“It’s a barter. One of Ewan’s friends has this video game that’s only available in Japan. He told me that he’d give it to me if I could get you to dress in drag.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I yelled. I threw my fake hair against the wall.
“Don’t wig out, Simone,” she said, and grinned. “See what I did there?”
“Screw you,” I said, really not in the mood for puns. “You dressed me like a hooker for a video game.”
“It’s not just any video game. It’s Revenge of the Furry Bathtub Lickers, which is way more awesome than it sounds. It loses something in the translation.”
I was about to tell Stella all the places she could stick the game when I heard footsteps in the hall and someone cursing to himself. It sounded like Eli.
“And, we’re out of time. Get me a shirt from one of the drawers.” While I fished a green shirt from Cassie’s dresser and tossed it on the bed, Stella pulled out the handcuffs I’d seen in her car earlier. She laid them on top of the shirt and grabbed my arm.
“Hide.” She pulled me into the dark bathroom and closed the door all but a crack as Eli entered Cassie’s bedroom.
My anger drained away and was replaced by fear as I realized that I was trapped in Cassie’s bathroom, dressed like a bad facsimile of a girl, with Eli just a couple of feet away.
Fuck.
Living the Dream
God hated me and was punishing me for some crime I’d committed in a previous incarnation. I was cursed to live out the remainder of my days under the ire of an all-powerful deity who had bent his limitless fury toward the single task of ruining my life. It was the only explanation for how I could have come to be trapped in Cassandra Castillo’s bedroom with Eli Fucking Horowitz—her too-good-to-be-true ex-boyfriend, who actually happened to be that good. I was sure he usually spent his Friday nights rescuing kittens and saving old ladies from loud-music-blaring hooligans.
I stood in front of Cassie’s bedroom door, holding the busted knob in my hand, feeling hopeless. Being beaten up by the school sociopath and trounced at beer pong by the girl I loved were turning out to be the high points of the night. I suspected that being locked in a small room with my mortal enemy might not even be rock bottom.
“You look like shit,” Eli said. He’d moved into a sitting position and was now examining me, taking stock. I wasn’t sure what he’d been doing prior to my arrival, but now all his attention was focused on me.
“At least I don’t smell,” I said. There were pieces of the door on the floor, pieces that I had no clue how to fit back together. With a shrug, I dumped the knob and shoved my hands in my pockets.
Eli didn’t seem to take offense. He did, in fact, smell. It was an unwashed odor of rum and regret. Up close, he looked worse than he had at Gobbler’s. Stubbly and unkempt. The way Coop and Ben and I looked when we came back from camping, only sadder and drunker.
“Well, this is awkward,” I said.
“What happened to you?” Eli asked. I assumed he meant my face, but a quick glance in the mirror over Cassie’s dresser revealed that I looked less like I’d been beaten up and more like someone had dumped a bucket of pig’s blood on me.
“You should see the other guy,” I said.
Eli nodded. “Sure.” The way he looked at me and talked to me was infuriating. He was so authentically nice about everything. Eli was a parent’s wet dream. Granted, at that moment, he wasn’t living up to his potential, but Eli on his worst day was still better than most men on their best. He was certainly better than me.
As maddening as that was, he also put me at ease. I knew that I could tell him what happened and he would judge my actions honestly. So I told him about my fight with Dean without embellishing too much.
When I finished my story, Eli pointed at the bottom right drawer of Cassie’s dresser. “There’s a shirt you can wear in there.” He picked up a bottle of dark rum that had been hidden between his thigh and the bed and took a swallow.
The drawer was filled with clothes that were decidedly not Cassie’s. A couple of pairs of jeans, some shirts. Boxers. I glanced back questioningly and he said, “They’re mine.”
“Thanks,” I said. I chose a shirt at random and pulled it on. The thing was like two sizes too big. It was a green shirt with TEAM PLÁTANO written in red over a festive silk-screened menorah.
Eli chuckled. “Mr. Castillo had that made for me over the holidays. Every year he has a family contest. Last year was boys versus girls. Team Plátano versus Team Melón.” I didn’t get the joke, but it made Eli smile. I wished I could smile with him, but all I could think about was Eli celebrating Chrismukkah—or whatever inclusive hybrid religious holiday the Castillos had devised—with Cassie. Sitting around the table, part of the family, part of her life. It was all I could do not to rip off the shirt and burn it.
“You fucking her yet?”
