ANIMAL CONTROL GAVE up their search on Wednesday, and our homeroom teachers distributed a safety precaution handout that culminated in a laughable series of true-false questions about coyote attacks. I rolled my eyes and turned it over on my desk, not caring that we were doing popcorn reading, since no one would dare to popcorn me.
My school was big on using recycled paper, and it took a moment before I recognized what was on the backs of our Preventing Coyote Attacks! handout: leftover fliers for last year’s Junior-Senior Luau, complete with a poorly photocopied picture of the class council in sunglasses and leis. If you held the handout up to the light, the photo of us seeped through, creating this disturbing impression that it was a picture of attack victims, that we were the cautionary tale.
When I drove over to the medical center later that afternoon, the sun was just beginning to set, and these shafts of golden sunlight slanted through the magnolia trees that divided the rows of parking spaces. In that light, the leaves looked fake, like they were made of wax. Cassidy would have loved them.
I was slightly early when I pushed open the door of Suite 322 North: Cohen and Ford Group Mental Health Practice. The receptionurse smiled at me blankly, and asked which doctor I was there to see, and if I was a new patient. I told her Dr. Cohen and I’d been before, and she typed something into the oldest functioning computer I’d ever seen, and said the insurance stuff was taken care of and I should just sit and relax.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the only places people insist you relax are the least relaxing places on the planet. Airplanes, the dentist, psychiatric waiting rooms, those little curtained-off areas in the hospital where you have an IV put in. Anyway. I sat, waited, considered how incredibly unrelaxed I felt.
The whole place, and I really mean all of it, was decorated for Festivus. There were non-denominational snowmen, and seasonal snowflakes, and glittering garlands of enormous plastic peppermints. It was pretty terrible. Plus there was this older lady already sitting there, wearing a sari and an I’m-waiting-for-my-kid expression as she flipped through a decrepit magazine.
She coughed and shifted in her chair, making the peppermint garland rattle. A small avalanche of glitter sloughed off, and I wasn’t lucky enough to avoid it. I made a face and tried to wipe it from my shoulders, but there was no use.
The receptionurse poked her head through the vestibule and let me know that Dr. Cohen was running about twenty minutes behind. I sighed and put on my headphones, taking out the college app I was working on. The lady with the magazine was being pretty nosy, and after about five minutes, she finally decided to come out with it.
“Are those college applications?”
I nodded.
“Where are you applying?” she asked shamelessly.
“Um, this one’s for Duke,” I said, “and this is for Dartmouth.”
“You must be a smart boy.” She said it like I was some three-year-old, which wasn’t actually reassuring.
“Not really.” I shrugged. “But it’s worth trying.”
“My daughter was a National Merit Scholar,” she said, as though this fact was at all relevant to our conversation.
“That’s great.” I fiddled with my headphones, hoping she’d lose interest.
I’d just started back on my application when the door to Dr. Ford’s office opened. I glanced up, figuring it was going to be the nosy lady’s daughter and she’d make us awkwardly introduce ourselves, but it wasn’t.
Cassidy Thorpe walked into the waiting room, something in the cast of her shoulders suggesting this visit was routine. Her eyes were slightly red, as though she’d been crying, and her white sweater slipped off one freckled shoulder. Her trench coat was bundled in her arms, the belt dangling.
When she saw me, she paled. Bit her lip. Looked like she wanted to disappear.
We stared at each other, totally embarrassed, since the waiting room in a mental health clinic isn’t the best place to run into your ex, particularly when it’s decorated with a thousand glittering pieces of fake candy. I had no idea what she was doing there, but I was damn well going to find out.
“Hi,” I said, taking off my headphones.
The papers on my lap slipped onto the floor, and Cassidy and I stared at them like I’d carelessly broken a vase in someone else’s house.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Selling Girl Scout cookies,” I deadpanned.
Neither of us laughed.
“No, really.”
“Well, I was in this accident.” I was still trying to make a joke of it. “So I have to go through the hassle of convincing doctors that I’m not experiencing a crippling bout of clinical depression. Get it, crippling?”
“Stop,” Cassidy insisted, like what I’d said made her feel even worse. It was strange, since she used to laugh at stupid puns like that.
She knelt and picked up my papers. I muttered my thanks and zipped them back into my bag.
“You’d hate Dartmouth, by the way,” Cassidy said.
“Wow, really? We’re talking about this right now?” It was out of my mouth before I could think it through, floating there sarcastically, and I instantly wanted to take it back.
“Okay, well, see you in school.” Cassidy started to walk off, but I wasn’t having it.
“No way,” I said, standing up. “You don’t want to sit next to me in class, fine. You want to sulk in the library, be my guest. But I run into you here, you’re telling me what’s going on.”
I didn’t care that the lady in the sari was spying on us from behind her magazine. I didn’t care that my T-shirt was lousy with glitter. I just wanted her to trust me, for once, to tell me what it was that had turned our smooth-sailing relationship into a total shipwreck.
“Stay out of it, Ezra.” Cassidy’s eyes were pleading, but it sounded more like a warning than anything else. And that infuriated me.
“Make me.”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” Cassidy asked in exasperation.
Her expression was the one she’d worn a lot lately, full of this sadness that had lurked there for far longer than we’d been together. And I was tired of wondering why.
“I don’t know? Screw with me?”
“Excuse me,” the receptionurse said, poking her head through the vestibule. “Is there a problem?”
“We’re fine,” Cassidy and I said in unison, both of us sounding terrifically not fine.
“Hallway?” I suggested.
Cassidy glared but followed me anyway.
“What?” she demanded once the door had closed behind us.
“So, do you come here often?” I tried not to grin at how ridiculous it sounded.
“It’s none of your business,” Cassidy shot back, clearly not seeing any humor in this.
And if she wanted to play it that way, it was fine by me. Because I was tired of whatever we were doing, of whatever it was between us being this vast and unbreachable wasteland of misery.
“Of course not. But you know what I think?” I asked, not waiting for an answer. “I think you were alone that night in the park. That your ‘boyfriend’ didn’t exist.”
I’d been privately toying with that theory for a while and hadn’t planned on making the accusation, but the moment I said it, I knew I was right.
“Why would I make something like that up?” Cassidy demanded, avoiding the question.
“Did you?” I pressed.
“What does it matter, Ezra? We broke up. Not all nice things have happy endings.”
“I’m just trying to figure out what I did to make you act like this. Seriously, Cassidy, what tragedy occurred that made you wish we’d never met?”
Cassidy stared at the carpet. Tucked her hair behind her ears. Smiled sadly.