“All right,” I said, reversing over the chalk drawings.
The gate guard gave me a dirty look when I pulled through, and Cassidy laughed and flipped him the bird when we were too far away for him to see.
“I freaking hate that guy,” she said. “Do you read Foucault? What am I talking about? Of course you don’t read Foucault.”
“Mostly, I just don’t read,” I deadpanned, making Cassidy laugh.
“Well, Mr. Illiterate Jock, let me enlighten you. There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called the panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be under constant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway.”
“But how do you know who’s a watcher and who’s a prisoner?” I asked, pulling into the empty parking lot.
“That’s the point. Even the watchers are prisoners. Come on, let’s go on the swings.” She was already out of the car before I could even put on the handbrake.
“Wait,” I called.
Cassidy turned around, her dress rippling in the warm Santa Ana winds. I locked the car and stood there, awash in embarrassment.
“I don’t think I can go on the swings,” I admitted.
“Then you can push me.”
She took off toward the small playground and the bright plastic play set as though we were running a race. I stepped cautiously into the sandbox, feeling my cane sink into the sand like a beach umbrella. Cassidy kicked off her sandals and tied her sweater around her waist. Sitting there on the swing set, in her bare feet and blue dress, her hair slipping out of its ponytail, she was so gorgeous that it hurt.
“Go on,” she said, twisting on the swing so that the chains made an X. “Push.”
I laid my palms against her back, touching bare skin. I gulped and gave her a push, nearly losing my balance before I figured out how to manage it.
“Keep going!” she called.
I kept going. She rose higher and higher on the swing, and to be honest, I was rising a bit myself.
After a while, she didn’t need me anymore. She was just up there, impossibly high, the chains slapping against the top bar.
She tilted her head back, grinning at me. “We’ll escape the panopticon together,” she promised.
And then she jumped.
The swing buckled as she flew forward, laughing and shouting. She landed unsteadily on her feet, at the edge of the sandbox.
“Did we escape?” I called.
“Not even close.”
I sat down on the swing, hoping that would disguise my problem. Cassidy took the other swing, making a complicated design in the sand with her toes.
“Do you see that house just to the right of the tallest tree?” I asked, breaking the silence.
“With the two chimneys?”
“Yeah.”
“My bedroom’s the one with the fake balcony. It’s right above our pool with the fake waterfall,” I added, earning one of Cassidy’s rare smiles.
“I’ll send you secret messages,” she promised. “In Morse code. With my Hello Kitty flashlight.”
“You better.”
Suddenly, Cassidy’s phone buzzed. She slipped it out of her pocket and I glimpsed a list of missed calls.
“I should get back,” she said, standing up. “Pop your trunk so I can get my bike?”
“I don’t mind driving you.”
Cassidy shook her head. “I’d rather bike. It’s like, my mom’s already pissed? I’m not used to living at home, and I forgot to check in.”
“Well, if you’re sure.”
“I’ll see you at school,” she said, and then grinned evilly. “Unless I’m attacked by nocturnal wolves, in which case you’ll just have to live with the guilt.”
She scooped up her shoes, and I watched her silhouette as she ran across the grass, and I thought about how it usually wasn’t like this when it came to me and girls.
9
I SUPPOSE I’D better explain about Charlotte Hyde and how we’d started dating. I asked her to be my girlfriend in October of our junior year, during a scorcher of a weekend when we’d all driven out to Laguna Beach for the day. It was the usual crew piled into the usual cars, about fifteen of us.
Jimmy had packed a cooler of beers, bought with his older brother’s ID. In typical Jimmy fashion, he’d forgotten to bring anything that might disguise the open containers, so the guys kept sneaking them into the public toilets. The cops parked out on Beach Boulevard must’ve thought they all had the shits.
The girls wanted to sunbathe, as usual. They rarely did anything besides recline in beach chairs and flick through magazines, and it baffled me how anyone could go to the beach to willingly engage in the same pass-the-time activities that passengers suffered through on airplanes.
The seniors in our crowd put Evan and me to work grilling hot dogs on a public barbecue near the lifeguard stand. Evan complained about being a grunt, but I honestly didn’t mind. It was peaceful standing there, the heat from the coals drying my bathing suit, the sun slanting off the water. It was the beginning of junior year, and we had everything to look forward to.
After we ate the hot dogs on hamburger buns (“No one fuckin’ told me what kind of buns,” Evan had protested) and the girls pretended to be upset over it, Brett Masters, the captain of the water polo team, challenged the tennis guys to five-on-five volleyball.
They destroyed us because, unlike tennis, water polo plays all on the same court and knows how to pass the damn ball. I’d managed a pretty spectacular spike out of sheer luck, but Jimmy and Evan were drunk enough that it was actually entertaining to watch them fumble and curse at their own ineptitude.
The sun had begun to set during the game, the ocean breeze turning cold. The girls put back on their sundresses. Charlotte unhooked her bathing suit top and removed it from beneath her dress as if by magic. She caught me looking and grinned, sensing that I was under her spell.
“Ezra, come over here,” she demanded, pouting cutely.
Dutifully, I went.
“Jill and I found this quiz in Pop Teen magazine about how to tell if a guy likes you,” she said, and before I knew it, the girls had trapped me on their matching hot pink towels and were making me take the quiz from their magazine. The questions were ridiculous, and when we finally reached the last one, Charlotte insisted on looking up my horoscope.
“Love is in the cards for all of you stubborn Tauruses!” she told me, and then frowned. “Well, what do you think?”
“I think I just learned the plural form of Taurus,” I joked, and Charlotte pretended to be upset that I wasn’t taking the horoscope seriously.
Ever since the end of sophomore year, I’d suspected that Charlotte liked me, but that day at the beach was the first time I sensed that she wasn’t just flirting for the fun of it—that she had something specific in mind.
“You’re so sweet,” she murmured, leaning into my shoulder as we sat side by side on her towel. “It’s a shame you’re not over Staci.”
Staci Guffin and I had broken up a month earlier, for reasons I didn’t fully understand and didn’t particularly care to. She’d traumatized me with a Sex and the City DVD marathon when I thought I was going over to her house for, uh, something more orgasmic than shoes. Maybe she’d just wanted to break up so she could have an ex-boyfriend to complain about to her friends. I honestly didn’t know.