I was so caught up in envying Eli and then hating him for making me envy him that I missed his question the first time. It wasn’t until he said it again that my brain fired off the appropriate signals to my jaw, which, if I’d been a cartoon character, would have hit the floor with an audible thunk.
It wasn’t the question itself that blindsided me. Firstly, it was how he’d asked it. Hearing Eli Horowitz ask something so crude was out of character. Secondly, and more importantly, it was the fact that he actually thought I had a chance of hooking up with Cassie. Even if it was a jealous fantasy planted in his brain by a combination of alcohol and depression, it still meant that he believed me capable of such an act. Or better yet, that he believed Cassie would even have me.
“No?” I said.
“You don’t sound sure.”
“Definitely not,” I said. “She won’t even let me kiss her. Not that I tried. Well, I did, but it was an accident and she shot me down. I swear.” Eli stared at me, not blinking, not twitching a single muscle on his face the whole time I babbled. He scared me more than Dean did, but my fear couldn’t stop my diarrheal word geyser.
“Shut up, Simon.” Eli held the bottle out to me. It was only half full and I hoped that Eli hadn’t consumed the entire missing portion.
I held up my hands. “I’ve had enough liquor for two parties.” The truth was that I barely felt buzzed. I’d danced off the tequila shot long ago, and what little beer I’d had was doing nothing but making me have to pee.
Eli shook the bottle at me. “Drink.” It wasn’t an offer, it was a command.
“Yeah. Sure.” I sat down under the window and took the bottle. Eli watched me take a baby sip. “There. See?”
“For real this time.”
Nothing got past Eli, drunk or not. I tilted the bottle back a second time and took a mouthful, holding it in my cheeks. The stuff tasted like rancid maple syrup and I didn’t think I could choke it down. Eli slapped me on the back and I swallowed involuntarily, coughing and hacking as some of it went down the wrong pipe.
“Mazel tov.” Eli grabbed the bottle back and took another shot like it was water instead of viscous liquid fire obviously distilled from gasoline by demons in the third circle of hell.
As the rattlesnake venom worked its way through my veins, I sat silently, trying to think of something to say that wasn’t completely lame. For all that I’d envied Eli, I didn’t actually know much about the guy. Ben had told me some stories, but Ben’s stories are often more hyperbole than truth. From a distance, Eli appeared to have it all. A great family, a perfect future, more athletic prowess in his little toe than I had in my entire body, and a beautiful girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend, I mean. Upon close inspection, though, I could see the imperfections, the tiny cracks in his existence. Knowing that life sometimes sucked for Eli made him seem more human. Paradoxically, his flaws made him even more perfect.
“Don’t ever fall in love,” Eli said, his voice scratchy from drinking or crying—I didn’t know which.
“Okay.” What else was I supposed to say? I was already in love, had been for years, wi
th the girl who had dumped him. God, how I wanted to feel like this was some sort of karmic retribution for all the years I’d spent pining for Cassie while Eli kissed her and hugged her and wormed his way into the tiny crevices of her life. But few people actually deserved the torment Eli was enduring, and I seriously doubted he was one such person.
Eli locked onto me with his big eyes. I’d never noticed how they bulged out like a scared Chihuahua’s. “Seriously, man. Love is bullshit.” His words ran together, the rum deteriorating the spaces between them. But I got the message, loud and clear.
I nodded again, letting Eli know I’d heard, and then I realized that I had an opportunity that I might not have again. Cassie had chugged an entire beeramid rather than tell me why she’d broken up with Eli. Earlier, I’d suspected that the information might be important, but her stubborn refusal to answer the question had convinced me that knowing why she’d dumped her boyfriend of three years was essential to unraveling the puzzle that was Cassie—which I believed was the key to proving that I really loved her.
In a moment of clarity, free from the effects of the heroic mouthful of rum I’d been intimidated into swallowing, I decided that if I couldn’t get the answers I needed from Cassie, maybe I could wheedle them from Eli. It certainly couldn’t hurt to try. But first, I needed more rum. It took the edge off my war wounds and stiffened my courage, of which I was going to need every ounce.
We passed the bottle back and forth for a couple of minutes, each successive sip going down a little easier, until I felt my fear retreating.
“Sorry about Cass,” I said, easing into it. Eli was fragile and I didn’t want to push him too hard. Yet. He muttered something about love being bullshit again and I worried that I’d let him drink too much. He’d be useless to me if he passed out. “So, what happened with you guys?”
Eli glanced at me like he was gauging the shape and depth of my question. I watched as his face cycled through all the emotions available to him in his intoxicated state—anger, desolation, hopelessness—before he finally settled into a quiet resignation.
