Severed Heads, Broken Hearts

  Dr. Levine regarded me thoughtfully for a moment, and then looked down at my chart.

  “I think we could try that for a week or so to see how you get on,” he said, “so long as you understand that you’ll be working with your current range of motion, which really is on the borderline.”

  I said that I understood, and he went on to depress me with a list of cautions and don’ts and definite don’ts that came along with a stack of pamphlets.

  I zipped the pamphlets into my backpack and stepped into the hallway, thinking it was lucky I’d kept that stupid elevator key after all. The bathroom where I usually changed out of my sweaty exercise clothes was out of order, so I used the one at the other end of the hall, near the north elevator.

  I had to pass by Dr. Cohen’s office, and I hesitated outside for a moment. I hadn’t been there since the summer, when I’d quickly figured out what to say to get out of the weekly trauma of trauma counseling. It was strange, passing a door and knowing exactly where it led, and how lousy my life had been when I’d last used it, a sort of anti-nostalgia.

  The door to the waiting room opened and a girl stepped out. She was wearing a red and yellow Rancho cheer uniform, and she caught my eye with an embarrassed smile before heading toward the stairs.

  I didn’t feel like going home, so I wound up crossing the pedestrian bridge and wandering around UCE’s campus. The campus was smaller than I remembered, and with my backpack and leather jacket, I disappeared instantly into the crowd of students. It was a welcome relief, feeling as though I was invisible after the last few days, when staring at me had become an extracurricular activity the whole school had apparently signed up for.

  Being there reminded me of the day Cassidy and I had pretended to be students here, but then, I’d known it would. I thought about how she’d made that crown of flowers by the creek, laughing at me when I told her I’d probably wind up at some nearby state school, that I didn’t really have any plans to leave Orange County. She was right, though. I didn’t belong here, in a dorm room ten miles from home, falling asleep every night to the only slightly more distant thud of the Disneyland fireworks.

  I guess I half hoped to see Cassidy exiting a building, wearing jeans and sneakers, her disguise. I pictured her looking up, secretly glad that I’d found her. We’d sit down on one of those wooden benches and she’d tell me how she was sorry, and it had all been a mistake. But things like that never happen, except in really awful movies.

  I wandered into the library, where the girl at the desk waved me through without looking up from the book she was reading. I hadn’t really expected her to let me in, or thought about what I would do once I was inside. But I had a backpack full of textbooks, and there was this comfortable-looking lounge area, so I sat down and took out my homework and put on my headphones. But I’d chosen a sofa with a view of the entrance, stupidly hoping Cassidy would walk in.

  Of course she never did, and after a while, I stopped looking up every time the door opened. It was incredibly peaceful sitting there, listening to an old Frank Turner album and puzzling through my physics worksheets over a surprisingly good cup of campus coffee. By the time I packed up, I wondered if I’d really been looking for Cassidy after all, or if I’d been hoping to find myself.

  I DON'T KNOW what I expected when I slunk into Speech and Debate on Wednesday. Certainly not for Cassidy to glance up from some thick book she was reading, this terrible sadness in her eyes.

  “You’re back,” I said, a statement that only served to multiply the awkwardness between us.

  “What happened to your cane?”

  “I’m fine without it.” I slid clumsily into my chair, unfortunately proving the exact opposite. The coffee I was holding splattered across our shared desk.

  “Sorry,” I said, fishing some tissues out of my backpack to mop up the table. “Overfilled it.”

  Cassidy closed her eyes and took a deep breath, like she was holding herself back from saying and doing a million things at once.

  She picked up her book, angling it like a shield. The desk dried slowly between us, smelling faintly of French roast.

  Ms. Weng didn’t even notice that I’d been absent. She’d come down with a cold and was determined not to waste her sick days, so she put on some documentary about the history of public speaking and dimmed the lights.

  Cassidy squinted at her book in the dim glow from the television, and I tried and failed to pay attention to the DVD. The air around us crackled with tension, the tension of an accusation I wasn’t going to make, a relationship we’d once had, and an explanation I was fairly certain neither of us believed.

  If she thought I was such a joke, if she’d had another boyfriend all along, then she should have been laughing in the aftermath of our breakup, not acting like she wanted to disappear entirely. Something had happened. Something important. Even though the signs all pointed to a mundane explanation: the way Cassidy sometimes wore boys’ clothes, the background photo on her phone with the boy she claimed was her brother, the way she’d never had me over to her house, like I’d needed to be hidden or kept away, I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Any of it.

  I BECAME A regular in the UC Eastwood library that week, driving there every day after school to get my homework done. I was used to my afternoons being filled with activities—tennis, student government committee meetings, even that horrible SAT prep class I’d taken with like half of the AP kids in my year. And then there had been the debate team, and Toby and Cassidy to fill my afternoons. It was disarming having endless swaths of free time, and I was oddly thankful my advisor had signed me up for so many advanced courses, since I could stretch out my homework for hours if I did it thoroughly enough.

  I could tell my mom was worried about me, because when I got home from the library on Thursday, she’d taken my cane out of the closet and propped it against the door of my bedroom like she thought maybe I’d just forgotten I had one, instead of decided to stop using it altogether.

  But there was something comforting about the pain of getting around without it. Something reassuring about having a physical ache to hold on to, this pain that was a part of me independent of Cassidy. I thought about the metal in my knee, replacing this piece of me that was missing, that no longer worked. And it wasn’t my heart, I kept telling myself. It wasn’t my heart.

