Severed Heads, Broken Hearts

  12

  ONCE EACH SEPTEMBER, the teachers had a training day, and we got the day off. Junior year, Evan and Jimmy and I went down to Balboa, ate cheeseburgers on the boardwalk, and watched some terrible 3-D movie. But that year, I had totally forgotten about Teacher Development Day until the day before.

  Unsurprisingly, Toby and the debate crew had a grand adventure planned; they’d purchased tickets to a show in LA called Spring Awakening, and Toby was trying without success to convince everyone to dress up as turn-of-the-century schoolboys.

  “Really, you guys should come with us,” Phoebe said, when everyone sheepishly realized that Cassidy and I hadn’t been included in the original plan. “We bought our tickets over the summer, but you could still come even if you got seats in a different section.”

  “That’s all right,” Cassidy said casually. “Ezra and I already have plans.”

  This was news to me. Toby gave me a significant look, and I shrugged, having no idea what Cassidy was talking about.

  “Yeah? You two going gleaning?” Sam asked, which made everyone except Cassidy crack up.

  I should explain—“gleaning” is when you pick rotting and bruised crops, the stuff migrant workers leave behind in the fields because it’s not good enough to sell as produce. It’s actually a required field trip for eighth graders. They bus us over to the old ranch lands for the day, complete with a yearbook photographer, and it’s just as terrible as it sounds.

  Toby quickly filled Cassidy in on what we were laughing about.

  “You’re not serious,” Cassidy said. “Y’all had a field trip to pick rotting tomatoes? What about going to museums?”

  “Yeah,” Toby said dryly. “Not so much. Welcome to Eastwood.”

  On the way to third period, I asked Cassidy what she meant about our having plans. She was wearing a white lace dress with straps that wouldn’t stay put, and I couldn’t help but imagine running my hands over her shoulders, slipping the straps down.

  “Oh that.” Cassidy shrugged. “I figure it’s the perfect time to start your training. You’re going to be my protégé, remember?”

  “How could I forget?” I teased.

  “Good.” Cassidy grinned. “Pick me up outside Terrace Bluffs at eight thirty tomorrow morning. And bring a backpack full of school supplies.”

  SOMEHOW, EIGHT THIRTY on Wednesday morning felt horrendously early, as though my brain was convinced it should have the opportunity to sleep in on a day off. I yawned my way through a cup of coffee and joined the line of cars waiting to exit the Rosewood gates on their way to work.

  When I pulled onto the shoulder outside Terrace Bluffs, Cassidy was sitting on the curb, fiddling with a pair of Ray-Bans. She wore jeans and a plaid button-down shirt, a navy blue backpack by her feet.

  I’d been expecting another of Cassidy’s antique clothing concoctions, and this seemed out of character somehow. But even dressed normally, Cassidy was still someone you’d look at twice without quite knowing why. It was as though she was disguised as an ordinary girl and found the deception tremendously funny.

  “I saw a coyote this morning,” she announced, climbing into the front seat. “It was in our backyard obsessing over the koi pond.”

  “Maybe it just wanted a friend.”

  “Or it was looking for a koi mistress,” Cassidy observed wryly.

  It was a reference to a poem, I guessed, but I couldn’t place it. I shrugged.

  “‘Had we but world enough and time,’” Cassidy quoted. “Andrew Marvell?”

  “Right.” It sounded vaguely familiar, like something Moreno had put on an identification quiz back in Honors Brit Lit, but I wasn’t exactly a big poetry fan. “So where are we going?”

  “Where we have no business being, other than the business of mischief and deception,” she said. “Just drive over to the University Town Center.”

  So I did. And while I drove, Cassidy told me her theory about winning at debate tournaments. The most successful debaters (“I’d call them master debaters, but clearly you aren’t mature enough to handle that, Mister Smirkyface,” she teased) knew to reference literature and philosophy and history.

