. Cassie’s dad, Vince, and vodka? Definitely. Even Karen, Cassie’s mom, liked her martinis. My mom? Never.

“It wasn’t hers,” I say, but it only makes me feel worse.

“Yes, that’s possible,” Detective Oshiro says.

I turn and look straight at him. The wave of sympathy that greets me when our eyes meet unleashes tears. I blink and look down before they can make their way out. Was my mother somebody entirely different from who I believed her to be? Maybe she was lying to me about much more than me being an Outlier.

“It’s not hers,” I say again.

This time when I look up, the tears are streaming down my cheeks. But I no longer care. And Detective Oshiro looks right at me and lies, just the way I need him to.

“I’m sure you’re right, Wylie. I’m sure you’re right.”

6

OUTSIDE THE POLICE STATION, I pull out my phone and try Jasper. I’m losing count of how many times I’ve called. It just rings and rings. At least his house isn’t far, a three-minute walk, but a million miles away from the fancy shops and restaurants of downtown Newton.

“Jasper,” I say when his voice mail finally picks up. “This isn’t funny anymore. Where the hell are you? I need to talk to you.”

I shove my phone back in my pocket, hating how completely and totally true those words feel. As I make my way up Crescent Hill Road—one block down and over from the station—the sun is warm on my face and the air smells of cut grass. I’m almost hot in my jeans and T-shirt. It’s the first day it seems like summer. And I want so much for that to feel good, but the vodka bottle is lodged too deep in my stomach, right next to all my unreturned calls to Jasper.

When I round the corner onto Main Street, I close my eyes so that I don’t have to see Holy Cow, the ice cream shop where Cassie used to work. The one where she met Quentin for the first time. There are some things I will never again be able to bear, like the sight of Holy Cow, or the smell of strawberries, which reminds me too much of the lip gloss Cassie always used to wear.

I set my eyes instead on Gallagher’s Deli up ahead. It’s one of the few not-so-nice places in town—dusty with cramped aisles that smell faintly of cat pee. I’ve only been in there once to buy cigarettes with Cassie during the week and a half she smoked. I can still remember how the smell seemed to cling to me for hours afterward. Gallagher’s means that I am almost there.

To ease the pain in my feet, I slide them back a little in my vicious, toe-gouging yellow flip-flops. I never would have put them on if I had known that I was going to have to walk so far. I dial Jasper’s number one more time, but this time the call goes straight to voice mail. Like he’s turned it off, or his phone has died between this and my last call.

I can’t wait anymore to speak to him before going to his house. No matter what I promised.

I HAVEN’T SEEN Jasper’s house much in the light of day. His mother is always on night shifts, so that’s when Jasper has me over. This is not a coincidence. Jasper’s mother blames me for everything that happened in Maine. He hasn’t said that outright, but there have been clues.

“It doesn’t have a face,” Jasper had said once about his house, sounding sad. “Most houses have the windows on either side and the door in the middle. Like it’s a person looking at you or something. The way mine is, it’s like the front is just … empty.”

He’s right, and it is depressing. I start up the concrete area that is part driveway, part “front yard.” Jasper’s brother’s Jeep is parked there and, as usual, seeing it makes the hairs on my arms lift. When the police went looking for it, the car was right there at the gas station where we’d left it, the starter purposely ripped out by Doug. Looking at it now is like seeing a ghost. Cassie’s ghost. I wrap my arms around myself and shudder hard. Luckily, I know Jasper’s brother is out of town visiting his “girlfriend,” which Jasper is pretty sure is code for buying pot. I’m relieved that at least I won’t have to deal with him. I have met Jasper’s brother and—like Jasper said—he is bigger than Jasper and also a total asshole.

I climb the rickety steps to the narrow porch, hold myself tight as I knock. The door sounds hollow beneath my hand. I wait. Nothing. Check the time. Ten a.m. exactly. I knock again, harder this time, then lean back to look in the window for signs of life.

My face is pressed to the glass when the door swings open.

“Can I help you?” a woman snaps.

I jerk back and turn. Jasper’s mom is glaring at me. At least I’m assuming it’s her. Her short black hair is pulled back in a low, no-nonsense ponytail. Her skin has a grayish undertone and she has puffy bags under her eyes. Still, you can see how she might have been quite beautiful once. How she still could be if she got some rest. She’s wearing green hospital scrubs and has her nurse’s ID badge looped around her neck.

“Sorry,” I say. Opening with an apology seems wise. “Is Jasper here?”

