Track 2

“Beautiful Stranger”

Present Day

Dawson, Colorado

“Cassidy Roekiem! Earth to Cassidy Roekiem!”

I jolt awake at the mangled sound of my last name…and laughter. For the record, it’s ROO-keem, not Ro-ECKY-em. The weight of twenty pairs of eyes burns into the back of my head. Damn. I’d fallen asleep in class. Again. A puddle of saliva marks the spot where my head had rested. I wipe it with my sleeve, and snatches of the dream I was in the middle of fade into oblivion.

It’s not so much the public drooling that’s freaking me out. For the past few months, my habit of falling asleep whenever, wherever, has gotten worse. A spontaneous snooze during class is bad enough. But what if it happens while I’m driving on the freeway? My parents took me to a sleep clinic a few years back, but the doctors there couldn’t find anything physically wrong with me. According to them, the best cure is to get more zzz’s. Maybe just not in class.

My sharp-nosed biology teacher, Ms. Walters, continues. “Since you were here in body but not in spirit for the past ten minutes, you are cordially required to join me today at 3:15 for detention.”

What kind of sadist gives out that kind of punishment on a Friday? Doesn’t she have something better to do? I open my mouth to protest, to tell her I have urgent business to take care of after school. But an audible yawn comes out instead.

Ms. Walters rolls her eyes. I sit up straighter and try to pay attention to her lecture on panspermia.

“Now,” she drones on, “the theory of bacteria being distributed across the universe on dust particles and evolving into complex alien life-forms is an exciting one.”

Somebody behind me pipes up enthusiastically. “Are you saying there are real E.T.’s out there?”

“Tony, when I say, ‘complex alien life-forms,’ I’m not talking about little beings with big eyes and glowing fingers. No, I mean bacteria and…”

Tony clicks his tongue in disappointment.

My mind drifts once more to anything but free-floating bacteria. The new kid in the seat beside me, Hayden McSomething, is playing with his phone, making the screen flash on and off. Out of the corner of my eye, I spy Hayden’s jean-clad right leg sliding toward my chair, inch by inch. His seat squeaks as he quickly folds his leg back to its original position. I can’t blame him for feeling restless.

I’m not sure what his issue is with this period, but I am more than ready to ditch my classes. I have Important Things to do for Mom. Even exploring the mysteries of the universe seems trivial in comparison.

White light persistently blips from Hayden’s phone. It’s annoying as hell. My head thumps to the beat—blip, blip, blip. Rubbing my temples, I sneak a sideways look at him, but he’s not watching the teacher or his phone. He’s staring at me.

Is he signaling me? Trying to tell me my clothes are inside out or that I’m still drooling? He catches my gaze and pockets his phone fast. Furtively, I do a quick grooming check.

Yep, my clothes are respectable and there’s no more drool.

Hayden sends me the faintest of smiles. I blink in surprise.

He arrived in Dawson at the start of the school year and is rumored to be a track team superstar. His speed is unreal. This sport factoid alone earned him instant respect. And, really, anyone with a pulse seems to have registered his magnetic presence. Who wouldn’t notice those serious but velvety-brown eyes? Dark floppy hair? That muscular chest and lean body? And he has to be smart if he’s enrolled in AP.

Yet despite meeting all the criteria for instant popularity, he keeps to himself. That aloofness only serves to ramp up the curiosity factor about him.

I whisper, “Hayden, is this class killing you as much as it’s killing me? How about we skip to lunch?”

Okay, I don’t actually say any of that out loud. Maybe in another lifetime I would, when we’re not surrounded by other students and a teacher who hands out detention slips like they’re Halloween candy.

Slowly, Hayden’s jaw drops as he turns toward me. His dark eyes are wide and deer-like. My heart strains hard against my ribs. Did I actually speak out loud? I clap a hand to my closed lips and cast a quick glance around the room.

In the back corner, Angie’s studying her nails instead of a textbook. Others are cradling their chins with their hands and staring into space. Tony’s lip is curled, unimpressed by the idea of bacteria being classified as aliens. But most are madly taking notes. There’s no evidence I disrupted the class with an unsolicited pick-up line.

So that’s good news. I blow out a relieved sigh. This one’s loud enough to capture everybody’s attention. Everybody except Hayden. He keeps his eyes on the chalkboard, lips flattened. That tiny smile is now a memory. Ms. Walters resumes scratching out a diagram of a bacterium hitching a ride on an asteroid.

When the bell rings later, Hayden practically jumps out of his chair. He jostles my shoulder.

“S-sorry,” he says, his stammering almost drowned out by everyone’s chatter. He focuses on shoving his notepad into a plain black satchel.

“No problem,” I reply brightly. “Interesting about the pansperm—”

“I have to go,” he breaks into my attempt at casual conversation. His tight smile is brief but apologetic. Then he’s out the door before I can respond, a blur of dark denim and white tee.

