The Beginning of Everything

  “It’s just Connor MacLeary,” I said. “He’s like a big drunk puppy. Honestly.”

  “Maybe to you,” Toby said. “But he made my life hell in middle school. Who do you think dared Tug Mason to piss in my Gatorade?”

  Actually, now that Toby mentioned it, the mystery of Tug Mason’s sports-drink-pissing proclivity resolved itself. I mean, people don’t just do that sort of thing without prompting.

  “Toby’s right,” Phoebe said. “Football’s a bunch of drunk rednecks. They haven’t won a game in how long?”

  “Well, they tied with Beth Shalom once last season,” I offered. “Although that doesn’t really count, since half of the other team was missing due to Rosh Hashanah.”

  “I’m so glad Faulkner’s here to give us last year’s football statistics,” Luke grumbled.

  “Screw you,” I said.

  “Screw your girlfriend,” he retorted. “If you can get your crippled dick to work.”

  Our table went quiet, and the white noise of the quad seemed to drop away until it was just me and Luke Sheppard, with his slacker glasses and nasty smirk and unforgivable insult.

  I always thought it wouldn’t get to me, someone calling me crippled like I should be ashamed of myself. I suppose I’d only pictured it broadly, the word by itself, like when Charlotte called the debate team nerds, or the orchestra losers. But what Luke said wasn’t some generalized insult. It was genuinely offensive, and he wasn’t getting away with it.

  “You are such an asshole,” Phoebe said, slapping Luke across the face. The slap echoed—or maybe the word is reverberated—and in its aftermath, the whole world roared back into place.

  Phoebe got up, taking her backpack with her. The poltergeist of her unfinished lunch sat on the table, half of a chocolate cookie and a peanut butter sandwich missing two neat bites.

  “I’m going to see if she’s all right,” Cassidy said.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I’ll go.”

  I found Phoebe sitting on the metal bench outside of the swim complex, at the very edge of the parking lot. There weren’t any lunch tables over there, so it was a decent place to sulk, if you didn’t mind the tang of chlorine.

  Her eyes were red, and she cradled her right hand as though it still stung. She scooted down on the bench to make room for me, and I sat, and we said nothing.

  “He’s such a jerk,” Phoebe mumbled after a while, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater.

  “I know.” I reached into my backpack for a packet of tissues.

  “You have tissues.” She shook her head as though I’d just offered her an embroidered handkerchief.

  “My mom buys them in bulk. I’ve got hand sanitizer, too, if you want to cleanse Luke’s face from your fist.”

  “You don’t have to be so nice to me,” she muttered.

  “Well, you sort of defended my honor back there.”

  “I slapped Luke Sheppard.”

  She said his name as though it meant something. As though she didn’t even have the right to expect him to say hello to her in the hallways, and he really was as big a deal as he made himself out to be. It killed me, Phoebe sitting there in her ponytail and glasses, a year younger than me and so tiny that her toes barely touched the concrete, appalled at herself for being the only one of us brave enough to call Luke out on his bullshit.

  “He was being a backpfeifen—whatever. His was the face that launched a thousand fists,” I said. “So don’t worry about it. You didn’t give him anything he didn’t deserve.”

  “Now I sort of wish I’d slapped him harder,” Phoebe said thoughtfully.

  I snorted.

  “God, I can’t believe he said that.” Phoebe winced, like she was replaying it in her head. “No one thinks of you like that. With pity, or whatever. Luke always used to compare himself to you, how you both ran things. He’d complain about it constantly, how you were this smug, brainless jock who did nothing but took all the credit. And now you’re on the same side, and you’re actually pretty cool, and it’s killing him. I mean, if there’s anyone who doesn’t belong at our lunch table, it’s me.”

  It had never struck me that Phoebe was insecure about sitting with us. Maybe it was because I’d always seen our table as co-ed, rather than a group of boys with their girlfriends, or maybe it was because Phoebe got along so well with everyone. But I couldn’t stand to see her awash in self-doubt like that.