  27

  WHEN I CAUGHT up with Toby and Phoebe at the coffee cart on Friday, they seemed surprised, and not entirely pleased, to see me.

  “Hi,” I said sheepishly, stepping into line behind them.

  “Oh, am I allowed to talk to you?” Toby faked concern. “Or will your grunty jock friends shove me up against the lockers?”

  I snickered at the joke. Our school didn’t have lockers, since we each got a personal set of textbooks to keep at home.

  “Well, you look miserable,” Toby said.

  “Cassidy and I broke up.” Like the whole school hadn’t known for days.

  “I said miserable, not heartbroken, you asscanoe,” Toby corrected. “And you could have at least returned my texts after I took care of your absence on Monday.”

  I’d been wondering about that.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said. “The lack of detention was awesome.”

  It was so easy to slip back into the way I used to be around them that standing together in the coffee line made me miss them even more than I’d thought possible.

  “I’ve been sort of avoiding my phone lately,” I explained lamely.

  Phoebe smiled hesitantly and started to say something, but then changed her mind.

  “No cane,” she said instead.

  “I traded it for some magic beans and the dictatorship of a small Middle Eastern country.”

  “An unfortunately arid climate in which magic beans don’t exactly thrive,” Toby pointed out drily.

  “Knew I was getting screwed on that deal somehow.” I faked disappointment.

  Phoebe laughed, and Toby started talking about how, in the ev
ent my magic beans did grow, I should order my subjects to go gleaning, and the three of us standing there making ridiculous jokes was the happiest I’d felt in a long time.

  “Listen,” I said, “I wanted to—”

  “Ezra! Hiii!” Charlotte squealed, hugging me with an intimacy that she’d conjured out of nowhere. Jill and Emma materialized next to her, and the three of them joined our place at the front of the line like they knew exactly what they were doing and were confident they’d get away with it.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Charlotte asked sweetly, cutting in front of Phoebe to give her coffee order.

  Phoebe’s expression darkened, and she mumbled something at her shoes. Toby coughed meaningfully.

  “Ezra was saving our spot, weren’t you, sweetie?” Jill patted me on the arm.

  “Yeah, of course,” I said hollowly, wincing as I heard the words come out of my mouth.

  Toby looked disgusted, and I didn’t blame him.

  CASSIDY WAS CURLED in her seat in Speech and Debate, two-thirds of the way through the novel from Wednesday. I sat down quietly and took out a book of my own. She glanced over and sighed, shifting away from me in her chair, my presence actually making her recoil.

  “Seriously?” I whispered.

  “What?” Cassidy frowned, apparently unaware.

  “You can’t even stand to sit next to me now?”

  Cassidy put down her book and studied me for a moment, and whatever she was looking for, she obviously didn’t find it. “Well, we don’t really need to keep sitting next to each other.”

  “Fine,” I said stiffly, standing up.

  I moved to an empty table a few down from the one where we usually sat, and Ms. Weng came in and put on that awful documentary, and Cassidy and I glared at our respective books and occasionally each other in the thin light from the tinted windows.

  After a while, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I nearly jumped a mile.

  “Come with me,” Toby said.

  I hadn’t even heard him come in.

  Ms. Weng had abandoned us to the DVD, so I grabbed my bag and followed Toby into the Annex.

  “Don’t do this,” Toby said, leaning against the center table. It was covered with a mess of papers he’d been grading and the world’s most outdated iPod, which was leaking what sounded suspiciously like opera through its headphones.

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “You’re severed head-ing me!” Toby accused angrily.

  “I have no idea what that means!” I honestly didn’t. But Toby was serious.

  “Really?” His voice dripped scorn. “Remember my twelfth birthday? The severed head? How all of a sudden, we weren’t friends anymore.”

  “Are you calling Cassidy a severed head?”

  “No, Faulkner. I’m calling you an idiot. You’re pushing me away, exactly like you did in the seventh grade.”

  Toby glared at me, and I crossed my arms, glaring back.

  “In case you forgot, you were the one who caught that head,” I said. “It was nothing to do with me.”

  “I’m not talking about that stupid head, Faulkner! I’m talking about you. I was the fat kid who drew comic books. I was going to be bullied no matter what. You act like that day at Disneyland was my big tragedy, but you’re the one who lost your best friend. You’re the one who started eating lunch with the popular jocks and forgot how to be awesome because you were too busy being cool. We could have still hung out after school if you’d asked, if you’d wanted to. But you just dropped me because everyone expected you to. And you’re doing it again, and it sucks.”

  I stared at Toby in horror, realizing that he was right. I had pushed him away. To be fair, we’d been twelve, and I’d considered it a miracle that I’d looked and dressed and hit a ball well enough to be spared the brunt of that hell. But it had honestly never occurred to me that I didn’t have to lose my best friend that year. That I had a choice.

  “So I’m an asshole,” I said.

  “Well yeah. Insert gay joke about my liking assholes here.” Toby shrugged, trying not to grin.

  “Well, I would. But then that would make me a dick.”

  To by snorted. “Touché.”

  “I’m sorry I severed-headed you. I just, I don’t know. The whole Cassidy debacle.”

  I sighed and glanced toward the door to Ms. Weng’s room.

  “Yeah, thanks for texting. We waited for you two at the Fiesta Palace forever,” Toby complained.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, feeling awful.

  “How’d she do it, anyhow? Make you stop at some coffee place and then break your heart at the table?”

  “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, be
cause 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.”