Severed Heads, Broken Hearts

  Cassidy and I slunk from Ms. Weng’s room in defeat. The moment the door closed, Cassidy turned toward me, eyes blazing.

  “What the hell?” she demanded. “She cornered us back there. And I never signed up to compete—it’s like she was planning this all along. I knew there was a reason I got put in debate class! ‘Oh, there aren’t any other team electives open,’ my advisor said. ‘It’s this or phys ed.’ Yeah, freaking right. I’m not some champion pony they can parade around whenever they feel like it. I don’t compete anymore, and they have no right to force me into it like this.”

  “Um,” I said.

  “And you didn’t sign up for it, either!” Cassidy jabbed a finger at my chest. “You should have seen your face when Ms. Weng asked if you had any special needs. I wish you’d punched her.”

  “Yeah, that would’ve been productive.”

  Cassidy sighed. “God, Ezra, you really don’t get it. Our names are already entered. We compete or forfeit on the tournament listing.”

  Crap. I wasn’t familiar with the rules of debate competitions, and I hadn’t realized the only way out was to forfeit publicly.

  “Um, Cassidy?” I had to tell her. “Remember that day in class with the sign-up sheet and how you were laughing at me?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I sort of signed you up as a joke,” I admitted.

  “You WHAT?”

  “I didn’t know!” I quickly amended. “You’d pulled that stupid stunt on me in Spanish and then Toby had signed me up so I just figured—”

  “You just figured what, exactly?” Cassidy said coldly. “That it would be funny?”

  “Um, I guess? I didn’t know you felt like that about debate. I didn’t know that you’d stopped competing.”

  I hung my head, waiting for Cassidy to laugh and say that it was okay. But she didn’t.

  “That’s right,” Cassidy said fiercely. “I stopped competing. Just like how you stopped competing in tennis. But you know what? I get that you don’t want to talk about it. Just because I don’t limp around with a freaking cane doesn’t mean I have to explain myself to people I’ve known for five seconds for quitting. So screw you for signing me up for this because you thought it would be funny.”

  Her eyes burned with revulsion as she stomped past me. And I didn’t blame her. I felt awful. Like I should go back into Ms. Weng’s office and explain everything. But then the bell rang, and I realized I was going to be late for Spanish.

  11

  BY THAT EVENING, my weekend was shaping up to be pretty lousy. I’d come straight home from school and spent the day alternating between doing the key terms for Coach Anthony’s class and playing Zombie Guitar God on mute to keep my mind off how badly I’d screwed things up with Cassidy. But it wasn’t working.

  Worse, I could tell that my mom kept coming to check on me, hovering just outside my bedroom door and listening. Cooper, who was curled on a bathrobe at the foot of my bed, would glance at the door and then sigh, settling back into his nest.

  Well, it is Friday night, old sport, his eyes seemed to say. And there’s a whole world out there.

  Cooper was right; maybe I should go to Jimmy’s backyard kegger. I briefly considered it before remembering what happened the last time I went to a house party. So yeah, that was definitely out. And then the little Skype icon on my computer screen dinged. It was Toby, and did I want to come over?

  I changed out of my pajamas, grabbed my keys, and practically opened my bedroom door into my mom’s face.

  “Oh, you’re up,” she said.

  “Well yeah, it’s nine o’clock. I’m going out.”

  “Where are you going?” she called after me. “I need to know where you’re going!”

  “Why?” I asked, mildly curious as to when this had become a new house rule.

  She spluttered over that one for a good ten seconds.

  “Look, I’m going to Toby’s,” I said, which was pretty charitable. “I have my phone, and we’re not going to huff rat poison or anything.”

  “Ezra!” She sounded shocked. “Don’t be rude. I have every right to worry.”

  “I know,” I said in exasperation. “You keep reminding me.”

  As I pulled out of the driveway, I wondered what everyone from school was doing. I could pretty much guess the crowd that was headed to Jimmy’s party to drink a few beers in their bathing suits. And everyone else was probably headed to the Prism Center, this outdoor mall with an IMAX cinema and lots of dramatically lit palm trees. The Prism was really the only place to go in Eastwood besides the Chinese strip mall, and even there, the cops would hassle you to start heading home when it was still early because of the town curfew. I privately thought of them as the Prism Wardens, which was funny for about two seconds, and then became infinitely depressing—and not just because the name now reminded me of Cassidy and her panopticon.

