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  A year ago, she would have worked on the paper for weeks, would have gotten an A. But a year ago, her mother hadn’t been married to Rick, hadn’t even been dating him. A year ago, Dr. Rick Wheeler had been Jackie’s boss and Jackie certainly hadn’t been pregnant by him. Which was so gross. Her mom was thirty-nine, way too old to be having a baby.

  Everything had changed, but as far as her mom was concerned, Cassie was still supposed to be the same quiet little girl who got straight A’s. And both Jackie and Rick would really be mad if Cassie got a D for turning the paper in late. Her stepfather had already had several talks with her about her lack of motivation.

  Now, as Cassie stared at the blank computer screen, she thought about how one more bad grade might be all it took to get her mom to agree with Rick that she needed Socom to change her attitude and help her focus.

  Cassie had better figure out a way to get this paper done, and fast. Should she call that guy, Thatcher Hedrick, from school? He had told her he worked part-time at a computer store.

  She knew Thatcher a little better than most of the other kids because they had both spent a few hours after school each week working together on the yearbook. He looked kind of scary, with a pierced eyebrow and shoulder-length hair dyed dead black. But a few weeks ago he had told Cassie he wanted to be a doctor because his older sister had died of cancer. He had said it offhand, like it was no big deal, but his eyes had blinked several times.

  Maybe Thatcher could fix the computer. Except what would her mom and Rick think if they came home and found her alone with a boy—even if it was just in the kitchen? Besides, there wasn’t time to call him.

  Rick’s computer. Cassie looked over her shoulder, as if someone was watching her. Which was silly. She was completely alone. But Rick had emphasized that no one was ever to go into his office. All his patient records were kept there, and he said the government had new, strict laws about confidentiality.

  Cassie looked at the digital clock on the stainless steel range. She had maybe a half hour before they would be home. She went down the hall, took a deep breath, and opened the door to Rick’s office.

  three

  April 14

  She wasn’t going to let them hear her cry. Cassie promised herself that as she sat on the cold rubber mat in the back of the van. The one whose nose she had broken—at least she hoped she had broken it—was half turned in his seat, smirking at her through the bars. To gain privacy, she dropped her chin onto her chest, let her bangs cover her eyes, and turned as far away from him as the handcuffs would allow.

  Her chest ached as if someone had torn out her heart. She still couldn’t believe her mother had done this. For seven years, Cassie and Jackie had been on their own. “It’s just us against the world, kid,” her mom used to say. After Cassie’s dad had moved out to be with his new girlfriend (who later became his wife), Cassie had brought all her stuffed animals to her parents’ queen-size bed. For the next year, she slept next to her mother. During the day, they never talked about the nights, about how her mom had night-mares and Cassie would wake her up because she was screaming. Or worse, sobbing so hard, it sounded like something was ripping inside her.

  “Better stop your bawling and get used to the new reality,” the guy with the bloody nose said now. Cassie had thought she was keeping her tears a secret, but he must have seen them anyway. Out of the corner of her eye, Cassie watched as he pinched the end of his nose and then examined his fingertips. He looked over at her again, his mouth twisted and ugly. “You really messed up my nose. I can’t breathe right anymore.”

  “Oh, c’mon, JJ, your nose has been broken before,” the fat one said. He had tattoos all up and down his arms, colorful ones that must have taken hours and hours. “You’re just mad that this time it’s a girl.”

  “Yeah, and now she’s crying just like a girl.” JJ turned back to her. “Don’t you get it? Your parents don’t want you. Looks like your mom has a new baby on the way—you know how much people like babies. A lot more than they do kids who do drugs.”

  “Rick’s not my father. And I don’t do drugs.” It was stupid to appeal to them. Still, Cassie couldn’t help herself.

  JJ just laughed. “Oh, right. That’s a new one. Marty and I will have to remember that one.”

  Marty acted as if he hadn’t heard Cassie at all. “Once you start taking drugs, you lose all self-respect. Next thing you know, you’re tricking yourself on the street, driving off with some man old enough to be your daddy.”

