He kept glancing over his shoulder at dinner, either expecting—or maybe hoping for—the phone to ring. Dad keeps a home office, so he can get work done before and after he comes home from his actual office. He claims it’s because New York is three hours ahead and sometimes he has to take a conference call at six in the morning, but really, it’s because he wants us to see how important he is, that he can’t ever be away from his files and fax machine.
My parents quietly discussed what to do about the neighbor’s tree branches that hung over into our backyard, and then the phone in my father’s office rang. The call went to voice mail, the familiar notes riffing through his answering machine. Dad dashed for the phone.
“Stop calling, you little bastard,” he roared.
Mom pursed her lips and ate another mouthful of quinoa, but I nearly died laughing. When my father had his office line installed, he must’ve pissed off the telephone company, because they gave him a real gem of a number. Do you remember the first time you figured out that you could play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by dialing a certain combination of tones on the keypad? That combination just so happens to ring my father’s home office.
There’s usually a completely clueless kid on the line, punching away at the keypad, unaware he’s even made a call. It drives my father nuts, but he’s convinced it would be too much of a hassle to have the number changed. Personally, I think it’s hilarious. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll pick up and try to get a conversation going with whoever’s on the other end. A lot of the time they don’t speak English, but last December this charming little kid decided I was Santa Claus and made me promise to get him a retainer for Christmas, which just about killed me.
When Dad sat back down at the table, he picked up his fork as though we hadn’t just heard him shouting obscenities into the phone.
“So, Ezra,” he said, giving me the same schmoozy grin he must use at every UCLA alumni donor reception, “how’s the new car running?”
“Yeah, it’s awesome,” I said, even though it was just your average five-year-old sedan. Not like I’d been expecting our insurance, or my dad, to replace the roadster. But, I mean, it would have been nice.
“Well, just remember, kiddo: if you put a dent in that thing, I’ll kill ya.” Dad started laughing like he’d said something tremendously witty, and I offered up a weak grin in return, hoping I’d missed the joke.
6
IF EVERYTHING REALLY does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. You draw up an X axis and a Y axis, where a positive slope represents a positive attitude, plot some points, and there you go. But that’s crap, because better isn’t quantifiable. Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about in Calculus the next morning while Mr. Choi reviewed derivatives. Well, that and how much I hate math class.
I got in line for the coffee cart during break, where I had the particular luck to get stuck behind two freshmen girls who wouldn’t stop giggling. They kept bumping each other with their shoulders and glancing back at me, as though daring each other to say something. I didn’t know what to make of it.
They hung around while I gave my coffee order, and when I grabbed a sugar packet from the little station, the taller girl thrust a stirrer at me.
“Thanks,” I said, wondering what this was about. I’d occasionally experienced this sort of thing from love-struck freshmen during junior year, but I was pretty certain that my status as an unattainable upperclassman had been irrevocably withdrawn.
“Hi, Ezra,” the girl said, giggling. “Remember me? Toby’s sister?”
“Yeah, of course,” I said, even though I doubted I would have recognized her in the hallway. She looked like so many other freshmen girls, skinny and brunette, with a pink hoodie and matching braces. And then I realized I’d completely forgotten her name.
I stalled, stirring the sugar into my coffee, and then I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Good morning,” Cassidy said brightly. “What kind of high school has its own coffee cart?”
“Beverage cart,” I said. “We had a coffee rebellion last year. Before that, it was just hot chocolate.”
I started to introduce Cassidy to Toby’s sister, mostly out of politeness, and hesitated, wishing I could remember the girl’s name.
“Emily,” Toby’s sister supplied.
“Right, Emily,” I said sheepishly, committing it to memory.
The passing bell rang, and both freshmen looked panicked, as though the world would collapse if they didn’t head to class that very second. Ah, to be a ninth grader.
“Shouldn’t you two get to class?” I asked, gently teasing them. “Don’t want to be late.”
