The Beginning of Everything (21 page)

“Prom?” I didn't think I'd heard her correctly. “Do you know where I was the night of
prom
, Charlotte? I was in the hospital, wondering if I'd ever
walk
again. And we both know how I got there.”

It got really quiet for a second, and I think we both expected some drunken couple to stumble through the door and interrupt us, rescuing us from the uncomfortable silence, but none did.

“If we both know, then why does it feel like you blame me?” Charlotte demanded. “I wasn't even
there
.”

“No, you
weren't
there,” I said. “The paramedics found me all alone. And you just
left
me like that. You left me.”

Charlotte's face had gone pale, and she couldn't quite bring herself to look at me.

“We were drunk,” she said defensively. “I didn't have a ride, and everyone was shouting about the cops coming because of the accident, and I'm terrible with blood, I probably would have fainted.”

“‘I'm sorry' would have been enough,” I told her. “Look, it's late, and I think we're done here. Why don't you go find Evan or something?”

“Are you going to tell him what I said?” she asked nervously. “Because I only said I'd dump him if—”

“No, Charlotte, I'm not going to tell him,” I said drily. “The hymen of your integrity remains intact. Your precious jewel of a reputation is un-besmirched.”

I left Jill's party thinking that sometimes it isn't worth confirming what we already know about people we understand so well. Because what Charlotte had wanted that night wasn't me. It was some imaginary version of the boy she used to date but had never bothered to really think about as a person. And maybe the imaginary Ezra would have gone back to her and tried to forget the last five months. Maybe
he
would have convinced himself that he was happier for it, that neither of them were terrible people in the end, that it was possible to retreat into one's popularity and carelessness and never have to acknowledge the harm they'd caused to those around them, or the lies they believed to make their happiness possible.

But it doesn't matter what the imaginary Ezra inside Charlotte's head would have done, because he wasn't real, and he certainly wasn't me. What
I
did was drive home, past the egged stop signs and toilet-papered poplar trees, and coax Cooper off the kitchen mat where he was still sulking over not being allowed to play with the trick-or-treaters, and fall into bed without even bothering to wash off that ridiculous body glitter.

29

COOPER WAS ACTING
strange on Sunday night, his expression uneasy, his head cocked as though listening for something just beyond the mosaic tile of our leaf-strewn pool.

“It's all right, boy,” I told him, absently patting the top of his head as I sat at my desk flipping through college catalogues.

They were filled with pictures of a world that reminded me of her, a place brimming with unknowable possibility and almost certain adventure. For a moment, I let myself imagine what it would be like to go East, where leaves turned golden and snow coated the rooftops, where libraries looked like castles and dining halls were straight out of the Harry Potter films. But the brochures all seemed to blend together with the same promise of New England, and I realized that there's a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.

 

THE COYOTES WERE
back in Eastwood again, and somehow Cooper had sensed it. Two housecats were dragged off over the weekend, and a coyote had been spotted in Terrace Bluffs. The local newspaper's headline hinted that our town was being “terrorized”—as though the streets were filled with nocturnal wolves gliding through the shadows, preying on the old and the sick.

In the way that some places have a rash of burglaries or hubcap thefts, we have coyotes. It's not that surprising when small animals disappear, and every once in a while I would see something slink past the tennis courts while I was practicing after dark. Occasionally the neighbors' koi ponds were depleted overnight, or a jogger would spot a coyote watching him on one of the trails, but no one had ever been killed by coyotes. It was an absurd idea, like something out of those novels filled with vampires and witches.

Still, there was an Animal Control van parked by the side of the football field on Monday, and every day that week, we'd watch officers comb the trails through our classroom windows.

I sat at Toby's lunch table again, where little was said about my reappearance. Austin looked up from his iPad long enough to flick his bangs out of his eyes and announce that it was about time I was back, and had I seen the new Nintendo console?

“No, but did you know there's an eight-bit Great Gatsby game?” I asked.

“You're making that up.” Austin furiously started typing.

I glanced over toward my former lunch table, where Jimmy had pulled a roll of Mentos out of his pocket and was threatening to dump them into Emma's soda bottle. Evan roared with laughter, and Trevor started a chant of “Do it and you're cool!” When Jimmy inevitably succumbed to the temptation, the boys backed away laughing as Emma's soda shot a geyser of fizz into the air.

“Oh
shit!
” they muttered gleefully.

