Be Not Afraid by Cecilia Galante

Author:Cecilia Galante [Galante, Cecilia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-37277-0
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2015-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Cassie wept with abandon, her face a picture of anguish. She tried to stretch an arm toward me, but the restraints made it impossible for her to move it more than a few inches. “Marin,” she whimpered. “Please, come here. Help me.”

But I didn’t move. What in God’s name had just happened? Were my eyes, my ears, all of my senses deceiving me? I searched Cassie’s face, straining to see something—anything at all—still lurking there inside her head, but there was nothing. Was the blackness really gone? Was whatever had just happened really over?

The veins along the outside of Cassie’s neck tightened as she tried to lift her head some more, but there was no sign of the softball-sized shapes that had been there, no trace of any distortion at all along the smooth slope of skin. “Please,” she whispered, still stretching her fingers in my direction. “Marin.”

Was it really safe? Cassie looked like a baby, a toddler who had been punished and was pleading for forgiveness. But was it just a trick? Another ruse to get me closer so that she could hiss at me again, spit curses in my direction?

“It’s okay now, Marin.” Dominic was beckoning me forward with his hand. “She can’t move out of the restraints, and the Risperdal is starting to work. She’s calm. It’s all right.”

I got up, moving toward her on wooden legs, and then stopped a foot away from the bed. Cassie’s face, splattered with drops of saliva, was still pink from exertion. The figure eight on her cheek looked darker, as if the scabs had loosened and bled during her outburst, and the white bandages around her arms were unraveling.

I stretched out my hand until it came into contact with Cassie’s, but it was not until my fingers closed around the other girl’s that she began to cry. Her body heaved up and down as she wept, taking in air, breathing in oxygen. “Marin, don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave me.”

I struggled to wrap my head around everything that had just happened. First of all, what was the blackness I kept seeing inside Cassie? And secondly, where had it gone? Was it just hibernating again, the way it obviously had since I’d seen her in the hospital, waiting to emerge when it needed to? What made it come out? And then withdraw again?

“Cassie.” I pulled back a little and lowered my hand. “Is that really you?”

“It’s me.” Cassie’s voice was a whisper, but it broke on the word me. “Oh, Marin, please don’t leave. When you’re here, I can’t feel it anymore. It’s gone. She’s gone.” She was breathing hard again, but her eyes were still the same clear blue, the voice definitively hers. The muscles inside her face relaxed as her sobbing slowed. She smelled like sweat and body odor, and despite my terror, I reached out and touched her hair.

“Who is ‘she’?” I asked, just as I had in the hospital. “Who are you talking about, Cassie?”

“I don’t know.” The girl was starting to panic again.

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