They scrambled away as though I’d given orders. I could hear them giggling as they walked, their shoulders pressed together.
“Don’t want to be late,” Cassidy echoed with a smirk. She’d ditched the oversized boy’s shirt in favor of a plaid dress that must’ve been an antique. It was tight in all of the right places though, and Butch Cassidy she was not.
I threw away my empty sugar packet and headed toward the Speech and Debate classroom.
“It’s called a tartle,” Cassidy said, following me. “In case you were wondering.”
“What’s called a tartle?”
“That pause in conversation when you’re about to introduce someone but you’ve forgotten their name. There’s a word for it. In Scotland, it’s called a tartle.”
“Fascinating,” I said sourly. Actually, it was interesting, but I was still upset with her over what had happened in Spanish class.
“Wait,” Cassidy persisted. “About what I said yesterday? I didn’t know. God, you must hate me. Go ahead, I give you permission to aim an invisible crossbow at my heart.”
She stopped walking and stood there a moment, her eyes squeezed shut, as though expecting me to play along. When I didn’t, she frowned and caught up with me once more.
“It’s not like I was asking around or anything,” she continued. “The whole school’s talking about you. And we’re going to be late, by the way, if we don’t hurry.”
“You’re the one walking with me,” I pointed out.
She bit her lip, and I could tell that she’d made a pretty educated guess as to why I hadn’t wanted to walk her to English the day before. This strange, silent moment of understanding passed between us.
“What’s your fourth period?” I asked, filling the silence.
“Speech and Debate.” Her lip curled, as though she’d gotten stuck with the class like I had.
“Me too. Listen, you should go ahead.”
“And let you take that invisible crossbow and aim it at my back?” she scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
And so we were late together.
“FAULKNER!” TOBY BOOMED. He was sitting on top of the teacher’s desk and wearing another shocker of a bow tie. Class hadn’t started, and hardly anyone was in their seats. Through the little window built into the door, I could see Ms. Weng in the Annex, in conversation with the journalism teacher.
Toby slid off the desk and practically choked when he saw Cassidy.
“What are you doing here?” he spluttered.
“You two know each other?” I frowned, glancing back and forth between them. Cassidy looked horrified, and I couldn’t read Toby’s expression at all.
“Cassidy’s—well,” Toby seemed to change his mind mid-explanation. “She’s a fencer.”
For some reason, this made Cassidy uncomfortable.
“What, like swords?” I asked.
“He means a picket fencer,” Cassidy clarified, grimacing as though the subject was painful. “It’s just this term from debate. It’s not important.”
“Like hell it’s not!” Toby retorted. “I can’t believe you transferred to Eastwood. You transferred here, right? Because, seriously, this is epic! Everyone’s going to freak out.”
Cassidy shrugged, clearly not wanting to talk about it. We took a table together in the back, an
d, after a few minutes, Ms. Weng came in and passed out a course description. She was young, barely out of grad school, the sort of teacher who would constantly lose control of the class and quietly panic until the teacher next door came in and yelled.
She talked about the different types of debate and then made Toby get up and sell us on joining the debate team.
He sauntered to the front of the classroom, buttoned his blazer, and grinned.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “I presume that we all share an interest in booze, mischief, and coed sleepovers.”
The color drained from Ms. Weng’s face.
“I’m speaking, of course, about getting into college, where one has the option to engage in those sorts of illicit activities after achieving academic excellence, naturally,” Toby quickly amended. “And joining the debate team makes an excellent résumé stuffer for those college applications.”
Toby continued talking about the debate team, the time commitment, and the school’s past record (“We’re even worse than the golf team!”). He was a decent public speaker, and for a moment I wondered why he’d never gone out for student government. And then I remembered the severed head.
Afterward, Toby sent around a sign-up sheet for the first debate tournament of the year, which no one signed. When the sheet got to Cassidy, her shoulders shook with silent laughter. She slid the piece of paper onto my desk.