The girls stood there, dripping and indignant as the fizz explosion turned to a trickle. The pavement under their lunch table was drenched, and the front of Charlotte's Song Squad uniform was soaked. Evan looked up and caught me watching. He flicked his chin, telling me to get over there, but I just shook my head.

“Emma's going to kill him,” I said, breaking off a piece of Phoebe's Pop-Tart.

“Their relationship's
fizzed
,” Phoebe said, belatedly swatting my hand away from her breakfast.

“Ten points to Chang,” Toby said.

“He should probably keep that soda as a
mementos mori
.” I smirked, and our table went totally silent.

“Get it?” I asked. “Mentos, like, memento—”

“We got it,” Toby assured me. “Jesus, Faulkner. Was that
poetry
? In
Latin
?”

“That was fifty points,” I told him. “Unless any of you can do better?”

“Pop-Tart sharing privileges activated,” Phoebe said, offering me another piece.

“Dude!” Austin looked up from his iPad. “There really
is
an eight-bit Gatsby! Why are you guys looking at me like that? What'd I miss?”

 

ANIMAL CONTROL GAVE
up their search on Wednesday, and our homeroom teachers distributed a safety precaution handout that culminated in a laughable series of true-false questions about coyote attacks. I rolled my eyes and turned it over on my desk, not caring that we were doing popcorn reading, since no one would dare to popcorn me.

My school was big on using recycled paper, and it took a moment before I recognized what was on the backs of our
Preventing Coyote Attacks!
handout: leftover fliers for last year's Junior-Senior Luau, complete with a poorly photocopied picture of the class council in sunglasses and leis. If you held the handout up to the light, the photo of us seeped through, creating this disturbing impression that it was a picture of attack victims, that we were the cautionary tale.

When I drove over to the medical center later that afternoon, the sun was just beginning to set, and these shafts of golden sunlight slanted through the magnolia trees that divided the rows of parking spaces. In that light, the leaves looked fake, like they were made of wax. Cassidy would have loved them.

I was slightly early when I pushed open the door of Suite 322 North: Cohen and Ford Group Mental Health Practice. The receptionurse smiled at me blankly, and asked which doctor I was there to see, and if I was a new patient. I told her Dr. Cohen and I'd been before, and she typed something into the oldest functioning computer I'd ever seen, and said the insurance stuff was taken care of and I should just sit and relax.

One thing I've noticed is that the only places people insist you relax are the least relaxing places on the planet. Airplanes, the dentist, psychiatric waiting rooms, those little curtained-off areas in the hospital where you have an IV put in. Anyway. I sat, waited, considered how incredibly
unrelaxed
I felt.

The whole place, and I really mean all of it, was decorated for Festivus. There were non-denominational snowmen, and seasonal snowflakes, and glittering garlands of enormous plastic peppermints. It was pretty terrible. Plus there was this older lady already sitting there, wearing a sari and an I'm-waiting-for-my-kid expression as she flipped through a decrepit magazine.

She coughed and shifted in her chair, making the peppermint garland rattle. A small avalanche of glitter sloughed off, and I wasn't lucky enough to avoid it. I made a face and tried to wipe it from my shoulders, but there was no use.

The receptionurse poked her head through the vestibule and let me know that Dr. Cohen was running about twenty minutes behind. I sighed and put on my headphones, taking out the college app I was working on. The lady with the magazine was being pretty nosy, and after about five minutes, she finally decided to come out with it.

“Are those college applications?”

I nodded.

“Where are you applying?” she asked shamelessly.

“Um, this one's for Duke,” I said, “and this is for Dartmouth.”

“You must be a smart boy.” She said it like I was some three-year-old, which wasn't actually reassuring.

“Not really.” I shrugged. “But it's worth trying.”

“My daughter was a National Merit Scholar,” she said, as though this fact was at all relevant to our conversation.

“That's great.” I fiddled with my headphones, hoping she'd lose interest.

I'd just started back on my application when the door to Dr. Ford's office opened. I glanced up, figuring it was going to be the nosy lady's daughter and she'd make us awkwardly introduce ourselves, but it wasn't.

Cassidy Thorpe walked into the waiting room, something in the cast of her shoulders suggesting this visit was routine. Her eyes were slightly red, as though she'd been crying, and her white sweater slipped off one freckled shoulder. Her trench coat was bundled in her arms, the belt dangling.

When she saw me, she paled. Bit her lip. Looked like she wanted to disappear.

