Read with Fern

Spoilers Beyond This Point

Characters:

• Cassie: outdoorsy twin
• Lenora: agoraphobic twin
• Wayne: their landlord who recently died
• Sarah: the new owner of the campground
• Tilly: the teenager staying at Cabin Three
• Karen: Tilly’s mom

Summary (with Spoilers)

We start with Cassie, exploring the campground woods. The first thing we learn about her is that she never wears shoes, and she throws in an offhand joke about it being a sign of her past trauma and the need to feel something. She runs into Wayne’s nephew, who’s in town to sell the campground after Wayne’s death. As Cassie heads back, she ruminates on her relationship with Lenora. We learn that the twins were monoamniotic twins, sharing a sac and placenta in utero, which is extremely rare. Their level of physical closeness has barely changed since being in the womb, but their level of mental closeness has definitely dropped.

Meanwhile, Lenora is inside Cabin Two, her only safe space. She’s on a video call with her therapist, who’s trying to get Lenora to open up about her past. Lenora doesn’t leave the cabin, except to walk to the bathhouse between the three cabins. She never goes out in public, or interacts with anyone besides Cassie. But when her therapist pushes her to talk about why that is, Lenora shuts down. Her therapist directly asks if it’s about knowing her mother is out in the world, but not knowing where.

“‘Do you think the moonshine is what killed Wayne?’ I ask, not knowing what’s gotten into me. What I expect from her. It’s bad enough, the images of the lethargic, vomiting dog. Now there are images of Wayne mixed in. Dead Wayne. I never saw his body, and that’s almost worse. I only have my imagination to fill in the gaps.”

When She Was Me, Marlee Bush

Cassie and Lenora’s first interaction in the book is charged. Cassie very bluntly tells Lenora that Wayne’s nephew is selling the campground. Lenora tries to avoid the conversation. Both sisters have flashbacks throughout their conversations, always about their traumatic night. Neither one discusses it, but they both have memories of walking down a hallway to a closed door, then opening it to find their mom stabbing their dad over and over. The biggest difference is that Cassie ran away, while Lenora stayed.

“When I sit in front of the camera, I like to wear their skin. The victims. Slip them on like an evening coat and pretend their lives and mine are the same.”

When She Was Me, Marlee Bush

Living as sequestered young adults in the middle of nowhere, Cassie and Lenora both have remote jobs to fund their lifestyles. Lenora is a ghostwriter, while Cassie runs a popular Youtube channel about the victims of true crime events. Cassie does a lot of internal justification of her job, and it all boils down to the fact that she and her sister were never treated with empathy and support after what happened to them. 

The new owner moves to the campground quickly, and introduces herself. Her name is Sarah, and she’s roughly the same age as the sisters. Cassie immediately feels a connection, and realizes how starved she is for interaction with other human beings. Soon after Sarah, a family arrives to stay at the third cabin in the campground. Cassie meets the teenage daughter, Tilly, one night when they’re both out skulking around the woods. Cassie was spying on Sarah (literally looking in her windows) and Tilly was smoking weed. 

Tilly stops by the sisters’ cabin the next day and meets Lenora. That interaction doesn’t go as well because Lenora just stares at her through the window for 5 minutes before being formally introduced by Cassie. Lenora continues watching the girl from afar, and quickly becomes obsessed. That night, she watches Tilly and her mom, Karen, get in a fight outside their cabin.

“I have to act quickly and quietly. It’s not that I don’t want Cassie to know I sleepwalked again;  it’s that I don’t want her to worry about it. To worry about me more than she already does.”

When She Was Me, Marlee Bush

The next morning, Lenora wakes up, covered in dirt. She sneaks out of the cabin, washes her clothes and takes a shower at the bathhouse, and sneaks back into the cabin. She swears she saw someone leaving Cabin Three, but can’t make anything out. A few hours later, there’s a commotion outside, and the sisters are told that Tilly is missing. Cassie immediately joins the search, and spends the entire day with the police team, volunteers, Sarah, and Tilly’s parents, all looking. Unfortunately, they don’t find her. 

When Cassie comes home, she questions Lenora about her sleepwalking. She knows it happened because of Lenora’s wet hair in the morning, but Lenora denies it. The night ends with the two in wildly different moods. Cassie is convinced Tilly is dead, and is worried that Lenora had something to do with it, and might not even remember. Lenora is convinced that Tilly ran away in the middle of the night and that’s who she saw briefly the night before.

“The ground is covered with strewn tree branches from last night’s storm, partially obstructing my view. But I can just make out a slender pale arm.”

