Mom Hung Up on My Call for Help to Toast My Cousin, So I Vanished novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Room 214

Cass reaches Chicago, gets a room and a doctor's written note, and her mother's first text asks her to bring something back.

I read Brynn's text four times on the bus, somewhere past Fort Wayne.

Chicago's cold in the morning, Kay. Bring a coat.

I had told nobody where I was going. I hadn't told Nate. I hadn't told my mom.

Then I remembered the kitchen iPad.

In April, I had checked my acceptance emails on it, and I never logged out.

Brynn had read every one.

I opened the family location app my mom set up when I was twelve.

Under my name, it said: Viewed by Brynn, 14 times since 5:12 a.m.

I turned off sharing and logged out of my email on every device I could think of.

Then I put the phone face down on my knee and watched the corn go by.

The bus got in at two in the afternoon.

Northfield University was a mile of brick buildings and green lawns, and nobody on it knew my name.

The Presidential Scholars office was in a small stone house at the edge of the quad.

A woman about my mother's age sat behind the desk, eating almonds from a paper bag.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"I'm Cassidy Hartwell," I said. "I'm a scholar. I know I'm three weeks early."

She looked at me, then at my duffel, then at the sleeve I kept pulling over my wrist.

"Dorms don't open until the twentieth," she said.

"I know."

"Do you have somewhere to stay tonight?"

"No."

She put the almonds in the drawer.

"Sit," she said. "Do you want to tell me, or do you want a sandwich first?"

I said sandwich, and my eyes started to sting, and I hated it.

She made two calls while I ate.

By three o'clock I had a key to room 214 in the summer residence hall, where a research program for visiting students was housed, and a note with her cell number on it.

"It's yours until move-in," she said. "Then you'll go in the scholars' house with the others."

"Thank you."

"One more thing. Your file says you have a severe allergy. Have you been to student health?"

I thought of the pen in my pocket.

I took it out and set it on her desk.

"Somebody put this in a laundry pocket," I said. "I didn't have it when I needed it."

She looked at the label, my name in my own handwriting, and her face changed.

"Go now," she said. "Take that with you."

The student health clinic was a low building behind the library, and the doctor there was a young man with tired eyes.

I told him what happened in as few words as I could.

I said a peanut layer in a cup marked nut-free, one bite, an ambulance and a needle in my thigh.

I said the pen was missing from my bag and turned up in someone's dress.

He stopped typing.

"Someone else's dress," he said.

"My cousin's."

"Was it an accident, do you think?"

"She handed me the cup," I said. "She told everyone it was safe. She did it in front of forty people."

He was quiet for a second.

Then he turned his monitor so I could see it.

He had typed: Ingestion of peanut allergen in dessert labelled nut-free. Patient's auto-injector not in her possession. Auto-injector later located in another person's clothing. Patient reports the other person served the dessert.

"I'm writing exactly what you told me," he said. "It goes in your record with today's date. If you ever need it, it will be there."

"Thank you."

"Is anyone coming to get you?"

"No."

He wrote me two new prescriptions and told me to carry both.

"Keep one in your hand when you sleep," he said. "I'm serious."

I walked back across the quad with a paper bag in my hand and two new pens in it.

The sun was low and the lawn was empty.

For the first time in two days, nobody was watching me.

I stood still and let it be quiet.

Then my phone buzzed in my back pocket.

I had meant to turn it off.

It was my mother.

She had not asked where I was, or whether I could breathe.

Brynn says you took something from her room. Bring it back.

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