The Beginning of Everything

  “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.

  Junior year, the entire tennis team had come dressed in bedsheet togas and played so many rounds of flip cup that I was still drunk when I woke up the next morning, something I hadn’t even known was possible.

  The party was going strong when I got there. All of the girls seemed to be in costumes that consisted largely of lingerie and high heels, not that I was complaining. The football team had claimed a keg in the living room and some guys were attempting keg stands through a Hillary Clinton mask, which was just baffling enough to be plausible, since Connor MacLeary was involved. I walked past two girls in the kitchen in the same stripper Dorothy costume, who were screaming at each other while their friend tried to break it up by saying, “You guys! It’s not like you’re wearing the same prom dress!”

  I tried not to laugh as I opened the screen door and stepped through into the backyard. I was starting to get the unfortunate impression that I’d arrived at the party too late. Some sophomores, whom I doubted had been invited, were already sick in the bushes, and cups littered the grass.

  “Ezra!” Charlotte said, launching herself at me. She was a bit unsteady in her high heels, and seemed to be dressed as a Disney princess with a penchant for pole-dancing. “You came!”

  “Of course,” I said. “Who could miss a pirate ship full of beer?”

  “How come you’re not wearing a costume?” Charlotte asked. I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me.

  “I’m a vampire,” I insisted, popping in the plastic fangs.

  “Hmmm.” Charlotte considered this. “It’s more realistic without the fangs. Come on.”

  She giggled and dragged me over to a picnic table crowded with our friends. I’d missed the theme, apparently. The girls were all sexy Disney princesses, and the guys were in zombie makeup, convincingly slack-jawed by the girls’ revealing costumes.

  “Dude, you made it!” Jimmy enthused, sloshing beer out of his Solo cup. It was as though he thought I was actually the life of the party, or maybe he always got too drunk to remember that I wasn’t.

  The party was a mess, filled with the kinds of things you regretted doing when they spilled out into the schoolwide rumor mill on Monday. After flirting heavily, Trevor and Jill wandered away to hook up, and apparently Trevor threw up in the middle of it. To his credit, he gallantly avoided her shoes—and they say chivalry’s dead. Evan and Charlotte got into a fight over nothing, which ended with Charlotte glaring at him from a circle of pissed-off Disney princesses while Evan broke into the off-limits liquor cabinet and downed half a bottle of whiskey despite Jill screaming that her parents would kill her if they found out.

  I figured it was only a matter of time until the cops showed up and shut it down, and I didn’t want to be there when they did. I left my unfinished beer and plastic fangs on the table and was considering how best to step over the kid passed out across the sliding door to the kitchen when Charlotte caught up with me.

  “You’re leaving?” she asked.

  And I don’t know what made me say it, except that I was tired from sitting there and watching the sloppy falling action of the party, but I shrugged and told her, “Well, yeah. I mean, it’s a terrible party.”

  “It really is,” she agreed. “But no one’s going to remember that on Monday.”

  “All anyone’s going to remember is the pirate ship filled with beer.”

  “And that Ezra Faulkner showed up without a costume,” she teased.

  “Screw you, I’m a vampire!” I insisted.

  “Really?” Charlotte grinned, leaning toward me. “Should I be afraid?”

  She stared up at me through her eyelashes, and I realized that the conversation had turned uncomfortable, and we were at one of those parties no good ever comes from, and she wasn’t wearing all that much, and I was covered in body glitter.

  “So, uh, Happy Halloween, Char,” I said, awkwardly stepping around the kid who’d passed out in the doorway.

  “Ezra, wait,” Charlotte said. “Before you go—can we talk?”

  I told her okay and led her into the laundry room. Charlotte sat on top of the dryer, and I sat on top of the washer, watching her examine the ruins of her manicure.

  “I miss us,” she said, still staring at her nails.

  I hadn’t been expecting that, and it threw me.

  “Charlotte, you’re drunk,” I pointed out. “And you’re dating Evan.”

  “Evan and I had another fight,” she blurted. “You and me were so good together, Ezra. I wish we hadn’t broken up.”

  She put her hand on my leg, and I was surprised to see that she was serious.

  “Well, we did,” I said matter-of-factly.

  “I know. But, like, we could get back together.”

  She squeezed my leg and tilted her face toward mine, daring me to kiss her. For a moment, I let myself imagine it. The taste of her lips, the curve of her back, the breasts that were so obviously spilling out of her gold bra-top. And then I imagined Evan opening the door and finding us there. Except it wasn’t Evan, it was me, five months ago, at a different party, because this was the way things were with Charlotte: so impulsive, and so meaningless.

