Cassidy opened her mouth as if to say something, but then she stopped herself.
“I’m not going,” she informed me, as though it should have been obvious.
“Okay. Well, maybe you should have told me that before?” I shrugged helplessly.
The stadium lights seemed harsh all of a sudden, like the lights they use in operating rooms.
“Go away, Ezra,” Cassidy pleaded. “Please, just go.”
“No,” I said stubbornly.
Cassidy glared at me, her eyes not so much filling with tears as lacking the capacity to hold any more of them.
“God, can’t you see that you’re the last person I want to talk to right now?” she asked.
“Yeah, actually,” I said. “And I have no idea why.”
“It’s complicated.” Cassidy wrapped her arms around herself as though she was cold, and my first instinct was to offer her my jacket, but of course I didn’t. Not with the two of us standing on top of that grassy hill in the castle park, a corsage going limp in the passenger seat of my car while our friends ate their entrees at a table with empty seats.
“Maybe you can explain it to me anyway?”
“Oh, honey.” She’d never called me that before, and I didn’t like it. “Isn’t it obvious? You. Me. Dating. I was amusing myself. And then my boyfriend drove down from San Francisco to surprise me. He just ran to the gas station to buy cigarettes. You probably don’t want to be here when he gets back.”
Cassidy nodded toward the neon lights of the gas station, which was just across the street. I thought about going in there and punching that asscanoe right in the face. But then Cassidy sniffled, and asked me again to leave.
We stood there, coolly regarding each other. The castle park was behind her, like a photograph of a night we’d shared a million years and two weeks ago.
“I—just—the whole time, it’s been someone else?” I said numbly.
She cocked her head slightly, her hand on her hip, as though it pained her to have to explain it to me.
“How could it have been you? My God, Ezra, look at yourself. You’re a washed-up prom king who lost his virginity to some cheerleader in a hot tub. You take me out for burgers and Friday-night movies at the multiplex. You’re everything I make fun of about small hick towns like this one, and you’re still going to be here in twenty years, coaching the high-school tennis team so you can relive your glory days.”
Back when they’d reset the broken bone in my wrist, I’d woken up on the operating table. It was just for a moment, before the doctors upped the anesthesia, but in those seconds when the lights were bright and hot and the surgeons were bent over me with my blood dripping from their scalpels, I’d felt as though I’d woken into a nightmare.
Hearing Cassidy say those things was worse. Because I hadn’t been broken when I’d left my house an hour earlier, with a wrist corsage of white roses still cold from the refrigerator, but I was certainly broken now.
I stared at her, horrified. Her chin jutted stubbornly and her eyes were a hurricane, and there was nowhere for me to seek cover.
“Okay,” I said hollowly. “Sorry. I just—sorry.”
I turned and walked away.
“Ezra!” she called desperately, as though I was the one who was being unreasonable.
I paused, considering it, but what more was there to say? And then I continued my funeral march toward the parking lot.
The death of a relationship. At least I was dressed for the wake.
My phone was a grocery list of missed calls, but I didn’t feel like dealing with them. Instead, I drove home in the cooling darkness, past the ghostly stretch of white birch trees and around the loop that encircled Eastwood like a noose.
I jammed my brakes at a stop sign that had gone up recently, and the corsage flew forward, landing on the floor. I left it there, sliding back and forth, its petals bruising with each curve of the road.
“Ezra?” my mom called when I came in.
“Yeah, hi.”
She could see it in my face that something was deeply, horribly wrong. And that I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Aren’t you going to the dance, honey?” she asked.
“No.”
I went upstairs, Cooper following worriedly, and slammed the door, barricading the two of us inside. I lay down on top of the bed in my suit and closed my eyes.
This is how they bury you, I thought. In your best suit, the one you wear to weddings and funerals, a suit that girls have draped over their shoulders on cold nights and dry cleaners have absolved of all stains.
Suddenly, I couldn’t stand wearing the thing. She’d picked it out for me, and I felt sick at the thought.
Cooper whined nervously, his tail thumping against the duvet as I stripped down to my boxers. I stared up at the ceiling fan, but the propellers reminded me of my old car, the BMW logo, so I turned over, burying my face in my pillow.
That was when I heard it: the alarm on my phone. Homecoming court. The results. And I couldn’t have cared less.
The alarm continued to trill in two-minute intervals as I lay there undressed and miserable in the darkness. I cried for my brokenness, for the way her words had crippled me, and for the three unspoken words I’d been carrying with me for a while now, and how quickly one of them had changed.
“I hate you, Cassidy Thorpe,” I whispered. “I hate you.”
25
THERE’S A CLOCK in Mr. Choi’s calculus classroom that has sixty-two seconds in each minute. I’ve counted it before, fascinated with the discrepancy, but not really believing in it. There was something wrong with the clock, not with time itself.