  “Hey,” I said sternly, the way I did back when I had to give pep talks to the team. “Listen. Everyone at our lunch table loves you.”

  Phoebe regarded me like she wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth.

  “But what if they stop?” she asked, wincing.

  “If you and Luke break up?”

  Phoebe shook her head. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “It’s like . . . I’m paranoid about people borrowing my laptop because I’m convinced they’ll find some secret document on there that would make the whole world think I’m a terrible person—something I don’t even remember writing. And it doesn’t matter that there’s no document like that. I’m still terrified, you know?”

  “Everyone feels like that,” I said. “Even Luke.”

  “You’re wrong. Luke doesn’t care if everyone thinks he’s a horrible person, so long as they do what he says.”

  I realized then that Phoebe knew him infinitely better than I ever would. That Luke had put his arm around her at the movies and his tongue down her throat at debate tournaments, and not once had she ever seemed happy about it, about them.

  “Just once I want someone to be afraid of losing me,” Phoebe said. “But the only thing Luke’s afraid of losing is power.”

  I shrugged, not knowing what to say, so I didn’t say anything for a while. I stared out at the gym across from the swim complex, and after a few minutes, I put my arm around Phoebe, because she was small and crying, and it seemed like the thing to do. And we sat like that until the bell rang.

  WE HAD VOTING for homecoming court that week, the glitter-encrusted ballot box mocking me as it sat in the front of my homeroom. We were supposed to nominate one boy and one girl for the court, and I was never good at that. It felt weird voting for myself, even in things like student government elections where I’d had to take the initiative to run, and I always felt like my votes were disingenuous when I wrote down my friends. In the end I left my ballot sheet blank.

  When I sat down at my lunch table, it was oddly empty. Luke and Sam had driven off campus, to Burger King or somewhere, and we didn’t talk about it—where they’d gone, or if they’d be back.

  Phoebe had swiped half a bag of candy corn from the journalism room, and we each took a handful. Cassidy showed us how to pinch off the bottom parts so they looked like teeth. Well, she didn’t so much show us as pretend she’d knocked a tooth out, and then laugh when we realized what had happened. But our laughter felt too small, as though we were in a theater with an overwhelming number of open seats, and nothing we did could make the space less empty.

  Our lunch table stayed like that for two days, until Luke and Sam reappeared as though they’d never been away. There was a smug cast to Luke’s shoulders, and when he unpacked his sandwich, a flash of silver glinted on his finger. A purity ring. At first I thought it was meant to be ironic, so I didn’t understand why everyone was laughing. But it turned out Luke meant it—or wanted us to think he did.

  “What can I say?” he shrugged humbly. “I’ve seen the error of my ways.”

  Phoebe snorted and whispered in a way that suggested she wanted Luke to overhear her: “More likely he’s hooking up with a girl from his church.”

  It was fantastic. Instead of Luke reappearing at our table in a massive cloud of awkwardness, the way these things usually went, his holier-than-thou attitude and Sacred Gift Ring gave us all an opportunity to poke fun at him, an opportunity Toby seized with glee. It was as though the fault in our lunch table had resolved itself into a jagged crack, with Luke and Sam on one side, and the res
t of us on the other, wondering how we’d missed the earthquake in the first place.

  23

  FRIDAY MORNING BROUGHT with it the second pep rally of the year. The balloon arches over each section of the bleachers were in fall colors. God, brown and orange balloons. It was like the world’s most cheerless carnival.

  I joined Toby and Cassidy in the third row of the senior section; Toby had saved me the end.

  “Sure you don’t want to switch to the teacher bleacher?” he joked.

  “Screw you,” I said, not really meaning it.

  “Screw your girlfriend,” Cassidy added, laughing. It was something we did now; the phrase had become a joke among our group of friends, and I was glad of it.

  We settled into the bleachers, waiting for the pep rally to begin. In the row below us, Staci Guffin’s hot pink thong rose magnificently out the back of her jeans in a neon whale tail.

