The Beginning of Everything(21)

“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.