The Beginning of Everything (4 page)

I'd always been fairly ambivalent about Spanish. Usually, I could waste a good five minutes pondering Mrs. Martin's pin-of-the-day, and occasionally we got to sit back and watch Spanish-dubbed Disney movies. But when Mrs. Martin told us that we'd be interviewing a classmate and introducing them to the class
en espanol
, I realized that Spanish had the capacity to be even worse than that morning's pep rally.

I watched as everyone around me, who had been so friendly only minutes before, partnered together. In the past, I'd always had someone to work with. But clearly, things had changed. And then I caught sight of the new girl staring down at a blank page in her notebook.

I claimed the seat next to hers and grinned in the way that girls usually found irresistible. “So what's your name?” I asked.

“Don't we have to speak in Spanish?” she countered, unimpressed.

“Mrs. Martin doesn't care, as long as we do when we give our presentations.”

“How challenging.” She shook her head, opening to a blank page in her notebook. “Well,
me llamo
Cassidy.
Como te llamas?
”

“
Me llamo
Ezra,” I said, writing her name down. Cassidy. I liked the sound of it.

We fell silent for a moment, listening to one of the groups around us struggle on in tortured Spanish. Everyone else was using English because, as I'd said, Mrs. Martin didn't much care.

“Well,” Cassidy prompted me.

“Oh, sorry. Uh,
de donde has venido de?
”

She raised an eyebrow.
“Dondo de la Barrows School de San Francisco. Y tu?”

I hadn't heard of the Barrows School, but I imagined it as some sort of rigid prep school, which only made her appearance at Eastwood High even more odd. I told her that I was from here.

“So, um,
es una escuela donde duerme uno con el otro
?” I asked. My Spanish was rusty, and not that great to begin with.

She burst out laughing, in that unencumbered way you sometimes do at parties or lunch tables, but never in a quiet classroom. Charlotte and Jill whipped around to stare at us.

“Sorry.” Cassidy's lips twisted into a smirk, mocking me. “But you seriously want to know if all of the students sleep with each other?”

I winced. “I was trying to ask if it was a boarding school.”

“
Si, es un internado
. A boarding school,” she replied. “Maybe we should switch to English.”

And so we did. I learned that Cassidy had just completed a high-school summer program at Oxford, studying Shakespeare; that one weekend, she'd nearly gotten stranded in Transylvania; that she'd been teaching herself how to play guitar on the roof of her dormitory because of the acoustics of gothic architecture. I'd never been out of the country—unless driving the three hours to Tijuana with Jimmy, Evan, Charlotte, and Jill last spring break counted. I'd certainly never been to the Globe Theatre, or had my passport stolen by gypsies at Dracula's castle, or climbed out of my bedroom window with a guitar strapped to my back. Everything I had done, everything that defined me, was stuck firmly in the past. But Cassidy was waiting patiently, a fountain pen poised above the pale lines of her notebook.

I sighed and gave her the standard Spanish-class answers: that I was seventeen years old, my favorite sport was tennis, and my favorite subject was history.

“Well,” Cassidy said when I had finished, “that was certainly boring.”

“I know,” I muttered. “Sorry.”

“I don't get you,” she said, frowning. “Practically everyone goes out of their way to avoid you, but they can't stop staring. And then you sit with
that crowd
in the corner like you're the freaking prom king or whatever it's called and all you can say about yourself is
me gusta el tennis
, which, I'm sorry, but you obviously can't play.”

I shrugged, trying not to let it show how much it unnerved me that she'd noticed these things.

“Maybe I
was
the prom king,” I finally said.

This infuriated her. I tried not to laugh at how ridiculous it seemed now, that stupid plastic junior prom crown and scepter gathering dust on my bookshelf, when I hadn't even made it to the dance.

We sat there studiously ignoring each other until it was our turn to present.

“
Yo presento Cassidy
,” I said, and Charlotte giggled loudly.

Mrs. Martin frowned.

“Butch Cassidy,” Charlotte stage-whispered, sending Jill into muffled hysterics.

I knew what Charlotte could be like, and the last thing Cassidy needed was to become the new object of her torture. So I made up a boring story about how Cassidy's favorite subject was English and that she liked to dance ballet and had a younger brother who played soccer. I did her a favor, making her forgettable, rather than giving Charlotte further ammunition. But clearly Cassidy didn't see it that way, because, after I finished, she grinned evilly, pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, and calmly told the class:
This is Ezra. He was the prom king and he's the best tennis player in the whole school.

