I had this horrifying realization that my nightmares were true: While I was sleeping, my parents had been downstairs grilling the girl I liked on what her parents did for a living.
When I dashed into the kitchen five minutes later, still buttoning my shirt, I found Cassidy sitting cross-legged on the tile, scratching Cooper behind the ears.
“Hi!” she said brightly. “You forgot about team breakfast, didn’t you?”
“Oops,” I said sheepishly, mostly for my parents’ benefit, since I was fairly certain there was no team breakfast.
“Can we bring Cooper?” Cassidy asked.
Cooper lifted his head, halfway interested.
“To a restaurant?” Mom asked, dismayed.
“Of course not, Mrs. Faulkner,” Cassidy said. “Everyone’s coming over to my house for pancakes. Our housekeeper won’t mind. It’s just across the park.”
“Well, I suppose,” my mom said doubtfully.
The moment we were out the front door, Cassidy holding Cooper’s leash, I raised an eyebrow. “What’s really going on?” I asked.
“You mean you didn’t believe me?” Cassidy made her eyes go wide and innocent. “Honestly, Ezra, I’m hurt.”
I followed her toward the pedestrian gate that led out into the park. Cooper bounded ahead, prancing importantly. He had part of his leash dangling from his mouth, and he looked very pleased with himself.
“There’s sunscreen in my purse, by the way. If you want to borrow some,” Cassidy said, holding open the gate.
“Why would I want to borrow sunscreen?”
“We’re going on a treasure hunt. Didn’t I mention?”
“No, you told me we were eating pancakes with the debate team. At your house,” I said.
“Clearly that was code for ‘We’re going on a treasure hunt.’ Which is why we need Cooper here. So he can be our truffle sniffer.”
She turned right on the path, which led toward Eastwood’s hiking trails.
“All right,” I conceded. “Give me the sunscreen.”
She dug it out of her purse, and I slathered it on while she played with Cooper. He gave me a look as if to say So this is the girl, old sport.
“You’re in charge of the GPS,” Cassidy told me, handing me her phone. “Don’t close the app or we’ll have to start over.”
Cassidy led me into the trails, explaining as we went that we were searching for a geocache, or tiny capsule. They were hidden all over the United States, and you had to solve puzzles to find them.
“Sometimes they have nothing inside, and sometimes they’re filled with little treasures,” she said. “But if you take something, you’re supposed to leave something in its place.”
“The law of conservation of geocaches,” I said.
“Why yes, Mr. Illiterate Jock, exactly like that.” Cassidy smiled at me, her hair fiercely red in the sunlight. There was a little smear of sunscreen below her ear.
“Wait,” I said, reaching to wipe it away. “You had sunscreen on your cheek.”
“Did you get it?” Cassidy asked.
“No, I smeared it bigger.”
“Whatever,” she said. “At least I don’t have sunscreen in my hair.”
“It’s not sunscreen. You’re turning my hair white.”
I navigated us through the hiking trails, telling Cassidy stories about the invisible world Toby and I had concocted there when we were kids. We found the geocache behind a loose brick on this wall down by the back of the Catholic Church. It was filled with junk—cheap fast-food toys, mostly. But it didn’t matter what was inside, just that the hiking trails really were filled with buried treasure.
And I understood then that Cassidy was making it up to me. That this adventure was her apology for what had happened at the debate tournament, because simply saying sorry was too normal for a girl like Cassidy Thorpe.
“Don’t you want to sign the log?” I asked, motioning toward Cassidy’s phone, which had finished playing this little congratulatory fanfare and was displaying a list of names.
“Why?” Cassidy asked.
“So the next people who find this know we were here?” it sounded lame even as I said it. But Cassidy’s eyes lit up.
“Hmm,” she said, grabbing the phone and typing quickly.
“My turn,” I said, taking it back. But then I frowned at what she’d written. “Who’s Owen?”
“My brother,” Cassidy said sheepishly. “We used to do this, to mess with the universe.”
“So you signed each other up for weird newsletters and stuff?” I asked.
“Everyone does that. We’d switch library cards, put each other’s names on blog comments, screw with the grand cosmic record of who did what.”
“Why?” I asked, confused.
“The world tends toward chaos, you know,” Cassidy said. “I’m just helping it along. You could too. Just write down a made-up name, or even a fictional character. And to the next person who finds this geocache, it’s as though things really happened that way. You have to at least allow for the possibility of it.”
“Fictional people?” I teased. “Only you would think of that.”
But I know now that isn’t true; history is filled with fictional people. And even the epigraph Fitzgerald placed at the beginning of The Great Gatsby is by a writer who doesn’t exist. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary—made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn’t whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it’s whether or not you want to.