I DROVE CASSIDY to school every day that week, pulling up outside her house with two travel mugs of coffee and waiting for her to slip out the front door, swinging her leather satchel as she hurried down the front walk.
Her house was enormous, one of those Spanish-tiled villas with a four-car garage, the kind you’re almost certain is two houses attached, because of the oversized symmetry. I remembered when they’d built this subdivision, two years after mine, and how I’d woken up every morning in the fifth grade to the sound of the workmen, not even bothering to set an alarm after a while. I remembered the eerily quiet Monday morning when the hammering finally stopped, and how my mom had yelled at me for oversleeping.
How could I have known, back then, that the white house across the park would belong to Cassidy Thorpe? That out of a row of nearly identical McMansions, there’d be one window in particular I searched out every night before bed, looking for secret messages?
It took about five minutes for everyone at school to figure out we were together. I suppose we were lousy at keeping it a secret, or maybe we weren’t even trying. I’d dated Charlotte for such a long time that I’d forgotten how these things went, how everyone would stare as we climbed out of my car in the Senior Lot in our sunglasses, carrying identical mugs of coffee.
Word had definitely gotten around by break; it felt as though the entire quad was watching as we sat down at our table with the rest of the debate team.
“Honestly,” Phoebe said, giving me a stern look, “I wore sweatpants today. You could have warned me this was going to happen.”
I assumed Phoebe meant the, uh, camera phones aimed in our table’s general direction. It was unsettling, being newsworthy at this particular lunch table, being entirely certain that you were the reason everyone was staring, and being unsure whether it was envy or disapproval.
The stream of attention slowed to a trickle over the course of the week as everyone realized that Cassidy and I weren’t going to climb onto each other’s laps and mash faces at the table. That’s not to say we were totally innocent of any public displays of affection; there was some hand-holding and the occasional hurried good-bye kiss on even days, when we had different sixth periods.
During break on Wednesday, I went into the main office and asked Mrs. Beams, the school secretary, for an elevator key.
“Ezra,” she said, leveling me with a stern glare over the top of her rhinestone reading glasses, “you were supposed to pick this up on the first day of school.”
“I forgot?” I tried sheepishly, although a more accurate answer would have been that I’d made it my top priority to avoid doing so.
“It’s almost October, young man,” she chastised.
“You’re right, I know.”
She handed over the key, and I put it into the pocket of my jeans, trying to look extra pathetic on my way out of the office, in case she had second thoughts. I didn’t use the key until that afternoon, when the bell rang for fifth period. Cassidy started to walk toward Mrs. Martin’s classroom our usual way, via the staircase by the faculty lot, but I stopped her.
“Actually,” I said, “let’s go around the other side.”
Cassidy raised an eyebrow, but went along with it. I took out the key and twisted it into the call slot for the handicapped elevator, trying not to look too pleased with myself.
“Ladies first,” I said grandly.
“What’s going on?” Cassidy asked suspiciously, stepping inside the dented metal elevator.
I shrugged and waited for the doors to close before sliding my arm around her waist.
“Ever wanted to make out in an elevator?” I asked, grinning.
WHILE THE REST of the school quickly became obsessed with watching Cassidy and me, our lunch table was obsessing over news of a silent rave in Los Angeles that Friday. Toby volunteered to drive, and Phoebe promised she’d try to get out of babysitting, and by the time I got up enough nerve to ask what exactly a silent rave was, everyone stared at me like I was crazy.
“It’s a type of flash mob,” Cassidy explained. “Hundreds of strangers gather in a public place, put in their headphones at exactly the same moment, and start dancing.”
I tried and failed to picture it, but I had to admit that it sounded more interesting than a three-hour historical musical about depressed German teenagers, which had been the last thing they’d all gone to LA for.
“So there’s one tomorrow?” I asked.
“Yep. And we’re going to be in the middle of it,” Toby informed me.
Luke and Sam already had plans to go paintballing with some guys from their church, and Phoebe couldn’t get out of babysitting after all, so it wound up being Toby, Austin, Cassidy, and me who piled into the Fail Whale after school on Friday.
Toby made us stop at a gas station for snacks so it felt like a real road trip, even though the drive was two hours at most. Cassidy got a pack of licorice, and Austin dumped an energy shot into a cherry slushie, which we all made fun of.
“It’s good,” Austin protested. “Honestly, haven’t you ever had a Red Bull slushie?”
“I don’t see the point in caffeine without coffee. Or coffee without caffeine, for that matter,” I informed him.
“Whatever.” Austin put up his hood as he took his change from the cashier. “One day the world will recognize Red Bull as a legitimate food group, and who will be laughing then?”
“Everyone,” Cassidy said dryly. “They’ll be too jacked on caffeine shots to do anything else.”
We piled back into the Fail Whale, which featured—get this—a tape deck. Toby had a bunch of mix tapes he’d picked up at swap meets and thrift stores, so we listened to “Happy Bday Heather!!!” as we merged onto 5 North. It was like playing Russian roulette with terrible eighties music in five out of six chambers.