“Good Lord,” she huffs, but mildly. Like she’s too tired to even care. “That kid will be a picked-over carcass, and one of you girls will still be coming around, trying to drag him home.”

“He was expecting me.” My voice rises at the end like a question. But instead of that making me sound sweet and polite, it kind of makes me sound like a stalker.

“Well then, I guess he changed his mind,” she says, face pinched. Then her eyes shoot up to my hair. A headband is the only thing that makes my hacked hair look okay, even now. I jammed an elastic one in my pocket on the way out of the house, but it’s too late for that. Her eyebrows draw tight. “Yes, well, I can’t tell you why he’s not here because I haven’t seen him. But Jasper’s been changing his mind a lot lately.”

And then I feel it—even without her looking at me—the full weight of her heartbreak. She isn’t angry at Jasper, or hoping to get rich off of him playing professional hockey. She isn’t worried about money. She’s afraid she is going to lose her son. That something awful is going to happen to him.

And Jasper has absolutely no idea she feels this way. It makes me so sad for the both of them.

“Are you sure he’s not here?” I ask.

“Jesus, you are a persistent thing.” She looks me up and down. And then I feel a momentary twinge of pity. She knows what desperation feels like. “Come on in if you want. I am going to take my shoes off, but you can go look for him yourself if you think I’m hiding him.”

I step inside the dim entryway with its two sagging armchairs and worn wooden bench against the wall. Jasper’s mom winces as she sits down to take off her shoes. It isn’t until then that it occurs to me: she just got home from work. She is not just up from being asleep after a double shift like Jasper said. He lied to keep me away. And now he is gone.

“Can I look in his room?”

“Will it make you go away?” she asks. I nod. “Then go ahead, but be quick.”

She flaps a hand in the direction of Jasper’s room, though I already know where it is.

THE LIGHTS IN Jasper’s room are off, but the curtains are open. Twin bed, dark comforter, a desk and some bookshelves along one wall. As usual, it is freakishly neat, the bed made with military precision. Full of promise, but tinged with sadness—like everything about Jasper. I’m still surveying how tidy everything is when something on Jasper’s nightstand catches my eye. As I get closer, I can see that it’s a stack of clipped-together envelopes, each already torn open. I look over my shoulder before picking them up. Jasper’s mom said I could come in his room to check for him. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t an invitation to rummage through his things.

There’s no return address on the envelopes, only Jasper’s name and address printed on the label. When I pull out the note inside the top envelope, I recognize Cassie’s curly script right away.

My eyes move to the top. There’s no “dear” anybody, only a date. And only days before the camp. And the lined paper is ragged at the side as though it’s been torn from something. Some sick asshole has been sending Jasper excerpts from Cassie’s diary? There’s so many of them, too. Jasper has been getting bits and pieces of Cassie’s journal ever since we got back from Maine, probably convincing himself more and more that he was the reason she got mixed up with Quentin in the first place. No wonder he’s been getting worse.

Then I see one more envelope, this one on the floor. Dropped there or maybe it slid from the stack. I pick it up. Postmarked yesterday. I slide the page out.

I swallow hard. Poor Jasper. The thing he was most afraid of—that he drove Cassie to Quentin and drinking and all of it—written right there, in Cassie’s own words.

I COME BACK out into the foyer, holding the stack of envelopes.

“I didn’t say you could take anything.” Jasper’s mom glances at me.

“Do you have any idea where Jasper might have gone?” I press on. “I think he might be really upset.”

“I have no goddamn idea where he is!” She shouts, so loud I flinch. But then she hangs her head and bites down on her lip hard—guilt and sadness. That’s all. The anger is just easier. I wonder what I would think if I couldn’t read her so well, if I were Jasper. “I don’t know why you’re here or what you want with my son. But Jasper is not in any condition to be anyone’s boyfriend.”

“I’m a friend, that’s all,” I say. “A friend who’s worried about him.” Though for the first time, that feels like a lot less than the truth.

“Maybe he went for a walk,” she says, motioning toward the door. Her voice is quiet now, unsteady. “He does that these days. A lot. He likes to go to the Bernham Bridge to watch for canoes. We used to do that when he was little.”

Bridge. Bridge. Bridge. It’s the most awful alarm ringing in my brain. A bridge you can jump from? I do not want it to stick in my head the way it does, but it already has. My heart is racing as I clutch Cassie’s letters tight in my hand and head for the door.

“I’ll go look for him,” I say. “But I also think you should call the police.”

