The Beginning of Everything(9)

“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.