Angie catches up as we funnel into the hallway. “Your spontaneous sleep sessions are getting ridiculous,” she says, swinging her orange purse over her shoulder. Orange because it’s fall.

Ever since I’ve known her, she’s been prone to wearing colors to reflect the seasons. When December rolls around, she’ll trade the pumpkin-hued flats for white knee-high boots. She’s considering bleaching her hair platinum this year. I don’t remember what her original hair color was. Today, it’s maple-syrup brown.

Yawning, I say, “You don’t understand. I need as much sleep as I can get.”

“Liar. Something’s keeping you awake all night. Or someone.” Angie arches a single brow. It’s a maneuver she mastered over countless practice sessions in front of the mirror. She wants to be an actress, so it was important to get that down pat. Angie can also cry real tears on demand, but only from her right eye.

“Someone? Like whom?”

She waves a hand toward a dark-haired figure in the hall up ahead. His tall form sticks to the center of the corridor, skillfully weaving around dawdling students. “Hayden McGraw. I saw him staring at you during class. He’s obsessed.”

“Don’t make it sound creepy.” Paradoxically, I keep my gaze locked on Hayden till he disappears around a corner. “I think he’s just lonely.”

Angie does the single-brow thing again. Practice makes perfect. “Well, jump right in there and ask him out!”

I groan. “Angie, I am truly thrilled you’re now happily coupled with this mysterious Jacob from Whatever High, but that doesn’t mean I want to be coupled with someone, too. Why do I need to ‘jump’ straight into dating? This guy needs a friend, for starters.”

Angie isn’t listening. She started swooning at the mention of her new boyfriend’s name. He’s from a rival school in Bartlett, and she first saw him at a football game. According to her, it was love at first on-field fight. “That’s a pity. I wish you could have what Jacob and I share.”

I smile wryly. She sounds like a character in a soap opera. “Yeah, someday my prince will come, but he’ll probably turn into a toad.”

“Such a cynic!”

“I’m a realist.” I haven’t had the best of luck in the romance department. Admittedly, it’s through lack of trying. At my locker, a pile of books and notes fall out the second I open it. “I have zero time for dating right now. I’ve got a new project.”

Here’s when I would normally spill my guts to Angie and tell her what I’m doing. And she’d fire question after question at me. Maybe even tell me I’m chasing phantoms. But right now I’m not ready for a verbal assault.

Angie tuts. She crouches on the floor with me and picks up paperclips with her tangerine-painted nails. “I told you not to do that advanced sign language course. You don’t need the extra credit.”

“Since when is extra credit a bad thing? Especially when I’m learning a useful skill?” Turns out I’m pretty good at it, too. It often surprises people to know that the language Deaf people use is totally different to spoken English. Learning the grammar rules of American Sign Language is challenging. I just wish I had more time to put it into real-world practice. Still, I tend to talk with my hands a lot when I’m talking to people who can hear.

Ultimately, I want to study languages in college and work at the United Nations. At the very least, I’d like to be able to have real conversations with the Indonesian relatives on my dad’s side and my Dutch family on Mom’s side. Of course, I’ve known the essential profanities in both languages since middle school.

But the UN is years from now. My current project is far more urgent.

Angie hands me one last paperclip. “True. But, excuse me for sounding like your mom—you’re spreading yourself too thin. Look at you. You’re falling asleep in class. You’re working your ass off at your dad’s office. When do you get to flake out and doom-scroll through your social media until five o’clock in the morning like us normal people?”

Suddenly, my throat jams up. Great. Just when I thought I had everything together, I’m on the verge of falling apart. In front of the whole school. Using my long hair as a curtain, I hide my face from Angie.

She isn’t fooled. Angie pulls back my hair. The sympathetic tears forming in Angie’s right eye unravel something inside me.

“Ohhh, Cassidy. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to mention your mom.”

“It’s all right,” I say with a too-bright smile. “No need to pretend she doesn’t exist anymore, okay?”

But that’s the painful thing. Mom does exist. She just flat-out refuses to see me or Dad for reasons I’m sure make sense to her. Not to the rest of us, though.

“Got it. No more pretending,” Angie says.

My mom is Nina Groen-Roekiem.

Yes, that Nina Groen-Roekiem. Every politician’s nightmare. Her nickname at the Times may have been Rookie, but she was anything but. She got her start at Rolling Stone magazine and worked like a demon. Covering rock gigs is just as tricky as covering politics, according to Mom.

When I was in middle school, she missed out on a Pulitzer Prize for her series of articles about government inaction on climate change. My ten-year-old self was as crushed as she was. I’d spent hours with her on the road, watching her interview academics. We cried oceans of tears together.

