Dear Cassie Read Online Free Page A

she couldn’t even talk.
    “Wick,” Rawe said, in the same voice she’d used on Nez.
    I got back up, but my legs felt shaky. My ass burned. I stood in front of my stump.
    The boys lined up beside us. Ben was directly next to me; he’d pulled his hair back in a red bandana. He held his ax high. I didn’t want to watch him, but I couldn’t help it.
    I wanted to see him fail.
    I watched his arms go up and then down, splitting the wood like he was wielding a karate chop.
    “Hot,” Nez whispered, her eyebrows wiggling.
    Ben saw me watching him and winked. I looked down at my uncut log.
    “Want some help?” he asked, then stuck his ax into the stump in front of him. He moved it so fluidly, so not like how I moved mine.
    “Not from you,” I snarked.
    “You don’t seem like the kind of girl who would take help from anyone,” he said, his brown eyes as sharp as his ax blade as he picked it up again.
    “Then why the hell did you ask?”
    “Because I’m not just anyone,” he said, picking up a log and splitting it so hard I felt the ground shake.
    I tried to remember to breathe.
    I tried to remember that this might be how things started, but it wasn’t how they ended.
    “He likes you,” Nez said.
    “Who cares?” I said. I felt my stomach cinch up like a drawstring waistband. I didn’t care what any guy thought of me—guys could like me or hate me, but they were never touching me again.
    Never again.
    “What’s his name?” Nez whispered.
    “Asshole,” I whispered back.
    “Wick,” Rawe said, her voice exploding out of her like a volcano, “if I say your name one more time . . .”
    “Jeez Louise,” Nez whispered. “You better make this one.”
    I lifted the ax, looking at the log like a bull’s-eye. I could do this. I had to do this. I closed my eyes and thought about Aaron, put his face in the center of the log. I would smash it. I would destroy it. I would annihilate it. Do everything I never had the chance to do.
    I swung and hit right in the middle. The log cracked in two.
    “I did it,” I said, feeling weirdly relieved. No one else could hear me. They were all chopping, too, the sound around me like homerun after homerun after homerun. I turned back to Rawe. I wanted to make sure she had seen.
    “Great,” she said with a sarcastic thumbs-up. “Only four hundred more logs to go.”
    Aw, fuck.

    Hours later, in bed and diarying, all I can feel is searing, burning pain in my shoulders and hands, splinters I can’t even see, and calluses the size of almonds on my fingers. This was supposedly our day off, and it was pretty much the worst day of my life so far.
    Well, the worst day I’m willing to write about.
    Not that I have to. I’m supposed to be writing about my family.
    Rawe said that if we knew where we came from, it would be easier to see how we’d ended up where we’d ended up.
    The crap not falling far from the butthole and all that. Or maybe that was just my family.
    I can’t help thinking about when I was a kid and we had this same assignment in class. Back then I always said, I have a mom and a dad and a brother and I love them all. And they all love me.
    It was a lie then and it’s more of a lie now.
    I have a mom, but she’s an alcoholic. I have a dad, but he’s in the army like my brother and he isn’t home a lot. He’s deployed most of the year. When he comes home, my mother tolerates us and he tries to figure out everything that has happened while he was gone. When he leaves, my mother gets drunk.
    She couldn’t even wake up to say good-bye to me the morning I left for this camp. My father had gone on his deployment right after I was sentenced and when I went into my mother’s bedroom to tell her I was leaving, she was passed out, unconscious, her empty bottle of vodka sleeping in my father’s spot.
    Not that I was surprised. She was too drunk to say good-bye to me most mornings, but most mornings I wasn’t leaving for thirty days.
    When I was little I used to be