Written at the top of the list, in obnoxiously hot pink Sharpie, was this beauty:
EZRA MOTHA-EFFING FAULKNER, YO!
(you owe me for the Gatorade piss)
I couldn’t help it—I burst out laughing.
The room went deadly silent, and Toby grinned like he’d just won the Ping-Pong world championship. Ms. Weng frowned at me. I quickly turned my laughter into a fake coughing fit, and Cassidy leaned over and helpfully whacked me on the back. To my deepest shame, this made me actually start coughing in earnest.
By the time I got it under control, it had sort of become an event.
“Sorry,” Cassidy whispered.
I shrugged like it didn’t matter, but when she wasn’t looking, I scribbled her name onto the sign-up sheet in payback and then passed it forward. For the remainder of class, we worked in pairs structuring a parliamentary debate. Cassidy and I partnered together.
“What’s a picket fencer?” I pressed, when she made no move to start the assignment.
“It’s, well, it’s when you place first in every round at a tournament.” She sighed, fiddling with her still-capped pen. “Your cumulative’s a row of ones, like a little picket fence.”
I considered this, the idea not just of winning, but doing so without a single defeat, as Toby wandered over and pulled up a chair.
“Yeah, hi,” he said. “In case you were wondering, you’re not going to have to turn that in.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“I swear it on the grave of my sweet dead hamster Petunia,” he said, which wasn’t exactly reassuring since, to my knowledge, Toby had never owned a hamster. “Ms. Weng asked me to come up with a random topic during break as an exercise. Technically, I’m not in this class. I’m her student aide.”
“So you’re her Weng-man?” Cassidy asked.
The three of us laughed, and it struck me that Cassidy and Toby knew each other. That, if anyone was an outsider, it wasn’t the new girl, it was me.
When the bell rang, Ms. Weng told us to hold on to our debates, and Toby mouthed, “Told you so.”
The classroom began to clear out, and I watched Cassidy fasten the buckles on her satchel. Her hair was half pinned up into this crown of braids, and with the sharp planes of her cheekbones and her pale skin, she looked as though she’d stepped out of a different era, one where people bought war bonds and decamped to the countryside to avoid air raids. I’d never seen anyone like her, and I couldn’t help but stare.
“Come on,” Toby said, and Cassidy glanced up, nearly catching me staring. “Join me for lunch. You’re coming too, Faulkner. I could use a new sidekick.”
“Actually, I’m going to Chipotle,” I said. “With Evan and Jimmy and them.”
But it sounded ridiculous, and even as I said it, I knew I wasn’t really going.
“Sure you are.” Toby laughed. “I’m not taking no for an answer. Now let’s go, for my harem does not eat before I have graced them with my magnificence.”
7
THE MOMENT I entered the quad, I realized I’d made a grand miscalculation: Jimmy and Evan hadn’t gone to Chipotle after all. All of my old friends had stayed on campus. I could see them there, at the choice table near the wall that divided the upper and lower quads. The water polo and tennis guys were squished around the too-small table, balancing girlfriends on their laps. Charlotte’s Song Squad crowd sat on the wall, drinking Diet Cokes and swinging their bare legs. It wasn’t quite the same crew as last year, but the composition didn’t matter. It was still that table, the one where the laughter carried across the quad and everyone who heard it wished they were in on the joke.
“Yo, Captain!” Luke Sheppard called, catching sight of Toby and waving.
I could feel everyone watching as we crossed the quad: Toby in his bow tie, Cassidy in her crown of braids, and me, with the sleeve of my black hoodie pulled low over my wrist brace, trying to look as though I needed my cane less than I actually did.
Toby ushered us over to one of the better-placed tables in the upper quad, an eight-seater with a gray beach umbrella, half full of our year’s resident eccentrics. “Meet the rest of our school’s illustrious debate team,” he said, and for a moment I thought he was joking.
