The Outliers

by Kimberly McCreight

  “And so that’s what this is?” Jasper asks, looking around at the run-down cage of a cabin. “It’s some reform school?”

  But that does not seem right to me, not right at all.

  “Yeah, I mean, I thought so until we actually got here and they locked me in one of these piece-of-shit cabins.” She sounds mad instead of sad, and it’s a relief. “I mean, obviously this isn’t any kind of school, not even one for crackheads. So I started freaking out, screaming my head off.”

  Crackheads. Kind of a coincidence after all the talk of meth. And this story still doesn’t feel like the truth. Cassie is leaving something out. Like maybe she wasn’t just sitting on that bench minding her business when this guy came up to her.

  “So this doesn’t have anything to do with drugs?” I ask. I can’t help it.

  “Drugs?” Now Cassie shoots Jasper a look: see, this is what I meant, she’s judgmental. “Why? Because I bought pot once?”

  “That’s not why,” Jasper says, defending me. But kind of reluctantly. “The police in town said that meth is the only reason people come up here.”

  “Meth?” Cassie laughs angrily as she looks from Jasper to me, and back again. “So now the two of you think that I—”

  “The police thought that,” I say. But unlike Jasper, I just sound defensive. “And you wouldn’t tell us anything. What were we supposed to think?”

  “How about not the worst?” Cassie’s voice cracks. “Sometimes, Wylie, you really are just like my mom.”

  Ouch. The worst part? She’s not even totally wrong. Am I really more willing to believe some version of events that includes Cassie using meth than I am this boarding-school/boot camp story? If Karen did get Cassie into this mess with some therapy school gone wrong, she might even lie to my dad about it when she came to ask for help.

  “So that’s it?” Jasper asks. “They haven’t told you anything else?”

  “There is this other guy, not the jerk who drove me and not the freak on the door,” Cassie says. “He was pretty nice. He said that they didn’t want me to worry. That I’m here because I’m in some kind of danger, but not from them, from someone else. I don’t understand what that has to do with them being some therapy school …” It’s obvious she knows this doesn’t make much sense. “But it’s like they’re protecting me.”

  “Protecting you?” I ask. “From who?”

  “Myself, maybe? That’s the only thing that makes sense, right?” She shrugs. “I have no idea. He said that was all he could tell me.”

  “Why wouldn’t your mom tell us?” I ask.

  “I’m sure she feels like an asshole. There’s no way she expected the place to be like this. I saw the brochures.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us any of this when you were texting?” I ask.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

  I want to say I would have come no matter what, but that would be a lie.

  “Also, I didn’t really have the time to explain anything. They didn’t know I had my phone.” Cassie motions to her bra. She’s always tucked stuff in there—cash, lipstick, even her phone—in a way that me and my flat chest never could have dreamed of. “And I had to stand on a chair to get a signal. I didn’t want you to tell my mom, because on the off chance she did know what this place was like, I figured she would turn around and tell them I had my phone. You know how she’ll never admit she’s made a mistake. They finally caught me anyway. They said I was putting myself and everyone else ‘in danger’ by sending texts. After that, they took my phone.”

  “Did they actually say they would kill you?” I ask, thinking of that text we got from Cassie at the Freshmart.

  “What do you mean?” She looks confused.

  “The text you sent,” I say. “You said not to call the police or they would kill you.”

  Cassie shakes her head and looks down. “They must have sent that after they took my phone.”

  “And you didn’t tell us to go to Seneca or the police?”

  She shakes her head again. “No.”

  “You keep saying ‘they,’” Jasper says. “How many of them are there?”

  Cassie looks up like she’s considering, then counts on her fingers. “Maybe a dozen?”

  “A dozen?” Jasper looks nervously toward the door. Even he can’t do anything with those kinds of odds.

  “Maybe more. I’ve only seen most of them through the window. A couple of them are women. They all look so normal, which is maybe even creepier.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Jasper claps his hands together in a go-team-go kind of way. “I think we’ve heard enough. We are getting the hell out of here, right now.”

  He strides over to where Cassie is sitting on the couch and reaches down for her hand. She seems so sad and sorry when she finally reaches up.

  “Come on,” he says quietly. “You’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.” Finally, Cassie’s body loosens. She even smiles a little.

  And I’m amazed at how he does that: makes it better—makes her better—without actually fixing anything. That’s love, I guess. And it’s something I don’t know anything about.

  A minute later, Cassie and I are standing behind Jasper as he sets to work on the last couple sets of screws, harder than ever before.

  “What is this?” Cassie asks.

  “A way out.” And Jasper sounds so confident now that I almost feel convinced myself.

  “And then what?” Cassie looks toward the windows, worried.

  “We run,” Jasper says.

  “But what if they catch us?” Cassie asks, and now she sounds officially scared. “There is a guy out there with a gun, remember? Or what if they were actually telling the truth about trying to protect me from something? Maybe we’re safer in here.”

  “Protect you from what?” I ask, staring at her hard. “You said you thought they were making that up.”

  “I don’t know that for sure,” she says, her eyes still on the window. “What if there is somebody or something out there? These people haven’t actually done anything to me. Maybe they’re not so bad.”