“Ugh.” Cassidy made a face. “Switch it. Ace of Base overload.”
Toby ejected the tape, and Austin, who was riding shotgun, put in a different one and hit rewind.
“There’s nineties nostalgia,” Austin observed while we waited for the tape to rewind, “and then there’s antiquated technology. Unfortunately, this is the latter.”
Toby didn’t take well to anyone insulting his car. As he put it, the Fail Whale was “a magnificent relic of the enduring crisis of solidly middle-class suburbia.”
“Austin, you drive a Jetta.”
“It was my sister’s!” Austin protested. I could see his face turn red in the rearview mirror.
I didn’t say anything, since I’d, uh, earned a Beemer by turning sixteen. Cassidy offered me one of her Red Vines, and I accepted it absently, biting off each end before I realized what I was doing.
“Toby,” I called. “Remember making straws out of licorice at Cub Scouts?”
“I thought I was the only one who did that,” Austin said.
“Well, did any of you squish those little paper cups they have next to water dispensers into pots?” Cassidy asked.
I had no idea what she was talking about, but Toby did.
“Yeah. You had to blow into them and smash the bottoms at the same time to get it to work.”
And then we spent the rest of the ride reminiscing over old Nickelodeon programs, and Furbys and I-Zone cameras and Tamagotchis, and how weird it was that everyone did video calling and watched television on their computers.
“Dude,” Austin said as we exited the freeway, “in fifty years, all of the old folks’ homes are going to be filled with seniors listening to Justin Bieber on the oldies station and talking about how movies used to be in two-D.”
“All of our longings are universal longings,” Cassidy said. “I’m paraphrasing, but it’s Fitzgerald.”
“I don’t think he was talking about Neopets.” Toby’s voice dripped scorn as he edged into the center of the intersection, waiting to turn.
“Well, he was talking about the human condition,” Cassidy retorted. “And if, for our generation, that happens to be a collective longing for a world before smart phones, then so be it. There’s no sense in speculating on the enduring impact of the recently past; if popular culture was that predictive, everything would be obsolete the moment it came into existence.”
For a moment, no one said anything. And then Austin laughed. “Jesus, what are they teaching kids in prep schools these days?”
“Conformity,” Cassidy answered, as though Austin had been serious.
THERE WAS THIS hectic undercurrent to the shopping center. Everyone was staring at everyone else, wondering who was there to participate in the flash mob, and who was on an innocent shopping expedition.
We were slightly early, so we went into the Barnes and Noble. Toby and Austin headed for the graphic novels, and Cassidy and I wound up on our own in the art section, where we looked at a book on Banksy, this subversive graffiti artist I hadn’t heard of.
“What I love about him,” Cassidy said, her eyes bright and excited, “is how he printed up all of this fake money and threw it into a crowd. People thought it was real and tried to spend it in shops, and they were so angry when they found out it was fake. But now, those bills sell for a fortune on eBay. It’s simultaneously real and not real, you know? Worthless as currency, but not as art . . . my brother asked for one of those bills for Christmas a few years ago, and my mom assumed he wanted it framed, and he said he’d just stick it in his wallet because it was one of the few works of art you could carry in your pocket.”
Cassidy trailed off, closing the book.
“We should find Toby and Austin,” she said.
“They can wait,” I insisted, tilting Cassidy’s face up toward mine and stealing a kiss.
“Oh, really?” Cassidy murmured, her lips against mine.
When we came up for air, Toby was standing there, making a face. Cassidy and I shuffled toward the escalator, mildly humiliated at having been caught.
“Hey,” I said, reaching into my back pocket. “I brought you something.”
I handed Cassidy the iPod I’d borrowed off my dad, and she stared down at it, completely baffled.
“It’s a loan,” I explained. “I put on some songs.”
Cassidy’s lips curved into a smile.
“You made me a flash-mob playlist?” she asked.
“Sort of. You just hit play. I synched it to mine, so we can dance to the same songs.”
I’d had the inspiration around midnight the night before, and had stayed up until two deciding on the perfect tracks to use. I’d pictured it quite romantically, the two of us in the middle of a crowd of strangers, dancing to the same music. But Cassidy’s smile disappeared, and I had the impression that I’d disappointed her somehow.
“What?” I asked.
“Ezra,” she said. “It’s a flash mob. The point is that everyone dances to their own music, and it’s so beautifully random that it works. Hundreds of strangers, all choosing a different song to encapsulate their own experience. It’s a dance floor where every genre of music is playing at once, and no one’s supposed to know what anyone else is listening to.”
“Sorry,” I muttered, embarrassed.
She handed the iPod back to me with a reassuring smile.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “You didn’t know.”
“You could put it on shuffle,” I suggested. “That way it wouldn’t be the same music as mine.”
“That’s okay,” Cassidy said, her smile widening until it was genuine. “I’d rather dance to my own songs and watch you try and guess what they are.”
Toby and Austin had walked down the escalator, and were waiting at the door of the bookstore. Austin had bought a book and was zipping the plastic bag into his omnipresent backpack.
