The Secrets of Boys (21 page)

“But what if I’m only that way around you?”

Cassidy asked. “What if the second you leave, everything goes back to the way it was?”

Zach moved closer to her on the bed and put his arm around her shoulders. “Well, you can let that happen if you want. Or you can have faith in yourself to keep on learning and growing.”

“I guess you’re right.” Cassidy sighed, snuggling against his shoulder.

The CD ended and silence filled the room. She could feel Zach’s pulse against her cheek.

“I’ll never forget this summer,” he whispered. “Or you.”

Cassidy sighed again. Zach drew her in closer and their lips met, tentatively at first but growing more and more urgent. Cassidy knew as she tugged her shirt above her head that this would be the last time she and Zach would ever do this, and she tried to drink in as much of him as possible, to imprint his smell and the feel of his skin in her memory in indelible ink. She could feel the piles of shirts he’d stacked neatly on the bed sliding away from them as he climbed on top of her, and the loud thump of his suitcase hitting the floor was enough to make them pause for a moment but not to stop.

Cassidy wanted to hold him just like that forever, hover-ing over her, his ragged breaths matching hers, both of them afraid to move much for fear it would be over too soon. She wanted to take those few moments and freeze them in a test tube so she could go back and revisit them every day for the rest of her life. Most of all, she just wanted Zach to stay there in Malibu, with her.

Her cheeks were wet with tears when they finished.

Zach bent to kiss them gently away before gathering her in his arms and holding her tightly as they drifted off to sleep.

* * *

The jarring bleep of the alarm clock woke them up. Zach groaned and flailed his hand in its direction, obviously hoping it would land on snooze but missing by about a foot.

Cassidy sat up quickly, confused. The sky outside the window was still dark. She reached over, turned off the alarm clock, and looked down at Zach. He had drifted back into sleep, and his face against the pillow looked as content and innocent as a child’s. Cassidy took a silent mental snapshot before gently shaking him awake.

“It’s still dark out,” Zach moaned as his eyes blinked open.

“You have to catch your plane,” Cassidy reminded him, feeling sick to her stomach as she uttered the words.

Zach bolted upright. “Shit, what time is it?” he asked, looking around wildly.

Cassidy pointed to the clock.

“I have to finish packing.” Zach scrambled out of bed and into a pair of black boxer-briefs he found under the overturned suitcase on the floor. Cassidy sat up and pulled the covers around her chin as she watched him hurriedly toss the rest of his clothing into the suitcase and struggle to zip it up. Her mouth tasted like she’d been chewing sawdust, and she had a headache. She felt hungover, even though she hadn’t had anything to drink the night before.

Zach disappeared into the bathroom and returned shaking water droplets from a toothbrush, which he shoved into the pocket of his duffel bag.

“Ready?” he asked, leaning down to kiss Cassidy on the forehead. She got out of bed and struggled into her clothes. Her skin felt sticky from not showering.

He lifted the suitcase and duffel bag, and she silently shouldered an oversized backpack, which she carried out to the driveway and heaved into the trunk of the Volvo.

Zach began to fiddle with the radio once they were on the road, wrinkling his nose as he spun the dial furiously through the FM stations. By the time they got to the departures terminal, Cassidy estimated they must have listened to about four seconds each of fifty songs, and about a hundred commercials.

“This is me,” Zach said, leaning forward and pointing through the windshield to a big brown Delta sign.

Cassidy’s heart felt like lead as she pulled up to the curb and got out to help him with his bags. Once they were all stacked on the curb, Zach turned to face her.

“I really will miss you,” he said, his voice heavy with emotion.

“I’ll miss you too.” Cassidy willed herself not to cry.

If there was a time to be strong, she thought, this was it.

“We’ll always have Malibu,” Zach joked, and they both tried to smile. Cassidy didn’t know what else to say. She wanted to tell him that she loved him and would never forget him as long as she lived, but the words stuck in her throat. You weren’t supposed to say

“I love you” to your summer fling, were you?