  “And the more sophisticated your references are, the better,” Cassidy said, toying with the air vent. “You don’t want to quote Robert Frost, for God’s sake. Quote John Rawls, or John Stuart Mill.”

  I hadn’t heard of either of those last two guys, but I didn’t say anything. Actually, I was trying to figure out if we were on a date, albeit one that had started at eight thirty in the morning.

  “We could still go gleaning,” I said, nodding out the window as we passed one of the remaining orange groves.

  “I don’t know why you think that’s funny.”

  “Haven’t you heard? It’s my hillbilly way of taking you to a museum.”

  Cassidy shook her head, but I could see that she was smiling.

  The University Town Center was an odd place to be at 8:45 in the morning. I hardly ever went there, since it was a fifteen-minute drive in the direction of Back Bay, this snotty WASP beach town. Actually, the Town Center straddled the border between Eastwood and Back Bay, said border consisting mostly of a Metrolink station, a medical complex with which I was intimately familiar, and a golf club where my father was a member.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” I said, pulling into the lot, “how the Town Center is on the border of two towns but in the center of neither?”

  Cassidy snorted appreciatively.

  “Well, come on,” she said, putting on her sunglasses. “We’re going to be late for class.”

  “Ha ha,” I said, but Cassidy didn’t seem like she was joking. “What are we really doing here?”

  The Town Center was the unofficial hangout for the University of California Eastwood, whose campus was just across the street.

  “I already told you,” Cassidy said impatiently, climbing out of the car and shouldering her backpack. “Mischief and deception. We’re crashing some classes at the university, getting you good and educated in the liberal arts so you make a stunning debut at the San Diego tournament. Voilà, here’s our class schedule.”

  I looked down at the purple Post-it she’d handed me.

  “History of the British Empire?” I read aloud. “Seventeenth-Century Literature? Introduction to Philosophy?”

  “Exactly,” Cassidy said smugly. “Now hurry up. We’re taking the road beyond the road less traveled, and being on time will make all the difference.”

  “WON’T THE TEACHER notice?” I asked, struggling to keep up with Cassidy’s fast pace as we took the elevated pathway from the Town Center to the main campus. “We’re not exactly enrolled here.”

  “First of all, it’s professor, and no, they won’t notice. I used to spend spring break staying with my brother when he was at Yale, and I’d randomly sneak into classes when I got bored. They never caught me. Besides, I picked survey courses, the ones with like a hundred students. We’re just going to appreciate the lectures, take notes on whatever we can use in debate, and then go on our merry way.”

  Which is basically what happened—in History of the British Empire, at least. We joined a hundred other students in an echoing, tiered lecture hall and sat through a mildly interesting but mostly dull fifty minutes on imperialism, capitalism, and war economy. I dutifully scribbled down some notes, which was more than I could say for the bearded guy two rows down who spent the entire class playing Angry Wings on his phone.

  “So?” Cassidy asked, once the class had let out and she’d dragged me into the line for the nearest coffee cart. “What did you think?”

  “Interesting,” I said, because I knew that was what she wanted me to say.

  “‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.’” Cassidy grinned and poured some sugar into her coffee. “Hamlet. And speaking of which, time for some seventeenth-century literature.”

  WHEN WE GOT to the lecture hall, something seemed wrong. It wasn’t until I noticed the textbooks that
I realized why.

  “I think we’re in the wrong room.” I whispered. “Should we go?”

  And then a professor in a funny, flat-bottomed tie strode to the front of the room and it was too late to do anything but sit there and listen.

  Somehow, we’d wound up in Organic Chemistry. I’d done honors chem as a junior, which had been one of the least pleasant experiences of my high-school career, and I assumed that organic chemistry would be an equally painful continuation of the same.

  The professor, this tiny Eastern European guy with a penchant for stroking his little blond chin beard, rolled up his sleeves. He drew two hydrocarbon chains on the board—that much at least I could recognize. One was shaped like an M, the other like a W.

  “Who can tell me the difference?” he asked, surveying the lecture hall.