  My stomach tightens as I look out the dark window. It is creepy out there, that’s for sure.

  “Whoever these people are, they have the police or a policeman helping them,” Jasper says. “They grabbed you off the street and have us all locked up here. That’s enough information for me. We need to go.”

  Cassie eyes me for a long time, like she’s considering whether or not to agree. Instead, she looks down and takes my wrist in her cold fingers. “Wylie, what happened?”

  There’s blood smeared on my forearm from three deep cuts beneath my bunched-up sleeve at the crook of my elbow and a few thicker pink scratches. I felt the pain when I first pulled my arm out from the plywood, but after that: nothing. I wrap my fingers tight around my arm, like a tourniquet, which only makes it wake up and throb.

  “It was the wood.” I point to the wall. “I pulled my arm out too fast. It’ll be okay.”

  Cassie is staring at my arm still. “Thank you for coming,” she says. “Especially after all our …” She reaches down and links her fingers through mine. “After everything.”

  “Of course I came,” I say, turning to look at Jasper as he keeps on working. “What are best friends for?”

  Cassie and I were lying on the couch, toe to toe, propped up on pillows doing our homework as we had been each day for the nearly two months since the funeral. And each day, I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to keep coming, to keep pretending that we were friends. But a larger part of me was too afraid of what would happen to me if she stopped.

  We both ignored the doorbell the first time. For sure, I was never going to answer it. Not if they rang it a thousand times. Not even if it was more flowers or another kindly casserole dropped off by a neighbor. Because there was also a chance it was another reporter. I don’t know what it was: the cruel irony of my mom getting the Pulitzer nomination posthumously, the fact that she had surviv
ed so much danger in the field only to die a mile from her home. Or that she was so beautiful. But the reporters kept coming no matter how many times or how many ways we told them to go away.

  Cassie knew this, too. And by the time the person rang the bell a third time, she couldn’t take it anymore. The people with the casseroles were never that insistent.

  “I’ll get rid of them,” she said, pushing herself up off the couch. A minute later, I heard the front door creak open, a beat of silence, followed by Cassie’s quiet voice: “What the hell?” Then her stomping outside and down the front steps: “Hey! Come here, you fucking asshole!”

  Reluctantly, I forced myself up to investigate. Our front door was hanging wide open when I got out there, and Cassie was nowhere in sight. I stepped into the open doorway, my eyes watering from the March cold blasting in. Finally, I spotted Cassie out in the street, standing in front of a dark-gray sedan in her cropped sweater, short skirt, and bright argyle tights. Her barely-still-curly brown hair was lifted in an arc around her head in the strong wind, making her look like a pissed-off Medusa. She had one hand on the hood of the car, the other high in the air. It took me a minute to realize what she had gripped in her fist: a plastic baby doll. We’d gotten a half dozen in all, but not a single one since my mom’s accident.

  “But she’s dead,” I whispered in the empty foyer. “You got what you wanted.”

  Cassie was shaking the baby over her head now.

  “Get out of the car, you asshole!” she shouted. “You think you can fucking do this to them still?”

  I’d almost forgotten about the babies altogether. And all I wanted was for my mom to appear next to me. To shrug and shake her head: you cannot control the world. I wanted that so bad it felt like my heart was going to burst. Actually, I wished it would. As depressed as I’d been, I hadn’t actually thought about killing myself, not seriously, anyway. But did I want to die? Every single second.

  Whoever was in the car—I figured it was a he, but I couldn’t see from where I was—must have said something super messed-up then. Because Cassie went crazy.

  “Get out here! You piece of shit!” she screamed, climbing up on the hood of his car and slamming the baby down.

  And I was glad. I wanted her to smash his windshield. To reach in and grab him by the throat. Because it felt like that guy in the car—who was just some idiot who hated what he thought my mom’s pictures said—was responsible for my mom being dead. And watching Cassie out there, waving that baby around like a lunatic, I felt this tiny flutter of hope. Like someday all the sadness flooding my insides might be lit up like that—into an unstoppable blaze.

  My dad drove up while Cassie was still on the hood. He screeched to a stop and jumped out, looking for a second like he might beat the crap out of that baby-dropper. God did I want him to. But he didn’t even look in the driver’s direction. Instead, he calmly talked Cassie down. As soon as she was off the car, the driver sped away. And my dad tossed the doll to the curb, where it sat until somebody—the garbageman, a neighbor, a passerby—must have picked it up and carried it away.

  “What did that guy say?” I asked Cassie later when we were back inside on the couch.

  “Your dad’s right, it doesn’t matter,” she said, waving me off. “He was a nut ball.”

  “It matters.” I stared at her hard.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “He said, ‘Beware false prophets.’” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know how your mom dealt with those people. But trust me, that particular turtle-ish guy isn’t going to be coming back. When I got up on his car, I think he might have peed himself.”

  And I knew Cassie and my dad were right. That man—whoever he was—didn’t matter. None of the people who hated my mom and her pictures did. Maybe I should have even been grateful. Because, in a way, them still hating her kept her alive.