  Cassie dropped her head again. How could her mom have abandoned her like this? How could her mom have believed Rick? Jackie must know that Cassie didn’t use drugs.

  But Rick had so many horror stories. About teens gone bad, runaways who didn’t come back, kids who tried heroin once and were addicts for life, who started hanging out with the wrong friends and somehow ended up living at the bus station. Rick must have scared Jackie into doing this. He’d brought them to Portland, cut them off from all their old friends, and then had gone to work on Jackie so it could be just the two of them. Them and the baby in her mom’s belly.

  And now it seemed he had backed up his lies by planting drugs in Cassie’s room.

  She had to get free and find someone who would listen to her. Cassie shifted on the floor, which wasn’t softened at all by the rubber mat. When she did, she became aware of something hard in the right pocket of her jeans. Her cell phone! It was one of the tiniest models, bought by her mom as a major bribe for moving to Portland.

  The two guys hadn’t had time to search her before they hustled her into the van. But what good would the phone do her? With her hands behind her back, she couldn’t even get it out of her pocket.

  And who would Cassie call, anyway? It would take too long to explain things to her dad. Thatcher knew what was happening, so he would catch on a lot quicker, but how much could a sixteen-year-old do? The best bet would be 9-1-1, Cassie decided.

  But first, Cassie had to figure out how to get her hands on the phone and a little bit of privacy. And soon, before they got to where they were going. Then the chances of them searching her would go way up. The thought of their hands on her made Cassie feel like throwing up.

  She swallowed hard, hearing her mom’s voice in her head. Don’t go borrowing trouble. One thing at a time. And the first thing was the phone. She shifted so that her hands were hidden from view, then pretended to stretch her shoulders. Instead she tested the handcuffs by quickly jerking her wrists apart. They didn’t budge.

  Ignoring the shooting pains that resulted, Cassie wiggled her sluggish fingers. Ideally, she needed a place where she could be by herself, unobserved, for a few minutes. But how was she going to manage that?

  Then she had an idea.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Cassie said.

  four

  April 11

  Everything in Rick’s office was so neat—she would have to be sure not to leave any trace. While Cassie waited for the computer to boot, she spun around in his leather chair. Only the best for Rick. She looked at his filing cabinets and thought about how he had begun to treat her like a potential patient. She wouldn’t put it past him to have started a file on her.

  Opening the top filing cabinet, Cassie looked at the tabs. Adams, Elizabeth. Bowers, Jeremy. Candlewick, Samantha. She recognized several of the names as being kids from Minor, but she didn’t really know them. They were all older or younger than Cassie. Some of them were already out of high school. She was about to close the filing cabinet and go to the next one, where Streng, Cassie, might be. Then she saw a name that made her stop.

  Cartright, Darren. She hadn’t realized Darren had been Rick’s patient. Of course, it wasn’t like Rick was going to talk about it, especially after what had happened.

  Darren had had black-framed glasses and thick brown hair that stuck up like an animal’s pelt. Tall enough to play basketball, he was too awkward to dribble a ball, let alone make a basket. He had been in honors English and math with Cassi
e, but they had never really talked. Later, after everything happened, she realized he didn’t really have any friends. Nobody had paid much attention to him until he leapt off the tallest building in Minor. The mailman who saw him said Darren seemed to think he could fly. He was still flapping his arms when the pavement rose up to meet him.

  In the weeks just before his death, Darren had changed. In class, he started whispering to himself, so low that only the people nearest him could hear it. Cassie had asked him “What?” a couple of times, but when it was clear he hadn’t been addressing her, she tried to block it out.

  Death made Darren someone special, romantic. A lot of people went to his funeral, cried and hung on to each other. Candles appeared on the sidewalk—still stained with his blood—and bouquets wrapped in clear plastic, and sometimes an open can of beer, although Cassie had never heard that Darren drank. People talked about him far more than they ever had when he was alive.