When She Was Me, Marlee Bush

The next morning, the police find Tilly’s dead body. It’s in a central location at the campground that was thoroughly checked the day before, which leads to even more questions. Cassie goes to see the site, and discovers a coin that Lenora always carries. She quietly picks it up and hides it.

The sisters are interviewed by detectives, but neither has much information. Cassie shares that she met Tilly for the first time when she was smoking. Lenora tells them about possibly seeing her in the middle of the night, and about the fight with her mom. The general consensus seems to be split between believing the mom did it and that there was some creepy guy in the woods.

“My heart pounds in my chest as I think of the last time I saw you with a girl. What that led to. It’s not about her or the fact you’ve made a new friend. It’s that I don’t know if you can handle this.”

When She Was Me, Marlee Bush

The book switches back and forth between the current timeline and the past. We aren’t told which girl narrates the past, but she’s clearly worried about her sister’s behavior. Their family dynamics are explained more in detail, with a religious mother and an alcoholic father. Their mom often kicks out their dad because of his behavior. 

“In my assigned seat, two tables away, I watched the boy next to her jut an elbow into her side. It sent me to my feet, but I wasn’t fast enough. As soon as the boy turned, Lenora gripped the back of his head and slammed his face against the table.”

When She Was Me, Marlee Bush

Cassie is truly worried that Lenora had something, if not everything, to do with Tilly’s death. She has flashbacks to Lenora hurting other kids in school, and of her obsessions with other people. They had to move from their most recent home because Lenora got fixated on their neighbors, and was convinced the husband was cheating. She watched them constantly through the windows, and confronted both the husband and the wife so often that it became a legal issue.

After some more prodding from Cassie, Lenora admits to sleepwalking. They talk about their mom, and how there weren’t any signs before she turned on their dad and started stabbing him. Lenora is terrified that’s what is happening to her. Cassie is stuck, a feeling in her gut saying Lenora killed Tilly, but loyalty to her sister overrides it. 

Back to the past, our narrating girl is getting more worried about her sister. The sister is purposefully taunting other girls in their neighborhood, and even goes so far as setting a fire that permanently damages one of them. She also starts stalking a few girls, taking hundreds of photos and keeping them under her mattress.  Our narrator confronts her sister, who breaks down and admits that their father is abusing her. Lit with fury, our narrator immediately starts looking for a way for them to both run away. And then the sister suggests killing their parents. 

“‘God asks his servants to kill people all the time,’ you say. ‘You’ll help me, won’t you?’ The way you say it. You’re God and I’m Abraham—encouraged to make an unconscionable sacrifice. It feels especially important now, my answer to you.”

When She Was Me, Marlee Bush

As decisions ratchet sisters towards destruction in the past, Cassie and Lenora are starting to come undone. Lenora finds stuff from Sarah and other people that Cassie has secretly taken and hidden. They get into a huge fight that centers around what they never talk about: Cassie running away while Lenora stayed. They’re bound together by their trauma and their guilt.

That night, Cassie has her on-again, off-again hookup stay at the cabin with her. In the middle of the night, Lenora wakes up outside and realizes she’s been sleepwalking again. Then she sees her cabin, fully on fire. She immediately runs back into the cabin, searching for Cassie. 

The next morning, Cassie wakes up in a hospital, with Lenora next to her. Lenora had pulled Cassie out of the cabin, which had burned to the ground. Sarah comes to visit, and tells them the police have charged Karen, Tilly’s mom. The sisters still need a place to stay, so they temporarily move to Cabin Three, where Karen had still been staying.

There isn’t much of their stuff that was rescued, but they start unpacking it. On a hunch/jealous tirade, Lenora does some research on Sarah, and can’t find anything. She then does a reverse image search of an older picture of Sarah. And the result comes up as Sandra, not Sarah.

“‘An article. Published over a decade ago. I’ll save you the trouble of reading. Sandra Wells was taken from her home the night someone killed her whole family. Everyone except her dad, who wasn’t home.’”

When She Was Me, Marlee Bush

Lenora immediately shows her research to Cassie, whose reaction is much more subdued. She reminds Lenora that they are also literally hiding in the woods, and it’s not their place to judge other people with similar backgrounds. But Lenora is too worked up about it, and Cassie agrees to break into Sarah’s cabin and quickly search it for anything incriminating. There’s nothing, and they go back to their new cabin.

The next morning, Lenora wakes up and Cassie’s not in the cabin. She starts looking, and can’t find her anywhere. Convinced Cassie has left her behind for good, Lenora furiously destroys the entire kitchen. Then she hears a noise from the walkie talkies they sometimes use. She answers it, but there’s no response from Cassie. Then a figure at the edge of the woods catches Lenora’s eye. She runs after them, assuming it’s Cassie. 