  It was strange, driving over to Toby’s. I’d only ever biked there, on the trails that connect the different subdivisions. Toby lived in Walnut Ranch, one of the older developments south of the loop. I’d practically lived at his house during elementary school, and as I drove, I remembered flashes of what we’d been like as kids: how we’d taped notes to the undersides of each other’s mailboxes, written in a code that only we could decipher. The year we dressed as Batman and Robin for Halloween and then switched costumes, just to see how long it would take my dad to notice, the answer being a disturbingly long time. The Cub Scout camping trip when the scout leader’s obnoxious son put a worm in my pudding cup, so Toby and I caught a frog and zipped it inside his sleeping bag. Writing swear words in the air with our sparklers on the Fourth of July. Begging my mom to take us to Barnes and Noble at midnight to get the latest Harry Potter book and promising we wouldn’t stay up all night reading but doing it anyway.

  I’d completely forgotten what Toby had been like, back then. How he’d always been the one to devise our elaborate schemes, how he’d constantly gotten me into trouble, and then out of it with an aw-shucks routine and apology. He’d grown up into exactly the unabashedly nerdy, quick-witted guy you’d expect from a kid who went door-to-door selling homemade comics to raise the start-up capital for our summer lemonade stand when we were ten. And I’d grown up into a massive douche—with a cane.

  TOBY’S HOUSE LOOKED the same as I remembered, complete with an unwashed burgundy minivan parked in the driveway. I rang the bell and a tiny dog started yapping.

  Toby’s sister opened the door. She was wearing a bright pink bathrobe and carrying an angry little terrier that looked like an ankle biter.

  “Hey, Emily,” I said.

  “Omigod.” She seemed shocked that I’d turned up at her house, as though she’d forgotten I used to know her garage door code.

  Toby’s house was pretty compact, and the front door opened directly into the living room, where three of Emily’s friends were watching one of those terrible vampire romance things in their pajamas, sleeping bags already laid out.

  “Hiiii, Ezra,” one of the girls said, giggling.

  “Um, hi?” I said. Poor Toby. No wonder he’d wanted me to come over. Thankfully, he came dashing around the corner, fastening a pair of cuff links.

  “Welcome to purgatory,” he said. “Come on in.”

  Toby’s room hadn’t changed much; there was a new shelf displaying some action figures I didn’t recognize, a police box, and some random dude dressed like Toby in a blazer and bow tie, plus a couple of samurai swords. And then I caught sight of the top shelf of his bookcase and stopped dead.

  “You kept them?” I asked.

  “I finished them.” Toby pulled out the thick stack of homemade comics and tossed them onto his bed.

  I reached for Superhero Academy, volume I. It was laughingly amateur, done in colored pencil on computer paper, with the byline in alternating blue and red bubble letters: created by Toby Ellicott & Ezra Faulkner.

  We’d worked on Superhero Academy every day after school in the fifth grade. I t
hink we’d gotten four volumes in before suffering from artistic differences. But there were at least eight volumes scattered across the bed. A few of them were computer-illustrated and almost professional-looking. I picked up Justice University: The Final Battle and flipped to the end.

  “Okay, there’s no way Invisible Boy could defeat the Arch Alchemist with a samurai sword,” I argued.

  “You’re just bitter because I made your character evil,” Toby snapped.

  “Not at all, I just don’t get how the Arch Alchemist became mortal all of a sudden.”

  “Because he split his soul into seven pieces and hid them all over Justice City,” Toby retorted.

  “You turned our comic book into a Harry Potter rip-off?” I spluttered.

  “Are we seriously having this discussion?”

  I felt my cheeks heat up, and I tossed the graphic novel back onto the bed with a shrug. Toby sorted them into the right order and returned them to his shelf.

  “So are we going or not?” he asked.

