Back when they’d reset the broken bone in my wrist, I’d woken up on the operating table. It was just for a moment, before the doctors upped the anesthesia, but in those seconds when the lights were bright and hot and the surgeons were bent over me with my blood dripping from their scalpels, I’d felt as though I’d woken into a nightmare.
Hearing Cassidy say those things was worse. Because I hadn’t been broken when I’d left my house an hour earlier, with a wrist corsage of white roses still cold from the refrigerator, but I was certainly broken now.
I stared at her, horrified. Her chin jutted stubbornly and her eyes were a hurricane, and there was nowhere for me to seek cover.
“Okay,” I said hollowly. “Sorry. I just—sorry.”
I turned and walked away.
“Ezra!” she called desperately, as though I was the one who was being unreasonable.
I paused, considering it, but what more was there to say? And then I continued my funeral march toward the parking lot.
The death of a relationship. At least I was dressed for the wake.
My phone was a grocery list of missed calls, but I didn’t feel like dealing with them. Instead, I drove home in the cooling darkness, past the ghostly stretch of white birch trees and around the loop that encircled Eastwood like a noose.
I jammed my brakes at a stop sign that had gone up recently, and the corsage flew forward, landing on the floor. I left it there, sliding back and forth, its petals bruising with each curve of the road.
“Ezra?” my mom called when I came in.
“Yeah, hi.”
She could see it in my face that something was deeply, horribly wrong. And that I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Aren’t you going to the dance, honey?” she asked.
“No.”
I went upstairs, Cooper following worriedly, and slammed the door, barricading the two of us inside. I lay down on top of the bed in my suit and closed my eyes.
This is how they bury you, I thought. In your best suit, the one you wear to weddings and funerals, a suit that girls have draped over their shoulders on cold nights and dry cleaners have absolved of all stains.
Suddenly, I couldn’t stand wearing the thing. She’d picked it out for me, and I felt sick at the thought.
Cooper whined nervously, his tail thumping against the duvet as I stripped down to my boxers. I stared up at the ceiling fan, but the propellers reminded me of my old car, the BMW logo, so I turned over, burying my face in my pillow.
That was when I heard it: the alarm on my phone. Homecoming court. The results. And I couldn’t have cared less.
The alarm continued to trill in two-minute intervals as I lay there undressed and miserable in the darkness. I cried for my brokenness, for the way her words had crippled me, and for the three unspoken words I’d been carrying with me for a while now, and how quickly one of them had changed.
“I hate you, Cassidy Thorpe,” I whispered. “I hate you.”
25
THERE’S A CLOCK in Mr. Choi’s calculus classroom that has sixty-two seconds in each minute. I’ve counted it before, fascinated with the discrepancy, but not really believing in it. There was something wrong with the clock, not with time itself.
That weekend, there was something wrong with time. It passed in an agony of drawn-out minutes and lost hours. I neglected my phone and shut the blinds and endured my misery until it was time for school and I slunk out the door with two days’ stubble and unfinished homework.
It felt strange driving to school alone, as though I was forgetting something. I stared out at the migrant workers in the strawberry fields, breaking their backs to harvest off-season fruit, and I thought about how I’d rather do that today. Feel the sun baking the back of my neck while I engaged in the sort of activity that occupied my mind just enough to push back the pain of what had happened. But no, I had a test in Calculus.
I flunked the test, badly. It was as though my brain didn’t want to solve for the rate of acceleration, as though it just wanted to hit the brakes and not accelerate at all. Decelerate. Whatever.
When I handed in my answer sheet at the bell, Anamica looked up from her desk and glared at me.
“Well, well,” she said, sliding her calculator into its case with unnecessary force. “If it isn’t the homecoming king.”
I’m fairly certain that the correct response to that isn’t, “Uh, what?” but that’s what I said.
Anamica sighed and thrust a copy of the school paper at me. Sure enough, the front page featured the picture from the pep rally, with all of us holding our Royal Roses and none of us looking at the camera. I supposed they’d wanted to take a shot of us at the dance, dressed formally and all, but I’d wrecked that.
EZRA FAULKNER AND JILLIAN NAKAMURA NAMED HOMECOMING KING AND QUEEN. Article and photos by Phoebe Chang, the subhead read.
“Right,” I said, still in shock. “Wow. Yeah, so apparently that happened.”
“You were supposed to escort me,” Anamica accused. “When all the nominees walked to the stage. I had to go alone because you ditched.”
“Sorry,” I muttered as Justin Wong clapped me on the shoulder.
“Yo, Faulkner! Congrats,” he called, already halfway out the door to break.
“Thanks.” I stood there, sort of dazed, while a few more of my classmates added their well wishes. I’d gotten ready for school that morning in a fog of low-hanging misery, hoping I could muddle through the day largely unnoticed, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen.
Tony Masters walked past and yanked the strap of Anamica’s backpack. “Don’t worry, Joke Vote, you’ll win teacher’s pet in the Senior Shout-outs for sure.”
Anamica shot me a dirty look, like she blamed me for that as well, and suddenly I just needed to get out of there. The last thing I wanted to talk about was why I’d missed the homecoming court announcement, and the last person I wanted to talk about it with was Anamica Patel.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and then fled the classroom, taking a back staircase to avoid the quad.
Homecoming king. And I’d been lying facedown on my bed in a pair of boxer shorts and a heap of despair when they’d announced it.
You’d think I would have been able to sense the entire school standing there, confused, as my name was called and I was nowhere to be found. You’d think someone—Toby, Phoebe, even Austin—would have texted. But of course my phone had been off, and still was. I’d extracted a disturbing amount of pleasure from watching it die on my bedside table, denying it a charge.
I wasn’t headed anywhere in particular, just avoiding seeing anyone, so I wound up sitting in my car, wishing I had the courage to drive off but knowing the security guard would harass me.
When the bell rang, I decided I wasn’t going to class. Instead, I disappeared inside my hoodie at one of the back tables in the library, listening to my old Dylan playlist from the summer and remembering when I’d first heard this music, in the waiting room of Dr. Cohen’s office, the perfect sound track for my personal hell. By the time I looked up, the quad was already filled for lunch and the librarian was staring at me like she didn’t know if I should be allowed to sit there all day.
I got up, trying to mentally prepare myself for the ordeal of going out there and facing the whole school as their homecoming king. I looked terrible; my hair was a mess and I hadn’t bothered to shave all weekend. The dark circles under my eyes were turning into parabola, and I’d thrown on a T-shirt that had definitely seen better days.
My eyes went automatically to Toby’s table: Phoebe spotted me and waved, but I hesitated, not feeling up to it. And then Evan McMillan’s booming voice cut above the tension in the quad: “Yo, Faulkner! Get your royal ass over here!”
Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. And maybe I’d known it all along. So I nodded at Evan and walked over there with the whole school watching, to that choice lunch table next to the wall that separates the upper and lower quads, like I’d never been gone.
I endured the tennis team’s backslapping and clowning with a good-natured grimace and waited for someone to offer me a seat at the already crowded table.
“Trevor, get up,” Evan grunted at one of the juniors.