  “We’re close,” Jasper whispers. He’s already on the last screws—only one corner and a few along the side left to go. “Hold the board so it doesn’t fall and make noise once I have them all out. We’re going to have to move fast, too. That way, I think.” He points to the other side of the cabin, which backs up to the woods. “No stopping, no matter what. Even if we get separated. Everyone has to just keep running.”

  Are we really doing this? My heart is thumping. My body tensed for flight. Yes. Yes, we are. And I know I can. Jasper and I just did this a few hours ago. I nod, ready to step forward and take the board. But Cassie is just standing there, shaking her head.

  “I still don’t know if we should—” her voice chokes out.

  “Cassie, come on. You’re just freaked out,” Jasper says. “You’re not thinking clearly.”

  There’s a loud noise from the front of the cabin then. The lock again, the door cracking open.

  “Move,” Jasper says.

  We break off in opposite directions, jetting away from the wall and the wood. The scene of our escape in progress. At least the board is still in place. It’s our best chance for them not to realize we’ve found a way out.

  I hold my breath as we wait to see who’s coming inside. I pray it is not that toothless man from the window. I do not want to see him up close. But it’s not him who finally steps tentatively inside. This man is youngish and normal-looking, a couple of years older than us maybe, with shaggy black hair and warm eyes behind square, black-framed glasses. He’s wearing dark jeans, lace-up boots, and an orange down vest over a flannel shirt, but even in those clothes he seems more big city than Maine woods.

  “Hi,” he says, uncomfortable, even nervous. Aware, maybe, that this situation is profoundly messed up. It could be a good sign. “I’m Quentin.”

  He’s got some bottles of water and some granola bars cradled unevenly in his arms. When he goes to put them down on the table, the water bottles immediately roll onto the floor. He scrambles awkwardly to pick them up.

  “You know, whatever Cassie’s mom agreed to, she definitely didn’t sign up for this.” Jasper steps forward. His arms are at his sides, but his fists are clenched. “And Wylie and my parents didn’t agree to anything. Keeping us here is false imprisonment.”

  Jasper will make an excellent lawyer someday. It’s actually pretty convincing. If only we were in a position to threaten anyone with anything. The guy holds up his hands, eyes wide.

  “You’re confused, which totally makes sense. And I was just about to—” The light in the bathroom goes off, making us all twitch. “And there goes the generator again. Wait, hold on one second.” He ducks his head back out the still-open door and returns with two kerosene lanterns. They bathe the cabin in warm yellow light. “Okay, that’s better. Being trapped in the dark is not going to help anything. Listen, to be clear, having you here is for your safety. If you could just trust—”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Jasper takes another step forward, his voice rising. He is much bigger than this Quentin guy. “We don’t even have any idea who you are. Why the hell would we ever trust you?”

  “You okay in there, Quentin?” A nasally voice outside draws out his name like a schoolyard bully. The toothless guy, no doubt, reminding us that he’s out there. With a gun.

  Quentin shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “Yes, Stuart, we’re fine.”

  “You’re not from some reform school, are you?” I ask.

  “No,” Quentin says quietly, pressing his lips together and shaking his head again. “And everyone feels terrible about all the deception. We were really hoping he’d be here by now so he could explain himself.”

  “Him, who?” I ask. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Oh.” Now Quentin looks confused. “Your dad, Wylie.”

  “My dad,” I hear myself say. It’s not a question. Just a word that doesn’t make any sense.

  “Don’t worry. He’s fine,” Quentin hustles to add. “I didn’t mean to make it sound like there’s a problem. I guess he’s just taking the long way around.”

  “Why is my dad coming here?” My heart is
throbbing in my head again. “How do you even know him?”

  “Oh,” Quentin says again, looking even more confused, and officially nervous. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “What is going on?” I shout, and so loud I almost scare myself.

  “Okay, okay.” Quentin holds up his hands. “Your dad would have preferred if you had stayed home, obviously. But once Cassie”—he motions to her, smiles uncomfortably—“I mean once we knew you were already in Seneca, your dad had us bring you here so that you’d be safe. That’s the most important thing.”

  “No, he did not,” I say, my voice quiet and trembling. I can barely force any sound out.

  And it cannot be true. Because that would mean my dad knew all along what had happened to Cassie. That he stood there in our living room while Karen freaked out. While I freaked out. Pretending he had no clue. Pretending he was trying to help when really he had something to do with it. What kind of monster does that? And why?

  But it feels like some kind of awful key sliding into place. I’m terrified what’s going to happen when somebody pops the lock.

  “Have you decided what you’re going to do, Ben?” my mom asked my dad that last night at dinner, her last night.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, except that she was launching into another one of their fights—the ones they had all the time now right in front of us, without ever revealing what they were actually fighting about. But from the way my dad’s face puckered, he knew what she meant. And he was not happy.

  “Do about what?” I asked. This couldn’t be about my dad’s study. Finally that was finished, about to be published. “What happened?”

  My dad eyeballed my mom: see what you’ve started. “There have been some lapses in cybersecurity campus-wide,” he said, glancing in my direction. “But Dr. Simons got a colleague from Stanford’s computer science department to bolster my study’s data security until our university can work out its problem.”