Fortunately, she didn’t have to say anything at all.

Zach leaned down and gave her a long, lingering kiss.

When he straightened, she could almost see tears glimmering in his eyes.

“I have to go,” he said, definitely choked up. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

“Good-bye,” she said quietly.

She watched as he balanced the three bags around his body and sauntered through the automatic sliding glass doors, into the terminal, and out of her life forever.

She navigated the complicated ramps and byways around the airport on automatic pilot, thankful that the early-morning traffic was nearly nonexistent. It was just starting to get light out, and as she sped down the free-way, she decided that home was the very last place she wanted to go. She felt like she needed about a million years of sleep but was afraid that once she crawled into her bed, she would never get out again.

Instead she found herself taking an exit off the free-way that led to the beach. The sky was just starting to brighten as she pulled into the empty parking lot, and she thought sitting on the sand and watching the sun come up might make her feel better.

Cassidy took off her shoes and stepped onto the beach, shivering slightly at the cool touch of the sand against her feet. It must have rained while she and Zach were sleeping because the beach felt wet and soggy and the waves roared below her like they were dissatisfied with the world. Cassidy walked halfway down to where the surf hit the sand and sat, feeling the dampness soak through her skirt and into her skin. She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth, waiting for dawn’s gentle colors to break through the clouds above her.

But the sky was gray and overcast, and even the keen-ing of the seagulls seemed lonely and sad. Instead of cheering her up, the day seemed determined to reflect how she was feeling.

And the way she was feeling was empty. Torn apart.

Like there was something missing inside her and nothing would ever be the same again.

August 29

Dear Cassidy,

I don’t know what to say. I hope you’re all right. I
wish I was there. If it makes you feel any better (not that
it will), I’ll be home in less than a week and I promise
when I am, I’ll do as much to distract you as possible.

Actually, I guess I can start now. Want to know
something really ironic? Yesterday when we were
done with afternoon group, this guy Jesse asked if I
wanted to take a walk with him. I’ve never told you
about him because he never says anything at all, he
usually just kind of sits there like a bump on a log, so
I was pretty surprised, but I didn’t have anything
better to do so I went with him. We walked down to
236

the lake and then he took out this joint and was like,

“Wanna smoke?”

And I figured, you know what? Here I am in god-damn rehab and I’ve never even tried it. I might as well
at least know what it’s like. So I shared this joint with
Jesse. You wouldn’t believe what it did! First it made me
sleepy. Then it made me hungry. And that was it! I have
no clue what the big deal is. Do you? I’m going to have
to give my brother some serious hell for being so into such
a pointless drug when I get home.

I hope that cheered you up a little. I’m looking forward to seeing you again.

Joe

It sucked. There was no other way for Cassidy to describe the way she’d been feeling since Zach had left.

And it didn’t suck the way losing your cell phone or getting grounded for a couple of days sucked. It sucked like having a vacuum cleaner attached to your heart and trying to pull it out of your chest, sucked all the fun and freedom and sunlight from her life, sucked like watching your dog get put to sleep. That kind of suck.

And the only thing she could do about it was stay in bed and cry.

Cassidy knew it was dumb and awful to get so bent out of shape over a guy, but Zach hadn’t been
just a guy
.

Zach was the hottest, most brilliant guy in the world.

The guy she’d chosen to lose her virginity to. The guy who was three thousand miles away in New York City and hadn’t called once since he’d left.

After the second day of sneaking out of French class every half hour to check her messages and coming home right after class to climb into bed, watch the Lifetime channel, and sniffle into a box of tissues, Cassidy remembered an old record her dad used to play sometimes when she was a kid. While her parents were out that evening at a dinner party, she crept downstairs to the den and flipped through the dusty record jackets her dad kept in a little-used cabinet behind the gleaming new entertainment center. When she found what she was looking for, she brought the record up to her room, then came back for the turntable, which she had to struggle to keep from dropping on the stairs.

It was worth it, though. The snaps and crackles on the old album seemed like the perfect background for the song, which she played over and over again, quickly learning how to set the needle back into the proper groove.

