Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [65]
I can still remember the day that she ran away like it was yesterday. It was a Friday, and Tess didn’t show up to school that day. I remember sitting at my desk, listening to Mrs. Lavallee take attendance, knowing all about Tess’s plans and feeling so superior to everyone in the room, like I was the only one who could be trusted with the biggest secret of the year. I knew something so important that no one else knew. It took all my willpower to keep my mouth shut.
Then the weekend came and my family went to stay with Aunt Nancy on the Cape. This was long before cell phones and pagers, so the Brysons had no way of getting in touch with us during those two days. And with the beach and the sun and the two cute boys in the house next door to ours, Noah and Ewan Wol-a-something, I forgot all about Tess and her plans. Besides, I wasn’t really worried. Like I said, Tess ran away all the time. I guess if I had taken the time to think about it in between all the swimming and flirting, I would’ve assumed that Tess was already home, stuck in her room for the weekend without TV.
We got back late Sunday night and my parents found a note on our door from the Brysons asking for us to call as soon as we got home. I knew that it was about Tess, and so did my mom, but it was nearly midnight when we pulled in, so she decided to wait until the next day to call. Tess running away was just a regular part of life back then. No big deal. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.
I was in class the next morning, Monday morning, and Tess wasn’t there. At first I thought, Wow, she must’ve caught a cold hiding under the bridge all night. But then I started to think that maybe she had really done it. Maybe she really had packed up our maps and directions and my forty dollars and taken off for North Carolina. That’s when I started to get scared. Not for Tess, but for me. What if my parents found out? What would they say if they knew that I had helped Tess run away for real this time?
I was sitting at my desk in the back of the classroom, thinking about how much trouble I would be in if my parents found out, when two police officers walked right into our class like they owned the place and started talking, without an introduction or anything. They said that Tess Bryson was missing and her parents thought that she might have runned away. “Runned away,” the older cop said, and I remember that it made a few kids around me giggle. But not me. I was thirteen years old and suddenly understood what it meant to be fucked.
They said that they wanted to know if anyone had information about Tess and would be asking each one of us to come across the hall to the music room to answer a few questions. “No big deal,” the older guy said, but I didn’t believe him for a second. Then the one with the Yosemite Sam mustache said, “We’d like to start with Cassidy Glenn.” God, my stomach felt like it had dropped right out of my body. It took me like a minute to say anything, and in that time, everyone had turned and was staring right at me. Then Yosemite said, “Are you Cassidy Glenn?” and he pointed at me. I nodded. I couldn’t have said a word even if I had wanted to. Then he asked me to follow him.
Milo understood the importance of the information that he had just heard. Freckles’s real name was Cassidy Glenn. But he almost didn’t care, completely transfixed by the woman in the tiny screen on his lap. Unlike with previous stories, Freckles (using Cassidy would take some getting used to) was not exhibiting any emotion despite the content of her narrative. She had become a storyteller, conveying the emotion of the time without the emotion of the present interfering. And he noticed that she was speaking slower and with more of a cadence, as if the woman on the screen were suddenly thirteen years old again and telling the story in a long-forgotten