“The police?” Worried still, yes, but also suspicious. “The last thing Jasper needs is trouble with the police. We’ve had enough of that with his brother.”

“I know, but—all I can say is that I have a really bad feeling. Like he could be in danger. We were talking on the phone last night and—”

“Danger? What are you—oh no. Wait one second here.” Her eyes flash hard in my direction. Then they move again up to my hair. Finally, she has realized, and when she looks me in the eye again, the blast of anger burns. “You,” she growls, pushing herself to her feet. “You’re her. The one that almost got my son killed.”

She steps forward. And I take another couple steps back toward the door. I toss the envelopes addressed to Jasper into a nearby chair. This feels like a peace offering.

“I’m sorry about—but right now—” My foot catches on a chair.

“Oh, so now you’re worried about him? You know what, you should be worried. You know what you cost him? What you took from your so-called friend? How hard he’s worked since he was a teeny-tiny kid to get that opportunity at Boston College? The hours and hours at that ice rink freezing his ass off? And now—” She makes an exploding motion with her hands. “You destroyed everything.”

I am finally at the door, fumbling with the knob behind me as she steps closer. I turn my face, bracing for her to slap me.

“I just—I’m worried about him,” I say again as I get the door open. It scrapes hard against my back. “I’m sorry.”

“You should be sorry!” she shouts after me as I rush outside.

7

I STUMBLE DOWN THE STEPS and run away from Jasper’s house. Bernham Bridge. You should be sorry. Bernham Bridge. You should be sorry. The bridge is not far, I don’t think, maybe less than a half mile. Only a couple of quick turns. But I need to get there now. I can feel it. And that isn’t about reading anybody’s feelings, not about simple Heightened Emotional Perception. There is no one there to read. This feeling is something more.

But I have never been more certain of anything in my life: Jasper needs me, and he needs me right now.

I look around for a taxi, a car, some other option, overwhelmed by the sense of the time I have already wasted. The things I should have realized. Should have said. But there is no one around to help. I have no choice but to run on. I look down at my stupid, useless flip-flops, tugging them off and sprinting barefoot, one gripped in each hand.

My legs feel wiry and taut as I turn down Juniper toward Sullivan. Soon my feet go numb against the sharp, hot pavement as I race past the bigger, more beautiful houses. The only sounds are the rough heaving of my breath, and the slapping of my bare feet against the concrete. Don’t do it, Jasper. Don’t do it. Because I am thinking that he has gone there to jump. And I pray that I am wrong.

Finally, I reach the place where the road curves and ends in a cluster of trees. After that, there is the bridge.

I am running so fast now. I can barely feel the ground.

Jasper.

A bridge.

And all that emptiness below.

But I will be in time. I have to be. And somehow I will say exactly the right thing. And he will realize that he’s not thinking clearly. Because he may not care about what happens to him right now. At this moment. But he will—tomorrow, the next day. And I care now. So much more than I realized.

I am almost at the bridge now, the span in clear view. My eyes scan the length of it, searching up and down. But there is nothing. There is no one to convince. No one to save. Maybe I was wrong. Wrong, and not late.

I have to be.

But then I spot something on the ground about halfway down, along the railing. A small, dark pile. I race ahead to see what it is.

I am shaking when I finally stop in front of it. It isn’t until I crouch down that I realize it’s a sweatshirt. Blue and green. Any other colors would be better. Because blue and green are the ones worn by all the Newton Regional High School sports teams. I have to put a hand on the railing to steady myself as I pick it up. Before it’s even in the air I can see the arc of the words on the back: NRHS Hockey Team.

No. No. No.

This is not the way it ends. It can’t be. I should have—no. It’s not. Jasper is okay. He has to be. I press myself hard against the railing and over the water below, scanning for any sign of him.

I need to calm down. Focus. Even if he jumped, there’s still time to get him out. It couldn’t have happened that long ago. My hips press against the railing like a gymnast propped up on uneven bars. Looking for signs of life. Praying I find something.

There’s a loud sound behind me then. Wheels screeching to a stop, doors opening. Footsteps. I am afraid to peel my eyes from the water. Afraid I will miss some glimpse of Jasper.

“Stop!” a man shouts behind me. Not quite angry. But very, very firm. “Come away from the railing.”

The police? Jasper’s mom must have called them. Thank God.

But I do not turn. I do not take my eyes off that water. I will spot Jasper if he surfaces—no matter what anyone says. “He’s down there!” I shout back instead.

