“Where are you?” he demanded. “Let me talk to her!” my mother shrieked in the background. She could have gone into my father's office and picked up the extension there, but I knew she wasn't thinking of that, couldn't even move from that spot in the hallway where she was standing. “Cassandra!”

“Don't worry about me,” Cass said. “I'm”

“No,” my father said. “You must come home.”

“This is what I want,” she said. “You have to respect that.”

“You're only eighteen,” my father told her. “This is ridiculous, you can't possibly know”

“Daddy,” she said, and I realized suddenly I was crying, again, the receiver wet against my face. “I'm sorry. I love you. Please tell Mom not to worry.”

“No,” my father said, firm. “We are not”

“Caitlin?” she said suddenly. “I know you're there. I can hear you.”

“What is she saying?” my mother kept asking, now close to the receiver. “Where is she?”

“Margaret, just hold on,” my father told her. “Yes,” I whispered back to Cass. “I'm here.”

“Don't cry, okay?” she said. The line crackled, and I thought of her tackling me that night, her breath against my neck, laughing in my ear. “I love you. I'm sorry about your birthday.”

“It's nothing,” I said. There was a voice outside her end, a yell, and another buzz on the line. “Is that him?” my father demanded. “Is he there?”

“I have to go,” she said. “Please don't worry, okay?”

“Dammit, Cassandra,” my father said. “Don't you hang up this phone!”

“Good-​bye,” she said softly, as my father's voice dropped away. “Good-​bye.”

“Cassandra!” my mother wailed into the phone, all the anger and fear of the last twenty-​four hours bursting across the line. “Please” Click. And she was gone.

Chapter 3

By the time I started school two days later, we hadn't heard from Cass again. The first call had come from somewhere in New Jersey, but beyond that there was a whole world that could have swallowed her up.

I still didn't have anything I thought worthy of being entered in my journal. I was waiting for something that was meaningful, real, a night when I saw Cass and she spoke to me. But instead my dreams were as dull as my everyday life, consisting mostly of me walking around the mall or school, looking for some undetermined thing that i could never find, while faces blurred in front of me. I woke up tired and frustrated, and felt like I never got any real sleep at all.

My mother kept Cass's bedroom door shut, with all of her Yale stuff piled up on the bed, waiting for her. I was the only one who ever went in there, and when I did the air always smelled stale and strange, pent up like the sorrow my mother carried in her shoulders, her heart, and her face. She was taking it the hardest. My mother had spent the last eighteen years just as involved in Cass's activities as Cass herself was.

She sewed sequin after sequin on ballet costumes, made Rice Krispies Treats by the panful for soccer team bake sales, and chaperoned Debate Club bus trips. She knew Cass's playing stats, SAT scores, and GPA by heart. She'd been prepared to be just as involved long-​distance. A copy of Cass's Yale schedule was already taped to our refrigerator, my mother a member of the Parents' Organization, plane tickets pre-​bought for Parents' Weekend in October. But now, in claiming her own life, Cass had taken part of my mother's as well. I got my license, finally, and without comment was given the keys to Cass's car. It was due to be mine anyway, since she couldn't have taken it to Yale, but it still felt strange.

I put all her tapes and the Mardi Gras beads she'd hung on the rearview mirror into a box and stuck it in the corner of the garage, under a patio chair and some flowerpots. It seemed like I couldn't do anything without thinking about her: The scar over my eye was always the first thing I noticed in the mirror's reflection now. As for my father, he threw himself into his work. With a new semester, he was now busy with a class of incoming freshmen, a set of demonstrations over a controversial speaker, and a group of football players who had started a brawl at a local dance bar.

He couldn't “fix” the problem of Cass running away, but through work he could still do his daily miracles, smoothing tensions and reassuring nervous administrators. Whenever I see my father in my mind, he is wearing a tie. They were the only gifts Cass and I ever gave him for his birthday, Christmas, and Father's Day, year after year. In all, he owned hundreds by now, the collection carefully hung and organized in his closet by color and degree of loudness.

(During our grade school years, we were enamored of polka dots and big stripes.) It had become somewhat of a family joke, at this point, and we'd taken to wrapping them in strangely shaped boxes and tubes, even folded up tiny in a jewelry boxjust to make things more interesting. But he wore them, proudly, each day to work, and prided himself on remembering not only the giver and the occasion, but the year as well.

If my mother was the emotion of our family, he was the fact-​keeper. He remembered everything. “Caitlin, Christmas, 1988,” he'd say, smoothing his hand proudly over a tie I myself didn't even recognize. “You had the chicken pox.” The other thing my father lovedbesides ties, and uswas sports. Whenever the university basketball or football team played, Cass and I would find our way into the living room and plant ourselves on the floor at his feet to watch and scream and trash the refs together.