The Beginning of Everything (20 page)

28

MY MOM WAS
waiting for me with two enormous Halloween pumpkins and a set of carving knives when I got home, evidently harboring the delusion that I'd find such an activity fun.

“I thought you could use some cheering up,” she said, gesturing toward the kitchen table, which was blanketed in at least a dozen layers of newsprint and guilt. So I sat and we carved smiling faces into our pumpkins and chatted until I was reasonably certain she wouldn't make me participate in any more cheering-up activities in the foreseeable future.

“I made you an appointment with Dr. Cohen,” Mom said when she put our finished jack-o'-lanterns by the front door.

I stopped clicking the little LED on and off and stared at her in horror, realizing that this had been her itinerary all along. The pumpkins were just the first stop on her all-expenses-paid guilt trip.

“Mom, no.”

Cooper, who was investigating the pumpkins, stared up at me, wondering why I was so upset.

“One appointment,” Mom said firmly. “You're supposed to check in, you know this. Can you hand me that light?”

I scowled and handed her the LED I'd been playing with.

“I don't need to see a therapist.”

Mom sighed. Adjusted the jack-o'-lantern. Made it clear we weren't discussing this on the front steps because, God forbid, the neighbors might overhear. Finally, she closed the front door and pursed her lips at my attitude.

“I'm
fine
,” I insisted. “I got dumped, that's all.”

“This isn't negotiable,” Mom said. “I'm sorry, honey, but your father and I agree on this one. I made you an appointment after school on Wednesday.”

“What if I'm not exactly jumping at the chance to drive myself over there and talk to a doctor about my personal life?” I asked.

I knew I was being an ass, but I didn't care. She couldn't just spring this on me. Expect me to go back to that office where the last time Dr. Cohen had seen me, I'd been on crutches, my pocket rattling with a bottle of prescription painkillers, trying to get over the news that I'd never play college sports. To have to catch him up on all of the things he'd never understand, about Cassidy and Toby and my old friends. To discuss my life like it was the plot of some novel I'd read but hadn't really understood.

“You can sulk about it all you want,” Mom warned, “but if you miss that appointment, you're losing your car privileges for the month. Even for school. I don't mind driving you, you know.”

“Great,” I said, wandering into the kitchen so I could glare at the pantry because of course she wouldn't have bought any Halloween candy. At least I wasn't in danger of suffering from
kummerspeck
, or emotion-related overeating, in our house.

 

LUKE HELD ANOTHER
floating movie theater on Saturday night, some sort of classic fright fest in the gym, and of course I wasn't invited. Toby insisted that I should just come anyhow, but I didn't think it would go over well. In the end, I wound up attending Jill's big Halloween party, which I'd halfway been planning to back out of at the last minute.

I just wanted to stay home, since I'd been sort of exhausted lately. But it turned out I couldn't spend Halloween watching my mom hand out those little boxes of raisins to dismayed trick-or-treaters while my dad typed up some important document in his home office, sighing every time the doorbell rang. So I picked up some plastic fangs and body glitter on my way over to Jill's. It was pretty pathetic, and I doubted anyone at the party would get that I meant it ironically, but it was all I could manage on short notice.

Jill lived in one of the older subdivisions on the lake, where most of the homes had been purchased for their lots and then rebuilt. Her backyard had a private dock, and her parents kept a sailboat there. Every year for her Halloween party, Jill decorated it as a ghost ship, complete with cobwebs and a Jolly Roger flag and a hull filled with beer.

Junior year, the entire tennis team had come dressed in bedsheet togas and played so many rounds of flip cup that I was still drunk when I woke up the next morning, something I hadn't even known was possible.

The party was going strong when I got there. All of the girls seemed to be in costumes that consisted largely of lingerie and high heels, not that I was complaining. The football team had claimed a keg in the living room and some guys were attempting keg stands through a Hillary Clinton mask, which was just baffling enough to be plausible, since Connor MacLeary was involved. I walked past two girls in the kitchen in the same stripper Dorothy costume, who were screaming at each other while their friend tried to break it up by saying, “You guys! It's not like you're wearing the same prom dress!”

