In the way that some places have a rash of burglaries or hubcap thefts, we have coyotes. It’s not that surprising when small animals disappear, and every once in a while I would see something slink past the tennis courts while I was practicing after dark. Occasionally the neighbors’ koi ponds were depleted overnight, or a jogger would spot a coyote watching him on one of the trails, but no one had ever been killed by coyotes. It was an absurd idea, like something out of those novels filled with vampires and witches.
Still, there was an Animal Control van parked by the side of the football field on Monday, and every day that week, we’d watch officers comb the trails through our classroom windows.
I sat at Toby’s lunch table again, where little was said about my reappearance. Austin looked up from his iPad long enough to flick his bangs out of his eyes and announce that it was about time I was back, and had I seen the new Nintendo console?
“No, but did you know there’s an eight-bit Great Gatsby game?” I asked.
“You’re making that up.” Austin furiously started typing.
I glanced over toward my former lunch table, where Jimmy had pulled a roll of Mentos out of his pocket and was threatening to dump them into Emma’s soda bottle. Evan roared with laughter, and Trevor started a chant of “Do it and you’re cool!” When Jimmy inevitably succumbed to the temptation, the boys backed away laughing as Emma’s soda shot a geyser of fizz into the air.
“Oh shit!” they muttered gleefully.
The girls stood there, dripping and indignant as the fizz explosion turned to a trickle. The pavement under their lunch table was drenched, and the front of Charlotte’s Song Squad uniform was soaked. Evan looked up and caught me watching. He flicked his chin, telling me to get over there, but I just shook my head.
“Emma’s going to kill him,” I said, breaking off a piece of Phoebe’s Pop-Tart.
“Their relationship’s fizzed,” Phoebe said, belatedly swatting my hand away from her breakfast.
“Ten points to Chang,” Toby said.
“He should probably keep that soda as a mementos mori.” I smirked, and our table went totally silent.
“Get it?” I asked. “Mentos, like, memento—”
“We got it,” Toby assured me. “Jesus, Faulkner. Was that poetry? In Latin?”
“That was fifty points,” I told him. “Unless any of you can do better?”
“Pop-Tart sharing privileges activated,” Phoebe said, offering me another piece.
“Dude!” Austin looked up from his iPad. “There really is an eight-bit Gatsby! Why are you guys looking at me like that? What’d I miss?”
ANIMAL CONTROL GAVE up their search on Wednesday, and our homeroom teachers distributed a safety precaution handout that culminated in a laughable series of true-false questions about coyote attacks. I rolled my eyes and turned it over on my desk, not caring that we were doing popcorn reading, since no one would dare to popcorn me.
My school was big on using recycled paper, and it took a moment before I recognized what was on the backs of our Preventing Coyote Attacks! handout: leftover fliers for last year’s Junior-Senior Luau, complete with a poorly photocopied picture of the class council in sunglasses and leis. If you held the handout up to the light, the photo of us seeped through, creating this disturbing impression that it was a picture of attack victims, that we were the cautionary tale.
When I drove over to the medical center later that afternoon, the sun was just beginning to set, and these shafts of golden sunlight slanted through the magnolia trees that divided the rows of parking spaces. In that light, the leaves looked fake, like they were made of wax. Cassidy would have loved them.
I was slightly early when I pushed open the door of Suite 322 North: Cohen and Ford Group Mental Health Practice. The receptionurse smiled at me blankly, and asked which doctor I was there to see, and if I was a new patient. I told her Dr. Cohen and I’d been before, and she typed something into the oldest functioning computer I’d ever seen, and said the insurance stuff was taken care of and I should just sit and relax.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the only places people insist you relax are the least relaxing places on the planet. Airplanes, the dentist, psychiatric waiting rooms, those little curtained-off areas in the hospital where you have an IV put in. Anyway. I sat, waited, considered how incredibly unrelaxed I felt.
The whole place, and I really mean all of it, was decorated for Festivus. There were non-denominational snowmen, and seasonal snowflakes, and glittering garlands of enormous plastic peppermints. It was pretty terrible. Plus there was this older lady already sitting there, wearing a sari and an I’m-waiting-for-my-kid expression as she flipped through a decrepit magazine.
She coughed and shifted in her chair, making the peppermint garland rattle. A small avalanche of glitter sloughed off, and I wasn’t lucky enough to avoid it. I made a face and tried to wipe it from my shoulders, but there was no use.
The receptionurse poked her head through the vestibule and let me know that Dr. Cohen was running about twenty minutes behind. I sighed and put on my headphones, taking out the college app I was working on. The lady with the magazine was being pretty nosy, and after about five minutes, she finally decided to come out with it.
“Are those college applications?”
I nodded.
“Where are you applying?” she asked shamelessly.
“Um, this one’s for Duke,” I said, “and this is for Dartmouth.”
“You must be a smart boy.” She said it like I was some three-year-old, which wasn’t actually reassuring.