Suicide was seen by many as a sign of the weak. This was a cold bitter truth she was all too aware of. What most people didn't realize was those who attempted it thought the exact same thing. Yes, Cassandra Croswell knew full well that she had been so weak that she couldn't handle life anymore.
She had thought for many months about suicide. She weighed the pros and cons very carefully for she was after all a very intelligent girl who always tried to think before acting. She internalized all her feeling bottling them up giving them nowhere to go. "It's unhealthy to hold it all in," she recalled the grey-haired psychologist her father had hired said to her the very day she had attempted to end her own life.
Why was she so desperate to die? It was the question that so many people wanted to ask but so few did. The answer however was fairly simple. She had seen firsthand the cruelness and savagery that lies within every man's heart. Cassandra was part of a group of what is now called, the island kids. She along with nine other girls and nineteen boys had been left on an uninhabited island when their evacuating plane crashed due to weather complications. Of the twenty-nine children that originally survived the crash only twenty-two remained. Three of the children died on the island and four of them had taken their own lives after the fact. She would have been the fifth. It had been eight months, three weeks, and five days since they left the island. It had been seven months and six days since her brother had been locked up in Hanwell Asylum. It had been six months since her friend Ralph Fletcher had killed himself. It had been one month and tree days since she tried to kill herself.
Her father 'suggested' she moved to a new school, and by suggested, she meant he told her she was going to the new school whether she liked it or not. The school itself wasn't so awful. It was a special school known as Bloomington's Art Academy where students from all over England with advanced talents in the arts (she was blessed not only with an amazing talent for writing but also high skill in the visual arts as well) would come to study and develop their skills. Not only did it have an outstanding arts departments but it was also one of the highest ranked schools in academics in all of Europe. That didn't bother Cassandra quite as much as the fact she would be leaving behind her two best friends in the world, the boys who had been there through it all, Sam and Eric (who were constantly referred to as Samneric due to the fact they were twins and functioned mostly as a single unit). She was so afraid that without her best friends she would be sucked back into depression and constant fear. No matter how much she begged, or pleaded, or argued with her father she ended up sitting in the car in the Bloomington parking lot September first, her bags packed and ready (though she distinctly remembered unpacking everything her stepmother had tried to pack) for the long stay until Christmas holiday.
"Come now Cassi," Mr. Croswell said sternly nearly dragging his daughter out of the car and into the building. "What could possibly go wrong?"