We stared at each other, totally embarrassed, since the waiting room in a mental health clinic isn't the best place to run into your ex, particularly when it's decorated with a thousand glittering pieces of fake candy. I had no idea what she was doing there, but I was damn well going to find out.

“Hi,” I said, taking off my headphones.

The papers on my lap slipped onto the floor, and Cassidy and I stared at them like I'd carelessly broken a vase in someone else's house.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Selling Girl Scout cookies,” I deadpanned.

Neither of us laughed.

“No, really.”

“Well, I was in this accident.” I was still trying to make a joke of it. “So I have to go through the hassle of convincing doctors that I'm not experiencing a crippling bout of clinical depression. Get it,
crippling
?”

“Stop,” Cassidy insisted, like what I'd said made her feel even worse. It was strange, since she used to laugh at stupid puns like that.

She knelt and picked up my papers. I muttered my thanks and zipped them back into my bag.

“You'd hate Dartmouth, by the way,” Cassidy said.

“Wow, really? We're talking about this right now?” It was out of my mouth before I could think it through, floating there sarcastically, and I instantly wanted to take it back.

“Okay, well, see you in school.” Cassidy started to walk off, but I wasn't having it.

“No way,” I said, standing up. “You don't want to sit next to me in class, fine. You want to sulk in the library, be my guest. But I run into you here, you're telling me what's going on.”

I didn't care that the lady in the sari was spying on us from behind her magazine. I didn't care that my T-shirt was lousy with glitter. I just wanted her to trust me, for once, to tell me what it was that had turned our smooth-sailing relationship into a total shipwreck.

“Stay out of it, Ezra.” Cassidy's eyes were pleading, but it sounded more like a warning than anything else. And that infuriated me.

“Make me.”

“What do you think I've been
trying
to do?” Cassidy asked in exasperation.

Her expression was the one she'd worn a lot lately, full of this sadness that had lurked there for far longer than we'd been together. And I was tired of wondering why.

“I don't know? Screw with me?”

“Excuse me,” the receptionurse said, poking her head through the vestibule. “Is there a problem?”

“We're fine,” Cassidy and I said in unison, both of us sounding terrifically not fine.

“Hallway?” I suggested.

Cassidy glared but followed me anyway.

“What?” she demanded once the door had closed behind us.

“So, do you come here often?” I tried not to grin at how ridiculous it sounded.

“It's none of your business,” Cassidy shot back, clearly not seeing any humor in this.

And if she wanted to play it that way, it was fine by me. Because I was tired of whatever we were doing, of whatever it was between us being this vast and unbreachable wasteland of misery.

“Of course not. But you know what I think?” I asked, not waiting for an answer. “I think you were alone that night in the park. That your ‘boyfriend' didn't exist.”

I'd been privately toying with that theory for a while and hadn't planned on making the accusation, but the moment I said it, I knew I was right.

“Why would I make something like that up?” Cassidy demanded, avoiding the question.

“Did you?” I pressed.

“What does it
matter
, Ezra? We broke up. Not all nice things have happy endings.”

“I'm just trying to figure out what I did to make you act like this. Seriously, Cassidy, what tragedy occurred that made you wish we'd never met?”

Cassidy stared at the carpet. Tucked her hair behind her ears. Smiled sadly.

“
Life
is the tragedy,” she said bitterly. “You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamned wedding.”

“Well, thanks for that. That clears everything up nicely. We're all prisoners. Wait no—we're living tragedies, just passing time till our funerals.”

Cassidy scowled at this, but I didn't care. I was furious with her for being there, for being miserable, for refusing to explain.

“No one's
dead
, Cassidy,” I said harshly. “I can't decide whether you're just crazy, or a liar, or someone who likes hurting people. You're all riddles and quotes and you can't give me a straight answer about anything and I'm
tired
of waiting for you to realize that you owe me one.”

I hadn't meant to go off like that, and I wasn't exactly using my indoor voice when I said any of those things. Cassidy studied the carpet for a long moment, and when she glanced up at me, a tropical storm was churning in her eyes. Two tears slid down her cheeks.

“I don't owe you anything,” Cassidy sobbed, “and you're right, I do wish we'd never met.”

She rushed past me, taking the stairs, where she knew I couldn't follow.

“Yeah, well, so do I!” I called after her, not meaning it but not caring.

The door to the stairwell banged shut in response.

I took a deep breath, and ran a hand through my hair, and kept my shit together long enough to go back into that doctor's office and calmly tell the receptionurse that it was probably best if I rescheduled.