Re: Cass & Mat: the Quiet Home
Cass had never been a Cassie. Cassie intimated the kind of friendship that braided each other's hair, traded secrets under comforters at boarding schools. Cass had courted trouble as devotedly as others did lovers, she had been thrown out of boarding schools for smoking cigarettes beneath fire alarms, for being found ostentatiously in bed with the son of the headmistress. Cass had never had close girlfriends, no one whose life she couldn't see. She had madness flirting on the edge of reason, a perpetual threat, a perpetual awaiting of the inevitable desire to walk into cold water and drown instead of See.
The orderly didn't sway. He remained with his weight over his knees and he walked off a little dreamily but otherwise himself. What did the mind look like, feel like, to someone like Matilda? Cass didn't know, she could only wonder. She kept her fingers to herself, even the dulled edge of a knife could cut - a little. But she paused, momentarily caught betwixt bewilderment and wonder.
"I thought you wanted to get me out," she said, a little slowly, her voice thick.