Maybe I should start spinning at clubs,
Cassidy thought bitterly as Al Green began to sing again:

Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,

A-woah-a-woah-woah.

Only darkness every day.

In her head, she substituted
he
for
she
. Because that was exactly how she felt: like Zach’s going away had left a permanent stain across the sun, and her world would never be bright again.

“What the hell is this crap?” a voice said somewhere in her room. Cassidy couldn’t tell exactly where because she had the covers pulled over her head and was rocking back and forth to the music.

“Go away,” she said automatically.

Cassidy flinched as a hand reached down and yanked the covers off her, flooding her eyes with light.

“Wow, dude,” said Larissa, standing over her with the blankets in one hand and her oversize neon green Emilio Pucci tote bag in the other. “I came to try and win you back as my best friend, but it looks like I may need to give you a makeover first. When was the last time you brushed your hair?”

“Hair?” Cassidy’s hand went gingerly to her head.

It felt a little crunchy, but not too bad. “I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter. I’m too depressed to think about it.”

“How long have you been wallowing?” Larissa asked.

“Because if it’s been more than two days, your official wallowing period is over. Come on, Cass. How about we put some highlights in your hair or something to cheer you up?”

“I don’t know,” Cassidy said. “Considering what you said the last time I saw you, how do I know you won’t try to turn my hair green?”

“Well, you know, that’s part of the reason I came here,” Larissa said, shifting nervously from foot to foot.

“To turn my hair green?” Cassidy asked.

“No!” Larissa corrected her quickly. “I mean, I know I was a total
bee-otch
last time we hung out and, like …”

Cassidy could see her struggling to get the words out. “I wanted to apologize.”

“Really?” Cassidy asked. Larissa almost never apologized for anything.

Larissa bit her lip and nodded firmly. “Yeah. I was just so embarrassed about what happened at the show, and I took it out on you, which was mega-unfair. I’m so,
so
sorry.”

“Wow,” Cassidy said. “It’s very un-Larissa-like of you to admit you were wrong.”

“I know,” Larissa said sheepishly. “I’m trying to change. I realized after a while that I missed talking to you.”

“I missed talking to you too,” Cassidy said. “But when I tried to tell you that, you didn’t seem to want to listen.”

“I know.” Larissa looked guiltily down at the floor.

“I just got so wrapped up in the whole fashion-show thing and all my new friends and, like, you were acting all weird and stuff.”

“Me? How was I acting weird?” Cassidy asked.

“You know: doing crazy things like actually talking to people when we went out. It just kind of threw me off guard. But you weren’t obnoxious at all. I was.

Seriously. Everyone liked you a lot.”

“It seemed like you kind of had a problem with that,” Cassidy said.

Larissa sighed and looked down at her sparkly green fingernails. “This is going to sound retarded,” she said.

“But I kind of felt threatened by you.”

“You’re right, that is retarded.”

“I mean it. Here you were, talking about sophisticated stuff that I knew nothing about and making jokes I didn’t even get. I just wasn’t used to feeling like the outsider. It made me feel so self-conscious.”

“I understand what you mean,” Cassidy said. “That’s exactly how I used to feel.”

“I never realized how icky that is, to be worried about talking and everything. What a drag.”

“It was. But I’m working on being more outgoing, and I’m liking it a lot.”

“Really? So you’re going to be more like me?” Larissa asked excitedly.

“I said outgoing, not outlandish,” Cassidy quipped.

“Again with the jokes. I got that one, though. You’re pretty funny for a sidekick,” Larissa said, smiling. “So do you forgive me?”

“Of course I do,” Cassidy said. “I wouldn’t want to ruin this season finale moment of ours.”

“Thank God.” Larissa laughed. “But it’s not over yet.

You have to tell me what you’re doing lying around in a dark room crying on a beautiful day.”

“Oh, this,” Cassidy said, looking down at her dirty oversize T-shirt and badly chewed fingernails. “This is the work of a boy.”