5

WHEN I GOT
home, I changed into a pair of sport shorts and stretched out on a pool chair in the backyard. The cushion was dusty, and as I listened to the water lap against the landscaped rocks that made up our fake waterfall, I tried to remember the last time anyone had actually used the pool. The sun was hot on my chest, and so bright that I could barely read the instructions in my Spanish exercise book.

“Ezra, what are you doing?” my mom shrilled, startling me.

I rolled over and squinted toward the house, where she hovered behind the screen door, carrying a yoga mat.

“I'm coming in, all right?” I called back.

“What were you thinking?” Mom asked gently as I joined her in the kitchen. She was still in her yoga clothes, which made her look a lot younger than forty-seven.

I shrugged. “I thought I could get a tan. I'm too pale.”

“Oh, honey.” She took a carton of lemonade out of the fridge and poured us each a glass. “You know you're supposed to stay out of direct sunlight.”

I grunted and took a sip of the lemonade, which tasted awful. Everything my mom bought was healthy, which meant that it was helpfully missing at least one key ingredient, such as gluten, sugar, or flavor.

She was right though, about the sunlight thing. I was still on painkillers from my last knee surgery and one of the more delightful side effects was increased sensitivity to sunlight. After twenty minutes in the backyard, I was a bit dizzy, but I wasn't about to admit it.

“How was school?” She frowned at me, the picture of concern.

Quietly humiliating
, I thought.

“Fine,” I said.

“Did anything interesting happen?” she pressed.

I thought about how I'd gotten kicked out of the pep rally over a hypothetical nicotine patch (incidentally, I'd never even tried a cigarette), and about Coach A's nightmarish AP Euro class. I thought about the new girl, a world away from the disappearing strawberry fields and man-made lake of Eastwood, perched on a gothic rooftop in her funny old clothes, strumming a guitar as she stared out at the bell towers and cobblestones.

“Not really,” I said, and then I pretended that I was tired and went upstairs.

 

OUR HOUSE IS
a monstrosity. Six bedrooms and a “bonus room,” all painted the same calming shade of free-range eggshell. It looks like one of those models you walk through in the future subdivisions, full of generically bland showroom furniture, the kind of house that you can't imagine anyone actually living in. We moved in when I was eight, an “upgrade” from an older gated community on the other side of the loop. A year later, we inherited Cooper, my mad aunt's massive poodle, when she got remarried and moved into a luxury condo that didn't allow large pets.

Cooper was a standard poodle, the kind that look like furry black giraffes. I used to take him for walks when I was a kid, riding my Razor scooter while he pulled me up and down the streets. I snuck him into my bed when I had nightmares, even though he was supposed to sleep in the downstairs laundry room. He was about eight years old when we got him, and you could tell he considered himself terribly elegant, a regular lord of the manor. All right, I'll admit it: I loved that crazy dog, and the way his fur smelled like popcorn, and how his eyes gave the impression that he understood everything you said.

He was waiting for me in my room, curled up at the foot of my bed with his nose on the copy of
The Great
Gatsby
I'd been thumbing through the night before.

How about a walk, old sport?
His eyes seemed to ask.

I sat next to him and patted his head. “Sorry,” I said.

And I swear he nodded sagely before settling back down on top of Mom's old paperback of
Gatsby
. He just about broke my heart, Cooper. I wanted to grab his leash and take him for our usual jog around the neighborhood, culminating in a full-out race down the steep hiking trail at the end of Crescent Vista. And the thought of how long it had been since we'd done that, and how I'd never be able to take him for a jog again, hit me full force.

I turned on the same Bob Dylan playlist I'd been moping to all summer and lay down on top of the duvet. I wasn't exactly crying, but it hurt like hell to swallow. I stayed like that for a while, listening to that fantastically depressing old music with the blinds closed and trying to convince myself that what I really wanted was my old life back. But I'd felt completely hollow that afternoon, sitting there in Spanish with the old crew talking about nothing, about lunch. It was like the part of me that had enjoyed those friends had evaporated, leaving behind a huge, echoing emptiness, and I was scrabbling on the edge of it, trying not to fall into the hole within myself because I was terrified to find out how far down it went.

 

I'D MOSTLY GOTTEN
it together when Mom called me to dinner through the intercom at precisely six thirty. She'd cooked salmon with quinoa and kale, and not to sound ungrateful or anything, but my father and I would have preferred pizza. But we didn't say anything. You never can, to my mom.

I look a lot like my dad. Same dark curls, although his are gray at the temples. Same blue eyes and slightly cleft chin. He's six one, though, so he has me beat by two inches. He's one of those buddy-buddy corporate lawyers who donates a mint to his old college fraternity. Booming laugh, always smells like Listerine, played tennis once, plays golf now. You know the type.

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, and, 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.”