There was Luke Sheppard, the president of the film club, with his hipster glasses and signature smirk. The year before, our whole school had followed this blog called Auto-Tune the Principal, and while Luke had never outright claimed credit, everyone knew it was him. Sitting next to Luke was Sam Mayfield, looking like he’d gotten lost on his way home from the country club. Sam smacked of future lawyer, and even though he was a junior, he’d been head of the Campus Republicans for as long as I could remember. Across from Sam, drinking a can of Red Bull and playing some game on his iPad, was Austin Covelli, our school’s resident graphic designer. Austin was the guy who whipped up the yearbook cover and designed the school sweatshirts. Back during sophomore year, he’d launched an online T-shirt store.
Mostly, I’d been picturing Toby’s friends as a bunch of obscure honor-roll students, the sort who clubbed together out of social necessity and made it through high school largely unnoticed. Not these guys.
“Look who I found,” Toby said gleefully.
Luke’s jaw dropped. Sam let out an incredulous laugh.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Cassidy Thorpe,” Austin said, flicking his shaggy blond hair out of his eyes without looking away from his game. “What the heck are you doing here?”
Cassidy smiled hugely. “Waiting to graduate and move on with my life, same as y’all. Now how come none of you ever mentioned that your school has a coffee cart?”
Cassidy slid onto the bench next to Toby, pulled out a packet of peanut butter crackers, and patted the seat next to her. It was the end of the bench, thank God, and I wondered if she’d left it for me on purpose, so I wouldn’t have to ask anyone to shift down.
“Oh, right,” Toby said a little too theatrically, pretending he’d only just remembered. “You all know Faulkner.”
“Hey,” I said sheepishly, taking the proffered seat. I guess they’d thought I was just passing by, showing the new student around, but when I sat down, Luke gave Toby a significant look, as though my joining the table needed to be preceded by his approval.
I put on my sunglasses and watched everyone pick at their food (lunch starts at 11:30, which is ridiculous, on account of how some nearby food chains are still serving breakfast sandwiches). I hadn’t brought anything, and I glanced toward the lunch line in the lower quad, which was an endless stretch of underclassmen.
“Quick, eat these.” Phoebe Chang slid a plastic container of grocery store cupcakes onto the table, her nose stud sparkling in the sunlight. There was a pink stripe in her hair that I didn’t remember. “I just swiped them from the front office. It’s the school nurse’s birthday.”
She glanced over her shoulder, as though expecting to be apprehended at any moment, and Toby grabbed for one of the vanilla cupcakes.
“Fifty points for irony if we get food poisoning,” he said. “By the way, Phoebe, this is Cassidy. And you know Ezra.”
Phoebe, who was still basking in the glory of her cupcake heist, glanced at me and nearly dropped her iced tea. “Holy crap. I’m five minutes late and I miss the most historic lunch-table switch in the annals of the upper quad.”
“I thought you didn’t do annals, Phoebs,” Luke said with a wink.
Phoebe picked up a cupcake, smashed the frosting down with her tongue, and offered it to Luke with an evil grin. “I don’t know about that. How about some sloppy seconds, Sheppard?”
Luke took the cupcake and bit into it with relish, antagonizing her. I wondered how long they’d been dating. Phoebe, who was not, in fact, a notorious cupcake thief, was actually the editor of the school paper.
“So Ezra,” Phoebe said, sliding onto the bench next to Luke. “How’s life as a teenage vampire?”
Toby snorted, and Cassidy snickered through a mouthful of cupcake.
“Oh come on,” Phoebe continued. “You’re asking for it. Pale skin, black clothes, no lunch, and that whole brooding thing? It’s hilarious. You should get some body glitter and go after an unsuspecting freshman.”
“You should!” Cassidy agreed. “Tell her you’re a dangerous monster. And mention how good her blood smells.”
“Wrong time of the month on that one, and I’m getting slapped,” I muttered, and everyone laughed.
“You’re funny.” Phoebe passed me the last chocolate cupcake. “And I always thought your friends were laughing over their own farts.”