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G
inny let me look myself up on the computer. She wasn’t supposed to. Using the office equipment was against house rules. But then again, so was running, or having a knife that actually cut things, or eating a peanut.

“Just for a minute,” she said, and she watched over my shoulder. I could smell her breath. I could hear her swallow.

I turned to look at her. “Do you want to leave me alone?”

There’s no way she was allowed to do that. I watched her blink three times.

“Of course, Cassiel,” she said, like she worked for me or something, like this was a hotel and I was paying to be there. “I’ll be just down the hall.”

God, having a name was something. Try being nobody and asking for your space.

Cassiel Roadnight had his own missing person’s profile. He came from a small town where everybody knew him, where everybody knew each other. He went missing on fireworks night when the place was full of strangers, packed with people all come to see the procession and the dancing and the costumes and the fireworks and the Wicker Man. It happened every year. A celebration in the town, called Hay on Fire. It was a clever time to disappear.

It was the fifth of November. I looked at that date on the screen for a long time. Cassiel Roadnight hadn’t been seen since then. Nor had I.

The profile said he was wearing jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt. His face was painted silver and gold for the procession, and over his ordinary clothes he wore a black cape and a mask that covered his eyes and nose. There were photos. It was strange to see a picture of him hours or maybe minutes before he was gone. It was even stranger to see my own eyes looking out from behind that mask.

His disappearance was “completely out of character,” which means they didn’t see it coming. He didn’t leave a note, and he didn’t tell anybody he was going.

His family said they would never give up hope of seeing him again.

They said,
“Cass, we miss you and think about you every day.
There is no problem that we can’t solve together. Just let us know that
you are okay. And please come home.”

I would have liked a message like that. It would have meant a lot to me, people never giving up hope.

There were other photos of him too, not just the firework ones. I sat in the empty office and I looked at them all: Cassiel with an ice cream, Cassiel on the soccer team, Cassiel with a panting dog, Cassiel on a windswept beach. It was like looking at myself with a life I couldn’t dream up, the life I wished I’d had. I knew I hadn’t been there, I knew it wasn’t true, but I willed myself to start hearing the drums in that procession, to start smelling the mud and sweat of the soccer field, to taste the strawberry pink of that ice cream, the salt and sand on my skin. I willed myself to start believing those pictures were pictures of me.

If you haven’t eaten for a few days you have to be very careful to take little bites, or the food you’ve been wishing for and dreaming about day and night can make you worse than sick. Trust me, I know. That’s why I knew not to wish for a family. I knew it was a terrible idea.

But wishing is addictive.

Cassiel Roadnight’s life slipped into my head right then and stayed there. I couldn’t make it go away. I thought about his mum and dad, about what they might look like, about how their faces would change when they saw me. I thought about his brothers and sisters, how many of them there might be, how old they were. I thought about his cozy little town and the gap he’d left by leaving. I thought about his friends. I imagined how happy they’d be when he came home.

I kidded myself that they needed me as much as I needed them. I kidded myself I could end all their suffering just by showing up.

I thought about the kind of house Cassiel lived in, about his room and how it would feel when it was mine. I thought about breakfast at the table in the kitchen, pancakes and bad jokes and orange juice and the yellow sun on our faces. I thought about going to school and having friends and being normal.

I wished for what Cassiel Roadnight had. I wished with every single breath.

I didn’t think about the knife-edge that being him would force me to live on. I failed to see it. I refused to look down.

I stared at his face on the computer screen and I dared myself to try it. Either I was going to make my wish come true, or I had to go right now and tell Gordon and Ginny the truth. I could become him, or I had to become me. That was my choice.

I picture it often, me walking down the corridor toward them, pretending to choose. I replay the scene in my head, the time just before there was no going back, the last seconds I was no one, not me and not Cassiel Roadnight yet, not quite.

My shoes squeak on the polished floor, my hands feel hot and swollen and clammy, and I think I am undecided. I think I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Undecided seems like a magical place to me now, a place before action and consequence.

Undecided is what I wish for.

•  •  •

I knocked on the door. Gordon and Ginny were making phone calls. They’d been talking to the police and missing persons and social services. They were all coffee and triumph and activity. My lie had snowballed into fact already while my back was turned.

“Cassiel, my
man
,” Gordon said, wheeling his chair away from his desk. “How’re you doing?”

It was embarrassing, him talking like that. I knew it and he knew it. I looked at him and he looked away.

“It’s Cass,” I said. “That’s what people call me.”

I didn’t know I was going to say it, but when it came out it sounded right. I liked the feeling of the name in my voice. I was tall and I looked down on Gordon in his chair. I had a family and friends and somewhere to be. I was somebody. The fugitive I’d been had finally disappeared.

Nobody could get me now.

“Sorry,” he said, clearing his throat. “Cass. What can we do for you?”

I said I’d finished on the computer.

“Good lad,” he said, straightening himself. “Find what you were looking for?”

