I had to pass by Dr. Cohen’s office, and I hesitated outside for a moment. I hadn’t been there since the summer, when I’d quickly figured out what to say to get out of the weekly trauma of trauma counseling. It was strange, passing a door and knowing exactly where it led, and how lousy my life had been when I’d last used it, a sort of anti-nostalgia.
The door to the waiting room opened and a girl stepped out. She was wearing a red and yellow Rancho cheer uniform, and she caught my eye with an embarrassed smile before heading toward the stairs.
I didn’t feel like going home, so I wound up crossing the pedestrian bridge and wandering around UCE’s campus. The campus was smaller than I remembered, and with my backpack and leather jacket, I disappeared instantly into the crowd of students. It was a welcome relief, feeling as though I was invisible after the last few days, when staring at me had become an extracurricular activity the whole school had apparently signed up for.
Being there reminded me of the day Cassidy and I had pretended to be students here, but then, I’d known it would. I thought about how she’d made that crown of flowers by the creek, laughing at me when I told her I’d probably wind up at some nearby state school, that I didn’t really have any plans to leave Orange County. She was right, though. I didn’t belong here, in a dorm room ten miles from home, falling asleep every night to the only slightly more distant thud of the Disneyland fireworks.
I guess I half hoped to see Cassidy exiting a building, wearing jeans and sneakers, her disguise. I pictured her looking up, secretly glad that I’d found her. We’d sit down on one of those wooden benches and she’d tell me how she was sorry, and it had all been a mistake. But things like that never happen, except in really awful movies.
I wandered into the library, where the girl at the desk waved me through without looking up from the book she was reading. I hadn’t really expected her to let me in, or thought about what I would do once I was inside. But I had a backpack full of textbooks, and there was this comfortable-looking lounge area, so I sat down and took out my homework and put on my headphones. But I’d chosen a sofa with a view of the entrance, stupidly hoping Cassidy would walk in.
Of course she never did, and after a while, I stopped looking up every time the door opened. It was incredibly peaceful sitting there, listening to an old Frank Turner album and puzzling through my physics worksheets over a surprisingly good cup of campus coffee. By the time I packed up, I wondered if I’d really been looking for Cassidy after all, or if I’d been hoping to find myself.
I DON’T KNOW what I expected when I slunk into Speech and Debate on Wednesday. Certainly not for Cassidy to glance up from some thick book she was reading, this terrible sadness in her eyes.
“You’re back,” I said, a statement that only served to multiply the awkwardness between us.
“What happened to your cane?”
“I’m fine without it.” I slid clumsily into my chair, unfortunately proving the exact opposite. The coffee I was holding splattered across our shared desk.
“Sorry,” I said, fishing some tissues out of my backpack to mop up the table. “Overfilled it.”
Cassidy closed her eyes and took a deep breath, like she was holding herself back from saying and doing a million things at once.
She picked up her book, angling it like a shield. The desk dried slowly between us, smelling faintly of French roast.
Ms. Weng didn’t even notice that I’d been absent. She’d come down with a cold and was determined not to waste her sick days, so she put on some documentary about the history of public speaking and dimmed the lights.
Cassidy squinted at her book in the dim glow from the television, and I tried and failed to pay attention to the DVD. The air around us crackled with tension, the tension of an accusation I wasn’t going to make, a relationship we’d once had, and an explanation I was fairly certain neither of us believed.
If she thought I was such a joke, if she’d had another boyfriend all along, then she should have been laughing in the aftermath of our breakup, not acting like she wanted to disappear entirely. Something had happened. Something important. Even though the signs all pointed to a mundane explanation: the way Cassidy sometimes wore boys’ clothes, the background photo on her phone with the boy she claimed was her brother, the way she’d never had me over to her house, like I’d needed to be hidden or kept away, I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Any of it.
I BECAME A regular in the UC Eastwood library that week, driving there every day after school to get my homework done. I was used to my afternoons being filled with activities—tennis, student government committee meetings, even that horrible SAT prep class I’d taken with like half of the AP kids in my year. And then there had been the debate team, and Toby and Cassidy to fill my afternoons. It was disarming having endless swaths of free time, and I was oddly thankful my advisor had signed me up for so many advanced courses, since I could stretch out my homework for hours if I did it thoroughly enough.
I could tell my mom was worried about me, because when I got home from the library on Thursday, she’d taken my cane out of the closet and propped it against the door of my bedroom like she thought maybe I’d just forgotten I had one, instead of decided to stop using it altogether.
But there was something comforting about the pain of getting around without it. Something reassuring about having a physical ache to hold on to, this pain that was a part of me independent of Cassidy. I thought about the metal in my knee, replacing this piece of me that was missing, that no longer worked. And it wasn’t my heart, I kept telling myself. It wasn’t my heart.