She follows them to Sarah’s cabin, but Sarah’s the only one there. She takes Lenora inside and tries to calm her down. Lenora admits to finding out about Sarah’s past, and tells her she thinks Cassie abandoned her. Sarah tells her that’s not possible, and Lenora leaves abruptly, hoping to find Cassie back at their cabin. But she stops when she sees Cassie’s walkie talkie, lying on Sarah’s driveway.

She immediately calls the detectives that had worked on Tilly’s case, and they come and perform a search. Initially they think she was taken, based on the state of the kitchen. Once Lenora admits that she did that in a moment of rage, their sympathy leaves, and the team quickly leaves. Hopeless, Lenora has a panic attack until she falls asleep.

Full spoilers ahead ⎼ Warning: It gets graphic

Lenora wakes up to a loud banging sound in the woods. Desperate to find Cassie, she follows the sound, even though she’s in a state of near terror the whole time. She ends up near an area where Wayne used to work. She finds a storm cellar door that’s been flapping in the wind.

Lenora climbs down and finds a tunnel. As she follows it, she finds a door, cracked open, with light peeking through the edges. She listens, hesitantly, and hears Sarah and Cassie. Unfortunately, she doesn’t realize Cassie’s yelling “RUN!” until too late. 

Cassie is zip tied together, laying on the floor of a bunker. Sarah is standing over her, with another woman who looks like a paler version of Sarah. Lenora instantly realizes this unidentified woman is the one she kept glimpsing and thinking was Tilly or Cassie. Sarah starts apologizing while Cassie continues screaming at her to run. Instead, true to her nature, Lenora stays.

It quickly starts coming out that the fourth woman is Sarah/Sandra’s sister, Emily. Sarah has been hiding her since the night of their mother’s death, trying to keep Emily hidden away. When they found Wayne’s property, with his many hidden bunkers, Sarah thought it would be the perfect place to keep Emily out of sight. Unfortunately, Wayne was fully paranoid, not just slightly, and all of his bunkers and safe rooms had hidden exits. Emily found one, and had been terrorizing the campground every night. 

It’s clear to Cassie and Lenora that they’re face to face with an emotionless serial killer, but Sarah treats her like a little girl who doesn’t know right from wrong. Emily starts talking about how much she loves the feeling of killing people, but she’s constantly manipulating Sarah, saying she can’t help it. Cassie and Lenora start trying to talk some sense into Sarah, but she shuts down and runs, leaving the three women in the bunker together. 

What follows is a scene much more gruesome than I anticipated, with the sisters fighting tooth and claw to escape from a serial killer. Cassie breaks her hands to get out of her zip ties as Emily starts in on Lenora. Cassie starts choking Emily, but is starting to lose her grip. Lenora smashes a brick over Emily’s head and then Cassie takes it from her and does it again, just to be sure. They start hobbling out of the bunker. Cassie has made it all the way out, and is reaching for Lenora, when Emily stabs her in the back. 

“That’s when I see her. Sarah. Standing in front of me. Behind where her sister just fell. A bloody knife in her hands.”

When She Was Me, Marlee Bush

Sarah had a change of heart, and came to finally stop her sister. We quickly cut forward 4 weeks. Lenora survived her stab wounds, and is recovering slowly. Her agoraphobia has lessened, but she’s obviously still wary. She’s writing a book about their experience, shedding the ghostwriter cover. Cassie has done a media circuit about their experience as well, and they’ve decided to travel the country together when everything calms down. Sarah admitted everything to the police, and took a plea deal.

So what really happened in both sisters’ childhoods?

Cassie and Lenora’s childhood had been mostly normal. They woke up one night to the sounds of arguing, and went to find their parents. There, they saw their mom stabbing their dad multiple times. When Cassie ran, Lenora couldn’t move. Her mom then took the knife, put it in Lenora’s hands, and pushed herself forward, killing herself using her child. Lenora was convinced for two decades that she had killed her mother, until she finally confessed it to Cassie, who immediately told her no.

Sarah and Emily’s story is more complicated. Everything that we learned about in the past was actually from Sarah’s point of view. They had a religious mom and an alcoholic father who fought often. Emily started acting out more and more, terrorizing girls and often physically harming them. She killed neighbors’ pets and set fire to a girl’s house knowing she was inside. Then she started asking Sarah to kill their parents. One day, Sarah came home and found that Emily had killed a new girl staying at a group home in the neighborhood and their mother. Emily then sets fire to the house, and agrees to let Sarah “hide” her. Sarah tells her dad Emily was in the home with their mom, so that’s how he identifies the body of a small girl, and the rest is history.