CHAPTER FOUR

Cassandra

Cassandra Eugenie Fox was not the kind of girl to leave well enough alone. She seemed to breeze from place to place through the Milton streets after school—she’d started attending class regularly, god knows why—casually inquiring of boys she bummed cigarettes from if they’d seen Kai Harper lately; but really what she was doing was anything but breezing. She was a force with a stiff wind at her back, and she had a mission. 

She finally spotted Kai three days after the cemetery picnic, in the rain as he came out of a grocer’s. He was carrying a paper bag in one arm and his umbrella in the other hand. She crossed the street, her Wellies splashing on the the shiny-dark pavement, and fell in step beside him. Their umbrellas bumped, and he glanced at her nervously but kept walking, taking long, loping strides. Cassandra overtook him and then stood in his path, making him come to a sudden stop and clutch the bag against his chest. He was wearing a denim jacket with a The Clash T-shirt on underneath, which made Cassandra inwardly roll her eyes and think American poser.

“I’m here to make you answer for your slight against my brother’s honor,” she said, slightly tipping her umbrella at him.

Kai didn’t answer. He looked at her, and there behind his eyes was a sullen, smoldering anger, a red-hot spot among black ashes. She stepped backward, suddenly aware of his height, the width of his shoulders, the size of his hands—the way they gripped and crumpled the brown paper bag, the mild awkwardness of the boy she had met weeks before replaced with something darker. He closed his eyes, blanketing the sparks, and breathed in deeply. Cassandra counted the breaths—seven, eight, nine, ten—before he opened his eyes again.

“Bard told me not to talk to you, Cass,” he said, his deep voice quiet but firm, the anger in his eyes replaced with a kind of hardened resentment.

Cassandra mustered her resolve, standing up taller to try to reduce their size difference. “He doesn’t decide who gets to talk to me. I do. And I want answers from you, Kai Harper. Bard was gutted. What did you do?”

He looked down and away from her and bit his bottom lip. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Cassandra thought. No wonder Bard went arse over elbows so fast.

“It was all a misunderstanding,” Kai said. “I was just thinking out loud, and he—he got so defensive. He thought I was using him, but I wasn’t. I....” He took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “I really do like him, Cass. I just got too enthusiastic, and my mouth got ahead of my brain. I forgot that just because I can tell what he’s feeling, he can’t do the same with me. If he could, he’d get it—I just need to make him see….” He trailed off.

Cassandra drew her eyebrows together. “That’s another thing—you really got him all sideways with all your mind-reading talk. And what do you mean, ‘make him see’?” 

Kai hesitated, then fumbled with word-like sounds for a moment. “I—I didn’t mean I would do anything drastic, it’s just that I can’t explain—I can’t use words the way he does.”

She put one hand on her hip. “And how exactly did you happen to be in the cemetery at the same time we were?”

Kai shrugged. “I dunno. When my uncle asked where I felt like practicing that day—he says different settings help you improve your focus — something made me say All Saints Cemetery.”

“Something.”

“I’m allowed to go to the cemetery. Or is that off-limits now, too?” The anger in his eyes flashed, until Cass took a step away from him and almost turned away. “Wait, Cass—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean.” He sighed. “It’s why I came to live here with my uncle, you know.” He adjusted his hold on the grocery bag, loosening his grip, and pressed his lips together. “It did the same thing to my parents as it did to Bard—just weirded them out, so they sent me away.”

“Just because of that?”

“Well—” he blinked a drop of rain off of his eyelashes—“There were other things, too.”

Cassandra lowered her hand from her hip, almost wanting to reach out and pat him, as if he were a puppy. Instead, she thrust her hand in her pocket.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But, still—that has nothing to do with Bard.”

He sighed impatiently. “What am I supposed to do, Cass? He doesn’t want me to talk to him, so how can I explain?” He turned his right foot, clad in a black boot, on its side, wobbled it back and forth. “And even then he wouldn’t believe me.”

Cassandra looked at him in pity as the the rain pattered against their umbrellas, the only sound between them for a moment. The anger in his eyes had dissipated, but she still sensed heat coming from his core, enough that she was almost surprised the rain didn’t turn to steam when it fell on him. This was something very different from the cold disdain of her father or her own white-hot fury—quick to flare, quick to extinguish. Was it safe to be so near something that seethed with… whatever it was that she saw in Kai Harper? She had told Bard that she wouldn’t interfere, and she had meant it then—but looking at Kai now—his pained eyes, his tall frame tense with frustration—That’s how they get you, though, isn’t it? Or at least how this one does. This one who really does like my brother. 

Her brother who was a right pain in the arse, but who meant well and wanted so much from life. Her brother, whose green eyes held a veiled hauntedness that nothing had been able to exorcise, ever since last May. If Kai’s strange ideas about sensing Bard’s feelings were real—could he see that, too? He wasn’t in Milton when the fire happened, but surely he had seen the burnt out six-floor building—a scar downtown, a reminder. Perhaps there was a place in Bard’s mind that was scarred too, where the events of that afternoon—both those in the store as it burned and those in the street afterward—resided. She wished she could see it, could crash through Bard’s mind, liberating the ghosts of his memories the way Christ cut a path through hell and raised up the old patriarchs.

She shook her head. Catechism, at a time like this.