Re: [The Lake: Atticus & Cass]
She had never been able to lie to herself. She could lie. It was better to lie and be thought a liar than to tell the truth and never, ever be believed. Cass's head ached; with truth instead of the sun. She couldn't lie, or perhaps she could and she had convinced herself. It went around and around like that. Truth, lie. Like a mirror-image. "There are always variations," she said quietly. Affirming. It wasn't what he meant, but the conversation had layered like that, in paper-thin substantiations. There were always variations. She didn't want to see a single future where the not-boy from the lake was lost beneath the water. There would be one. There always was.
"You should have company," she said of the island. "Irregularly." A smile that leaned into her cheek. She understood, a little. Isolation. It was easier, sometimes. It was easier not to see people ripple into who they could be every minute, she'd longed for an island, a nowhere. "People need people." Cass said it now, into the clear lack of people on the shorefront. She didn't know he'd expected any. Had there been, she might have gone over the side. There were people, and then there were people. She could do without a single one of the people she had presently.
She laughed. The silk was almost dry, water-stained but it had been before. Fountains. She liked water. She liked it even if she'd seen it the first time and she'd dreamed it nearly every month since then. "I'm mad," she said, calmly. "Mad people are always safe, because everyone else feels unsafe. It's practically the safest thing you can be." She swung herself over the side of the boat to the dock, to the shells of clothing shucked like snake-skin.
"Merci." She shrugged into a shirt, button-necked until she was decent, and she turned to look at him as he went. "You're kind."