  No one was brave enough to hazard a guess.

  “There is no difference,” the professor finally said. “The molecules are identical, if you consider them in three-D space.”

  He held up two plastic models and rotated one of them. They were identical.

  “Now, if you please,” he continued, drawing two new molecules on the board. “What is the difference here?”

  It was mind-blowing, the way I could suddenly see exactly what he was asking, now that I knew to look past the scribbles on the board and to imagine the molecules as they actually were.

  “Come on, doesn’t anyone play Tetris?” the professor asked, earning a few laughs.

  “They’re opposites,” someone called.

  “They’re opposites,” the professor repeated, picking up two new models and rotating them, “in the same sense that your left hand is the opposite of your right hand. They are mirror images of each other, which we shall call enantio-mers.”

  He went on, talking about how opposites could actually be the same thing, and how they occurred together in nature, not actually opposites at all, but simply destined to take part in different reactions. It was nothing like the grueling equations we’d been forced to crunch in honors chem, numbers with exponents so high that I sometimes felt bad for my calculator. There wasn’t any math to it at all, just theories and explanations for why reactions proceeded the way they did, and why molecules bonded in three dimensions. I didn’t understand all of it, but the stuff I did get was pretty interesting.

  When the class ended, Cassidy turned toward me, a little furrow between her eyebrows.

  “I’m really sorry I mixed up the classrooms,” she said.

  “What are you talking about? That was awesome.”

  I’d never before walked out of a classroom with my mind racing because of what I’d learned, and I wanted to savor the feeling as long as possible. It was as though my brain was suddenly capable of considering the world with far more complexity, as though there was so much more to see and do and learn. For the first time, I was thinking that college might not be like high school, that the classes might actually be worth something, and then Cassidy started laughing.

  “What?” I asked, a bit annoyed that she’d interrupted my private Zen moment.

  “No one likes organic chemistry. It’s, like, the worst requirement there is for pre-med.”

  “Well, maybe I liked it because I’m not going to be pre-med.”

  “No, you’re planning to be a field hand.” Cassidy rolled her eyes.

  “Obviously. I’ll operate on a seasonal schedule. I’ll call it Spring Gleaning.”

  Cassidy whacked me with her notebook.

  After an unexciting philosophy lecture on something called consequentialism, we walked back to the Town Center. It was around noon, and the weather had turned scorching. The sky, which was a brilliant blue directly overhead, lightened to white gray as it stretched over the mountains.

  I took off my button-down, which I’d worn over a T-shirt in case it was a date.

  Cassidy glanced over as I stuffed the collared shirt into my backpack.

  “What happened to your wrist?” she asked.

  “Nothing, it’s just a brace,” I said, not wanting to get into it.

  “So it’s some kind of jock fashion statement?” Cassidy teased. She pushed her sunglasses up into her hair, suddenly becoming serious. “Is that why you always wear long sleeves?”

  “No,” I said, mocking her. “I always wear long sleeves because it’s some kind of jock fashion statement.”

  She stuck out her tongue, which made her look like a little kid.

  “Very mature,” I said. “I thought we were pretending to be college students.”

  “Not anymore. Class is dismissed. Now it’s lunchtime.”

  We got sandwiches at Lee’s, one of those chains you grow up thinking must be everywhere, but in reality exists only in California.

  At Cassidy’s insistence, we took our sandwiches across the street to this little slope of rocks and grass that ran alongside the man-made creek and had our picnic in the shade of an oak tree. On the trail above us, bicyclists whizzed by on their narrow path, and across the water, I could see another couple spreading out their picnic. Not that Cassidy and I were a couple.

  I turned up the speakers on my phone and put on an old Crystal Castles album while Cassidy rooted through the grass, picking tiny white flowers and knotting them together into a crown.

  “Here,” she said, leaning in to place the circlet on my head.

  Her face was inches from mine. I could see the freckles that dusted her nose and the gold flecks in the disquieting blue of her eyes.

