It’s awful, isn’t it, how I remember crap like that? Tiny, insignificant details in the midst of a massive disaster.
I don’t really want to get into the rest of it, and I hope you’ll forgive me, but going through it once was enough. My poor roadster was totaled, just like everything else in my life. The doctors said my wrist would heal, but the damage to my leg was bad. My knee had been irreparably shattered.
But this story isn’t about Toby’s twelfth birthday, or the car wreck at Jonas’s party—not really.
There is a type of problem in organic chemistry called a retrosynthesis. You are presented with a compound that does not occur in nature, and your job is to work backward, step by step, and ascertain how it came to exist—what sort of conditions led to its eventual creation. When you are finished, if done correctly, the equation can be read normally, making it impossible to distinguish the question from the answer.
I still think that everyone’s life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst—the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere—it’s what comes after that determines the result.
2
SO WHO WAS I in the aftermath of my personal tragedy? At first, I was a lousy sport when it came to the chipper attitudes of the pediatrics nurses. And then I was a stranger in my own home, a temporary occupant of the downstairs guest room. An invalid, if you will, which is probably the most horrific word I’ve ever heard to describe someone who is supposed to be recuperating. In the context of a mathematical proof, if something is considered “invalid,” it has been demonstrated through irrefutable logic not to exist.
Actually, I take it back. The word was fitting for me. I had been Ezra Faulkner, golden boy, but that person no longer existed. And the proof?
I’ve never told this to anyone, but the last night of summer before senior year, I drove over to Eastwood High. It was late, around eleven, and my parents were already asleep. The landscaped lanes of my gated community were dark and inexplicably lonely, in the way that suburbs sometimes get at night. The strawberry fields on the side of the road looked as though they stretched on for miles, but there wasn’t really much left of the old ranch lands—just the small orange grove across from the Chinese strip mall, and the center dividers where last century’s sycamore trees grow in captivity.
If you think about it, there’s something quite depressing about living in a gated community full of six-bedroom “Spanish-style” homes while, half a mile down the road, illegal migrant workers break their backs in the strawberry fields, and you have to drive past them every morning on the way to school.
Eastwood High is as far north as you can go within the city limits of Eastwood, California, nestled in the foothills like some sort of stucco fortress. I parked in the faculty lot, because screw it, why not? At least, that’s what I told myself. Really though, it wasn’t a rebellion at all, but a show of weakness—the faculty lot was practically on top of the tennis courts.
A haze of chlorine drifted over the wall of the swim complex, and the custodial staff had already set up the beach umbrellas on the café tables in the upper quad. I could see them in silhouette, tilted at rakish angles.
I fitted my key into the lock on my favorite tennis court and propped the door open with my gear bag. My racquet, which I hadn’t handled in months, looked the same as I remembered, with black tape coming loose from the grip. Nearly time for a new one, judging from the dings in the frame, but of course I wouldn’t be getting a new one. Not then, and not ever.
I let my cane clatter to the ground and limped toward the back line of the court. My physical therapist didn’t even have me on the stationary bike yet, and my other therapist would probably disapprove, but I didn’t care. I had to know how bad it was, to see for myself if it was true what the doctors had said—that sports were finished. “Finished.” As though the last twelve years of my life amounted to nothing more than third-period phys ed, and the bell had rung for lunch.
I pocketed a ball and prepped my soft serve, that vanilla hit I used so as not to double fault. Barely daring to breathe, I tossed the ball high and felt it connect with the racquet in a way that, while not entirely pleasant, was at least tolerable. It landed neatly in the center of the square without any heat. I’d been aiming for the back right corner, but I’d take it.
I shook out my wrist, grimacing at how constricting the Velcro brace felt, but knowing better than to take it off. And then I gave the second ball a toss and slammed it, angling the racquet to put a slight spin on the serve. I landed on my good leg, but the momentum carried me forward along with my follow-through. I stumbled, accidentally putting too much weight on my knee, and the pain caught me off guard.
By the time it had begun to fade back into the familiar, dull ache that never quite went away, the ball had rolled silently to a stop at my feet, mocking me. My serve had faulted; I hadn’t even made it over the net.
I was done. I left the balls on the court, zipped my racquet back into my gear bag, and picked up my cane, wondering why I’d even bothered.
When I locked up the courts, the campus felt spooky all of a sudden, the dark shadows of the foothills looming over the empty buildings. But of course there was nothing to be worried about—nothing besides the first day of school, when I’d finally have to face everyone I’d been avoiding all summer.
Eastwood High used to be mine, the one place where everyone knew who I was and it felt as though I could do no wrong. And the tennis courts—I’d been playing on varsity since the ninth grade. Back when the school was mine, I used to find peace there, between the orderly white lines etched into the forest green rectangles. Tennis was like a video game, one that I’d beat a million times, with the pleasure of winning long gone. A game that I’d kept on playing because people expected me to, and I was good at doing what people expected. But not anymore, because no one seemed to expect anything from me anymore. The funny thing about gold is how quickly it can tarnish.
3
THERE ARE A lot of unexpected public humiliations in high school, but none of them had ever happened to me until 8:10 A.M. on that first day of senior year. Because, at 8:10 A.M., I realized that not only did I have no one to sit with during the welcome back pep rally, but I was also going to have to take the front row, since the bleachers were too cramped for my knee.
The front row was all teachers and this one goth girl in a wheelchair who insisted she was a witch. But there was no way that I was going to hobble feebly up the stairs with the whole school watching. And they were watching. I could feel their eyes on me, and not because I’d won a record percentage of the vote in the class council elections or held hands with Charlotte Hyde as we waited in the coffee line in the upper quad. This was different. It made me want to cringe away in silent apology for the dark circles under my eyes and the fact that I had no summer tan to speak of. It made me want to disappear.
A balloon arch and butcher-paper sign decorated each section of the bleachers. I sat directly beneath the R in “GO SENIORS!” and watched the leaders of the Student Government Association huddle together in the center of the basketball court. They wore plastic leis and sunglasses. Jill Nakamura, our new class president, was dressed in a bikini top and denim cutoffs. And then the huddle broke apart and I caught sight of Charlotte laughing with her friends in their short Song Squad skirts. Her eyes met mine and she looked away, embarrassed, but that one moment had told me all I needed to know: The tragedy of what had happened at Jonas Beidecker’s party was mine and mine alone.
And then a small miracle happened and Toby Ellicott sat down next to me.
“Did you hear about the bees?” he asked cheerfully.