Free Double by Jenny Valentine Page A

spoke straight to me, the bell on the door announcing their arrival, heralding their decision to come in. I had to smile and pretend I knew who they were without actually using their names.
    “It’s you,” they said, and, “You’re back,” and I said, “Hello,” and, “Yes.”
    Everything else, all the questions they wanted to ask, all the information they craved, went on behind their eyes. I watched it. And I didn’t have to join in.
    Nobody was scared. Nobody exploded. Maybe they wanted to. It must have been something, seeing a boy they probably thought was dead, sitting with his sister drinking coffee, like nothing had happened.
    I thought it was going quite well, but Edie seemed disappointed.
    “Where is everyone?” she said. “What time is it?”
    “Twelve thirty.”
    “We should have come in later,” she said. “If I’d thought about it, we could have come in after school, when all your mates are about. I bet you’re dying to see them.”
    I wasn’t. I was happy with just her. Mates had never been my strong point. Groups of kids were never my thing. Suddenly I felt very unsafe. I was walking on a tightrope, losing my balance. I felt the ground sway beneath me.
    I couldn’t see people that knew him like that, not yet. I wouldn’t know how to act around them. I didn’t know how you behaved with friends. I wanted to be back in the cottage, tucked beside the hill, hidden. I stood up. My coffee cup rattled in its saucer when I moved. My chair squawked against the polished floor.
    “Can we go now?” I said.
    “Don’t you want to hang around?”
    “No.”
    Edie looked up at me in surprise. I was abrupt and rude. Maybe I was being more like the real Cassiel. I remember that’s what I thought.
    I felt sure that something bad was going to happen if we didn’t leave. I put Frank’s hat on. I pulled it down over my eyes.
    “Why don’t you want to see them?” she said.
    “I do,” I said. “But not now. I’m bored.”
    “I suppose a two-hour wait in this place might’ve killed us,” she said.
    It wasn’t the waiting I was worried about.
    “Let’s go. Come on.”
    “All right, all right,” she said.
    I left the café before Edie did. The bell on the door rang once when I opened it and once when it closed behind me while she was paying the bill. I got to the car before her. I got in.
    “You still hate it here, then,” Edie said, catching up and getting in without looking at me, putting the key in the ignition.
    “Yep,” I said.
    The engine started. In the passenger-side mirror I could see part of a castle that towered over the parking lot. I wondered when its now-ruined battlements and crumbling walls guarded something other than a parking meter, something more than a collection of old books.
    Edie said, “One day I’ll get out too.”
    “Where?” I said while she backed slowly out of the parking space, turned the car into the road.
    “Maybe next year I’ll go to college.”
    “What would you do?”
    “Art, I guess. You knew that.”
    “’Course. Sorry.”
    “Most of my friends have gone,” she said. “They come back at Christmas, and maybe a couple times a year.” She smiled. “Trailing life behind them.”
    “Why aren’t you at college already, then?” I said.
    “I didn’t want to go.”
    “Why not?”
    “I told you. I wanted to be here when you got back.”
    So it was Cassiel’s fault.
    “Sorry,” I said, for him.
    “Don’t be.”
    But I was.
    I wondered how long she would have waited. I wondered if she would have stayed here forever, putting herself on hold, waiting for Cassiel. Was he ever planning to come back? Did he know that when he left? Did he think about it? Did he care?
    Edie waved at a woman with a baby, a balding man, at an old lady with a shopping bag.
    “That’ll do it,” she said, nodding at the old lady. “If you only told her, everyone would know you were back by tomorrow.”
    I didn’t want that. The more people that knew, the more