  Cassie surrendered to temptation and slipped out Darren’s file. It was surprisingly thin. On top was a sheet labeled Socom Informed Consent. So Darren had been on Socom? Obviously, it hadn’t worked.

  The next few pages were written in Rick’s distinctive handwriting, which slanted to the left, sharp narrow letters, all upper-case.

  Her eye was drawn to an entry dated October 3. “Has been responding well to Socom. Moods more stable. Mother reports he is more obedient.” She turned the pages, looked at the last entry.

  “Patient claims that he can become a bird, and has flown over his school. Last Socom injection ten days ago. Drug’s side effects are worrisome.”

  Cassie looked at the date. October 29, three days before Darren died. She remembered because Darren had killed himself the day after Halloween. She wasn’t sure what the entry meant. If Socom was so good, why had Rick been worried about Darren being on it?

  On a hunch, she looked more closely at the names in the filing cabinets. Two more of them sounded familiar. Ben Tranbarger had gone to Cassie’s high school, too, but had been a senior. Carmen Hernandez had dropped out in ninth grade. Ben had drunk silver cleaner; Carmen stabbed herself in the abdomen. The newspaper interviewed experts who cautioned that media attention could prompt copycat suicides. One story said that after Ben killed himself, his mom found a clipping about Darren’s death on top of his dresser.

  Maybe it was copycatting. Or maybe it was only a coincidence. Crazy people went to therapy, at least that was how it was supposed to work. Even so, doctors couldn’t fix everything.

  But when Cassie opened the two files, she saw that both Ben and Carmen had been on Socom. And just like in Darren’s file, Rick had notes about how they were starting to become delusional—and that he was taking them off Socom.

  Cassie needed to show these files to someone. But if she took them and he found out—well, she didn’t even want to think about how angry her stepfather would be. If only Rick had a photocopier!

  Then Cassie thought of her digital camera, the one Rick had bought her to try to soften the move. She had already had a camera, a Minolta her father had given her for her fourteenth birthday. The new camera had intrigued her, even if it seemed too easy. No film to buy, no f-stops to fiddle with. “Just point and shoot,” Rick had told her.

  She looked at her watch. 8:44. How long did she have until they came back from Baskin-Robbins? She ran upstairs and snatched up the camera from her desk.

  As she steadily turned the pages and pressed the camera’s button, Cassie tried to reason with herself. Minor was a small town. Rick had been one of just two therapists who specialized in adolescents. It probably was just a coincidence that he had been the one who had treated these three teenagers.

  She jumped when she heard the garage door whine. Cassie wasn’t done, but she hurriedly closed the files, slid them back in the right places, turned off the light, and slipped out of the office. By the time her mom and Rick came in, Cassie was coming down the stairs, as if she had been in her room all along.

  But at three o’clock in the morning, panic jolted her awake. Had she remembered to turn off Rick’s computer?

  five

  April 14

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Cassie repeated, putting her plan into motion.

  Leaning forward, JJ got what looked like a broken-off car antenna from the floor by his feet. He turned and poked it through the bars. Cassie flinched as far back as she could. JJ’s laugh was a bray. He prodded the white five-gallon plastic bucket closer to her.

  “Use that.”

  She recoiled. There was no way she was even pulling her pants down in front of these guys, let alone peeing. Then she realized there was no way she could—and that maybe her idea would still work.

  “How am I even supposed to get my pants down with my hands cuffed?”

  JJ’s sneer turned into a leer. “Stop the van, Marty, and let me get in back with her.”

  “Nuh-uh.” Marty shook his head. “I’m not letting you handle the merchandise.”

  Cassie said in a meek voice, “Can’t we stop at a rest area or something? I promise I won’t run away.”

  “I’ve heard that one before,” Marty said with something like a laugh. “I don’t think so. You put up a pretty good fight when we grabbed you.”