I shrugged. (Yes Yes Yes. I’d found everything I ever wanted.)

I said, “What happens next?”

Ginny said that they were arranging for my family to be told. She said, “Someone will let them know as soon as possible. Then we can sort out getting you home.”

Home.

I didn’t know what to look at. A kind of hunger burst open in my gut, this cool empty space. I licked my lips, and I felt a sudden fine sheen of sweat rise in my hair and under my arms.

Gordon said, “It won’t be long now.”

I heard what he said and I didn’t hear it at the same time. I think I nodded.

Home. Was it that easy?

Ginny said, “You do want to go home, don’t you, Cassiel? Is that what you want to do?”

“Yes,” I said. “I want it more than anything in the world.”

I thought she might laugh. The whole world could have burst out laughing right then and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Who was I to want anything?

“Well, good,” Ginny said. “Of course you do.”

Gordon sat back in his chair with his hands behind his head, and because the conversation seemed to be over, I left the room. I put one foot in front of the other, and when I got out I leaned against the wall and shut my eyes and made my heart slow down just by asking it to.

I was him.

And with each step I took as Cassiel Roadnight, with each new slowing heartbeat, I replaced something I wanted to forget about having been me.

M
y grandad’s place was a big house that backed on to the park. I don’t remember anything before that. I’ve tried. Through the window I could see the playground, kids moving all over it like ants on a dropped lollipop.

Being in that house was like going back in time. It was quiet and dark and book-lined and mostly brown, full of clocks ticking, real clocks counting the days away in every room. The curtains were always closed, as though outside didn’t matter. Grandad thought the best thing a person could spend his day doing was reading in the dark. I don’t think it ever crossed his mind that not everybody wanted to do it.

After the accident, people kept saying it was no place for a child, the health visitors and social workers and neighbors and noseyeffingparkers, as Grandad would’ve called them.

They didn’t ask me. It didn’t matter what I thought.

There were thirteen rooms in that house. I counted them. Grandad only lived in one.

I thought he must have used them once, must have needed them for something, like a wife and kids or dogs or lodgers or whatever it was he had before he had me. He never talked about it, even if I asked him. He acted like there wasn’t anything to remember before there was him and me. He called it The Time Before, and that’s all he’d say about it.

Grandad was happiest just to sit and read and sleep and drink in the front room, the one with the big bay window you couldn’t ever see out of. Sometimes he got up and shuffled out to the bathroom or the kitchen or to get the mail off the doormat, but not all that often. Sometimes he ventured out to the shop on the corner and shuffled back again, bottles clinking, whiskers glinting, hair gone wild.

We had our bed in the front room by the fire, and his chair, and his books, and his bottles. It was warm in there, not like the rest of the house, which was so cold your face felt it first, as soon as you went out there, then your fingers and the tip of your nose died just a little. Those were my places: the weed-run garden, the other twelve rooms, and the arctic upstairs, lifeless like a museum or a film set; a perfect timepiece, fallen into quiet and fascinating ruin.

In the stifling warmth of the front room I’d run my hands over the wallpaper that felt like flattened rope. The pattern of the curtains looked like radioactive chocolates in a box. That’s what I always thought when I looked at them. Chocolates of the future. Chocolates you should never ever eat. I couldn’t imagine Grandad choosing those curtains. I often wondered who did.

I slept in there with Grandad every night. I made a nest of cushions at the end of the bed. He sat in his sagging leather chair and read to me, with the bottle on the table at his side so he wouldn’t have to stop for it. He read me H. G. Wells and John Wyndham. He read me C. S. Lewis and Charles Dickens and Tolkien and
Huckleberry Finn
. Every night he read until I was asleep on my cushions or he was asleep in his chair. That’s how we said good night, by disappearing in the middle of a sentence.

And that’s how I learned everything I know, with the clocks’ soft ticking and the heating
click-click
of the gas fire and the raised nap of velvet against my cheek and the smell of whiskey and the sound of Grandad’s voice reading.

How could that not be a place for a child?

How could they say that?

What did they know?

T
he next day I got a phone call.

Ginny came running down the corridor to find me. I was picking at a hole in my jeans. I was waiting. I was trying to take time apart minute by minute, second by second. It wasn’t working.

Ginny had sweat across her upper lip. It glistened. “Cassiel,” she said. “It’s for you. It’s your sister.”

I walked behind her, back the way she had come. When we got to the office I looked at the receiver for a moment before I picked it up. Ginny flapped with her hands and mouthed at me to talk.

“Hello?” I said.

“Cass?”

He had a sister.

I could tell how hard she was shaking, by her voice. I wanted to make her stop.

I looked at Ginny. She was still flapping. I turned my back on her.

“Cass. It’s Edie.”

“Hello, Edie.”

She made a little sound, not a whole word really, and then she said, “Is that you?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s me.”

Then I sat in the office with my eyes closed, and I listened to this Edie girl I’d never met crying because I was alive. I’d imagined people jumping around, beside themselves with joy and relief, not sobbing miles away on the end of the phone. I didn’t think it would be like that.

