“It’s not sunscreen. You’re turning my hair white.”
I navigated us through the hiking trails, telling Cassidy stories about the invisible world Toby and I had concocted there when we were kids. We found the geocache behind a loose brick on this wall down by the back of the Catholic Church. It was filled with junk—cheap fast-food toys, mostly. But it didn’t matter what was inside, just that the hiking trails really were filled with buried treasure.
And I understood then that Cassidy was making it up to me. That this adventure was her apology for what had happened at the debate tournament, because simply saying sorry was too normal for a girl like Cassidy Thorpe.
“Don’t you want to sign the log?” I asked, motioning toward Cassidy’s phone, which had finished playing this little congratulatory fanfare and was displaying a list of names.
“Why?” Cassidy asked.
“So the next people who find this know we were here?” it sounded lame even as I said it. But Cassidy’s eyes lit up.
“Hmm,” she said, grabbing the phone and typing quickly.
“My turn,” I said, taking it back. But then I frowned at what she’d written. “Who’s Owen?”
“My brother,” Cassidy said sheepishly. “We used to do this, to mess with the universe.”
“So you signed each other up for weird newsletters and stuff?” I asked.
“Everyone does that. We’d switch library cards, put each other’s names on blog comments, screw with the grand cosmic record of who did what.”
“Why?” I asked, confused.
“The world tends toward chaos, you know,” Cassidy said. “I’m just helping it along. You could too. Just write down a made-up name, or even a fictional character. And to the next person who finds this geocache, it’s as though things really happened that way. You have to at least allow for the possibility of it.”
“Fictional people?” I teased. “Only you would think of that.”
But I know now that isn’t true; history is filled with fictional people. And even the epigraph Fitzgerald placed at the beginning of The Great Gatsby is by a writer who doesn’t exist. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary—made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn’t whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it’s whether or not you want to.
“I think I’ll stick with reality,” I said, handing Cassidy back her phone.
She stared at it, and then me, disappointed. “I’d think you of all people would want to escape.”
“Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners,” I said, which was apparently the right thing, because Cassidy slipped her hand into mine and told me more about Foucault as we walked back toward the park.
THAT NIGHT, WHEN Cassidy clicked on her flashlight to say hello, I did the unthinkable: I replied by text message.
Actually, I was stunned that it worked. But after a relatively short back and forth, she’d given me her address and agreed to wait outside while I drove over. When I pulled up, Cassidy was leaning against a streetlamp, bathed in its soft orange glow. She carried the green sweater she always wore, one sleeve trailing.
“Hi,” she said. “Where are we going?”
“You forgot about team dinner,” I joked, throwing the car into reverse.
Cassidy laughed, buckling her seat belt. Her hair was wet, and its wetness had left an abstract pattern across the shoulders of her blue blouse. I told her that I wanted to show her something, and that it was a surprise. I reached for her hand, and we drove like that, in the reassuring quiet of Sunday night in Eastwood, all the way to the freeway, listening to the Buzzcocks.
The moment I merged onto the 5 North, the quiet was replaced with the emptiness of the freeway at night, and we rolled down the windows, shedding music like ballast. After a couple of miles, I began to hear it in the distance—the dull thud of what we’d come to see.
“What’s that noise?” Cassidy asked suspiciously.
“Just wait.” I grinned, enjoying the suspense.
And then a firework burst over the Harbor Boulevard overpass. It hung there, shimmering in the night sky before blinking into a cloud of smoke.
“A firework!” Cassidy turned toward me, delighted.
Three more fireworks shot up over the freeway, contorting into purple stars as they burst against the dissipating smoke. The sky was stained the color of charcoal, and the fireworks kept coming, louder now, and enormous.
“Disneyland fireworks,” I said, exiting the freeway. “I thought we could park and watch.”
There was a diner right off the freeway, open more out of optimism than demand. I pulled into the empty lot and Cassidy reached up to open the sunroof. Her smile was luminous, even brighter than the fireworks, as she shimmied out the sunroof, her legs dangling. One of the laces on her Converse had come untied, and it swished gently against the hand brake.
“Climb up!” she insisted, and I did, because she was waiting for me beneath the fireworks shaped like planets and stars.
We sat there, side by side, holding hands in that childhood way with our fingers zipped together, our faces turned toward the sky. The fireworks sparkled overhead, pounding like drums.
“Hey,” Cassidy said, nudging me with her shoulder.
“Hi.”
“This is nice.”
“Very nice,” I agreed. “The nicest parking lot I’ve ever seen.”
Cassidy shook her head at my terrible attempt at humor. Three fireworks burst in tandem: purple-green-gold.
“There’s a word for it,” she told me, “in French, for when you have a lingering impression of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explodes and lights up the smoke from the ones before it.”
“That’s a terrible word,” I teased. “It’s like an excuse for holding onto the past.”
“Well, I think it’s beautiful. A word for remembering small moments destined to be lost.”
And I thought she was beautiful, except the words caught in my throat, like words used to, back when I sat at a different lunch table.
We turned our attention to the fireworks display, although I was having trouble concentrating, because my fingers were laced with her smaller ones, and the leg of my jeans was pressed against the pale cotton of her skirt, and the breeze carried just a hint of her shampoo.
“Wouldn’t it be incredible,” I said, “if you could send secret messages with fireworks? Like Morse code.”
“Why?” Cassidy asked, her face inches from mine. “What would you say?”
I closed the distance between us, pressing my lips against hers. We kissed like we weren’t in a parking lot in a not-so-nice part of Anaheim, sitting on the roof of my car on a school night. We kissed like there was a bed waiting for us to share at a debate tournament, and it didn’t matter if I’d remembered to pack pajamas. And then we kissed again, for good measure.
She tasted like buried treasure and swing sets and coffee. She tasted the way fireworks felt, like something you could get close to but never really have just for yourself.
“Wait,” Cassidy whispered, pulling away.
Sillage, I thought. The lingering impression of a kiss having ended.
She dropped through the sunroof, crawling into the backseat with a mischievous smile and motioning for me to follow. I learned three things that night: 1) sharing a bed isn’t nearly as intimate as making out in a too-small backseat, 2) inexplicably, some bras unhook in the front, and 3) Cassidy hadn’t known I was Jewish.
19