Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3 Read online

  Lane had hired a new girl to take her spot, another high school student who would need to be trained, and put her on with Cassie for her final week. He’d already told Jackie she’d be moving back to the day shift once Cassie was gone, and that was all right with her. The new girl would need the evening shift so that her schedule wouldn’t interfere with her education.

  And then it was time. With her student loans and the money her parents had put away for her education, Cassie was able to get into one of the dorms at the school, and she loaded up everything she was taking with her for the drive up to meet her new roommates and get her class schedule and do all the many things that would be necessary so that she could start on time a week later.

  It was just after ten when she got there, and she was directed to her dorm by a stuffy woman who seemed to think that all students were somehow beneath her. Cassie bit her tongue to avoid telling the woman her own thoughts about that, and followed the scribbled map into Oak Hall, a building that housed four hundred students in four-bedroom suites. It was designed for students who were under twenty, so Cassie’s eighteen had fit right in.

  The building was coed, and the lobby was packed with young men and women, many of whom were drinking coffee and watching the three big TV’s that were mounted on the walls. Cassie noticed a coffee bar, like the ones she had seen in convenience stores along the Interstate, near the wall and sent a quick prayer of thanks up to Heaven for it.

  Coffee could wait, however. She found the elevator and pushed the button to get up to her floor, then stepped out into the hall and looked for her room number. It was the fourth door down on the left, and she hesitated for a second before knocking on it.

  A girl about Cassie’s age opened the door and introduced herself with a smile. “Hey, I’m Abby Jordan,” she said excitedly. “I guess you and I are the first ones here. You’re Cassie, right? I saw your picture on the roster when I checked in. You need help with all that?”

  Cassie gratefully let Abby take a couple of the big plastic trash bags she’d shoved her clothes into and followed her in. They stepped into a small living room, but Cassie wondered if it might actually be what you would call a ‘sitting room,’ instead. There were two small sofas that faced each other with a single coffee table between them, and a small in-depth table with a lamp built into it at each end of the sofas. It was obviously intended to be more of a study area than a social area.

  “I took this room, ’cause it was on a corner,” Abby said, pointing at a doorway, “but you can have it if you want it. The rooms on either side of it have just one window, but I think this one next to mine has the best view of them all. The other room doesn’t have a window at all, so whoever’s last will probably get stuck with it. What do you think?”

  Cassie looked at each of the remaining three rooms, but she took the one Abby had suggested as having the “best view.” “This one will be fine,” she said, dropping her suitcase and computer bag onto the bed. She started to take the other bags, but Abby set them on the bed beside the others, then started helping her unpack.

  “You know who else is coming?” Cassie asked as they worked. “I saw the list on the roster but I didn’t pay attention.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Abby said. “There’s a girl named Cindy—she’s from England, I heard—and there’s a black girl. Her name is Letitia; I think that’s how you say it, La-tee-sha.”

  Cassie looked up at her. “Does that bother you?” she asked. “A black girl, I mean?”

  Abby looked shocked. “Oh, no!” she said quickly. “I’m from Chicago Heights, honey—most of my friends are black. I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression.”

  Cassie smiled sheepishly. “I’m the one who’s sorry,” she said. “I have a lot of black friends back home, too. You just sounded sort of nervous.”

  “Oh, did I? Probably ’cause I’m just always nervous meeting new people. I think the English girl is probably gonna be more nervous than me, though. Do they even have any black people over there?”

  “I’m sure they do,” Cassie replied, trying not to laugh. “I know I’ve seen some on British TV shows…”

  There was a knock on the door, and both girls went to open it. A tall pale girl stood there, a big smile spreading across her face.

  “Oi,” she said, “I think I’ve gotten the right room. I’m Cindy Winstrop, from London.”

  “You’re in the right place,” Abby said. “I’m Abby and this is Cassie. Welcome to America!”