“Come away from the edge!” Even louder now. But a woman this time. “Miss, get off the railing now!”

“But my friend Jasper—”

“We aren’t listening until you come away from there!”

I glance over my shoulder and see the two police officers coming slowly closer from either side of a stopped police car.

“Someone has to go after him. Do you have a boat or scuba people or something?”

“We can talk about that after you step over here, miss.” When I look quickly again, I see the female officer has curly hair pulled back in a ponytail. And she’s waving me toward her. “Take a step or two away from the edge, hon. Toward me.”

The way she says “hon” has a warm ring to it, but she’s nervous. I can feel it. I see her look down at my shoeless, possibly bloody feet. I get it: I look unhinged. But she is trying to be patient, to give me the benefit of the doubt. Her partner, on the other hand—young and jumpy and overmuscular—seems like he is going to pounce. They are focused only on me, too. They don’t understand what’s going on. They’ve been misinformed.

“You’re wasting time! It’s not me, it’s my friend! He jumped!” I shout back at them as I turn again to the water. “He is going to die down there if you don’t hurry!”

“We want to help you,” the female officer says. She is calmer now, like she’s hit her stride. “But we can’t until you step away from the railing.”

Help you. They are still not listening. I am just going to have to make them.

“If you want me away from the railing, then send somebody down there!” I scream, jabbing a finger toward the water.

I whip around and lean way back on purpose over the railing. The female officer stops, but her partner is still inching toward me, off to the side. His right hand is at his hip, reaching for something. I don’t think they would actually shoot me, but there are other options. She raises a hand again, telling him to hold. He does, but he’s pissed about it.

“We’ll see about your friend,” she says, forcing her voice higher. “As soon as—”

When I press even farther back over the railing, she stops talking.

“Now! Go look for him now!”

God, why didn’t I go over to Jasper’s house last night? Because I had believed him, that’s why. Maybe he’d even been telling the truth last night when he said he’d be okay.

“Wylie, hon?” The female officer knows my name? Jasper’s mom might have told them. So why does her using it seem so off? “Are you listening to me?”

No, I am not. What I am listening to is this terrible feeling I am having. I am listening to the way she feels, which is completely and totally focused on me and not listening to a word I am saying, the worst combination imaginable.

“They didn’t send you for me. They sent you for my friend Jasper.” I push up and actually sit on the railing. I feel queasy when I glance down toward the water and see nothing—no boat, no search party, no flashing lights on shore. No Jasper. And being suspended so far over the water is totally terrifying. “Get people to look for him. Now!”

She holds up a hand. “Okay, okay.” Now she is pissed. Worried, too, but in a mostly pissed-off way. She hates that this situation has gotten away from her. Her nostrils flare as she dials her phone. A second later she is asking for a marine unit. “Possible male teenage victim in water. Fall from Bernham Bridge.” She pauses, gives some more details. It is like she is actually talking to someone, and not pretending. “They’re on their way,” she says when she’s done. “Now, Wylie, we had a deal. Come down.”

I still have the most awful feeling. Different now, though. Like I am missing an essential detail. The most important one.

“What’s going on here?” I ask.

“You’ve got yourself leaning over the side of a bridge, which is extremely dangerous. And you’re scaring the hell out of us.”

The girl with the knife has become the girl sitting on top of a bridge railing. Threatening to jump. A danger to myself, no doubt. Shit. How did that happen? How did I become exactly who I didn’t want to be?

“Everyone wants to help you,” she goes on. “We want you to be okay.”

“But it’s not me,” I whisper. I do want to come down, though. It’s scary hanging over that railing. And she has done what I wanted—sent people looking for Jasper. “Okay, okay.”

I grip the metal tighter as I push myself back to the ground. As soon as my feet touch down, something knocks me hard from the side, throwing me off balance and also away from the water. I’m yanked up by my arms right before I hit the concrete.

“Let go!”

“Calm down.” A man’s voice. A new one, behind me. “Or we’ll have to restrain you.”

Here it is, at long last. People coming to take me away. But I hadn’t pictured it like this. Being so obviously unjust. No. I won’t let it happen. I won’t go quietly. I won’t behave, not the way they want me to. They are wrong about me.

And so I nod, like I have heard them. Like I am listening. “Okay,” I say quietly. “But you’re hurting my arms. Please, let me go.”

They loosen their grip, a little and then a little more. It’s my chance. Maybe the last one. I lunge forward. Run. Run. Run

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