fml (17 page)

It wasn't the question itself that blindsided me. Firstly, it was how he'd asked it. Hearing Eli Horowitz ask something so crude was out of character. Secondly, and more importantly, it was the fact that he actually thought I had a chance of hooking up with
Cassie. Even if it was a jealous fantasy planted in his brain by a combination of alcohol and depression, it still meant that he believed me capable of such an act. Or better yet, that he believed Cassie would even have me.

“No?” I said.

“You don't sound sure.”

“Definitely not,” I said. “She won't even let me kiss her. Not that I tried. Well, I did, but it was an accident and she shot me down. I swear.” Eli stared at me, not blinking, not twitching a single muscle on his face the whole time I babbled. He scared me more than Dean did, but my fear couldn't stop my diarrheal word geyser.

“Shut up, Simon.” Eli held the bottle out to me. It was only half full and I hoped that Eli hadn't consumed the entire missing portion.

I held up my hands. “I've had enough liquor for two parties.” The truth was that I barely felt buzzed. I'd danced off the tequila shot long ago, and what little beer I'd had was doing nothing but making me have to pee.

Eli shook the bottle at me. “Drink.” It wasn't an offer, it was a command.

“Yeah. Sure.” I sat down under the window and took the bottle. Eli watched me take a baby sip. “There. See?”

“For real this time.”

Nothing got past Eli, drunk or not. I tilted the bottle back a second time and took a mouthful, holding it in my cheeks. The stuff tasted like rancid maple syrup and I didn't think I could choke
it down. Eli slapped me on the back and I swallowed involuntarily, coughing and hacking as some of it went down the wrong pipe.

“Mazel tov.” Eli grabbed the bottle back and took another shot like it was water instead of viscous liquid fire obviously distilled from gasoline by demons in the third circle of hell.

As the rattlesnake venom worked its way through my veins, I sat silently, trying to think of something to say that wasn't completely lame. For all that I'd envied Eli, I didn't actually know much about the guy. Ben had told me some stories, but Ben's stories are often more hyperbole than truth. From a distance, Eli appeared to have it all. A great family, a perfect future, more athletic prowess in his little toe than I had in my entire body, and a beautiful girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend, I mean. Upon close inspection, though, I could see the imperfections, the tiny cracks in his existence. Knowing that life sometimes sucked for Eli made him seem more human. Paradoxically, his flaws made him even more perfect.

“Don't ever fall in love,” Eli said, his voice scratchy from drinking or crying—I didn't know which.

“Okay.” What else was I supposed to say? I was already in love, had been for years, with the girl who had dumped him. God, how I wanted to feel like this was some sort of karmic retribution for all the years I'd spent pining for Cassie while Eli kissed her and hugged her and wormed his way into the tiny crevices of her life. But few people actually deserved the torment Eli was enduring, and I seriously doubted he was one such person.

Eli locked onto me with his big eyes. I'd never noticed how
they bulged out like a scared Chihuahua's. “Seriously, man. Love is bullshit.” His words ran together, the rum deteriorating the spaces between them. But I got the message, loud and clear.

I nodded again, letting Eli know I'd heard, and then I realized that I had an opportunity that I might not have again. Cassie had chugged an entire beeramid rather than tell me why she'd broken up with Eli. Earlier, I'd suspected that the information might be important, but her stubborn refusal to answer the question had convinced me that knowing why she'd dumped her boyfriend of three years was essential to unraveling the puzzle that was Cassie—which I believed was the key to proving that I really loved her.

In a moment of clarity, free from the effects of the heroic mouthful of rum I'd been intimidated into swallowing, I decided that if I couldn't get the answers I needed from Cassie, maybe I could wheedle them from Eli. It certainly couldn't hurt to try. But first, I needed more rum. It took the edge off my war wounds and stiffened my courage, of which I was going to need every ounce.

We passed the bottle back and forth for a couple of minutes, each successive sip going down a little easier, until I felt my fear retreating.

“Sorry about Cass,” I said, easing into it. Eli was fragile and I didn't want to push him too hard. Yet. He muttered something about love being bullshit again and I worried that I'd let him drink too much. He'd be useless to me if he passed out. “So, what happened with you guys?”

