The Beginning of Everything(3)

“Right,” I said, wishing that she’d been smarter, and that her answer had impressed me.

Everyone laughed and began to joke about porn, but now that I thought about it, I had no idea where Charlotte had gone. I’d assumed I was meeting her at the party, that she was doing what she usually did when we had one of our fights: hanging out with Jill, rolling her eyes at me and acting annoyed from across the room until I went over and apologized profusely. But I hadn’t seen her all night. I pulled out my phone and texted her to see what was going on.

Five minutes later, she still hadn’t replied when Heath, an enormous senior from the football team, sauntered over to our table. He’d stacked his Solo cups, and had about six of them. I suppose he meant it to be impressive, but mostly it just hit me as wasteful.

“Faulkner,” he grunted.

“Yeah?” I said.

He told me to get up, and I shrugged and followed him over to the little slope of dirt near the lake.

“You should go upstairs,” he said, with such solemnity that I didn’t question it.

Jonas’s house was large, probably six bedrooms if I had to guess. But luck, if you can call it that, was on my side.

My prize was behind door number one: Charlotte, some guy I didn’t know, and a scene which, if I’d captured it via camera phone, could have been mistaken for porn, although that wouldn’t have been my artistic intention.

I cleared my throat. Charlotte cleared hers, though this required quite a bit of effort on her part. She looked horrified to see me there, in the doorway. Neither of us said anything. And then the guy cursed and zipped his jeans and demanded, “What the hell?”

“Ezra, I—I—,” Charlotte babbled. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

“I think he was about to,” I muttered sourly.

No one laughed.

“Who’s this?” The guy demanded, looking back and forth between Charlotte and me. He didn’t go to our school, and he gave the impression of being older, a college kid slumming it at a high-school party.

“I’m the boyfriend,” I said, but it came out uncertain, like a question.

“This is the guy?” he asked, squinting at me. “I could take him.”

So she’d been talking about me to this douche-canoodler? I supposed, if it came down to it, he probably could take me. I had a helluva backhand, but only with my racquet, not my fist.

“How about you take her instead?” I suggested, and then I turned and walked back down the hallway.

It might have been fine if Charlotte hadn’t come after me, insisting that I still had to take her to prom on Saturday. It might have been all right if she hadn’t proceeded to do so in the middle of the crowded living room. And it might have been different if I hadn’t babied my car, parking all the way over on Windhawk to avoid the scourge of drunk drivers.

Maybe, if one of those things hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have inched out onto the curve of Princeton Boulevard the exact moment a black SUV barreled around the blind turn and blew through the stop sign.

I don’t know why people say “hit by a car,” as though the other vehicle physically lashes out like some sort of champion boxer. What hit me first was my airbag, and then my steering wheel, and I suppose the driver’s side door and whatever that part is called that your knee jams up against.

The impact was deafening, and everything just seemed to slam toward me and crunch. There was the stink of my engine dying under the front hood, like burnt rubber, but salty and metallic. Everyone rushed out onto the Beideckers’ lawn, which was two houses down, and through the engine smoke, I could see an army of girls in strapless dresses, their phones raised, solemnly snapping pictures of the wreck.

But I just sat there laughing and unscathed because I’m an immortal, hundred-year-old vampire.

All right, I’m screwing with you. Because it would have been awesome if I’d been able to shake it off and drive away, like that ass weasel who never even stopped after laying into my Z4. If the whole party hadn’t cleared out in a panic before the cops could bust them for underage drinking. If Charlotte, or just one of my supposed friends, had stayed behind to ride with me in the ambulance, instead of leaving me there alone, half-delirious from the pain. If my mother hadn’t put on all of her best jewelry and gotten lipstick on her teeth before rushing to the emergency room.

It’s awful, isn’t it, how I remember crap like that? Tiny, insignificant details in the midst of a massive disaster.

I don’t really want to get into the rest of it, and I hope you’ll forgive me, but going through it once was enough. My poor roadster was totaled, just like everything else in my life. The doctors said my wrist would heal, but the damage to my leg was bad. My knee had been irreparably shattered.

But this story isn’t about Toby’s twelfth birthday, or the car wreck at Jonas’s party—not really.

There is a type of problem in organic chemistry called a retrosynthesis. You are presented with a compound that does not occur in nature, and your job is to work backward, step by step, and ascertain how it came to exist—what sort of conditions led to its eventual creation. When you are finished, if done correctly, the equation can be read normally, making it impossible to distinguish the question from the answer.

I still think that everyone’s life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst—the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere—it’s what comes after that determines the result.