  Cindy smiled as the two girls relieved her of her own load of suitcases and laundry baskets, leaving her only her laptop case to carry. They showed her the two remaining rooms, and Cassie was surprised when Cindy chose the one with no window.

  “I like it to be as dark as possible when I’m sleeping,” she explained. “I can’t sleep at all once the sun comes in, so no windows is perfect for me.” The three of them had her unpacked in a matter of minutes, and that’s when Letitia Jackson showed up.

  Letitia was small and quiet, but her smile was absolutely radiant. She happily took the last room, and listened to the other three girls talk about themselves and their plans. It was only once they’d all run out of things to say that she finally began to open up.

  “I grew up here in St. Louis,” she said, “but we all moved away to California a couple years ago. I grabbed the chance to come back here for school, though, ’cause I still got friends here. I’m’a be a nurse.”

  “That’s cool,” Cassie said. “I’m going for a psych degree, for social work.”

  “Law,” Abby said. “Pre-law, anyway, then somewhere else for law school, probably.”

  “I’m here for biotech,” Cindy finished. “After that, it’s engineering school. I want to build artificial organs one day.”

  “Wow,” Abby said.

  Cassie added, “What led you into that field?”

  “Oh… Well, my mum. She had a bout of liver failure and we almost lost her, but she got a transplant. The only problem is the antirejection drugs she has to take; they can be right nasty at times. If there was an artificial liver, something made of metals and silicon and other things the body won’t reject, then she could have a normal life again, you know?”

  “And we can all say we knew you before you invented it,” Letitia said, making everyone laugh. “That’s pretty fly, you wantin’ to do something that big. I be pullin’ for you.”

  They sat and talked for a while and then spent the afternoon getting set up for their various classes. There were schedules to learn, books to buy, maps to study and plenty of paths to memorize so they wouldn’t get lost going from one class to the next. The day went by so fast that Cassie was amazed when it was time to go and find dinner.

  There were several places to eat on campus, and all four of them chose to go for pizza. The place they were told had the best pizza was close to their own building, so they ended up buying two large ones and going back to their suite to eat.

  That first day set the tone for the four of them, and they became fast friends. Their schedules were somewhat erratic, with classes occasionally happening at odd times, or some days having no classes at all, so they got to spend a fair amount of time together. At least two of them, Cassie noted after the first week, were always in the suite when it was time to eat, so pooling their resources turned into a habit that saved them all money.

  Cassie actually had the most consistent class schedule, with something going on at least six hours out of every day. Unlike the others, there was only rarely a day with no class, but she felt that her schedule was ideal for her. She usually had a first class at eight but was always free by two or two thirty. That left her with time for homework assignments, research, and such, but even then it was rare that she wasn’t finished up by five or so.

  Her weekday evenings were usually spent either watching something on Netflix on her computer or on the phone with Scott or one of her friends, but she still found time to go out with one or more of her roommates once or twice a week. She
and Abby would find something to do together most frequently, because Letitia had friends in the city who would come and pick her up almost every night, and Cindy spent most of her free time online, looking at the latest innovations in artificial organ development.

  “Cindy’s gonna win the Nobel Prize one day,” Cassie said to Abby as they walked to the local movie theater one night. “She tries to tell me about all these things the doctors are coming up with to make transplants unnecessary, but I can’t understand most of it. She does, though, like it’s something she was born to do.”

  “Maybe she was,” Abby said. “My mom always said we each have a calling; maybe that’s hers.”

  Cassie grinned. “My mom said the same thing,” she said. “That’s why I’m taking psychology. I think maybe I’ve got a calling to help abused women.” She told Abby about Jackie, and some of the horror stories she’d heard about what Jackie’s husband would do to torture and frighten her. “Women shouldn’t have to live like that.”

  Abby seemed a bit distant, suddenly. “They don’t have to,” she said woodenly. “They just don't know that they can stop it. All it takes is saying, ‘Hey, I’m not putting up with this no more,’ but then you gotta stand your ground on it, too, even if it means you gotta fight.”

