I DROVE CASSIDY to school every day that week, pulling up outside her house with two travel mugs of coffee and waiting for her to slip out the front door, swinging her leather satchel as she hurried down the front walk.
Her house was enormous, one of those Spanish-tiled villas with a four-car garage, the kind you’re almost certain is two houses attached, because of the oversized symmetry. I remembered when they’d built this subdivision, two years after mine, and how I’d woken up every morning in the fifth grade to the sound of the workmen, not even bothering to set an alarm after a while. I remembered the eerily quiet Monday morning when the hammering finally stopped, and how my mom had yelled at me for oversleeping.
How could I have known, back then, that the white house across the park would belong to Cassidy Thorpe? That out of a row of nearly identical McMansions, there’d be one window in particular I searched out every night before bed, looking for secret messages?
It took about five minutes for everyone at school to figure out we were together. I suppose we were lousy at keeping it a secret, or maybe we weren’t even trying. I’d dated Charlotte for such a long time that I’d forgotten how these things went, how everyone would stare as we climbed out of my car in the Senior Lot in our sunglasses, carrying identical mugs of coffee.
Word had definitely gotten around by break; it felt as though the entire quad was watching as we sat down at our table with the rest of the debate team.
“Honestly,” Phoebe said, giving me a stern look, “I wore sweatpants today. You could have warned me this was going to happen.”
I assumed Phoebe meant the, uh, camera phones aimed in our table’s general direction. It was unsettling, being newsworthy at this particular lunch table, being entirely certain that you were the reason everyone was staring, and being unsure whether it was envy or disapproval.
The stream of attention slowed to a trickle over the course of the week as everyone realized that Cassidy and I weren’t going to climb onto each other’s laps and mash faces at the table. That’s not to say we were totally innocent of any public displays of affection; there was some hand-holding and the occasional hurried good-bye kiss on even days, when we had different sixth periods.
During break on Wednesday, I went into the main office and asked Mrs. Beams, the school secretary, for an elevator key.
“Ezra,” she said, leveling me with a stern glare over the top of her rhinestone reading glasses, “you were supposed to pick this up on the first day of school.”
“I forgot?” I tried sheepishly, although a more accurate answer would have been that I’d made it my top priority to avoid doing so.
“It’s almost October, young man,” she chastised.
“You’re right, I know.”
She handed over the key, and I put it into the pocket of my jeans, trying to look extra pathetic on my way out of the office, in case she had second thoughts. I didn’t use the key until that afternoon, when the bell rang for fifth period. Cassidy started to walk toward Mrs. Martin’s classroom our usual way, via the staircase by the faculty lot, but I stopped her.
“Actually,” I said, “let’s go around the other side.”
Cassidy raised an eyebrow, but went along with it. I took out the key and twisted it into the call slot for the handicapped elevator, trying not to look too pleased with myself.
“Ladies first,” I said grandly.
“What’s going on?” Cassidy asked suspiciously, stepping inside the dented metal elevator.
I shrugged and waited for the doors to close before sliding my arm around her waist.
“Ever wanted to make out in an elevator?” I asked, grinning.
WHILE THE REST of the school quickly became obsessed with watching Cassidy and me, our lunch table was obsessing over news of a silent rave in Los Angeles that Friday. Toby volunteered to drive, and Phoebe promised she’d try to get out of babysitting, and by the time I got up enough nerve to ask what exactly a silent rave was, everyone stared at me like I was crazy.
“It’s a type of flash mob,” Cassidy explained. “Hundreds of strangers gather in a public place, put in their headphones at exactly the same moment, and start dancing.”
I tried and failed to picture it, but I had to admit that it sounded more interesting than a three-hour historical musical about depressed German teenagers, which had been the last thing they’d all gone to LA for.
“So there’s one tomorrow?” I asked.
“Yep. And we’re going to be in the middle of it,” Toby informed me.
Luke and Sam already had plans to go paintballing with some guys from their church, and Phoebe couldn’t get out of babysitting after all, so it wound up being Toby, Austin, Cassidy, and me who piled into the Fail Whale after school on Friday.
Toby made us stop at a gas station for snacks so it felt like a real road trip, even though the drive was two hours at most. Cassidy got a pack of licorice, and Austin dumped an energy shot into a cherry slushie, which we all made fun of.
“It’s good,” Austin protested. “Honestly, haven’t you ever had a Red Bull slushie?”
“I don’t see the point in caffeine without coffee. Or coffee without caffeine, for that matter,” I informed him.
“Whatever.” Austin put up his hood as he took his change from the cashier. “One day the world will recognize Red Bull as a legitimate food group, and who will be laughing then?”
“Everyone,” Cassidy said dryly. “They’ll be too jacked on caffeine shots to do anything else.”
We piled back into the Fail Whale, which featured—get this—a tape deck. Toby had a bunch of mix tapes he’d picked up at swap meets and thrift stores, so we listened to “Happy Bday Heather!!!” as we merged onto 5 North. It was like playing Russian roulette with terrible eighties music in five out of six chambers.
“Ugh.” Cassidy made a face. “Switch it. Ace of Base overload.”
Toby ejected the tape, and Austin, who was riding shotgun, put in a different one and hit rewind.
“There’s nineties nostalgia,” Austin observed while we waited for the tape to rewind, “and then there’s antiquated technology. Unfortunately, this is the latter.”
Toby didn’t take well to anyone insulting his car. As he put it, the Fail Whale was “a magnificent relic of the enduring crisis of solidly middle-class suburbia.”
“Austin, you drive a Jetta.”
“It was my sister’s!” Austin protested. I could see his face turn red in the rearview mirror.
I didn’t say anything, since I’d, uh, earned a Beemer by turning sixteen. Cassidy offered me one of her Red Vines, and I accepted it absently, biting off each end before I realized what I was doing.
“Toby,” I called. “Remember making straws out of licorice at Cub Scouts?”
“I thought I was the only one who did that,” Austin said.
“Well, did any of you squish those little paper cups they have next to water dispensers into pots?” Cassidy asked.
I had no idea what she was talking about, but Toby did.
“Yeah. You had to blow into them and smash the bottoms at the same time to get it to work.”
And then we spent the rest of the ride reminiscing over old Nickelodeon programs, and Furbys and I-Zone cameras and Tamagotchis, and how weird it was that everyone did video calling and watched television on their computers.
“Dude,” Austin said as we exited the freeway, “in fifty years, all of the old folks’ homes are going to be filled with seniors listening to Justin Bieber on the oldies station and talking about how movies used to be in two-D.”
“All of our longings are universal longings,” Cassidy said. “I’m paraphrasing, but it’s Fitzgerald.”
“I don’t think he was talking about Neopets.” Toby’s voice dripped scorn as he edged into the center of the intersection, waiting to turn.