First & Then(22)

“Next time.”

He pulled the car through to the back lot. Mine was already there, washed, dried, and shining in the sun. I unrolled the windows and turned the radio on as Cas parked and got out.

“I’ll be wet-dry and you be dry-dry,” he said, and threw me a towel. I was always dry-dry.

I followed him around the car and retraced the tracks left by his towel. My car radio chattered with itself as we cleaned, commercials for laser hair removal and resale clothing stores. I glanced up at Cas periodically as we worked. I loved his faded T-shirts. He’d been wearing today’s since the eighth grade. It hung too loose back then, but now it was just the right amount of tight, the screen logo long since peeled away, the color now a perfectly faded shade of blue. A lot of the ones my mom bought for Foster at the mall tried to imitate this color, but Cas’s was the kind you couldn’t buy for ridiculous mall prices, or any amount of money, really. Cas earned that color with time.

“What?” he said, after we started on the windows.

“Huh?”

A smile split his face. “Why’re you looking at me funny?”

“I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

I invented fast. “The party last night. D’you have fun?”

He shrugged and pushed the towel in wide circles across the glass. “It was all right. Boring without you.”

Sometimes I hated when he said stuff like that, because it was always just what I wanted to hear, but not with the intention I wanted it to have. “Nothing spectacular happened?”

“Not really. Some people got pretty shit-faced.”

I snorted. “Stanton Perkins.”

“Yeah. Jordan and Ezra left pretty early, took most of the party with them. Good thing they did, too, or else I would’ve told Ezra to get his ass out of there. Stanton’s angry enough when he’s sober.”

“Why does he hate Ezra so much?”

“More of the same, I guess. Just in a greater intensity than everyone else.”

In a way, Ezra was a true celebrity, disliked just as much as he was admired. Half of the school revered him for taking the varsity football captain title this year, and the other half resented him for exactly the same thing. Cas didn’t like to admit it, but until Ezra came, the captainship had been down for him. Ezra was clearly the better player, but people liked Cas—that was the problem. You don’t always want what’s better. Sometimes you just want what you want, the familiar, the dependable, the accessible. There was nothing accessible about Ezra Lynley.

When Cas spoke again, his voice was strange. “Forty-five touchdowns in one season. It’s ridiculous.”

“Do you think Stanton’s right about him?”

“No. No, of course not. I just…” He paused, his towel resting on the back windshield across from mine. “Sometimes I can’t help but think it should be me, you know?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just made some incoherent sound of sympathy.

“It’s a f*cking classic,” he said. “It’s a f*cking TV movie in the making. The charismatic underdog and the brooding prodigy he’ll never be able to catch up to, no matter how hard he tries.”

“Charismatic might be a bit of an overstatement.”

“Shut up. I am so charismatic.” He gave the windshield a final swipe. “He’s a jackass, sure, but he’s better than me. I can’t hate him for that, right? It’s the same old story, so it’s, like, what is there to do?”

I shrugged. “Give it a different ending?”

“You mean, like, push Ezra into a pool of laser sharks?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I meant.” I threw the towel at him. “Or you could just … be the good guy. Be the one that everyone roots for.”

“So I should run up and down the bleachers a thousand times, throw the football through a tire swing, and then the big championship game’ll come around and Ezra will screw up and I’ll save the day? Win Temple Sterling’s heart? Get the girl?”

“Yeah. And the girl might even let you keep the laser sharks.”

Cas grinned.





10


I took Foster to training with Ezra the Sunday afternoon succeeding Temple Sterling’s victory over Freeport Senior High. I didn’t want to go, aware that both my mom and Foster expected me to stay the whole time, but I tried to see it as an opportunity to read, take in some fresh air, and appreciate the last of the lingering summer sun.

As we approached the empty varsity field, Ezra came into view. I peeled off toward a bench on the sidelines, not wanting to face a conversation with him, and Foster continued on to where Ezra stood in the middle of the field, a football in hand.

I opened Sense and Sensibility to the part where Marianne, our heroine Elinor’s younger sister, is sick. It couldn’t get any better than this. Mr. Willoughby, distraught at the news of Marianne’s sudden illness, shows up at their house intoxicated, begging to see her. It was tense and dramatic and somehow, although two hundred years previous, still totally relevant. It was the drunken text message to an ex two hundred years before such a thing existed.

I thought of Mr. Willoughby as one of the most interesting characters in Jane’s books. First, you think he’s great—he comes out of nowhere and has this whirlwind romance with Marianne—but then he turns around and drops Marianne completely, and you feel like he’s this truly terrible guy. But then somehow, in that scene where he shows up at the house, desperate to see if she’s okay, you almost feel sorry for him. Like maybe you could sympathize with him in some way, and you think perhaps he’s not such a bad, villainous person—just a regular person who made stupid decisions. He could’ve had everything that he wanted, but he threw it all away because of the choices that he made. You can’t truly hate someone like that. You can pity him, sure, but you can’t hate him.