The Initiation Page 0,9

at Cassie.

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