  “No,” I said, removing her hand from my leg. “We can’t. It’s not a good idea.”

  Charlotte’s lips trembled for a moment, and then she composed herself, leaving me wondering if I’d imagined it.

  “Why not?” she demanded. “You don’t have a girlfriend, and Evan would get over it. I mean, don’t you ever think about how we used to cuddle on my couch after school, and I’d bake cookies, and you’d get nervous that I might burn them when we kissed? Or the time we went to t
he OC Fair and you gave me ten dollars and told me to win you a stuffed animal? Or that time we double-dated with Jimmy and that freshman who spilled her Slurpee on his lap during the movie and we couldn’t stop laughing?”

  I did remember those things, and I couldn’t help but smile at the memories of them. They seemed like part of my childhood; they seemed forever ago.

  “See, you’re smiling,” Charlotte said, encouraged. “And I know you think I’m drunk, but I had like four beers, so I’m not even that bad. And this is different. Remember last year on the beach when you asked me to be your girlfriend and then on Monday the whole school wished they were us? We could be that couple again. It doesn’t even matter that you were on the debate team for like two seconds, or that you dated that snotty redhead. Seriously, I don’t even care about those things. We can pretend the last five months never happened.”

  Charlotte stopped babbling long enough to look up at me, her expression pleading.

  “We could,” I said gently, “but I don’t want to.”

  “I’m sorry, did you just reject me?” Her eyes narrowed in disbelief.

  But the thing with Charlotte was that she’d only mentioned the good parts of what we’d had. I wondered if she’d conveniently forgotten how she’d tormented me with her moodiness while we dated, picking fights over nothing. How she’d given me shopping lists for her birthday and Christmas, and I always still managed to get it wrong. How I never got to pick the movie, how she put her own presets in my car because I listened to “depressing hipster crap.” The offensive grammar in her text messages, and the way she freaked out if I took too long to text back. How she always volunteered me to be the designated driver at parties, even for her friends, and how she always copied Jill’s Spanish homework at break because I refused to let her have mine.

  For a moment, I wondered if I should just tell her that she was a selfish, reckless girl who thought the world owed her something simply because she was pretty, and that I didn’t want to be around when she discovered it didn’t. But of course I couldn’t. Around her, I found it impossible to conjure much of anything worth saying.

  “Look, Char, I think you’re great,” I said. “You know that. But you don’t want to date me. We’re not even remotely compatible. I’m sort of a nerd. I have a limp and a lousy car and I hate it here so much that I sit in the UCE library after school pretending that I’ve already left.”

  “How can you hate Eastwood? It’s perfect.”

  “You see perfection, I see panopticon.”

  “Oh my god, why do you use such big words?” she demanded in exasperation.

  “Sorry,” I apologized, realizing she was the sort of girl who got upset when someone used an unfamiliar word, rather than learning what it meant.

  “You’re really weird sometimes,” Charlotte accused. “Like tonight, when everyone dressed as zombies, and you wore that. I mean, don’t you want to be like everyone else?”

  “Not particularly,” I said, willing her to finally understand how much I had changed, and how very little she knew about me.

  Charlotte considered this for a moment, and then her face broke into a sly smile.

  “Very funny,” she announced, and then she launched herself at me.

  “Charlotte,” I said, pushing her off and climbing to my feet. “I said no.”

  “How was I supposed to know that you meant it?” She seemed tremendously offended all of a sudden. “You can’t agree to talk someplace private at a party and that’s it.”

  “Oh. I didn’t realize . . .” I winced as it dawned on me that she’d thought I’d wanted to be alone with her, too.

  “You never do.” Charlotte said with an exasperated sigh. “You can be a real jerk sometimes, and you don’t even see how you are. I used to think you did it on purpose, so I flirted with other guys to make you jealous.”

  I laughed hollowly.

  “That’s what you call it? Flirting with other guys? My mistake. At Jonas’s party, I should have realized you were just flirting.”

  “No, what you should have done was sucked it up and dealt with it on Monday and taken me to prom like everyone expected,” Charlotte fumed.

  “Prom?” I didn’t think I’d heard her correctly. “Do you know where I was the night of prom, Charlotte? I was in the hospital, wondering if I’d ever walk again. And we both know how I got there.”

  It got really quiet for a second, and I think we both expected some drunken couple to stumble through the door and interrupt us, rescuing us from the uncomfortable silence, but none did.

  “If we both know, then why does it feel like you blame me?” Charlotte demanded. “I wasn’t even there.”

  “No, you weren’t there,” I said. “The paramedics found me all alone. And you just left me like that. You left me.”

