Cassie went very still. “Mom, what are you trying to say?”
“I'm saying we're not going home, or at least not back to Reseda. We're going to my home, to move in with your grandmother. She needs us. We're going to stay here.”
Cassie felt nothing but a dazed numbness. She could only say stupidly, as if this were what mattered, “Where's 'here'? Where does Grandma live?”
For the first time her mother turned from the window. Her eyes seemed bigger and darker than Cassie had ever seen them before.
“New Salem,” she said quietly. “The town is called New Salem.”
Hours later, Cassie was still sitting by the window, staring blankly. Her mind was running in helpless, useless circles.
To stay here… to stay in New England…
An electric shock ran through her. Him. I knew we'd see him again, something inside her proclaimed, and it was glad. But it was only one voice and there were many others, all speaking at once.
To stay. Not going home. And what difference does it make if the guy is here in Massachusetts somewhere? You don't know his name or where he lives. You'll never find him again.
But there's a chance, she thought desperately. And the voice deepest inside, the one that had been glad before, whispered: More than a chance. It's your fate.
Fate! the other voices scoffed. Don't be ridiculous! It's your fate to spend your junior year in New England, that's all. Where you don't know anyone. Where you'll be alone.
Alone, alone, alone, all the other voices agreed.
The deep voice was crushed and disappeared. Cassie felt any hope of seeing the red-haired boy again slip away from her. What she was left with was despair.
I won't even get to say good-bye to my friends at home, she thought. She'd begged her mother for the chance to go back, just to say good-bye. But Mrs. Blake had said there was no money and no time. Their airline tickets would be cashed in. All their things would be shipped to Cassie's grandmother's house by a friend of her mother's.
“If you went back,” her mother had said gently, “you'd only feel worse about leaving again. This way at least it will be a clean break. And you can see your friends next summer.”
Next summer? Next summer was a hundred years away. Cassie thought of her friends: good-natured Beth and quiet Clover, and Miriam the class wit. Add to that shy and dreamy Cassie and you had their group. So maybe they weren't the in-crowd, but they had fun and they'd stuck together since elementary school. How would she get along without them until next summer?
But her mother's voice had been so soft and distracted, and her eyes had wandered around the room in such a vague, preoccupied way, that Cassie hadn't had the heart to rant and rave the way she would have liked.
In fact, for an instant Cassie had wanted to go to her mother and throw her arms around her and tell her everything would be all right. But she couldn't. The small, hot coal of resentment burning in her chest wouldn't let her. However worried her mother might be, she didn't have to face the prospect of going to a strange new school in a state three thousand miles from where she belonged.
Cassie did. New hallways, new lockers, new classrooms, new desks, she thought. New faces instead of the friends she'd known since junior high. Oh, it couldn't be true.
Cassie hadn't screamed at her mother this afternoon, and she hadn't hugged her, either. She had just silently turned away to the window, and this was where she'd been sitting ever since, while the light slowly faded and the sky turned first salmon pink and then violet and then black.
It was a long time before she went to bed. And it was only then that she realized she'd forgotten all about the chalcedony lucky piece. She reached out and took it from the nightstand and slipped it under her pillow.
Portia stopped by as Cassie and her mother were loading the rental car.
“Going home?” she said.
Cassie gave her tote bag a final push to squeeze it into the trunk. She had just realized she didn't want Portia to find out she was staying in New England. She couldn't stand to have Portia know of her unhappiness; it would give Portia a kind of triumph over her.
When she looked up, she had her best attempt at a pleasant smile in place. “Yes,” she said, and flicked a quick glance over to where her mother was leaning in the driver's-side door, arranging things in the backseat.
“I thought you were staying until the end of next week.”
“We changed our minds.” She looked into Portia's hazel eyes and was startled by the coldness there. “Not that I didn't have a good time. It's been fun,” Cassie added, hastily and foolishly.
Portia shook straw-colored hair off her forehead. “Maybe you'd better stay out west from now on,” she said. “Around here, we don't like liars.”
Cassie opened her mouth and then shut it again, cheeks flaming. So they did know about her deception on the beach. This was the time for one of those devastatingly witty remarks that she thought of at night to say to Portia-and, of course, she couldn't summon up a word. She pressed her lips together.
“Have a nice trip,” Portia concluded, and with one last cold glance, she turned away.
“Portia!” Cassie's stomach was in a knot of tension, embarrassment, and anger, but she couldn't let this chance go. “Before I leave, will you just tell me one thing?”
“What?”
“It can't make any difference now-and I just wanted to know… I just wondered… if you knew his name.”
“Whose name?”
Cassie felt a new wave of blood in her cheeks, but she went on doggedly. “His name. The red-haired guy. The one on the beach.”
Those hazel eyes didn't waver. They went on staring straight into Cassie's, the pupils contracted to mean little dots. Looking into those eyes, Cassie knew there was no hope.
She was right.
“What red-haired guy on the beach?” Portia said distinctly and levelly, and then she turned on her heel again and left. This time Cassie let her go.
Green. That's what Cassie noticed on the drive north from the Cape. There was a forest growing on either side of the highway. In California you had to go to a national park to see trees this tall…
“Those are sugar maples,” her mother said with forced cheerfulness as Cassie turned her head slightly to follow a stand of particularly graceful trees. “And those shorter ones are red maple. They'll turn red in the fall-a beautiful glowing, sunset red. Just wait until you see them.”