Eli glanced at me like he was gauging the shape and depth
of my question. I watched as his face cycled through all the emotions available to him in his intoxicated state—anger, desolation, hopelessness—before he finally settled into a quiet resignation.

“I don't know,” he said, almost as if he was talking to himself and not to me. “We were good, then we weren't. No warning, no nothing. One phone call and we were over.”

“She didn't say why?”

“Nope.” Eli shrugged.

“Was she acting funny? Before she broke up with you, I mean?” It might have been because of the rum, but the longer I spent with Eli, the less I feared him. He was as pathetic as I was; in some ways he was worse.

But Eli didn't answer my question. I watched him fight the effects of the alcohol, trying to tread water in a depthless pool. “I know you're in love with my girl,” he said. “Everyone knows.” He looked triumphant as he let that nugget of information hang out between us.

“Yeah,” I said. “It's pretty obvious, isn't it?” I thought back to that moment jumping on the bed with Cassie, when I'd told her that I loved her. Her lack of surprise. The way she'd brushed it off so casually. My similar reaction to Eli's statement clearly irritated him.

“Cassie laughed about it, you know? How pathetic you are.” Eli was tossing bombs, and they hurt. His serious inability to speak in fully formed words robbed them of some of the sting, but not all.

I had a feeling that he wasn't trying to hurt me as much as he
was trying to make himself feel better by lashing out at the only other person in the room who loved Cassie as deeply as he did. I could have fired back—in Eli's drunken state, it would have been so easy—but I didn't. Not even I could kick a man when he was so, so low.

“I came here tonight to tell Cassie I love her.” I looked Eli right in the eyes as I said it. He deserved that much. “I tried to barter with her for a kiss.”

Even drunk, Eli could have broken all 206 bones in my body. I watched him wrestle with his desire to do just that. But after a tense minute, he relaxed and sort of shrugged. A pitiable retreat. No matter what happened in the future, he'd never be Eli Fucking Horowitz to me again.

“Sometimes I think she liked you more than she liked me,” Eli said.

“Don't bullshit me.”

Eli took another swig from the rum bottle. It was definitely more than half empty now. “I'd been working up the nerve to ask Cassie out since I saw her in freshman assembly on the first day of school. Damn, she was fine.” I didn't know where Eli was going with his story, but hearing that Eli had once been as afraid as I had to talk to Cassie validated years of procrastination and fear.

“Then I heard you'd asked her out,” he said. He glanced over at me, some small bit of respect shining through. “She only said yes because she felt bad for you. No offense or anything, but you know how Cass is.”

I wanted to puke. Cassie had felt bad for me? I was some
kind of pity case? No way. Cassie had obviously never told Eli about the eighteenth hole. I said, “I had a chance to kiss Cassie and I blew it.”

Eli and I were past the point of being shocked or angry over our various Cassie revelations. We both loved her. We'd both do anything to be with her. In the arena, we might be enemies, but sitting in Cassie's room, trapped and not even trying to escape, we were just two lovesick high school boys drowning their miseries in a bottle of stormy rum.

“The first time I kissed Cassie was in a grocery store.” Eli slurred more words than not, but it was like an accent I'd gotten used to.

“What?”

“We went for stuff to make cookies,” he said, losing himself in the memory. “And I kissed her right in front of the chocolate chips.”

Eli laughed. It was probably the first time he'd laughed since Cassie had broken his heart. But his smile faded and he took a huge gulp from the rum bottle to cover the tears that had formed in his eyes. I pretended not to see them.

“I don't know what happened. We had all these plans for our futures and shit. Then she fucking dumped me. It's like she doesn't care about anything anymore.”

Nothing about the night made sense. Eli was right and I knew it. This Cassie—the girl who'd beaten up Blaise Lewis and trashed her house and jumped on her parents' bed—was not our Cassie. Somewhere along the way, she had changed and we'd missed it.

“How come you're up here?” I asked. “Shouldn't you be trying to help Cassie or get her back or something?”

“That was the plan. But then I saw the two of you dancing.” The anger was back, but it seemed like he was directing it at himself more than at me.

