“No,” I said bitterly, “because that would have been somewhat decent of her. As it happens, she just never showed up. I found her in the castle park, on a date with another guy.”
Toby dropped the pen he’d been fiddling with. “You’re joking,” he said. “On the night of the dance?”
“What does it matter? She wasn’t really planning to go.” I shrugged gloomily.
“Of course she was!” Toby insisted. “She texted me pictures of this five-hundred-dollar dress asking if you’d like it and dragged Phoebe to every shoe store in Eastwood.”
“You’re serious?” I asked.
“Here, Faulkner. Behold the girly texts,” Toby said, holding out his phone. “And note that I put up with them solely due to our friendship.”
“I believe you,” I said, but Toby was determined. I stared down at the picture Cassidy had sent him, a mirror snap in some fancy dressing room. She was making a silly face as she posed barefoot in a gold dress. I could see Phoebe in the background, trying to edge out of the picture.
“Okay,” Toby said gingerly, prying the phone away from me. “Showing you that was a bad idea, dude. Your hands are shaking.”
But I was barely listening. What I was thinking about was how these texts, this picture, proved it. Cassidy had meant to go to the dance with me after all. More importantly, it meant she’d lied that night in the park.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” Toby told me. “You’re going to start at the beginning. Use of the introduction ‘Once upon a time, my awesome best friend warned me about a girl, but I didn’t listen’ is optional.”
He probably meant that I should start at the beginning of Saturday night, but there were so many parts I’d left out that I couldn’t. I needed to go back further. So I told him everything: how Cassidy had made me cheat for her at the debate tournament, how we’d kissed during the Disneyland fireworks and communicated by flashlights, how perfect it all was, and the terrible things she’d said the night of the dance, about my being a small-town joke destined to coach the tennis team in a pathetic attempt to relive my glory days.
“It’s like she wanted to make you hate her.” Toby frowned. “That’s the sort of untrue but awful thing you say to ensure that someone never speaks to you again.”
“She can’t even stand to be around me, and I didn’t do anything,” I said despairingly.
“You really know how to pick ’em, don’t you?” Toby joked.
“I think I’m cursed.”
“I wouldn’t say cursed,” Toby mused. “More like suffering the aftermath of a personal tragedy.”
The aftermath of a personal tragedy. I liked that. It sounded appropriately gloomy.
“Yeah, probably,” I said. And I felt unspeakably grateful to him. For putting up with me, for pulling me out of class and forcing me to talk about what had happened, even though I’d been kind of a dick lately. For being an actual friend, and not just someone with whom I’d shared a lunch table, or competed for the same team. Because if there was anyone who could help me find the answers I was looking for, it was Toby.
“Listen,” I said. “I know it’s crazy, but I have this feeling that I’m missing this massive piece of what happened. And I have to know. I have to find out the truth about Cassidy Thorpe, and I need your help.”
Of course he’d help. Whatever I needed, because that’s how it worked, the whole best friends thing. Toby was staring at me like he couldn’t believe I’d half expected them to refuse. And I thought: Toby, Phoebe, Austin, they would have visited me in the hospital, not just sent some cheesy card. They wouldn’t have asked me to come to tennis practice and pick up a racquet just to win some stupid bet.
Because Cassidy had been wrong about one thing in that desperate lie she’d delivered that night in the park. It wasn’t me that would still be here in twenty years, coaching the high-school tennis team in a frantic bid to relive my glory days: it was Evan.
28
MY MOM WAS waiting for me with two enormous Halloween pumpkins and a set of carving knives when I got home, evidently harboring the delusion that I’d find such an activity fun.
“I thought you could use some cheering up,” she said, gesturing toward the kitchen table, which was blanketed in at least a dozen layers of newsprint and guilt. So I sat and we carved smiling faces into our pumpkins and chatted until I was reasonably certain she wouldn’t make me participate in any more cheering-up activities in the foreseeable future.
“I made you an appointment with Dr. Cohen,” Mom said when she put our finished jack-o’-lanterns by the front door.
I stopped clicking the little LED on and off and stared at her in horror, realizing that this had been her itinerary all along. The pumpkins were just the first stop on her all-expenses-paid guilt trip.
“Mom, no.”
Cooper, who was investigating the pumpkins, stared up at me, wondering why I was so upset.
“One appointment,” Mom said firmly. “You’re supposed to check in, you know this. Can you hand me that light?”
I scowled and handed her the LED I’d been playing with.
“I don’t need to see a therapist.”
Mom sighed. Adjusted the jack-o’-lantern. Made it clear we weren’t discussing this on the front steps because, God forbid, the neighbors might overhear. Finally, she closed the front door and pursed her lips at my attitude.
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “I got dumped, that’s all.”
“This isn’t negotiable,” Mom said. “I’m sorry, honey, but your father and I agree on this one. I made you an appointment after school on Wednesday.”
“What if I’m not exactly jumping at the chance to drive myself over there and talk to a doctor about my personal life?” I asked.
I knew I was being an ass, but I didn’t care. She couldn’t just spring this on me. Expect me to go back to that office where the last time Dr. Cohen had seen me, I’d been on crutches, my pocket rattling with a bottle of prescription painkillers, trying to get over the news that I’d never play college sports. To have to catch him up on all of the things he’d never understand, about Cassidy and Toby and my old friends. To discuss my life like it was the plot of some novel I’d read but hadn’t really understood.
“You can sulk about it all you want,” Mom warned, “but if you miss that appointment, you’re losing your car privileges for the month. Even for school. I don’t mind driving you, you know.”
“Great,” I said, wandering into the kitchen so I could glare at the pantry because of course she wouldn’t have bought any Halloween candy. At least I wasn’t in danger of suffering from kummerspeck, or emotion-related overeating, in our house.
LUKE HELD ANOTHER floating movie theater on Saturday night, some sort of classic fright fest in the gym, and of course I wasn’t invited. Toby insisted that I should just come anyhow, but I didn’t think it would go over well. In the end, I wound up attending Jill’s big Halloween party, which I’d halfway been planning to back out of at the last minute.
I just wanted to stay home, since I’d been sort of exhausted lately. But it turned out I couldn’t spend Halloween watching my mom hand out those little boxes of raisins to dismayed trick-or-treaters while my dad typed up some important document in his home office, sighing every time the doorbell rang. So I picked up some plastic fangs and body glitter on my way over to Jill’s. It was pretty pathetic, and I doubted anyone at the party would get that I meant it ironically, but it was all I could manage on short notice.
Jill lived in one of the older subdivisions on the lake, where most of the homes had been purchased for their lots and then rebuilt. Her backyard had a private dock, and her parents kept a sailboat there. Every year for her Halloween party, Jill decorated it as a ghost ship, complete with cobwebs and a Jolly Roger flag and a hull filled with beer.