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.