WHEN I CAUGHT up with Toby and Phoebe at the coffee cart on Friday, they seemed surprised, and not entirely pleased, to see me.
“Hi,” I said sheepishly, stepping into line behind them.
“Oh, am I allowed to talk to you?” Toby faked concern. “Or will your grunty jock friends shove me up against the lockers?”
I snickered at the joke. Our school didn’t have lockers, since we each got a personal set of textbooks to keep at home.
“Well, you look miserable,” Toby said.
“Cassidy and I broke up.” Like the whole school hadn’t known for days.
“I said miserable, not heartbroken, you asscanoe,” Toby corrected. “And you could have at least returned my texts after I took care of your absence on Monday.”
I’d been wondering about that.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “The lack of detention was awesome.”
It was so easy to slip back into the way I used to be around them that standing together in the coffee line made me miss them even more than I’d thought possible.
“I’ve been sort of avoiding my phone lately,” I explained lamely.
Phoebe smiled hesitantly and started to say something, but then changed her mind.
“No cane,” she said instead.
“I traded it for some magic beans and the dictatorship of a small Middle Eastern country.”
“An unfortunately arid climate in which magic beans don’t exactly thrive,” Toby pointed out drily.
“Knew I was getting screwed on that deal somehow.” I faked disappointment.
Phoebe laughed, and Toby started talking about how, in the event my magic beans did grow, I should order my subjects to go gleaning, and the three of us standing there making ridiculous jokes was the happiest I’d felt in a long time.
“Listen,” I said, “I wanted to—”
“Ezra! Hiii!” Charlotte squealed, hugging me with an intimacy that she’d conjured out of nowhere. Jill and Emma materialized next to her, and the three of them joined our place at the front of the line like they knew exactly what they were doing and were confident they’d get away with it.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Charlotte asked sweetly, cutting in front of Phoebe to give her coffee order.
Phoebe’s expression darkened, and she mumbled something at her shoes. Toby coughed meaningfully.
“Ezra was saving our spot, weren’t you, sweetie?” Jill patted me on the arm.
“Yeah, of course,” I said hollowly, wincing as I heard the words come out of my mouth.
Toby looked disgusted, and I didn’t blame him.
CASSIDY WAS CURLED in her seat in Speech and Debate, two-thirds of the way through the novel from Wednesday. I sat down quietly and took out a book of my own. She glanced over and sighed, shifting away from me in her chair, my presence actually making her recoil.
“Seriously?” I whispered.
“What?” Cassidy frowned, apparently unaware.
“You can’t even stand to sit next to me now?”
Cassidy put down her book and studied me for a moment, and whatever she was looking for, she obviously didn’t find it. “Well, we don’t really need to keep sitting next to each other.”
“Fine,” I said stiffly, standing up.
I moved to an empty table a few down from the one where we usually sat, and Ms. Weng came in and put on that awful documentary, and Cassidy and I glared at our respective books and occasionally each other in the thin light from the tinted windows.
After a while, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I nearly jumped a mile.
“Come with me,” Toby said.
I hadn’t even heard him come in.
Ms. Weng had abandoned us to the DVD, so I grabbed my bag and followed Toby into the Annex.
“Don’t do this,” Toby said, leaning against the center table. It was covered with a mess of papers he’d been grading and the world’s most outdated iPod, which was leaking what sounded suspiciously like opera through its headphones.
“Do what?” I asked.
“You’re severed head-ing me!” Toby accused angrily.
“I have no idea what that means!” I honestly didn’t. But Toby was serious.
“Really?” His voice dripped scorn. “Remember my twelfth birthday? The severed head? How all of a sudden, we weren’t friends anymore.”
“Are you calling Cassidy a severed head?”
“No, Faulkner. I’m calling you an idiot. You’re pushing me away, exactly like you did in the seventh grade.”
Toby glared at me, and I crossed my arms, glaring back.
“In case you forgot, you were the one who caught that head,” I said. “It was nothing to do with me.”
“I’m not talking about that stupid head, Faulkner! I’m talking about you. I was the fat kid who drew comic books. I was going to be bullied no matter what. You act like that day at Disneyland was my big tragedy, but you’re the one who lost your best friend. You’re the one who started eating lunch with the popular jocks and forgot how to be awesome because you were too busy being cool. We could have still hung out after school if you’d asked, if you’d wanted to. But you just dropped me because everyone expected you to. And you’re doing it again, and it sucks.”