She brushed herself off from the loss and got eyeballs-deep into researching a book on the disappearance of Jane Flanagan, President Flanagan’s five-year-old daughter, in the mid-eighties. There are conspiracy theories galore, yet nobody knows for sure—is she dead or alive? Helena Flanagan is on record saying, “Call it a mother’s instinct, but I feel Jane is out there somewhere. I won’t rest until she’s home.”

And my mother, who acted on gut feelings her whole life, understood. Moms have a spooky intuition when it comes to their kids. At least, that’s what mine believes. Until—God forbid—a body turned up, Mom wouldn’t give up hope. One way or another, she wanted to find out what happened. Bring some peace to the Flanagans.

Mom traveled back and forth to DC for months, trying to get answers, but hitting roadblocks at every turn. Mom’s obsession, as Dad called it, strained their marriage. It wasn’t a secret—their arguments were impossible to avoid. How I wish I could have slept through them. It got to the point where I’d jolt every time anybody raised their voice. When they split, it was almost a relief.

Almost.

That’s when Mom really threw herself into research. Because she didn’t have time to find a new place, Dad said she could stay in the tiny guest house on our property. But since she was always on the road anyway, that arrangement turned out better than Dad expected. We never saw her.

Then finally, the inevitable happened earlier this year. The Breakdown. Years of running at full speed but getting nowhere got the best of her. In June, she checked herself into a high-priced mental health facility, without consulting us. We since learned she was moved to a super-exclusive “wellness” resort called Eden Estate. I’ve looked into it. No Google reviews. No Yelp. Definitely no Facebook fan page.

That’s three million kinds of messed up.

Inexplicably, she won’t see me or Dad, not even on FaceTime. Sure, my parents have been divorced for a couple years, but they don’t hate each other that much. My mother is a woman of her word. She doesn’t say anything she doesn’t mean.

Eden’s front line is just as hard to get through. I’ve begged, pleaded. I’m about ready to start a petition. Every time I’m told by the same snooty-voiced receptionist, “We’re sorry. Visitations are not possible today,” a piece of my heart gets cleaved off.

What kind of a health facility doesn’t support visitors from friends and family?

Last week, I added a bunch of new songs to the playlist Mom made for me not long before she started treatment. Songs that influenced her when she was in college. Songs with lyrics that stirred her emotionally, politically. Songs that were the soundtrack to her life. I thought sharing music with her would melt whatever defenses she’d put up.

She didn’t respond.

Twisting the strap of her bag, Angie says, “I meant what I said. I see you constantly running in circles at a hundred miles an hour. It’s almost like…”

“Like what?”

She stares hard at me. “Like if you stop for a minute, you’ll see there’s something missing in your life.”

I slam my locker door. “There is. My mother.”

“No, it’s more than that.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Angie, good friend that she is, sees through my bravado and makes soothing noises. Despite her intentions, I wish she’d stop, because I’m about to slide off that verge.

Squaring my shoulders, I pull myself together both physically and metaphorically. Mom’s in a very dark place right now. And it’s up to me to get her out of there.

…

In the end, Ms. Walters held me in detention for a grand total of five minutes. She had somewhere to be. That made two of us.

But I doubt Ms. Walters’s “somewhere to be” is as shiver inducing as mine.

Eden Estate.

Long shadows of the impossibly tall, locked gates on a secluded road off I-15 loom over the little Fiat I inherited from my mother. The guard booth stands empty. With cobwebs clinging to the windows, I’m thinking it’s been empty for some time.

“This can’t be it,” I whisper to myself, then check my phone for the address that was buried deep in the bowels of an intensive Google search. It finally came up in the results when I punched in Eden’s phone number.

Super-exclusive? Resort?

Now I’m worried. I’ve had nightmares about places like this.

The boxy, two-story building’s paint might have been bright white fifty or sixty years ago, but today it’s gray and flaky. Weeds are growing out of what little I can see of the flat roof. Chunks of stucco have fallen off the front portico. Hard to believe anyone can see through those chalky windows and look out over Saddleback Ridge.

There are no patients wandering the grounds. Why would they? The grass is overgrown in some places, dry and yellowed in others, and there are more nettles than roses in the flowerbeds.

Ivy clings to a rusty comms box outside the guard booth. I open my window, press a faded red button, and call out loudly, “Hello?”

A few seconds pass, then static crackles through the speakers. No voice. Just static.

When it stops, I press the button again. “Um, hi? This is Cassidy Roekiem. I’m here to see my mother, Nina Groen-Roekiem.”

More static and electronic squealing vomits from the speaker.

Frowning, I check around the gates for surveillance cameras. But unless they’re cleverly hidden behind the weeds, there aren’t any.

“Is anyone there?” More static. I unlock my phone and find the contacts app. “Okay, I’ll just call your office, then. I really need to see my mother.”

But as soon as the phone line starts buzzing, the gates swing inward with an ominous, creaking groan that seems to intone, “Enter if you dare.”

I rev the engine in response. “I dare, all right.”