I tried to put myself in Eli's shoes, watching me dance with the girl he loved. I would have run all the way home and hidden in my room until the end of days. But Eli had had the balls to stay.

Cassie was the same way. Fearless. But Eli was right: She seemed to move through the night like she was no longer responsible for anything. It was her apathy, her nihilism, that was different tonight.

The Cassandra Castillo I'd first met in freshman anatomy had been a brilliant, blinding star. But the Cassie who was throwing this party appeared to be going supernova. She was either going to explode or collapse under her own mass, destroying her whole life and everything she'd worked for.

Tonight was bigger than me, bigger than a kiss. I didn't just have to get to know Cassie so that I could kiss her; I had to find out what was going on so that I could help her save herself.

“I love her,” Eli said.

“I know,” I said. Eli was little more than an annoyance now that I thought I understood the seriousness of Cassie's problems. “Me too.”

But Eli wasn't going to be dismissed. He grabbed my wrist in an iron grip. “You don't get it, Simon. I love Cassandra. Love. The way she walks and the way she gets all furious when she hears
about animals being abused and how she's only ticklish when she's in the mood to be tickled and how she knows how to make me happy when no one else can and how she uses my hand to shield her eyes from the scary parts of movies. I love her. I suck at saying it. I can never make the words sound the way they do in my head, but I love her and I don't think I'll ever love anyone like I love her.” Eli didn't sound drunk anymore. He spoke from a place inside him unaffected by the rum he'd consumed or the pain he'd endured since Cassie had broken his heart. Maybe his heart wasn't broken. Maybe it was only fractured and could be repaired.

“Tell her,” I said. “Just like you told me.”

“I can't.”

My neck hurt from the awkward angle I'd slouched into and I pushed myself into a sitting position so that I could look at Eli dead-on. “You mean to tell me that after all the stuff I'm sure you guys have done, you still can't tell her that you love her?”

Eli shook his head. “I can tell her. Just not the way I want to.”

“You're a pussy,” I said. The force behind my words shocked even me, but like drinking the rum, the first time was the hardest and each subsequent swallow got easier and easier. “If Cassie loved me like she loves you, there's nothing I wouldn't do to show her.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for his reply. There was a chance said reply was going to come via a fist to the face, but I was prepared to accept the consequences. See, if I'd learned anything tonight, it was that Cassie was seriously fucked-up. I wanted to be the one to help her—doing so would be all the
proof she needed that I truly loved her—but I wasn't delusional enough to believe that I could do it. If I was unable to pull Cassie back from the brink of self-destruction, I was putting my remaining chips on Eli Horowitz.

Instead of punching me or getting pissed, Eli simply stared at me for a tense moment before heaving himself to his hands and knees and crawling around the bed toward Cassie's closet. He disappeared into the deep recesses and I briefly entertained the notion that he'd gone in there and passed out. But he returned a minute later holding a cigar box in his hand. He found the indent his body had left in the carpet and settled back into it before handing me the box.

“Cassie will castrate us both if she finds out I showed you this.”

I held the cigar box in my hands, trying to imagine what secrets Cassie had entrusted to its heavy, well-constructed protection. Clearly there was something inside that Eli wanted me to see, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to violate Cassie's trust. If I opened the lid and peered inside, whatever precious things she'd placed there wouldn't belong solely to Cassie any longer. They'd belong to me, too, and I hadn't earned that right.

But my curiosity won out. I justified it by telling myself that I was opening Cassie's box of secrets only in order to help her.

When I opened the lid, I was immediately disappointed. Instead of a treasure trove of artifacts, I saw only junk. “What is this crap?” I asked, picking through some movie ticket stubs and a dirty coin and a pack of jam.

Eli picked up the blueberry jam. “This is from our first date.
IHOP. Lame, I know, but Cassie wanted French toast more than life. We kept trying to talk, but the waiter wouldn't leave us alone. Cassie sent him on errands to keep him out of our hair, one of which was to find blueberry jam. It bought us five amazing minutes.” Eli dropped the packet back in the box and motioned at me to keep digging.