I tried not to laugh as I opened the screen door and stepped through into the backyard. I was starting to get the unfortunate impression that I'd arrived at the party too late. Some sophomores, whom I doubted had been invited, were already sick in the bushes, and cups littered the grass.

“Ezra!” Charlotte said, launching herself at me. She was a bit unsteady in her high heels, and seemed to be dressed as a Disney princess with a penchant for pole-dancing. “You came!”

“Of course,” I said. “Who could miss a pirate ship full of beer?”

“How come you're not wearing a costume?” Charlotte asked. I couldn't tell if she was teasing me.

“I'm a vampire,” I insisted, popping in the plastic fangs.

“Hmmm.” Charlotte considered this. “It's more realistic without the fangs. Come on.”

She giggled and dragged me over to a picnic table crowded with our friends. I'd missed the theme, apparently. The girls were all sexy Disney princesses, and the guys were in zombie makeup, convincingly slack-jawed by the girls' revealing costumes.

“Dude, you made it!” Jimmy enthused, sloshing beer out of his Solo cup. It was as though he thought I was actually the life of the party, or maybe he always got too drunk to remember that I wasn't.

The party was a mess, filled with the kinds of things you regretted doing when they spilled out into the schoolwide rumor mill on Monday. After flirting heavily, Trevor and Jill wandered away to hook up, and apparently Trevor threw up in the middle of it. To his credit, he gallantly avoided her shoes—and they say chivalry's dead. Evan and Charlotte got into a fight over nothing, which ended with Charlotte glaring at him from a circle of pissed-off Disney princesses while Evan broke into the off-limits liquor cabinet and downed half a bottle of whiskey despite Jill screaming that her parents would kill her if they found out.

I figured it was only a matter of time until the cops showed up and shut it down, and I didn't want to be there when they did. I left my unfinished beer and plastic fangs on the table and was considering how best to step over the kid passed out across the sliding door to the kitchen when Charlotte caught up with me.

“You're leaving?” she asked.

And I don't know what made me say it, except that I was tired from sitting there and watching the sloppy falling action of the party, but I shrugged and told her, “Well, yeah. I mean, it's a terrible party.”

“It really is,” she agreed. “But no one's going to remember that on Monday.”

“All anyone's going to remember is the pirate ship filled with beer.”

“And that Ezra Faulkner showed up without a costume,” she teased.

“Screw you, I'm a vampire!” I insisted.

“Really?” Charlotte grinned, leaning toward me. “Should I be afraid?”

She stared up at me through her eyelashes, and I realized that the conversation had turned uncomfortable, and we were at one of those parties no good ever comes from, and she wasn't wearing all that much, and I was covered in body glitter.

“So, uh, Happy Halloween, Char,” I said, awkwardly stepping around the kid who'd passed out in the doorway.

“Ezra, wait,” Charlotte said. “Before you go—can we talk?”

I told her okay and led her into the laundry room. Charlotte sat on top of the dryer, and I sat on top of the washer, watching her examine the ruins of her manicure.

“I miss us,” she said, still staring at her nails.

I hadn't been expecting that, and it threw me.

“Charlotte, you're drunk,” I pointed out. “And you're dating Evan.”

“Evan and I had another fight,” she blurted. “You and me were so good together, Ezra. I wish we hadn't broken up.”

She put her hand on my leg, and I was surprised to see that she was serious.

“Well, we did,” I said matter-of-factly.

“I know. But, like, we could get back together.”

She squeezed my leg and tilted her face toward mine, daring me to kiss her. For a moment, I let myself imagine it. The taste of her lips, the curve of her back, the breasts that were so obviously spilling out of her gold bra-top. And then I imagined Evan opening the door and finding us there. Except it wasn't Evan, it was me, five months ago, at a different party, because this was the way things were with Charlotte: so impulsive, and so meaningless.