  When she pulled away to study what I looked like with the crown of flowers in my hair, I had the brief impression that she knew how much she confused me and was enjoying it.

  “When can I take this off?” I asked.

  “When you tell me where you’re applying to college,” she said mischievously.

  I shrugged. That question was easy.

  “Probably here, maybe some other state schools.”

  I could tell instantly that I’d said the wrong thing.

  “So that’s it?” Cassidy asked. “You’re fine with spending your whole life in the same twenty square miles?”

  Wordlessly, I took off the crown and examined it.

  “Well, it isn’t as though I’m going to be recruited anywhere.”

  “Oh.” Cassidy’s cheeks reddened, and she fiddled with her napkin for a moment. “Sorry. I hadn’t realized.”

  “No, it’s fine. One state school’s as good as the next. I wasn’t exactly aiming for the Ivy League.”

  “Why not?” Cassidy asked curiously. “Everyone from Barrows is.”

  It wasn’t the sort of question I was used to encountering: why not Harvard or Yale? The answer was obvious: because no one expected me to attend schools like those. I’d never shown a serious interest in academics, and I’d played tennis hoping our team would make All State, not training for the Olympics. The vast majority of my classmates, myself included, had never even seen it snow.

  “I don’t really think I’d fit in,” I finally said.

  “No, of course not.” Cassidy’s tone dripped scorn. “You’d prefer to fit in with the brainless jocks who win high-school popularity contests and the vapid girls who worship them.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t exactly fit in with them, either.”

  Cassidy started laughing.

  “Ezra,” she said slowly, “everyone has noticed.”

  I leaned over and placed the crown of flowers onto her head, letting my hands linger in her hair just a moment more than was necessary.

  And I suppose I should have tilted her face up toward mine and kissed her then, but I didn’t. I couldn’t tell if she was just trying to see if I would, or if she really wanted me to, and I didn’t want to find out.

  Instead, I told her about how it had been for me ever since the accident. I told her how I’d spent nearly two weeks in the hospital while the rest of my classmates finished junior year without me; how I’d missed prom and the student government elections and the
Junior-Senior Luau; how the first surgery hadn’t worked and my mom had cried when she found out I had to have another; how my tennis coach had come by the hospital and I’d heard him fighting with my dad out in the hallway, blaming me; how my so-called friends had sent a cheesy card they’d all signed, rather than visiting; how the doctors made such a big production of telling me that I’d never play sports again that I thought they were going to say I’d be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life; how the worst part was having to go back to school with kids I’d known since kindergarten, and the only thing that had changed was me, because I didn’t know who I was anymore, or who I wanted to be.

  When I finished, Cassidy didn’t say anything for a long time. And then she closed the short distance between us and brushed her lips against my cheek.

  They were cold from her diet soda, and it was over in an instant. But she didn’t move away. Instead, she sat down with her jeans touching mine and leaned her head on my shoulder. I could feel the flutter of her eyelashes against my neck with every blink, and we sat there for a while, breathing quietly together, listening to the thrum of traffic on University Drive and the gurgle of the creek.

  “There’s this poem,” Cassidy finally said, “by Mary Oliver. And I used to write a line from it in all of my school notebooks to remind myself that I didn’t have to be embarrassed of the past and afraid of the future. And it helped. So I’m giving it to you. The line is, ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do/With your one wild and precious life?’”

  We stared out at the creek, watching the couple across from us gather their things and head back to the path.

  “Well,” I said. “What are my options?”

  “Let me consult the oracle,” Cassidy mused, leaning forward to pull up a blade of grass. She examined it in her palm as though she was reading my fortune. “You can sound your barbaric yawp over the rooftops . . . or suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune . . . or seize the day . . . or sail away from the safe harbor . . . or seek a newer world . . . or rage against the dying of the light, although that one doesn’t start with s, so it sort of ruins the poetry of it all, don’t you think?”