“Trust me,” I said, glancing down at the long blonde hair piled on top of her head, and her endless, tanned legs, dusted with a fine layer of sand. “I’m definitely over Staci.”
I didn’t know much about Charlotte back then, just that she was gorgeous and sexy and always had gum in her purse that she’d offer me with a smile, like she’d brought it just for me. I didn’t know that she listened to her iPod in the kitchen while she made elaborate cookies and cupcakes from gourmet baking blogs, or that she thought it was bad luck to eat the batter. I didn’t know that she’d danced since she was three, that she did yoga with her mom before school, or that she collected everything to do with ladybugs. I didn’t know that we’d be together for more than eight months, the longest relationship I’d have in high school.
We wound up taking a walk to the other end of the beach, where the rocks jutted into the surf, forming little tide pools. She wore my Eastwood Tennis sweatshirt, because she’d gotten cold. I was secretly glad, since it made her seem more real somehow, the way she kept pushing up the sleeves of my hoodie as we walked through the tidal foam.
We scrambled onto the rocks, the barnacles stabbing into the soles of our feet. In the distance, I could see our friends beginning to pack up, and it filled me with a strange sense of urgency. I watched Evan heft the cooler, dumping its contents over Jimmy’s head, and I judged that we had maybe five minutes for whatever it was that had brought us apart from everyone else.
“I’m glad you’re not a complete jerk,” Charlotte said. She had slipped her phone out of the pocket of my sweatshirt and was texting.
“Thanks, I guess?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Charlotte looked up from her phone with a guilty smile. Her hair streamed behind her in the breeze, and the bridge of her nose had turned pink from the sun. “Sorry. Jill wanted to know where I’d put her sunscreen. Anyway, I just meant how we’re, like, destined to date each other. The most popular girl in the junior class and the most popular guy.”
“I’m not the most popular guy in our year,” I protested, dropping my gaze to the tide pools.
“Um, duh. Of course you are. Why else would I have brought you here?”
“You brought me here?” I raised an eyebrow, teasing her.
“Yes, I did. Now shut up and kiss me.”
I shut up and kissed her. She tasted like strawberry lip-gloss and diet soda, and she smelled like suntan lotion and my mom’s favorite detergent, and we were sixteen and not fully dressed, even as far as the beach is concerned.
“So?” Charlotte asked with a sly smile when we pulled apart.
“You should keep my sweatshirt,” I said. “It looks nice on you.”
“Ezra,” Charlotte chastised. She put her hand on her hip, waiting.
“Um, would you like to go out with me?”
“Of course.” She grinned triumphantly and kissed me again, her hands warm and soft on my back. “Mmm, you’re so cute. We should take you shopping. I bet you’d look super hot in some new jeans.”
So there it is. The day it happened: a romantic tale filled with beers consumed in a public urinal, getting creamed at volleyball by varsity water polo, kissing a girl in the tide pools, and not knowing what I was getting myself into.
Back in ninth-grade science, we had a unit on ecology, and I’d read Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez for extra credit after failing to impress Mr. Ghesh with my tenuous understanding of the water cycle. Steinbeck wrote about tide pools and how profoundly they illustrate the interconnectedness of all things, folded together in an ever-expanding universe that’s bound by the elastic string of time. He said that one should look from the tide pool to the stars, and then back again in wonder. And maybe things would have been different if I’d heeded his advice that day on the beach with Charlotte, but I didn’t. Instead, I linked my hand in hers and failed to appreciate the bigger picture, and the only stars I saw were wearing varsity jackets.
10
YOU CAN ALWAYS tell when it’s Friday. There’s an excitement specific to Fridays, coupled with relief that another week has passed. Even Toby’s friends, who I didn’t think ever did much over the weekend, were in a good mood that first Friday.
Luke, Austin, and Phoebe were already there when I got to the table during break. Luke had his arm around Phoebe, who was eating a Pop-Tart, and Austin was engrossed in some mobile gaming device.
“No, no, bad portal,” he scolded, totally oblivious to the world. “Stop—evil—eurgh! Suck my flagellated balls, douchenozzle!”
Phoebe sighed. “Help, help, Austin! Your flagellated balls are on fire!”
Austin didn’t even look up.
“Told you he was in the gaming zone,” Phoebe said.
“What’d I miss?” I asked, sliding onto a bench.
“Well, I heard Jimmy’s having a sick kegger tonight,” Luke said, in this sarcastic way that let me know he still wasn’t all that thrilled to have me around. “It’s a Tier One party, of course.”
“Yeah, I heard that too,” I said, not liking the way Luke had casually thrown around the term my old friends used to express the exclusivity of their little events. “It’s like Animal Farm.”
“You mean Animal House,” Luke corrected. “The movie about college frat parties.”
I shook my head. “No, I mean Animal Farm. You know: ‘Some animals are more equal than other animals.’”
Phoebe laughed and squirmed out from under Luke’s arm to throw away her Pop-Tart wrapper.
“Ezra, you’re taking me to Jimmy’s party, right?” she asked, fake-pouting.
“Definitely,” I said, playing along. “Should we bring a bottle of wine or an assortment of cheeses as a host gift?”
Luke broke off a piece of Phoebe’s Pop-Tart and she squealed in protest, ignoring my question.
“What up, minions?” Toby slid a preposterously large coffee thermos onto the table. “Ooh, is that Mortal Portal Three?”
Austin still didn’t look up.
“He’s in the zone,” Phoebe said. “Honestly, what is it with boys and video games? No wonder print is dead.”
“I read,” Toby protested as Sam and Cassidy joined us, eating fresh cookies from the bakery line. “For instance, last night I read that you can levitate a frog with magnets.”
Phoebe rolled her eyes, unimpressed.
“Hypothetically, or scientifically proven?” Cassidy wanted to know.
“Scientifically proven,” Toby said triumphantly. “These Nobel Prize–winning scientists did it.”
“How many beers do y’all think it takes before one internationally respected scientist turns to another and says, ‘Dude, bet you twenty bucks I can levitate a frog with a magnet?’” Sam drawled.
“Well, which magnetic charge?” Cassidy asked. “I mean, it has to be either positive or negative, doesn’t it?”
“You think you’re so clever, don’t you?” Toby teased.
“Just a tadpole,” Cassidy replied.
Everyone groaned.
And then the bell rang.
Cassidy and I had English together—with Luke, actually, but he usually walked Phoebe to class.
“So,” I said as Cassidy and I headed toward Mr. Moreno’s room, “I didn’t see any secret messages last night.”
“I didn’t want to be predictable,” Cassidy retorted. “But at least now I know you’re paying attention.”
GOOD OLD MORENO and his pop quizzes. I’d nearly forgotten about those. He slammed a tough one on us—themes and metaphors from the first one hundred pages of Gatsby.
I was slogging my way through the questions on the Smart Board when it hit me how the billboard that Wilson thought was watching him—the one with the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg—wasn’t so different from the idea behind the panopticon. I scribbled my revelation down as my final long-answer question and finished just before Mr. Moreno called time.
He made us trade papers with the person sitting behind us, which, lucky me, was Luke. Luke grinned as I tore my page out of my notebook and handed it over.
“Hope you studied, Faulkner,” he said, uncapping his pen.