  “Where? Jimmy’s party?” I sincerely hoped he wasn’t going to annoy me into showing up at that.

  “I could kill Luke,” Toby said. “He really didn’t invite you?”

  “Invite me to what?”

  “The Floating Movie Theater? You know, that piece of paper with some random words on it and a URL?”

  Suddenly, I remembered the sheet of paper Luke had passed me in Moreno’s class that afternoon. I’d thought it was some stupid flyer for Film Club.

  “Crap,” I said. “He gave me something, but I never opened it. I was sort of distracted.”

  Toby snorted. “Yeah, I’ll bet you were distracted.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Cassidy, dude. I know you’re into her, but trust me, it’s better to just forget it. She’ll get into your head and mess you up.”

  “Believe me,” I said with a sigh, “staying away from Cassidy won’t be a problem.”

  And then I explained how I’d accidentally forced her into joining the debate team.

  “You are so dead,” Toby said.

  “I didn’t realize it was such a big deal,” I admitted. “You put my name down.”

  “And I figured you’d cross it off.” Toby shrugged. “But Cassidy’s different. A FORFEIT next to her name on the tournament lists would cause gossip. She’s the defending champion, you know? Everyone thought she’d rank nationally, but she withdrew from the state tournament two days before the primaries, just totally disappeared. To have her name posted as a forfeit from Eastwood, the most pathetic debate team out there? Anyway, are we going to Luke’s screening or not? Because we need to pick up coffee filters on the way.”

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, we were in Toby’s spectacularly dinged, hand-me-down burgundy minivan (known fondly as the “Fail Whale”), trying to coax the broken antenna to pick up an FM frequency as we cruised up Eastwood Boulevard.

  “Tonight’s going to be fun,” Toby promised. “You’ll see.”

  And I guess it might have been, if I wasn’t still lugging around the memory of my earlier douche-baggage. Because the more that I thought about Cassidy on the swing set in her bare feet, smiling at me as she promised that we’d escape the panopticon together, the more I wished I hadn’t wrecked everything.

  “Yeah, fun,” I muttered, watching a tumbleweed blow through the crosswalk and latch itself to a yield sign in the center divider.

  According to Toby, the floating movie theater was something of a closely guarded legend in nerd circles, and my being invited was a pretty big deal. The history went back to our Cub Scout days, when an enterprising Eastwood High senior named Max Sheppard had stolen the janitor’s key ring and quietly made himself a copy. He used the keys to play a series of nasty pranks on the administration, successfully evading capture. On his sixteenth birthday, Luke Sheppard inherited the keys to the kingdom from his older brother, but chose to use them for good. And so began the Floating Movie Theater, a series of secret film screenings never held in the same place twice.

  The campus was pretty deserted, and Toby double-parked his van, straddling the principal’s and vice principal’s spots.

  “Grab the filters,” he told me.

  “Remind me why I just spent five bucks on coffee filters?”

  “Because you have five bucks and I don’t?” Toby grinned. “Naw, it’s just part of what we do. I mean, we don’t want to be caught—we want to be noticed. So we watched Dead Poets Society in Mr. Moreno’s room and left behind a ton of whiteboard markers. We watched the Princess Bride in the library and donated a box of books. And tonight, we’re screening Rushmore in the teachers’ lounge. Hence the coffee filters.”

  Toby stopped walking, waiting for the sheer awesomeness of the Floating Movie Theater to wash over me.

  Instead, this is what I said: “We’re breaking into the teachers’ lounge?”

  “More like ‘letting ourselves in,’” Toby assured me. “Come on.”

  I planted my feet firmly at the edge of the parking lot.

  “You better be damned sure we won’t get caught,” I warned. “Because I can’t exactly run if the cops show up.”

  Toby started laughing. “Funny story,” he said. “Max Sheppard? Why, just the other week, he let me off on a warning for my busted taillight. Now let’s go.”

  THE MOVIE HAD just started. Toby and I grabbed seats on the side, and I tried to follow along, but mostly, what I wound up following was Cassidy’s expression.