When she stopped crying, when she talked, I pretended it was
me
she was talking to, me she’d been missing all this time, me she was so happy to have found. I pretended she was my sister. That way I didn’t have to feel so bad.

She said, “I’m coming to get you, Cass. Please stay where you are. Please don’t disappear again before I get there.”

“Okay.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Oh God. Mum’s not here. I can’t get hold of her. I’m just going to come. I’ll be there. Don’t move!”

“I won’t move,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”

She took a long time to say good-bye. I put the phone down and forced myself to smile at Ginny.

“Well?” she said, “How was that?”

I didn’t know why she was asking. She’d heard all she needed, hanging around by the photocopier, pretending to be busy, holding herself still so she could listen.

“Good,” I said.

“You didn’t say much,” she said.

“I never do.”

I went to my room and sat on my bed. The dinner bell sounded and the soccer on TV started and the showers were free, but I just stayed there.

I should have run away. I should have got out of it while I still could. But I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t get off my bed even. I didn’t leave the room. I didn’t move. Because suddenly I had a sister, and she’d told me not to.

Four hours later, I heard Edie before I saw her. I heard her walking toward my room, and my stomach opened up like a canyon. Her shoes clapped gently next to Gordon’s and Ginny’s wheezy, squeaking steps.

When they came in, she stopped and put her hands up over her mouth. She stood there with Ginny beaming behind her.

I didn’t know what to do with my face.

I could feel a big flashing sign above my head that said this is not him. I waited for her to notice it. I waited for her to say, “You’re not my brother,” and I thought about what would happen next. Would sirens start wailing? Would I melt like candle wax into a puddle on the floor? How many people would hit me? Where would they put me, once they knew?

And if she thought I was Cassiel? If she fitted me into his place like the wrong piece in a puzzle, what would happen then? I was more scared of that than anything. And I wanted it more than anything too.

I stood there and waited for her to decide.

She kept her hands over her mouth. Her makeup bled from her eyes onto her skin. I thought about her putting mascara on that morning, before she knew she was going to see her missing brother.

“Say something, Cassiel,” whispered Ginny.

She said it like I was an idiot, like I was four years old. I wanted to hit her.

“Hello, Edie,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.

Edie took a deep breath and she got Ginny and Gordon to leave us on our own. She didn’t speak, she just asked them with her eyes and her hands, and they said yes.

And then I was alone with her. And suddenly I knew that anything I did, just one tiny thing, a word, a look, a gesture, could blow this open, could scream the house down that I wasn’t him. I was a cell under the microscope. She was the all-seeing eye. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I stood dead still and I watched her.

She wasn’t what I’d been expecting. She was a lot smaller than me, and her hair was long and dark. Long dark hair and blue eyes overflowing with water and light, a smile so full of sadness, it made me feel grateful to have seen it, like a rare flower.

“Talk to me,” she said.

I had to clear my throat. My voice was shrunken, hiding. “What about?”

She shrugged and her eyes ran and she didn’t say anything, not for a bit. She just looked at me. The asking and relief on her face made me flinch. It was like staring at the sun.

After a while she looked at the floor and said, “I don’t believe it. I can’t take this in.”

I breathed out. I just watched her. I didn’t know what else to do.

“It’s really you?” she said.

I nodded. My tongue felt swollen and dry in my mouth. I needed a drink of water.

“Say something,” she said. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”

Because I’m scared to. Because you don’t know me. Because I’ll
say the wrong thing.

“It’s good to see you,” I said.

“Good?” she said. “
Good?
Two years, Cass. You have to do better than
good
.”

“Sorry.”

“I drove so fast,” she said. “I kept thinking I was going to crash. I thought I was going to turn the car over, but I couldn’t slow down.

“Where have you
been
?” she said. “Why didn’t you call? What the hell happened to you?”

My lips were stuck together. Somebody had sewn my mouth shut.

“You’ve changed so much,” she said.

I felt the dusting of stubble over my chin. I rubbed my fingers across my cheeks, through my overgrown hair. I ran my tongue over my bad teeth.

“You too,” I said. Could I say that? Was that wrong?

“You are so tall.”

“Am I?”

“Why did you leave?” she said suddenly, and the skin of her voice broke, the anguish welling up underneath. “Why did you do that?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I thought you were
dead
,” she said. “People said you were dead.”

“I’m not dead.”

She nodded again and her face caved in, and she cried, proper crying, all water and snot. She couldn’t catch her breath. She stood on the other side of the room and looked at me like she wanted me to make it better. I didn’t know what to do. I waited for her to stop, but she crossed the room and walked right into me. She cried all over my shirt.

While she did it I shut my eyes and breathed slowly.

I had a sister and she was perfect and she cared that I was there.

I think it was the closest to happy I’d ever been. And I knew I was going to hell for it.

I know it still. If there’s a hell, that’s where I’ll go.