“So I’m an ass**le,” I said.
“Well yeah. Insert g*y joke about my liking ass**les here.” Toby shrugged, trying not to grin.
“Well, I would. But then that would make me a dick.”
Toby snorted. “Touché.”
“I’m sorry I severed-headed you. I just, I don’t know. The whole Cassidy debacle.”
I sighed and glanced toward the door to Ms. Weng’s room.
“Yeah, thanks for texting. We waited for you two at the Fiesta Palace forever,” Toby complained.
“Sorry,” I muttered, feeling awful.
“How’d she do it, anyhow? Make you stop at some coffee place and then break your heart at the table?”
“No,” I said bitterly, “because that would have been somewhat decent of her. As it happens, she just never showed up. I found her in the castle park, on a date with another guy.”
Toby dropped the pen he’d been fiddling with. “You’re joking,” he said. “On the night of the dance?”
“What does it matter? She wasn’t really planning to go.” I shrugged gloomily.
“Of course she was!” Toby insisted. “She texted me pictures of this five-hundred-dollar dress asking if you’d like it and dragged Phoebe to every shoe store in Eastwood.”
“You’re serious?” I asked.
“Here, Faulkner. Behold the girly texts,” Toby said, holding out his phone. “And note that I put up with them solely due to our friendship.”
“I believe you,” I said, but Toby was determined. I stared down at the picture Cassidy had sent him, a mirror snap in some fancy dressing room. She was making a silly face as she posed barefoot in a gold dress. I could see Phoebe in the background, trying to edge out of the picture.
“Okay,” Toby said gingerly, prying the phone away from me. “Showing you that was a bad idea, dude. Your hands are shaking.”
But I was barely listening. What I was thinking about was how these texts, this picture, proved it. Cassidy had meant to go to the dance with me after all. More importantly, it meant she’d lied that night in the park.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” Toby told me. “You’re going to start at the beginning. Use of the introduction ‘Once upon a time, my awesome best friend warned me about a girl, but I didn’t listen’ is optional.”
He probably meant that I should start at the beginning of Saturday night, but there were so many parts I’d left out that I couldn’t. I needed to go back further. So I told him everything: how Cassidy had made me cheat for her at the debate tournament, how we’d kissed during the Disneyland fireworks and communicated by flashlights, how perfect it all was, and the terrible things she’d said the night of the dance, about my being a small-town joke destined to coach the tennis team in a pathetic attempt to relive my glory days.
“It’s like she wanted to make you hate her.” Toby frowned. “That’s the sort of untrue but awful thing you say to ensure that someone never speaks to you again.”
“She can’t even stand to be around me, and I didn’t do anything,” I said despairingly.
“You really know how to pick ’em, don’t you?” Toby joked.
“I think I’m cursed.”
“I wouldn’t say cursed,” Toby mused. “More like suffering the aftermath of a personal tragedy.”
The aftermath of a personal tragedy. I liked that. It sounded appropriately gloomy.
“Yeah, probably,” I said. And I felt unspeakably grateful to him. For putting up with me, for pulling me out of class and forcing me to talk about what had happened, even though I’d been kind of a dick lately. For being an actual friend, and not just someone with whom I’d shared a lunch table, or competed for the same team. Because if there was anyone who could help me find the answers I was looking for, it was Toby.
“Listen,” I said. “I know it’s crazy, but I have this feeling that I’m missing this massive piece of what happened. And I have to know. I have to find out the truth about Cassidy Thorpe, and I need your help.”
Of course he’d help. Whatever I needed, because that’s how it worked, the whole best friends thing. Toby was staring at me like he couldn’t believe I’d half expected them to refuse. And I thought: Toby, Phoebe, Austin, they would have visited me in the hospital, not just sent some cheesy card. They wouldn’t have asked me to come to tennis practice and pick up a racquet just to win some stupid bet.
Because Cassidy had been wrong about one thing in that desperate lie she’d delivered that night in the park. It wasn’t me that would still be here in twenty years, coaching the high-school tennis team in a frantic bid to relive my glory days: it was Evan.
28
MY MOM WAS waiting for me with two enormous Halloween pumpkins and a set of carving knives when I got home, evidently harboring the delusion that I’d find such an activity fun.
“I thought you could use some cheering up,” she said, gesturing toward the kitchen table, which was blanketed in at least a dozen layers of newsprint and guilt. So I sat and we carved smiling faces into our pumpkins and chatted until I was reasonably certain she wouldn’t make me participate in any more cheering-up activities in the foreseeable future.
“I made you an appointment with Dr. Cohen,” Mom said when she put our finished jack-o’-lanterns by the front door.
I stopped clicking the little LED on and off and stared at her in horror, realizing that this had been her itinerary all along. The pumpkins were just the first stop on her all-expenses-paid guilt trip.