  Toby pointed it out with a disapproving frown that sent Cassidy into muffled hysterics, and I felt sort of bad that they were laughing, even if Staci was one of my ex-girlfriends. The pep rally started then, with SGA coming out in plaid shirts to dance to some hideous Katy Perry number. I glanced at Toby, who shook his head as though embarrassed for them.

  “SENIORS! SHOW SOME SPIRIT!” called Jill, putting her hand on her hip.

  The noise was deafening.

  It went on like that for a good five minutes, with the requisite I can’t hear you’s and That’s more like it’s.

  Tiffany Wells, our hopelessly blonde social events chair, took the microphone. She’d written notes at SGA meetings the year before with a pen topped by a cloud of pink feathers. You got the impression that her friends made fun of her to her face, and she didn’t quite understand why they were laughing.

  We all paid attention as Tiffany announced the theme for the homecoming dance: Monte Carlo. She said it as though it was particularly thrilling that we’d have cardboard backdrops featuring casino motifs and “real live blackjack tables.”

  Toby almost died.

  “Sober, fake gambling,” he whispered. “In the gym.”

  I had to admit, it was terrible.

  And then Jill handed Tiffany an envelope.

  “Okay,” she said, drawing out her vowels in that particularly Californian way, “we’re going to announce the homecoming court nominees, and I’m, like, super excited about this, you guys!”

  She squealed into the microphone, making everyone wince from the reverb.

  “If I call your name, you should come down here and take a Royal Rose!”

  “Dear God,” Toby whispered. “It’s like being at a reality television taping.”

  I laughed.

  Cassidy shushed us, enthralled.

  “The nominees for queen.” Tiffany went on, naming Jill Nakamura; Charlotte Hyde; Sara Sumner, who ran that obnoxious clique of Charity League girls who pretended they lived in beachfront mansions in Back Bay; and Anamica Patel.

  I winced when she called Anamica; it was one of those cruel games Charlotte liked to play, telling everyone to nominate someone as a joke, and Anamica was undoubtedly that year’s target. Anamica was a bit too focused on earning straight As, but she didn’t deserve to have her name hooted laughingly by the assholes sitting in the back of the senior section.

  “That’s awful,” Cassidy whispered as Anamica accepted her Royal Rose, her face bright red.

  “And now, the nominees for king,” Tiffany continued, once the hooting had died down. “Evan McMillan.”

  Evan sauntered up there and hoisted the rose over his head like it was a prize.

  “Jimmy Fuller.”

  Jimmy fist pumped.

  “Luke Sheppard.”

  Luke tried to act as though he was too cool for it, although you could see the triumph on his face.

  “And Ezra Faulkner.”

  I froze. The gym seemed to go silent, and all I could think was, Oh God, I’m Anamica Patel. I’m the joke vote.

  I have no idea how I got from my seat to the center of the gym, but suddenly there was a rose in my hand and the whole school was rising up around me like I was some doomed gladiator.

  When I sat back down, Toby was laughing.

  “Good thing you already own a suit,” he said.

  “Shut up,” I whispered wretchedly, wishing that everyone would stop staring.

  BY THE TIME lunch rolled around, I was thoroughly confused by what had happened: whether it was a joke, or residual pity, or something else entirely. Whatever it was, nearly half of my math class congratulated me as though the nomination was something to be proud of, rather than embarrassed about.

  It felt strange, like all of those party invitations I’d turned down had been genuine, as though it didn’t matter that I could barely handle stairs and was dating a girl on the debate team and spent my weekends studying for AP classes with Toby Ellicott.

  “Congrats,” I told Anamica after math class, since it seemed like the thing to do, the both of us sitting there with roses wilting on our desks.

  “Not you, too.” Anamica glared at me, like she suspected I was making fun of her.

  “What?” I asked, confused.

  “I get it, Faulkner. Your evil popular crowd voted for me as a joke. You don’t have to rub it in.”

  “My evil popular crowd?” I wondered if she’d somehow missed the memo that the throne had been usurped months ago. I’d thought we were in the same situation, Anamica and me, awkwardly navigating through a day that had showered us both with unwanted and embarrassing attention. But clearly she didn’t see it that way.

