The impeccable rows of homes marched onward, little soldiers on the front lines of suburbia, hoping valiantly they would never meet a tragic end. But so many of them did. So many identical houses behind identical gates bore the marks of tragedy, and it was from those houses that the determined few left Eastwood and all its empty promises behind forever.
Toby and I scattered Cooper’s ashes over the hiking trail one afternoon in late November, even though it was illegal. In eulogy, I read from my dog-eared copy of Gatsby, reciting that famous line about the foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams as I emptied the funerary urn into the wind.
As Toby and I walked back toward the park, my cane sinking into the freshly watered grass, the light was on in Cassidy’s bedroom, and I remember glancing at it and wondering. I wondered what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we’d gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.
When Cassidy failed to show up at school for the spring semester, I wasn’t particularly surprised. I’d been expecting for some time that she’d go back to boarding school, returning to the panopticon that she had never truly escaped, and it was just as well. The finality of her leaving allowed me to reclaim the places that had once been ours as mine, to say good-bye to my childhood parks and hiking trails rather than grasping for lost moments with a lost girl who refused to be found.
I’m at college now, and it’s been some weeks since the leaves turned to memory beneath our feet and trays began disappearing from the dining hall, smuggled out under wool coats in anticipation of the first snow.
Incidentally, it’s snowing again as I write this, the fat flakes drifting past the window of my dorm, which faces out onto a gothic quadrangle. Toby came down from Boston over the weekend, and my room still bears the unmistakable signs of his visit; some art book on Magritte his boyfriend insisted on sending along for me, even though I can’t imagine where he got the idea that I’m a fan of surrealist art. An inflatable mattress, which I’ve meant to return to the girl down the hall for days, except our schedules never seem to match up. And this fantastic picture from my eighteenth birthday that Toby taped up over my desk when I went to rinse out the French press in our hall kitchen.
Phoebe took the picture, twisting around in her seat on the roller coaster at the last moment, even though the Disneyland cast member was yelling at her to face front. It’s a blurry shot of Toby and me in the back row of the Thunder Mountain Railroad. Toby’s laughing at something Austin just said, and I’m almost but not quite looking at the camera. I’m smiling at Phoebe, at the whispered promises of that last summer, and the profound reluctance I’d discovered for leaving good people behind. But we had plenty of time for youthful indecision, both apart and together, for limping into the future past the unforgettable ash heaps of our histories.
I often wonder what will become of Cassidy Thorpe. She was the first of us to leave Eastwood, returning to the Barrows School that senior spring with what I can only imagine to be tales in which we’re all elaborately misrepresented. I can’t say I forgive her for refusing to indulge the perhapsness of what we might have been, but I understand why she chose to do it, and she never asked for my forgiveness.
She was right, though, in the end. I never should have given her so much credit. It all got tangled together, her appearance and Toby coming back into my life and the first time I ever read a book that spoke to me, and the question of who I wanted to be in the aftermath of my personal tragedy. Because I made a decision that year, to start mattering in a way that had nothing to do with sports teams or plastic crowns, and the reality is, I might have made that decision without her, or if I’d never fallen in love with a girl who considered love to be the biggest disaster of all.
The truth of it was, I’d been running the wrong experiment my whole life, and while Cassidy was the first person to realize, she didn’t add the elements that allowed me to proceed down a different path. She lent a spark, perhaps, or tendered the flame, but the arson was mine. Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that’s all. I don’t know if he’s right, but I do know that I spent a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.