If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late (2 page)

Shivering, Cass lifted her head off her pillow.

She was a member of a dangerous secret society now, the Terces Society, she reminded herself. Or she would be soon. She couldn’t let a little dream scare her.

What had Pietro, the old magician, said in his letter? That once she and Max-Ernest had sworn the Oath of Terces, they would “face the hazards and the hardships.” And that they must “obey all the orders without the questions.”
^*

If she couldn’t face her own dreams, how could she face real enemies like Dr. L and Ms. Mauvais? Like the Masters of the Midnight Sun.

Even so, the strange song lingered in her mind, haunting her.

Again.

Each night a different dream. But always the same song.

Why?

“Cassandra!”

Her mother was calling up to her from downstairs. Cass couldn’t hear every word but she knew what her mother was saying:

Get up — it’s late! I’m off to work (. . . or to yoga . . . or to a meeting). There’s oatmeal on the stove (. . . or granola on the counter . . . or a waffle in the toaster). Don’t forget you have your math quiz (. . . or book report . . . or oboe lesson). Love you!

These days, Cass’s mother ended nearly everything she said to Cass with
Love you!
— kind of like it was a punctuation mark or a nervous tick.

“Love you!”

See.

The front door slammed shut; her mother had left.

Unwilling to get up, Cass stared at the wall facing her bed.

Cass’s Wall of Horrors, her mother called it.

Hundreds of magazine and newspaper clippings covered the wall — all describing disasters, or potential disasters:

Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Tsunamis. Tornadoes.

There were pictures of seabirds blackened by oil spills, and of starving polar bears standing on shrinking icebergs. There were mushroom clouds and poison mushrooms, killer bees and killer mold.

Posters and diagrams showed
How to Treat Frostbite
. . .
The Heimlich Maneuver
. . .
THREE SIGNS THAT YOU HAVE A THIRD-DEGREE BURN
. . .
The ABCs of CPR
. . .

And in the center of the wall: an article about a bear haunting campers in the mountains.
BEAR OR BIGFOOT?
the headline read.

Most people — people like Cass’s mother — would find a wall like this very disquieting. Cass found it comforting.

Usually.

As a survivalist, she liked to be prepared for the worst at all times. She could face anything, she felt, if she knew it was coming.

Hurricane? Board up the windows. Drought? Save water. Fire? Don’t panic, avoid smoke inhalation, look for a safe way out.

And yet these were all
natural
disasters. What would she do, she couldn’t help wondering now, if she ever confronted a
supernatural
disaster?

That was what upset her about her dreams. They were strange and irrational.
They didn’t make sense,
as her friend Max-Ernest would say. (Max-Ernest talked compulsively, but he was
always
very logical.) An earthquake might not be totally predictable but at least it obeyed the laws of nature.

Most of her dreams involved a monstrous creature and a spooky old graveyard. How do you prepare for
that
?

Not that she thought her dreams were going to come true; she wasn’t superstitious. It was just that they felt so real.

“There must be something in the graveyard you want,” Max-Ernest had said when she finally told him about the dreams. “A dream is the fulfillment of a wish. That’s what Sigmund Freud says. How ’bout that?”
^*

“But why would I wish for a monster?” Cass had asked. Max-Ernest’s parents were psychologists — so she figured he knew what he was talking about.

“Well, I don’t know if it means you wished for it, exactly. I think dreams are like things you can’t admit you want because you feel guilty or embarrassed or something. It’s called the unconscious,” Max-Ernest had concluded. “It’s kind of confusing.”

Still in bed, Cass thought about what he’d said. She reached under her pillow, pulling out the small stuffed creature she’d hidden beneath it.

“Who are you? What are you?”

Cass’s sock-monster was a little, odd-shaped thing made out of old socks and scraps from her grandfathers’ antiques store. She’d sewn it together in a kind of fever one day, obsessed by the creature from her dreams. It was green and purple and troll-like with a big, sock-heel nose, bulging bottle-cap eyes, and floppy ears made from tennis-shoe tongues. Cass liked the ears especially — ears almost as big but not nearly as pointy as Cass’s own.

Since it was 100 percent recycled, the sock- monster was a super-survivalist, and Cass found that if she held him tight she absorbed his survival powers.

Sometimes.

Other times, he just felt good to hug.
^*

Maybe, thought Cass, her bad dreams would end when her new life — her secret life, her life with the Terces Society — began.

Like any serious survivalist, Cass followed a rigorous routine every morning:

As soon as she was on her feet, she pulled her backpack out from under her bed and double-checked its contents. The backpack was a custom-made model that Pietro had sent her; it had special secret capabilities, like converting to a tent or a parachute. Even so, Cass kept some of her old survivalist supplies in the backpack — like chewing gum, for its sticking value, and grape juice, which she liked to use as ink.

She didn’t know what her first Terces Society mission would be — all she knew about the society was that it was dedicated to protecting the Secret — but she would be ready.

Next, Cass examined every corner of her house to see if anyone had entered overnight — whether friend or foe.

She checked:

1. The tiny threads of dental floss she tied to the handles of her desk drawers so she’d know if anybody ever opened them.

2. The dried bee corpse she’d discovered one day and left strategically on her windowsill.

3. All the windows and mirrors and doors to see whether someone had written a coded message in dust, toothpaste, or shaving cream.

4. And a few other places I won’t give away, in case the wrong person reads this.

Only after she was sure that nothing had changed upstairs did she allow herself to go downstairs, where her first stop was usually the kitchen cupboard. Cass had a hunch she might find the next secret message from the Terces Society in a particular old box of alphabet cereal.