  Cassie kept her eyes on the mat. For the first time she noticed the rusty-brown stains. She couldn’t let herself think about what they might be. Instead, she concentrated on looking broken. “That’s when I thought you were kidnappers. Now that I know this was my parents’ idea, what good would it do? If I get away, they’ll just send me back. My mom made it pretty clear that she doesn’t”—the words stuck in her throat, and Cassie had to clear it—“that they don’t want me.” She looked at JJ with her chin tilted down and her eyes wide, the classic submissive pose they had learned about in biology. Dogs did it, chimps did it, even fashion models did it.

  JJ was going for it, too, Cassie could tell. But then Marty shot down the idea. “Every girl we get is a lying skank, you know that, JJ. Remember the last one? I’m not losing my job over this.”

  Cassie realized she didn’t need to get out of the van to be alone. All she needed was them out of the van. “Can’t you just pull over on the side of the road and give me some privacy? I’ll pee in the bucket if that’s what you want, but I won’t do it in front of you. I don’t think I could even if I tried. Then, afterward, you could dump the bucket. You don’t want to smell pee the whole trip, anyway.”

  There was a long silence. JJ watched Marty, so Cassie did, too. It was clearly his decision.

  He scratched his belly. “All right. But not until after dark. Then I’ll stop on a side road. And afterward, you empty the bucket. And if you can’t wait that long, then you’re going to have to pee your pants.”

  “I can wait,” Cassie assured him. “Thank you. I really, really appreciate it.” Cassie settled back to wait and wiggle her fingers. When the time came, she would have only a few seconds to act. She didn’t want to think about what they would do to her if her plan failed.

  six

  April 12

  The next day, Cassie only went through the motions in her classes, paying just enough attention to keep from getting called on. She kept thinking about Rick’s computer. When she had tiptoed down the stairs in the middle of the night, the computer had been dark. But had she left it that way—or had her stepfather discovered it was on and turned it off himself? When everyone passed forward their papers in history, she didn’t even care she had nothing.

  What could she do, she kept asking herself. Who could she tell? There were kids she said hi to, even people she sat with at lunch. But this called for more than that. In biology, they watched a film about cell division, but hardly anyone, including Cassie, paid attention. The guy next to her was reading a magazine article called “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 6: The Spine-Tingling Sequel.” The guy on the other side was drawing a picture of Mr. Meiner being shot in the back with an arrow. Only Thatcher, who sat in front of Cassie, seeme
d to have his eyes on the screen.

  After class was over, Cassie hurried up to him, catching him just outside the door as he swung his backpack on one shoulder.

  “Can I talk to you?” Unconsciously Cassie stood close, kept her voice low. He ducked his head to hear her. His breath smelled like coffee.

  Thatcher looked curious. “Sure, what about?”

  “I need your advice. It’s really complicated. But nothing to do with school. And not here. Someplace more private.”

  He hesitated, then said, “We could go to my house after school. There’s no one home until six or so.”

  This was taking their acquaintance forward one huge step. But where else could she turn? “Okay.” Cassie nodded uncertainly and looked up at Thatcher. His eyes were a pale blue that was almost gray. She realized how close they were standing and took a step back.

  “Meet me out front after seventh period, and we can walk to my house.”

  “All right. And, um, thanks.”

  Cassie ducked into the bathroom, took the little cell phone out of her pocket, and dialed. Her mom answered on the third ring.

  “Hi, Mom. Um, I forgot to tell you, but we’re having a meeting about the yearbook after school. So I won’t be home until dinnertime.” As Cassie spoke, she looked at herself in the mirror, seeing herself as if she were a stranger. Who was this too-tall girl with black curly hair, the one wearing the vintage black thrift store shirtdress, the black fishnets, and the pink Chuck Taylor All-Stars?

  “That’s great, honey. Maybe you can make some friends there.”

  “Mom!” Her mom’s worries made Cassie feel pathetic. A friendless loser.

  “Oh, you know what I mean, honey. You’ve just seemed so down lately. I know how hard it’s been moving here.” Her mom sighed. “Will you need me to come pick you up?”