  I suppose she didn’t think anyone was looking and had let her guard down, the way you do in an empty room. The way I did when I closed the blinds and stared up at the ceiling fan above my bed, equally fascinated and horrified by the thoughts racing through my brain.

  She seemed so sad, even though the movie was a comedy and everyone else was laughing, as though she wasn’t paying attention to the film at all, but was haunted by images of something else. I’d never seen her like that, and it made me wonder about what Toby had said, how she’d disappeared without warning, and how no one had known what to make of it.

  A couple of people stood up when the movie ended, but Luke insisted that we had to watch the credits. Surprisingly, they sat back down, looking thoroughly chastised; I hadn’t realized Luke carried that sort of power, but it made an odd sort of sense. I’d heard him referred to as the “king of the nerds,” and I had never understood why, but I could see it easily then.

  “So what did you think?” Toby asked as we deposited our coffee filters on a table with everyone else’s loot.

  “About the movie?”

  “Obviously the movie is a classic and Napoleon Dynamite is a pale imitation of this far superior film,” Toby said wryly, “but no. About this: secret screenings, coded invitations, positive vandalism.”

  “It’s awesome,” I said. And I meant it. I hadn’t known that people did things like this, especially in Eastwood. It was strange, realizing that these sorts of clandestine activities happened at a school I used to think I ran, that there were other things going on besides my old friends’ parties. “Why don’t more people know about it?”

  “Because Evan McMillan would turn this into some obnoxious drinking game,” Luke said, joining us.

  “Yeah, probably,” I admitted. “Beer funneling through coffee filters.”

  We stood there in silence for a bit, Luke with this knowing look on his face, as though he was glad I’d finally seen what he could do.

  “So Luke,” I said, breaking the silence, “how about screening One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the nurse’s office? I know it’d be a tight fit, but it would be sort of perfect.”

  “Dude,” Toby said. “That would be epic.”

  “I didn’t ask for your ideas, Faulkner,” Luke said coldly, drifting over to play host to a nearby group of juniors.

  “He really doesn’t like me,” I noted.

  “Nah, ’course he does,” Toby said unconvincingly. “You’re pals.”

  I gave him
a look.

  “His girlfriend used to have the world’s biggest crush on you,” Toby admitted. “Probably still does.”

  “Phoebe?”

  “‘Oh Ezra, you’re like some sexy vampire,’” Toby mocked.

  I winced, but I had to admit, he had a point.

  “Hey there, sexy vampire,” someone said, tapping me on the shoulder.

  Cassidy tucked her hair behind her ears and smiled as though that afternoon—and the past few hours—had never happened.

  “Hi?” I said cautiously.

  “How much do you love Bill Murray?” she asked, rambling about the movie we’d just sat through. “I adore him. If he popped the question, I’d Bill Murray him in a second.”

  “Um,” I said, confused. Had I missed something? Last time I’d checked, Cassidy hated my guts, and I’d gotten the impression that we weren’t speaking to each other any time in the foreseeable future.

  “Listen,” Cassidy said. “I could use a protégé, so tag, you’re it. I’m going to teach you everything I know about debate, and you’re going to win first place at the San Diego tournament.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes! And the heavenly cherubs will play tiny ukuleles of joy and you will lay incense and coniferous fruits at my alta r.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said dryly. “Coniferous fruits and goddess worship. Check.”

  “That’s more like it!” Cassidy grinned.

  “Oh, look over there,” Toby deadpanned, shooting me a sly glance. “It’s someone I suddenly feel the need to go bother.”

  “I thought you were mad,” I said after Toby left.

  “Like Hamlet, my madness is fleeting,” Cassidy informed me.

  “No, I thought you were mad at me,” I clarified.

  “Ezra, you’re being ridiculous. I’m over it. That’s what girls do; they get angry, and then they get over it. Haven’t you ever been friends with a girl before?”

  Of course I hadn’t; I’d dated my fair share of them, but I’d never wanted to be friends with any of the girls in my old crowd. What would have been the point?

  Maybe Cassidy was right—maybe it was only girlfriends who stayed mad at you. Still, there was something in her smile that I didn’t quite believe. But I accepted my good fortune, knowing better than to question it.