But this morning, when she walked through the kitchen door, Cass let out a very un-survivalist-like gasp of excitement: the magnets on the refrigerator had been moved. They weren’t arranged the way she’d left them the night before (by color rather than letter); she could tell from the doorway.

She covered the distance in two leaps and stood breathless in front of the refrigerator, ready to decipher a coded message or to read directions to a secret meeting place or to take instructions about a new mission. Or all three.

Then her heart sank.

The magnets spelled:
LOVE YOU

Clipped underneath was a handwritten note:

7 a.m. Off to work. There’s a waffle — the whole wheat kind — in the toaster. Don’t forget you have your field trip to the tide pools tomorrow — do you know where your windbreaker is? I can’t find it.

M.

M being for Mom or Mother. But also for Mel.

Mel being short for Melanie, her mother’s name.

Hardly a secret code.

Cass crumpled the note in her hand, despondent:
why
did her mom have to be such a mom?

And
when
was the Terces Society going to come?

T
he Xxxxxxxxx School. City of Xxxxx Xxxxxx. Lunchtime.

I’m sorry — I still cannot tell you the name of Cass’s school. Or where the school was located. Or what it looked like. Or almost anything else about it.

Of course, I trust
you.
But there’s always the possibility that, through no fault of your own, you will toss this book out the window and it will fall into the wrong hands.
^*

I can tell you this: it was a school that lived by strict rules.

There were, first of all, the principal Mrs. Johnson’s rules, which were strict enough, but usually understandable. Like no skateboarding in the hallways, for example. Or no wearing your underpants outside your clothing.

But there were also many other, unspoken rules that were made by nobody in particular, and that made no sense at all.

One of these pointless rules was that you ate lunch at the same table and with the same people every day; if you changed tables it could only mean that you were in a fight or something truly drastic had happened.

The lunch tables were clustered outside in a part of the school yard known as the Grove (even though there weren’t any trees nearby). At the center table sat Amber and her friends. Amber, you may remember, was the nicest girl in school, and the third prettiest. At least, that’s what everybody said.

Other tables spread out from there — like planets orbiting a sun.

Cass and Max-Ernest, I am sorry to report, did little to rebel against this system. In fact, their table, located on the very outermost fringes of the Grove, was so well known it had a name: the Nuts Table.

“The name doesn’t make any sense,” Max-Ernest complained almost daily. “It should be the No Nuts Table, since it’s for kids with nut allergies.”

“I think people think the Nuts Table sounds funnier,” Cass told him.

But she stopped short of a full explanation: if Max-Ernest didn’t understand that the other students thought that the kids at the Nuts Table were, well, nuts, then good for him.

Cass had no allergies herself; nonetheless, her diet was very restricted. Because she saw lunch as part of her survivalist training, everything she ate had to be capable of lasting for months without spoiling, whether in an underground bunker or an outer-space escape pod. Thus fresh fruit was prohibited, but Fruit Roll-Ups were permissible. Sandwiches were out, but cup-o-noodles was OK.

Trail mix was the most ideal food of all; it was a whole meal in one.
^*

Today, however, Cass hesitated before digging into her trail mix. A handwritten note was sitting on top.

Cass grimaced in annoyance. She hated it when her mother put notes in her lunch — it was
so
embarrassing. Not to mention, the notes usually consisted of lists of not-very-fun things Cass was supposed to do or remember.

She pushed the note back into her reusable waterproof lunch sack. She would read it later. Maybe.

Unlike Cass, Max-Ernest did have several nut allergies (to which nuts he was never sure) as well as a host of other food-related ailments. But what was more remarkable, he always brought two lunches to school: one made by his mother, and one by his father; he was always careful to eat the same amount from each. Max-Ernest’s parents were divorced, and everything in his life was doubled or divided. (When Cass first visited his house, she couldn’t believe it: the house was split down the middle, each side designed and decorated differently, with neither parent ever stepping onto the other parent’s side.)

Today, he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to eat
either
of his lunches.

“So, I learned a new trick. Wanna see?” he asked, already laying out his playing cards. “It’s called the Four Brothers.”

Max-Ernest had been reading up on magic for several months now, not just how-to books but also histories and biographies of famous magicians. Every time Cass saw him he had a new story about an Indian sword-swallower or a nineteenth-century flea circus or an essay on the first time a magician made an elephant disappear.

For today’s trick, Max-Ernest removed the four jacks from his deck and fanned them out in front of Cass. “See these four jacks? They’re brothers and they don’t like being separated.”

He gathered up the jacks and placed them in different places in the deck, separating them — or seeming to. Then he cut the deck.

“Now, watch how the jacks all come back together —”

He riffled through the deck and showed her how they’d moved next to each other — or seemed to. “How ’bout that?”

He was getting better, thought Cass. But not that much better.

It didn’t help that Max-Ernest had a big pimple on the tip his nose. Between the pimple and his spiky hair — each strand, as always, cut exactly the same length — he looked more like a hedgehog than a magician.

“Pretty good,” said Cass diplomatically. “But I think I’ve seen the trick before — only with kings. And they weren’t brothers, they were friends.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Four kings would never be friends — they would be rivals, fighting over their kingdoms. And even if they weren’t fighting — I doubt they would have that many friends. It’s not very realistic —”

Cass was about to point out that sometimes brothers could be rivals. Like Pietro and Dr. L. They were twins — but also mortal enemies. At the same time, plenty of people had four friends or even more. Amber, for instance. Amber considered herself to be friends with their entire school.