“Come on,” Toby said impatiently. “Two minutes!”
We all crowded into the central courtyard, where tons of high-school and college students were milling around, trying to look nonchalant. Everyone had their phones out, waiting for it to hit five o’clock exactly. A group of hipster-looking guys nodded at us, informing Toby that his bow tie was “quality.”
“See?” Toby said, grinning. “Bow ties are cool.”
We staked out a place near the fountain that Toby judged would be right in the middle of everything. The Grove was packed, which was unsurprising for five o’clock on a Friday. Families with strollers and tourists with fancy cameras wandered along the pedestrian paths, going about their business of shopping and sightseeing. For another agonizing minute, we waited in the palpable collective anticipation of hundreds of strangers trying to pretend they weren’t up to anything out of the ordinary, until Toby whispered, “Now.”
On an invisible cue, everyone put on their headphones and hit play. Teenagers began pouring out of shop fronts, running toward the central courtyard, joining the dance party.
It was fantastic, strangers smiling at one another, break dancing or rocking out or swaying to some mysterious beat that only they could hear. I turned up the volume on my headphones, dancing awkwardly to the Clash.
Cassidy was wearing a pair of expensive DJ headphones, gold-plated and glinting in the sunlight. She pressed them tightly around her ears, closing her eyes and dancing like no one was watching. The hem of her turquoise dress rose dangerously high, and the old pocket-watch necklace she wore bounced up and down over her chest, and she was so beautiful that I could hardly stand it.
Toby was dancing ironically, doing “the sprinkler” and “the shopping cart,” having the time of his life as he cracked himself up. And Austin was performing some complicated hand contortions to what I guessed was techno.
All around us, strangers paired up and danced together, laughing. I was overwhelmed by the number of people recording video of the event, unable to be present in the moment. There was an older guy in a banana costume doing pelvic thrusts, desperate for attention. I wondered what he did for a living, if it was some respectable bank job or something totally demeaning.
But the flash mob wasn’t about the banana-suit guy, or the people standing awkwardly with video cameras, or the gawking crowds that had come out of the stores to see what was happening. It was about being able to dance like Cassidy did, as though no one was watching, as though the moment was infinite enough without needing to document its existence. And so I closed my eyes and tried.
When I opened them, Cassidy was standing there, her headphones around her neck. She motioned for me to do the same, and when I did, the quiet of what was happening shocked me. I’d been so sure that my private soundtrack was a part of everything that I hadn’t realized what we looked like, hundreds of strangers dancing in absolute silence.
We’d danced for maybe half an hour, until it became more of a spectacle than a flash mob. No one wanted to head back quite yet, so we drove over to Santa Monica and had dinner at some old-fashioned burger place. We walked around the promenade afterward, making up hilarious and tragic life stories for the guy who’d worn the banana costume. Los Angeles seemed to change into a different city at night, a more vibrant and mysterious one. I was quiet, because we’d done a lot of walking, and I wasn’t sure how much more I could handle. It was getting pretty bad when Cassidy squeezed my hand and said, “Hey, let’s go sit on a bench and people-watch.”
“Sounds good,” I said, relieved.
Toby and Austin ducked into a bookstore to track down some graphic novel the other store hadn’t carried, and Cassidy and I sat down to wait for them. I thought I’d done a pretty good job of pretending I was okay, but something must have given me away, because Cassidy sighed and shot me a stern look.
“You could have said something,” she scolded.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“No, you want everyone to think you’re fine. There’s a difference.”
I shrugged and didn’t say anything. Cassidy shivered, and I pulled her closer against me.
“Do you think they’re together?” she mumbled, her cheek pressing warmly on my neck.
“Who?”
“Toby and Austin.”
I was fairly stunned by the question, because things like that just didn’t occur to me.
“Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know.” Cassidy shrugged. “Just an impression I had. But I could be wrong. Austin doesn’t quite seem the type.”
“And Toby does?” I didn’t realize it was a rhetorical question until I’d asked it.
It was strange, thinking that Toby might be gay. It made an odd kind of sense, but it didn’t bother me, or anything like that. He was still Toby, our fearless captain.
It wasn’t long before Toby and Austin came out of the bookshop.
“We should head back,” I said, in case they were up for walking another mile or two.
Cassidy kept giving me these glances out of the corner of her eye as we walked back to the Fail Whale, as though she thought I should say something, but no way in hell was I going to ask Toby to bring the car around.
“Backseat!” Austin called, scrambling for it. He stretched out, folding his arms across his chest. “Don’t wake me.”
Toby rolled his eyes. “I’m not driving back with all of you jerks sleeping. Faulkner, get up front.”
I’d already reclaimed my seat from the drive up, and a nap sounded awesome, like maybe I could sleep through the ache in my knee.
“Actually, I’ll keep you company,” Cassidy said, climbing into the passenger seat.
Our eyes met in the rearview mirror, and I shot her a look of gratitude before tossing my hoodie over my lap like a blanket and drifting asleep on the crowded lanes of the 10 East.