Later—after I’d returned the favor, and we’d gotten dressed, and Cassidy had expressed her undying appreciation for the fact that I had an en suite bathroom—after we’d let Cooper back into the room and were innocently playing Mario Cars with the door open in case my parents came home, Cassidy asked if I was a virgin.
I paused the game, since I had the A controller.
“Um,” I said, wondering if she’d guessed.
“Oh my God.” Cassidy’s lips twitched as she held back a smile. “You’re not!”
“Hey, I used to be cool!” I tried to make a joke of it.
“I know, it’s horrifying,” Cassidy said wryly, and then fiddled with the controller, realizing what she’d started.
“Well, I’m saving myself,” Cassidy announced, like it was the punch line to an untold joke, and then shrugged, embarrassed. “Why do they even call it that, ‘saving yourself’? Like we need to be rescued from sex? It’s not as though virgins spend their whole lives engaged in the sacred ceremony of ‘being saved’ from intercourse.”
“Just so long as you’re cool with outercourse, I guess I don’t mind.” I grinned.
“What the heck is outercourse?” Cassidy frowned.
I tried to make myself the picture of innocence.
“Well, I could show you again?”
21
I’M NOT CERTAIN I can pinpoint the exact moment when I became irreparably different. These days, I think it wasn’t a moment at all, but a process. A chemical reaction, if you will. I was no longer Ezra Faulkner, golden boy, and maybe I hadn’t been for a while, but the more time I spent with Cassidy, the more I was okay with it.
After Cassidy went home and my parents returned from their outing to various home décor warehouses, which we discussed at length over dinner, I put on my new leather jacket and looked at myself in the mirror. A real look, something I’d been avoiding for a long time.
Ever since the accident, I’d only seen the things that were wrong: my hair grown out from its athlete’s cut, my muscles diminished, my tan replaced by an unhealthy pallor, my formerly fitted jeans hanging off my hipbones, even with the aid of a belt.
But when I looked in the mirror this time, I didn’t see any of those things. They were still there, of course, but not as flaws, just as facts: skinny, messy-haired, pale. Me, I guessed, just a different version from the one most people remembered.
In some sort of grand gesture, I took the books out from under my bed and put them on the shelves. Not that I was planning on reading many of them, but it was a nice feeling, being able to glance at my bookshelves and contemplate the possibility of it. To think that a small piece of my bedroom finally represented something of me.
I wondered what Cassidy’s bedroom looked like, if it encapsulated her in a way that mine didn’t. I wondered if it was anything like Charlotte’s bedroom had been, with ladybug figurines lining the windowsill and an entire desk just for her makeup collection, which apparently was called a vanity.
“How come we never go over to your house?” I asked Cassidy when I picked her up for school on Monday.
“Because we have a housekeeper,” she said, sighing. “And she’d tell my parents I have boys over when they’re not around.”
“Technically, I’m singular,” I said, nodding at the security guard as we drove past.
“All the more disastrous,” Cassidy assured me. “Trust me, it’s easier if you don’t come over. You’re not missing anything.”
“I guess,” I said, sensing that Cassidy wanted to drop the subject.
Cassidy took a sip of the coffee I’d brought.
“Have you ever tried a French press?” she asked. “I think you’d like it better.”
CASSIDY AND I went out to the movies on Friday night—a real date, at the Prism Center. She wore a nice dress, and I wore my new clothes, and we saw this awful comedy starring the same actors who always star in awful comedies.
Going to the movies always makes me strangely exhilarated when I exit the theater, surrounded by the smell of popcorn and everyone talking about the film. It’s as though everything is more vivid, and the line between the probable and the cinematic becomes blurred. You think big thoughts, like maybe it’s possible to move someplace exciting, or risk everything for a chance at your dreams or whatever, but then you never do. It’s more the feeling that you could turn your life into a movie if you wanted to.
I’ve never been able to explain to anyone what’s so holy about the moments after you exit a movie theater, so it surprised me when Cassidy smiled and said nothing until we reached the bottom of the escalator, leaving me to the perfect silence of my moment.
“It’s creepy,” she observed, slipping her hand into mine, “overhearing a hundred identical conversations.”
“Then we’ll be the one conversation that’s different,” I promised. “Tell me something that happened when you were a kid.”
Cassidy smiled, pleased.
“When I was seven, my best friend blew out the candles on my birthday cake. I cried because I thought my birthday wish wouldn’t come true. Now you tell me something.”
“Um,” I said, thinking. “In the second grade, Toby and I borrowed a bunch of plastic jewelry from his little sister and buried it in his mother’s flower bed. We wanted to dig up buried treasure, I guess, but we got in so much trouble. I had to sleep over in a different room, like the world’s longest time out.”