  “Just leave me alone,” she warned, tossing her rose into the trash.

  THERE WAS A strange but unmistakable tension at our lunch table that afternoon. I’d never been in direct competition with Luke before, and I had the distinct sense that he didn’t like it, that he felt as though we were adversaries who had finally been pitted against each other.

  Toby was oblivious to the tension as he gleefully explained our school dances to Cassidy: the way we all had to pose for a photographer who set up his backdrop in the weight-training room, how our teachers stood awkwardly against the walls of the gym, appalled at the music and the dancing.

  “It’s hilarious,” Toby assured her. “All of the girls wear tacky satin dresses covered in rhinestones, and all of the guys come up behind them and freak dance.”

  “Freak dance?” Cassidy raised an eyebrow.

  “You know, rub their junk on them trunks?” Toby explained in an attempt to be gangster that made me choke on my iced tea.

  “Can we please do that?” Cassidy asked me. “And you have to take me out to dinner somewhere awful, with unlimited breadsticks or a soda machine.”

  “I think the guy’s supposed to ask the girl to the dance,” I told her.

  “Oh.” Cassidy’s face fell as she considered this. “Well, don’t worry, I’ll act surprised when you ask me.”

  I laughed.

  “It’s a plan,” I promised.

  “Ugh, hide!” Toby muttered, and it took me a moment, but then I saw what he was talking about. Charlotte Hyde was heading straight for our table—alone. Her ponytail was golden in the sun, and she smiled like she knew everyone was watching.

  “Ezra,” she purred. “Come over to the table for a sec.”

  The table. As though there was only one in the entire quad.

  “Why?” I asked suspiciously.

  Charlotte examined the end of her ponytail, annoyed.

  “It’s a homecoming thing. We need you.”

  I sighed and got up, figuring it was best to get it over with quickly. Luke stood as well, presuming the invitation had included him. Charlotte raised an eyebrow.

  “Not you,” she told him, grabbing my arm and steering me away.

  Charlotte popped her gum and smirked up at me, stroking my sleeve. She smelled the way she always did—a combination of scented lotion and lip-gloss and fruity gum that gave the overwhelming impression of artificial strawb
erries.

  “Your jacket’s cute,” she said as we walked toward my old lunch table. “I can hardly keep my hands off it.”

  “Cassidy picked it out.”

  Charlotte abruptly took her hand away.

  “You’re taking her to the dance, aren’t you?”

  “She’s my girlfriend, Charlotte.”

  We arrived at the table then, everyone looking up.

  “Dude,” Evan said, grinning. “The badass trio on the homecoming court. We’re fuckin’ kings.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the point of a homecoming court was that there would only be one king. So I smiled and said, “Yeah, totally.”

  “Oh my God.” Jill rolled her eyes. “I lol’ed so hard when they called Anamica. And then Luke, what a joke.”

  “I know.” Charlotte giggled. “He still has braces.”

  I stood there uncomfortably, wondering if anyone would dare to admit that I’d only been nominated out of pity, until Evan pulled me aside and explained that they were all getting a hotel suite after the dance. There would be Beer Pong, and afterward, a party in the hot tub. He wanted to know if I was in.

  “For what?” I asked, figuring he couldn’t really mean that they were inviting me—and my date—to get plastered with them at the Four Seasons.

  “A couple hundred bucks. Maybe more if we get a Hummer limo.”

  Evidently, he really did mean it. Evan actually thought I wanted to pay for the prestige of co-hosting what would no doubt be a hot-tub mess of a party.

  Somehow, I managed to make my excuses and extract myself from their lunch table.

  “Hey,” I said sheepishly when I sat back down with my friends.

  “What did they want?” Luke asked, narrowing his eyes.

  “Nothing. Limo share.”

  But I could tell that he didn’t believe me.

  I ASKED CASSIDY to the dance while we were studying with Toby in the Barnes and Noble café the next afternoon. I had the barista write it on her coffee.