“Oh come on,” Phoebe continued. “You’re asking for it. Pale skin, black clothes, no lunch, and that whole brooding thing? It’s hilarious. You should get some body glitter and go after an unsuspecting freshman.”
“You should!” Cassidy agreed. “Tell her you’re a dangerous monster. And mention how good her blood smells.”
“Wrong time of the month on that one, and I’m getting slapped,” I muttered, and everyone laughed.
“You’re funny.” Phoebe passed me the last chocolate cupcake. “And I always thought your friends were laughing over their own farts.”
“Ninety percent of Eastwood’s male population laughs over their own farts,” Toby said. “Present company excluded, naturally.”
“How many points would I lose if I farted right now?” Luke asked with a chuckle.
“Don’t even think about it!” Phoebe warned, preemptively scooting away from him.
I peeled the wrapper off my cupcake and glanced toward my old lunch table, where Charlotte had climbed onto Evan’s lap. She was texting, her ponytail spilling over one shoulder. Evan’s hand was on her thigh. Suddenly, she looked up and caught me staring. She nudged Evan, who glanced over as well, clearly wondering what I was doing at a different table. But it turned out they didn’t really care, because half a moment later, they were sucking face.
“Come on, new girl,” Phoebe said, standing up. “Let’s go to the bathroom.”
Once Phoebe and Cassidy had gone, Luke chuckled and shook his head.
“Can someone please explain why my girlfriend is going to the bathroom with Cassidy Thorpe?”
“I know nothing about the intricacies of female pack behavior,” said Sam. “But I do know that we need to expand Friday’s guest list.”
Luke shot Sam a dark look.
“Sorry,” Sam muttered, glancing guiltily in my direction.
“What the heck?” Austin said. “I thought she disappeared, and now she’s at Eastwood? It doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t make sense?” I asked.
“Any of it.” Toby balled up his cupcake wrapper. “But then, Cassidy always liked it that way. You know how I said she was unbeatable at debate? That’s not the half of it. She never seemed to try. She’d show up to tournaments in blatant dress code violations, throw a picnic in an elevator, and not even bother to come to the awards ceremony. She competed for this really snotty prep school, which made it even stranger. But she quit after winning the State Quals last year. Gave up her spot at the State championship four days before the tournament, and the rumor was that she’d left school suddenly, just completely disappeared.”
“Did you ever find out why?” I asked.
“Like anyone can get a straight answer out of Cassidy.” Toby laughed.
“Incoming,” Austin muttered, nodding toward Phoebe and Cassidy.
Everyone turned to stare at them guiltily, but I was watching something entirely different—the spectacle of Charlotte and Evan, and their all-too-public face sucking.
When the girls rejoined us, Phoebe glanced at my uneaten cupcake before reaching across the table to pat my hand.
“Don’t worry,” she teased. “There’s some nice O positive in the nurse’s office if you’re thirsty.”
8
I DON’T KNOW if you’ve ever been in line at the drugstore or somewhere, and the person behind you is chewing gum directly in your ear, and it’s so repulsive that you suspect they’re doing it on purpose and you’re a complete pushover for standing there and taking it. There was something about Evan and Charlotte that made me feel exactly like that. Something so deeply and personally offensive about the two of them all over each other that I just couldn’t handle it, even though the initial shock of it had originally fooled me into believing that I didn’t care.
So I might as well admit that, deep down, I’d known what I was doing when I decided to eat lunch with Toby instead of sitting with my old crew. Over the course of the week, I went out of my way to avoid my old friends, as I’d done all summer, and they seemed baffled by it, and more than a little bit hurt. I couldn’t figure out why they even cared. They couldn’t really have thought I’d turn up for that game of paintball or that last-minute rafting trip, or any of the other ridiculous things they’d texted me about. I mean, not one of them had even bothered to visit me in the hospital.
Anyway, Evan and Charlotte were together now, had been together for what seemed suspiciously like a few months at least, and it was plain what that meant. In the grand scheme of seniors worth gawking at, they should have topped the list. But they didn’t. Instead, I was the recipient of far too much attention for my liking. And when everyone wasn’t whispering and staring at me, they were whispering and staring at Cassidy.
Stories that the debate team had only hinted at spilled out into the schoolwide rumor mill: that Cassidy had turned up at a debate tournament dressed as a boy, complete with an enormous fake mustache, and still won. That Cassidy had organized a flash mob where more than one hundred strangers showed up at a graveyard in San Francisco dressed as zombies and had an enormous pillow fight. That you could purchase T-shirts with a pop art print of Cassidy’s face on them from a Spanish fast-fashion retailer. That she’d spent a summer modeling for teen book covers.
In our tiny, nothing-ever-happens town, Cassidy was an oddity, and even though the stories might not have been true, they were more likely to have happened to her than to anyone else.
She never let on that she knew about the rumors, though. And for all I knew, she didn’t. Our lunch group had plenty to talk about without resorting to petty gossip, and I was grateful to sit with them, though I could have lived without the unobstructed view of Charlotte and Evan’s lunchtime foreplay-dates.
On Thursday night, I had a meeting with Ms. Welsh, my advisor: one of those mandatory things for seniors. Of course I was late, since I’d left my math notebook in the waiting room at my physical therapist’s and didn’t realize until I was halfway to campus.
Ms. Welsh was nice enough, even about my being late. And so I settled into the world’s hardest chair in her office and smiled attentively and listened as she lectured me on the importance of maintaining one’s extracurriculars during senior year and reaching out to teachers well in advance for college recommendations. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that maintaining my extracurriculars was literally physically impossible, or that I suspected Mrs. Martin might decorate my recommendation letter with grape-scented Fiesta Snoopy stamps.
By the time I finally made my escape after promising to check out some “close to home” colleges I wasn’t particularly interested in attending, I was feeling pretty exhausted by the idea of college applications in general. I’d never really thought I’d have to deal with them. It was a given that I’d be recruited to play somewhere, probably one of the nearby state colleges. My father used to tell me stories about his college fraternity, and how future employers would be impressed if I became president of my frat house. I’d pictured it easily back then, my whole planned-out life: college athlete, fraternity president, getting some suit-and-tie job after school and cruising up to Big Bear or Tahoe on the weekends with my friends. There was more, but you get the idea: the perfectly generic life for the perfectly generic golden boy.
“Ezra?” someone called, derailing my train of thought.
It was Cassidy, coming down the stairwell from the 400 building in this blue sundress that perfectly matched her eyes.
“Oh, hey,” I said, attempting a smile. “College advisor meeting?”
“Unfortunately. Mr. Choi doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
“I’ve heard he enjoys jokes where the punch lines are mathematical equations,” I offered.
“Yeah, he seems like the sort of guy who would get off on a tangent.”
I snorted. “That’s terrible.”
Cassidy shrugged as we fell into step toward the parking lot.