“No,” I said, removing her hand from my leg. “We can't. It's not a good idea.”

Charlotte's lips trembled for a moment, and then she composed herself, leaving me wondering if I'd imagined it.

“Why not?” she demanded. “You don't have a girlfriend, and Evan would get over it. I mean, don't you ever think about how we used to cuddle on my couch after school, and I'd bake cookies, and you'd get nervous that I might burn them when we kissed? Or the time we went to the OC Fair and you gave me ten dollars and told me to win you a stuffed animal? Or that time we double-dated with Jimmy and that freshman who spilled her Slurpee on his lap during the movie and we couldn't stop laughing?”

I did remember those things, and I couldn't help but smile at the memories of them. They seemed like part of my childhood; they seemed forever ago.

“See, you're smiling,” Charlotte said, encouraged. “And I know you think I'm drunk, but I had like four beers, so I'm not even that bad. And this is different. Remember last year on the beach when you asked me to be your girlfriend and then on Monday the whole school wished they were us? We could
be
that couple again. It doesn't even matter that you were on the debate team for like two seconds, or that you dated that snotty redhead. Seriously, I don't even care about those things. We can pretend the last five months never happened.”

Charlotte stopped babbling long enough to look up at me, her expression pleading.

“We could,” I said gently, “but I don't want to.”

“I'm sorry, did you just
reject
me?” Her eyes narrowed in disbelief.

But the thing with Charlotte was that she'd only mentioned the good parts of what we'd had. I wondered if she'd conveniently forgotten how she'd tormented me with her moodiness while we dated, picking fights over nothing. How she'd given me shopping lists for her birthday and Christmas, and I always still managed to get it wrong. How I never got to pick the movie, how she put her own presets in my car because I listened to “depressing hipster crap.” The offensive grammar in her text messages, and the way she freaked out if I took too long to text back. How she always volunteered me to be the designated driver at parties, even for
her
friends, and how she always copied Jill's Spanish homework at break because I refused to let her have mine.

For a moment, I wondered if I should just tell her that she was a selfish, reckless girl who thought the world owed her something simply because she was pretty, and that I didn't want to be around when she discovered it didn't. But of course I couldn't. Around her, I found it impossible to conjure much of anything worth saying.

“Look, Char, I think you're great,” I said. “You know that. But you don't want to date me. We're not even remotely compatible. I'm sort of a nerd. I have a limp and a lousy car and I hate it here so much that I sit in the UCE library after school pretending that I've already left.”

“How can you hate Eastwood? It's perfect.”

“You see perfection, I see panopticon.”

“Oh my god,
why
do you use such big words?” she demanded in exasperation.

“Sorry,” I apologized, realizing she was the sort of girl who got upset when someone used an unfamiliar word, rather than learning what it meant.

“You're really weird sometimes,” Charlotte accused. “Like tonight, when everyone dressed as zombies, and you wore
that
. I mean, don't you want to be like everyone else?”

“Not particularly,” I said, willing her to finally understand how much I had changed, and how very little she knew about me.

Charlotte considered this for a moment, and then her face broke into a sly smile.

“Very funny,” she announced, and then she launched herself at me.

“Charlotte,” I said, pushing her off and climbing to my feet. “I said no.”

“How was I supposed to know that you meant it?” She seemed tremendously offended all of a sudden. “You can't agree to talk someplace private at a party and that's
it
.”

“Oh. I didn't realize . . .” I winced as it dawned on me that she'd thought I'd wanted to be alone with her, too.

“You
never
do.” Charlotte said with an exasperated sigh. “You can be a real jerk sometimes, and you don't even see how you are. I used to think you did it on purpose, so I flirted with other guys to make you jealous.”

I laughed hollowly.

“That's what you call it? Flirting with other guys? My mistake. At Jonas's party, I should have realized you were just
flirting
.”

“No, what you should have done was sucked it up and dealt with it on Monday and taken me to prom like everyone expected,” Charlotte fumed.