  Cassie looked at her friend, and suddenly she had the feeling there was more to Abby than she knew. “Abs?” she asked. “You sound like you know somebody who went through it.”

  Abby sighed and nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “My sister, Jill. She was six years older than me, and she married the boy she dated all through school when she was seventeen. She was pregnant, so my mom and dad, they thought it was a good idea for them to get married, but then about a year after the baby was born, Kenny started drinking and doing drugs. He’d go out with his friends now and then and get all stoned, then he’d come home and beat Jill up to the point she couldn’t move.” She shook her head. “Mom used to send me over to take care of little Bobby when that happened, and I had to make dinner for that son of a bitch when he’d get home. Jill wouldn’t tell the cops what was going on, so a couple days later she’d send me home, and then a week or two would go by before it happened again.”

  Cassie saw that there were tears trying to brim over. “Abby,” she said softly, “what happened?”

  “One day I saw Kenny out running around, and he had Bobby with him. He hardly ever took Bobby anywhere, so I called Jill to ask he what was up, but there was no answer. I went to her apartment and knocked, but still got no answer, so I went around the back and looked in through her bedroom window.”

  The tears let go then. “Cass, she was lying on the floor, and there was just blood everywhere. I started hitting the window and yelling, but she didn’t move, and I knew she was dead. I called Mom, but she didn’t answer her phone, so I called 911 and the cops came and broke the door in.” She shuddered and drew in a deep breath, as tears started to slowly run down her cheeks. “They said it looked like he beat her to death with a ball bat, ’cause there was one lying under the bed and it had blood all over it, so they went looking for Kenny. When they found him, he—he pulled a gun and started shooting at the cops from inside his car, and—and one of the bullets from the cops hit little Bobby and killed him.”

  Abby started sobbing then and fell into Cassie’s arms as she cried. Cassie held her for quite some time, until the sobbing finally began to subside. A moment later, Abby sat up and wiped her eyes.

  “I guess I needed to let that out,” she said.

  “No problem,” Cassie replied. “Isn’t that what friends are for? To be there when we need to let something out?”

  Abby smiled weakly. “I hadn’t planned on telling you about that, telling anyone. Mom and Dad won’t talk about it at all, anymore, so I guess I’ve been holding it in. That was three years ago—you’d think I’d be over it by now, right?”

  “Why would you think that? I don’t know that you’ll ever get over it, but I think you can at least come to grips with the fact it happened. That’s how you can go on with your own life, and you seem to be doing okay in that regard.”

  Abby rolled her eyes. “So much for you and your psych degree ambitions. Have you noticed that I never date? I don’t even look at guys. You’re the closest thing I’ve had to a boyfriend since then.”

  Cassie’s eyes went wide. “Um… I am?”

  This time Abby cracked up laughing. “Oh, my gosh,” she said, “I should take a picture of your face right now. No, I don’t mean I like girls, I’m just saying you’re the only one I hang out with regularly. If you were a guy, people would think we were dating.” She giggled. “A few of them probably think it already.”

  Cassie managed a grin. “Yeah, I guess so,” she said. “And I guess I can see why what happened might sour you on guys, too, but not all guys are like that, you know. Most of them are pretty decent, I think, once you get to know them.”

  Abby looked at her for a long moment. “Then why do you think battered women need shelters and social workers to help them get away from men like that? That must mean enough of them are bad news that it’s not uncommon, and if it’s not uncommon, then you can’t tell which ones are capable of doing things like that. I don’t know about you, Cass, but I’d rather do without a man than take the chance of ending up like my sister.”

  Cassie rubbed her shoulder. “But you wouldn’t end up like her, Abs,” she said. “You’d recognize the signs and get out before it got that bad.”

  “You think so?” Abby asked, and Cassie nodded. “Then tell me why my sister didn’t recognize it. Remember I said my folks won’t talk about it? That’s because, as long as I can remember, my dad’s been coming home drunk once or twice a month and beating up my mom, and me and Jill both knew it. Both of us got beat a few times, when we tried to make him stop, so why couldn’t she see what was happening and get herself out of it?”