I stared at Toby in horror, realizing that he was right. I had pushed him away. To be fair, we’d been twelve, and I’d considered it a miracle that I’d looked and dressed and hit a ball well enough to be spared the brunt of that hell. But it had honestly never occurred to me that I didn’t have to lose my best friend that year. That I had a choice.
“So I’m an asshole,” I said.
“Well yeah. Insert gay joke about my liking assholes here.” Toby shrugged, trying not to grin.
“Well, I would. But then that would make me a dick.”
Toby snorted. “Touché.”
“I’m sorry I severed-headed you. I just, I don’t know. The whole Cassidy debacle.”
I sighed and glanced toward the door to Ms. Weng’s room.
“Yeah, thanks for texting. We waited for you two at the Fiesta Palace forever,” Toby complained.
“Sorry,” I muttered, feeling awful.
“How’d she do it, anyhow? Make you stop at some coffee place and then break your heart at the table?”
“No,” I said bitterly, “because that would have been somewhat decent of her. As it happens, she just never showed up. I found her in the castle park, on a date with another guy.”
Toby dropped the pen he’d been fiddling with. “You’re joking,” he said. “On the night of the dance?”
“What does it matter? She wasn’t really planning to go.” I shrugged gloomily.
“Of course she was!” Toby insisted. “She texted me pictures of this five-hundred-dollar dress asking if you’d like it and dragged Phoebe to every shoe store in Eastwood.”
“You’re serious?” I asked.
“Here, Faulkner. Behold the girly texts,” Toby said, holding out his phone. “And note that I put up with them solely due to our friendship.”
“I believe you,” I said, but Toby was determined. I stared down at the picture Cassidy had sent him, a mirror snap in some fancy dressing room. She was making a silly face as she posed barefoot in a gold dress. I could see Phoebe in the background, trying to edge out of the picture.
“Okay,” Toby said gingerly, prying the phone away from me. “Showing you that was a bad idea, dude. Your hands are shaking.”
But I was barely listening. What I was thinking about was how these texts, this picture, proved it. Cassidy had meant to go to the dance with me after all. More importantly, it meant she’d lied that night in the park.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” Toby told me. “You’re going to start at the beginning. Use of the introduction ‘Once upon a time, my awesome best friend warned me about a girl, but I didn’t listen’ is optional.”
He probably meant that I should start at the beginning of Saturday night, but there were so many parts I’d left out that I couldn’t. I needed to go back further. So I told him everything: how Cassidy had made me cheat for her at the debate tournament, how we’d kissed during the Disneyland fireworks and communicated by flashlights, how perfect it all was, and the terrible things she’d said the night of the dance, about my being a small-town joke destined to coach the tennis team in a pathetic attempt to relive my glory days.
“It’s like she wanted to make you hate her.” Toby frowned. “That’s the sort of untrue but awful thing you say to ensure that someone never speaks to you again.”
“She can’t even stand to be around me, and I didn’t do anything,” I said despairingly.
“You really know how to pick ’em, don’t you?” Toby joked.
“I think I’m cursed.”
“I wouldn’t say cursed,” Toby mused. “More like suffering the aftermath of a personal tragedy.”
The aftermath of a personal tragedy. I liked that. It sounded appropriately gloomy.
“Yeah, probably,” I said. And I felt unspeakably grateful to him. For putting up with me, for pulling me out of class and forcing me to talk about what had happened, even though I’d been kind of a dick lately. For being an actual friend, and not just someone with whom I’d shared a lunch table, or competed for the same team. Because if there was anyone who could help me find the answers I was looking for, it was Toby.
“Listen,” I said. “I know it’s crazy, but I have this feeling that I’m missing this massive piece of what happened. And I have to know. I have to find out the truth about Cassidy Thorpe, and I need your help.”
Of course he’d help. Whatever I needed, because that’s how it worked, the whole best friends thing. Toby was staring at me like he couldn’t believe I’d half expected them to refuse. And I thought: Toby, Phoebe, Austin, they would have visited me in the hospital, not just sent some cheesy card. They wouldn’t have asked me to come to tennis practice and pick up a racquet just to win some stupid bet.
Because Cassidy had been wrong about one thing in that desperate lie she’d delivered that night in the park. It wasn’t me that would still be here in twenty years, coaching the high-school tennis team in a frantic bid to relive my glory days: it was Evan.