  Charlotte’s face had gone pale, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to look at me.

  “We were drunk,” she said defensively. “I didn’t have a ride, and everyone was shouting about the cops coming because of the accident, and I’m terrible with blood, I probably would have fainted.”

  “‘I’m sorry’ would have been enough,” I told her. “Look, it’s late, and I think we’re done here. Why don’t you go find Evan or something?”

  “Are you going to tell him what I said?” she asked nervously. “Because I only said I’d dump him if—”

  “No, Charlotte, I’m not going to tell him,” I said drily. “The hymen of your integrity remains intact. Your precious jewel of a reputation is un-besmirched.”

  I left Jill’s party thinking that sometimes it isn’t worth confirming what we already know about people we understand so well. Because what Charlotte had wanted that night wasn’t me. It was some imaginary version of the boy she used to date but had never bothered to really think about as a person. And maybe the imaginary Ezra would have gone back to her and tried to forget the last five months. Maybe he would have convinced himself that he was happier for it, that neither of them were terrible people in the end, that it was possible to retreat into one’s popularity and carelessness and never have to acknowledge the harm they’d caused to those around them, or the lies they believed to make their happiness possible.

  But it doesn’t matter what the imaginary Ezra inside Charlotte’s head would have done, because he wasn’t real, and he certainly wasn’t me. What I did was drive home, past the egged stop signs and toilet-papered poplar trees, and coax Cooper off the kitchen mat where he was still sulking over not being allowed to play with the trick-or-treaters, and fall into bed without even bothering to wash off that ridiculous body glitter.

  29

  COOPER WAS ACTING strange on Sunday night, his expression uneasy, his head cocked as though listening for something just beyond the mosaic tile of our leaf-strewn pool.

  “It’s all right, boy,” I told him, absently patting the top of his head as I sat at my desk flipping through college catalogues.

  They were filled with pictures of a world that reminded me of her, a place brimming with unknowable possibility and almost certain adventure. For a moment, I let myself imagine what it would be like to go East, where leaves turned golden and snow coated the rooftops, where libraries looked like castles and dining halls were straight out of the Harry Potter films. But the brochures all seemed to blend together with the same promise of New England, and I realized that there’s a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.

  THE COYOTES WERE back in Eastwood again, and somehow Cooper had sensed it. Two housecats were dragged off over the weekend, and a coyote had been spotted in Terrace Bluffs. The local newspaper’s headline hinted that our town was being “terrorized”—as though the streets were filled with nocturnal wolves gliding through the shadows, preying on the old and the sick.

  In the way that some places have a rash of burglaries or hubcap thefts, we have coyotes. It’s not that surprising when small animals disappear, and every once in a while I would see something slink past the tennis
courts while I was practicing after dark. Occasionally the neighbors’ koi ponds were depleted overnight, or a jogger would spot a coyote watching him on one of the trails, but no one had ever been killed by coyotes. It was an absurd idea, like something out of those novels filled with vampires and witches.

  Still, there was an Animal Control van parked by the side of the football field on Monday, and every day that week, we’d watch officers comb the trails through our classroom windows.

  I sat at Toby’s lunch table again, where little was said about my reappearance. Austin looked up from his iPad long enough to flick his bangs out of his eyes and announce that it was about time I was back, and had I seen the new Nintendo console?

  “No, but did you know there’s an eight-bit Great Gatsby game?” I asked.

  “You’re making that up.” Austin furiously started typing.

  I glanced over toward my former lunch table, where Jimmy had pulled a roll of Mentos out of his pocket and was threatening to dump them into Emma’s soda bottle. Evan roared with laughter, and Trevor started a chant of “Do it and you’re cool!” When Jimmy inevitably succumbed to the temptation, the boys backed away laughing as Emma’s soda shot a geyser of fizz into the air.

  “Oh shit!” they muttered gleefully.

  The girls stood there, dripping and indignant as the fizz explosion turned to a trickle. The pavement under their lunch table was drenched, and the front of Charlotte’s Song Squad uniform was soaked. Evan looked up and caught me watching. He flicked his chin, telling me to get over there, but I just shook my head.

  “Emma’s going to kill him,” I said, breaking off a piece of Phoebe’s Pop-Tart.

  “Their relationship’s fizzed,” Phoebe said, belatedly swatting my hand away from her breakfast.

  “Ten points to Chang,” Toby said.

  “He should probably keep that soda as a mementos mori.” I smirked, and our table went totally silent.

  “Get it?” I asked. “Mentos, like, memento—”

  “We got it,” Toby assured me. “Jesus, Faulkner. Was that poetry? In Latin?”