  Cassie swallowed hard as she looked at her friend. “Because she probably figured if your mom had to put up with it, then maybe it was normal. And that’s what they mean when they talk about breaking the cycle of violence. They mean that girls like Jill need to be taught that it isn’t normal, that they don’t have to take it.”

  Abby looked at her. “All girls need to learn that. They need to learn it early, that they don’t have to put up with being abused. They need to know they can stand up and say enough is enough.”

  Cassie nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, they do.”

  THREE

  That conversation had made the two girls grow closer, and so it was Abby that Cassie turned to a couple of weeks later when Scott’s phone was answered by a girl’s voice. Cassie had asked to speak to him, but the girl had started yelling that Scott was her boyfriend, and demanding to know why some girl was calling his phone. Cassie had hung up and tried again an hour later, but Scott wouldn’t even answer after that.

  “Men suck!” Abby had said when Cassie finished crying. “All of ’em, they’re worthless.”

  “Yeah,” Cassie said but without the fervor of her friend. “Men suck.”

  It took most of the week to get the truth. Scott had been living in a small apartment in Carbondale, where he was going to school. From what he had told a couple of his friends, which finally got back to Cassie through their girlfriends, he had been blindsided by one of the girls in his building. She had invited him and his roommate to a party, where Scott had gotten drunk and ended up sleeping with her. He had wanted to tell Cassie, he claimed, but there was something about the girl that kept drawing him back. By the time he realized that he wanted to be with her, he felt it was too late to be honest.

  “What a piece of crap,” Abby had said after hearing this story. “Cassie, you’re a lot better off without a jerk like that. And besides, if he could be that dishonest with you, there’s no telling what else might have happened. You’re better off, believe me.”

  Without the distraction of Scott, Cassie found herself spending more and more time with Abby, and l
ess and less time going home on weekends. The two of them had discovered a couple of bars near campus where they felt safe getting drunk and letting their hair down, and doing so became a regular thing for them on Friday nights.

  One Friday night, about halfway through their first year, they were at Flanagan’s, a bar that was close to the campus and offered students free rides back to their dorms. They could let themselves get completely wasted without worrying about how they would get back, although they’d noticed that the residence supervisors did seem to enjoy laughing at them as they helped them up to their suite.

  Drinking was their favorite pastime, and Flanagan’s was their favorite place to do it. Besides the free rides, there was a security staff that could instantly quash any trouble that started, so there was rarely any interruption of their fun. For that reason, they usually sat at the big wraparound bar, where two dozen regulars had welcomed two new pretty girls to their number.

  They could drink alone, or they could hang out with some of their fellow students. Some of the guys they knew from class hung out there, as well, so they could get up and dance when they felt like it. As long as the boys understood that they weren’t looking for relationships, those nights could be a lot of fun, and occasionally one or both of them would end up getting laid. It was all casual and consensual, without complications or commitments, and both girls wanted it exactly that way.

  But they didn’t date. It only took a couple of weeks for all the guys to catch on, and Cass and Abby found themselves permanently relegated to the “friend zone.” That didn’t mean they were perfect little angels, of course, but it did mean that any of the rare guys who got lucky with one of them knew it was something that wasn’t likely to happen again. For most of them, that was perfectly fine.

  It wasn’t going to happen on this night, they all knew. Abby was in one of her moods, the one that declared loudly that all guys were cretins who should be lined up in front of a deep ditch and mowed down with a machine gun, just to be sure they’d never break the heart—or the bones—of another girl. Surprisingly, a number of the less popular guys often expressed their agreement with this philosophy, always excepting themselves from the implied death sentence, of course. They weren’t heartbreakers, they reasoned, so shouldn’t suffer the same fate. After all, they couldn’t break a heart if no girl would even date them, right?