[Reaction]
This, Cass understands. She's in the room, in the quiet room in the Quiet Home while people howl and people scream and the world outside her window is placid, calm behind thick, thick glass and bars. For a minute she thinks it's back again, hers, fat and familiar and comforting within her shadow - shadows. A whisper in her ear, a glide across her eyes like a blindfold to blot the world away. But it isn't. It's history, but it isn't. It's memory, but it isn't. She remembers exhilaration, the patter of her heart in her throat, the light, light toes on boards to creep from bed and out a window, she feels its twin now.
The parental disappointment is new and old, it isn't hers, hers wouldn't care an iota if she was banished from school, they'd find another. The anticipation is thrilling, and Cass thrills with it, through the strange interlude, the coursing venom, the heat. She knows, in her throat, in her heart that the you she is, is the one who's done it, who's pulled the veil closer, tighter until he or she is nothing and nobody, shadows for a heartbeat.
Dreamily, Cass comes out of it, borrowed temper cutting like hot steel through the miasma of today's pills, the drugs. She comes awake in a room, alone and clear-headed with someone else's bruises purpling on her insides.