The Oxford Inheritance by Ann A. McDonald Page B

Cassie thought, waving back. A relic, an oddity in his tweed and absentminded concentration, he seemed as if he could have been transplanted from fifty or a hundred years ago. But then again, that was Oxford: its cobbled streets unchanged, the lampposts still old-fashioned wrought iron even if the bulbs inside were new.
    This was an odd, timeless place, a city out of step with the rest of the world, where walking down an empty backstreet along the snaking line of an ancient college’s walls, Cassie could almost forget which century she was in—until a cluster of noisy undergrads spilled out of some back-alley pub, with their modern fashions and noisy buzz of cell phones breaking the spell.
    It was still strange for Cassie to think of her mother here. She would have loved it, Cassie knew: the bustle of the city center, with its collision of old worlds and new: the old Tudor row houses and college walls, the modern office buildings and traffic that snaked through the winding streets, the horizon of turrets and curving spires. To have seen her there, immersed in such literature and tradition . . . It was a fantasy, impossible, Cassie knew, but as she searched through the old college records, expecting to see Joanna’s name on every next page, she could almost glimpse it. That laughing smile, that glow of possibility.
    What had happened to her, to strip away all that great potential and leave her so broken, so full of rage and sorrow? Or had it been inevitable, the time bomb in her delicate DNA: the threads of instability woven deep, and only surfacing later, when it was already too late?
    The DNA they both shared. Cassie shivered and turned back to her books, but the thought lingered. For years, she’d known that she’d inherited too much from her mother; not her blond hair or blue eyes or perfect singing pitch, but the darkness lingering beneath the surface. A poison of sorts, running in her veins. Her mother’s sickness had been the manic episodes, the heightened emotions, the dizzying, knife-edge depths.
    For Cassie, it took a different form.
    She’d been a kid still when they started. Tantrums, disapproving teachers would call them, but to Cassie, they were anything but a choice. The anger would take her over in a heartbeat, a pounding, furious storm that she was powerless to control. People used the term blind rage so casually, but Cassie knew from the inside exactly what it meant. She would lose track of herself, overcome with a red-hot fury that demanded release, until finally something broke through the fever or it ebbed away, leaving nothing but wreckage behind.
    It terrified her, losing control. She feared that she was becoming her mother, only worse. Sharper, more dangerous. Her mother only screamed and cried in the grip of her episodes, but Cassie . . . Cassie wanted to burn the whole world down.
    Her mother knew the signs. She held fast against doctors and medication until there was no ignoring the damage. But instead of submitting Cassie to the drugs that she swore numbed her to the world, Joanna taught Cassie her own coping mechanisms, making out like it was just a game. Hold on to the magic pendant, and count; imagine they were lying on the trampoline in the summer sun. Safe thoughts. Careful numbers. Keep the furious hunger at bay.
    Cassie knew the pendant was nothing more than chipped stone, and the simple meditation techniques designed for stress, but it was all she had. She focused that wild fury, boxed it up in walls of whispered chanting until she was safe, until it was contained.
    It didn’t always work. There was an incident with bullies when she was eight years old, the time on the school bus when she was twelve. Broken bones, black eyes, a trip to the ER, and little Cassie in the middle of it all, unharmed and unremorseful. They took her out of school in the end—it was just safer that way—and away from the daily battle of other kids, taunting and not