So she’d gone to the park, because Cassidy liked parks, because that was where she went when things needed to be said or thought through, and that was where I’d found her. It had gotten dark and she hadn’t realized, and then it was too late to explain the truth that she’d been hiding from everyone for so long. She hadn’t expected to get close to anyone at Eastwood, and now that I was there, what could she say so that I’d leave?
So she’d lied. Of course she’d lied. I’d caught her off guard and she didn’t have time to make it good. So it was her boyfriend she was there with, and I was just an amusement. It was a lie inspired by the very story I’d told her about how Charlotte and I had ended, and she hadn’t realized how completely it would shatter me. She’d tried to take it back—changed her mind—but I was already leaving. And when she’d finally had the courage to go back to class and face me, she hadn’t been able to face me at all.
I played this explanation over in my head as I drove home against the purpling sky, past the endlessly pristine golf courses that lay between Eastwood and Back Bay. If I’d gotten it right, then Cassidy had pushed me away because it was easier than explaining that her brother was gone, and there was nowhere else to run to pretend that it hadn’t happened. If I’d gotten it right, then we were never meant to break up that night in the park, and we were both hurting because of it.
MY FATHER STOPPED me when I got home.
“Come on in here a second, champ,” he said, beckoning me into his home office with a schmoozy grin.
I shrugged out of my backpack and took a seat on his sofa. The scent of dinner cooking drifted in from the kitchen—it smelled suspiciously like Italian food, which couldn’t be right.
“Is Mom making lasagna?” I asked hopefully as my father tabbed between multiple Excel files.
“Gluten free.” He swiveled his chair around to face me and steepled his fingers.
“Maybe it tastes better.” I somehow managed to keep a straight face.
“First step: lasagna; next step: pizza,” my father said, winking. And then he crossed his ankle over his knee, and got down to business. “I hear you’ve been keeping busy these days.”
“College applications,” I said. “It’s easier to get them done at the library.”
He said he was happy to hear I was being proactive about my future, and I nodded and listened while he launched into one of those endless stories about his good old days as chapter president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. When he finished, he beamed at me, waiting I suppose for me to confirm my ambitions to follow in his footsteps like we’d always planned. But I didn’t.
Instead, I told him I was thinking of going East. I named a string of schools whose brochures I had stashed in my desk drawer. His eyebrows went up at a couple of them, and I didn’t blame him. Mentioned history, English, chemistry. Mentioned that I thought I could do better than state college, and that I wanted to at least try.
“Well, I’m surprised,” my father said, scrutinizing me. “You’ve grown up a lot this year, kiddo. You’ve had to, and I’m sorry about that. But I’m glad to see that you have a plan.”
“You mean you’re okay with it?” I asked, hardly daring to believe it.
“I don’t presume to speak for your mother.” He smiled wryly. “But I think it would be good for you. And of course my old fraternity has chapters at most schools.”
I laughed, for once finding one of my father’s pseudojokes funny. And when my mom called us in to dinner and stood beaming over a platter of only mildly healthy-tasting lasagna, we finally had something to discuss besides light fixtures.
AFTER DINNER, I drove over to Toby’s house.
“Hey,” he said, ushering me into his bedroom. He was wearing glasses and pajama pants, and it reminded me of when we were little, the two of us sneaking around the house at night when we were supposed to be asleep.
He passed me an old N64 controller, the see-through one we used to fight over, and put in a game without asking. It was some retro Mario I’d given him for an elementary-school birthday back when it was the cool new thing, and we sat there and played it, like we had a hundred times, secret levels and all, except this time felt different.
“Do you want to see the article?” Toby finally asked.
I told him I did, and he pulled it up on his computer.
Sure enough, Owen Alexander Thorpe. Graduated first in his class from the Barrows School, gone on to Yale, and then Johns Hopkins for medical school. He’d died at twenty-three, unexpectedly, from a sudden cardiac arrest caused by a thromboembolism. I’d picked up enough from my time in the hospital to know what that meant: Owen had died of a broken heart.
There was a picture, too, a cheesy tourist shot, taking up half of the screen. I could see the Eiffel Tower in the background, the ground slick with rain, some strangers still under their umbrellas. Owen was smiling in this embarrassed way, his blond hair flopping into his eyes, Cassidy’s particular shade of blue that evidently ran in their family. A scarf was around his neck, and his arm was slung around someone who had been cropped from the picture. I could see the corner of a trench coat, the edge of a shopping bag.
To his credit, Toby let me sit there staring at his computer screen for a good long while. It was only when his neighbor’s lights came on, splashing through his bedroom window, that I looked up, remembering where I was.
The house across the street had turned on their Christmas lights. Toby and I looked out the window horrorstruck by the pair of twelve-foot-tall glowing inflatable snowmen that had ballooned out of nowhere, bookending a neon nativity. Someone had climbed onto the roof and used dozens of strands of lights to spell out “HAPPY BDAY JESUS” in flashing red and green.