“I don’t know,” he said, almost as if he was talking to himself and not to me. “We were good, then we weren’t. No warning, no nothing. One phone call and we were over.”
“She didn’t say why?”
“Nope.” Eli shrugged.
“Was she acting funny? Before she broke up with you, I mean?” It might have been because of the rum, but the longer I spent with Eli, the less I feared him. He was as pathetic as I was; in some ways he was worse.
But Eli didn’t answer my question. I watched him fight the effects of the alcohol, trying to tread water in a depthless pool. “I know you’re in love with my girl,” he said. “Everyone knows.” He looked triumphant as he let that nugget of information hang out between us.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” I thought back to that moment jumping on the bed with Cassie, when I’d told her that I loved her. Her lack of surprise. The way she’d brushed it off so casually. My similar reaction to Eli’s statement clearly irritated him.
“Cassie laughed about it, you know? How pathetic you are.” Eli was tossing bombs, and they hurt. His serious inability to speak in fully formed words robbed them of some of the sting, but not all.
I had a feeling that he wasn’t trying to hurt me as much as he was trying to make himself feel better by lashing out at the only other person in the room who loved Cassie as deeply as he did. I could have fired back—in Eli’s drunken state, it would have been so easy—but I didn’t. Not even I could kick a man when he was so, so low.
“I came here tonight to tell Cassie I love her.” I looked Eli right in the eyes as I said it. He deserved that much. “I tried to barter with her for a kiss.”
Even drunk, Eli could have broken all 206 bones in my body. I watched him wrestle with his desire to do just that. But after a tense minute, he relaxed and sort of shrugged. A pitiable retreat. No matter what happened in the future, he’d never be Eli Fucking Horowitz to me again.
“Sometimes I think she liked you more than she liked me,” Eli said.
“Don’t bullshit me.”
Eli took another swig from the rum bottle. It was definitely more than half empty now. “I’d been working up the nerve to ask Cassie out since I saw her in freshman assembly on the first day of school. Damn, she was fine.” I didn’t know where Eli was going with his story, but hearing that Eli had once been as afraid as I had to talk to Cassie validated years of procrastination and fear.
“Then I heard you’d asked her out,” he said. He glanced over at me, some small bit of respect shining through. “She only said yes because she felt bad for you. No offense or anything, but you know how Cass is.”
I wanted to puke. Cassie had felt bad for me? I was some kind of pity case? No way. Cassie had obviously never told Eli about the eighteenth hole. I said, “I had a chance to kiss Cassie and I blew it.”
Eli and I were past the point of being shocked or angry over our various Cassie revelations. We both loved her. We’d both do anything to be with her. In the arena, we might be enemies, but sitting in Cassie’s room, trapped and not even trying to escape, we were just two lovesick high school boys drowning their miseries in a bottle of stormy rum.
“The first time I kissed Cassie was in a grocery store.” Eli slurred more words than not, but it was like an accent I’d gotten used to.
“What?”
“We went for stuff to make cookies,” he said, losing himself in the memory. “And I kissed her right in front of the chocolate chips.”
Eli laughed. It was probably the first time he’d laughed since Cassie had broken his heart. But his smile faded and he took a huge gulp from the rum bottle to cover the tears that had formed in his eyes. I pretended not to see them.
“I don’t know what happened. We had all these plans for our futures and shit. Then she fucking dumped me. It’s like she doesn’t care about anything anymore.”
Nothing about the night made sense. Eli was right and I knew it. This Cassie—the girl who’d beaten up Blaise Lewis and trashed her house and jumped on her parents’ bed—was not our Cassie. Somewhere along the way, she had changed and we’d missed it.
“How come you’re up here?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be trying to help Cassie or get her back or something?”
“That was the plan. But then I saw the two of you dancing.” The anger was back, but it seemed like he was directing it at himself more than at me.
I tried to put myself in Eli’s shoes, watching me dance with the girl he loved. I would have run all the way home and hidden in my room until the end of days. But Eli had had the balls to stay.
Cassie was the same way. Fearless. But Eli was right: She seemed to move through the night like she was no longer responsible for anything. It was her apathy, her nihilism, that was different tonight.
The Cassandra Castillo I’d first met in freshman anatomy had been a brilliant, blinding star. But the Cassie who was throwing this party appeared to be going supernova. She was either going to explode or collapse under her own mass, destroying her whole life and everything she’d worked for.
Tonight was bigger than me, bigger than a kiss. I didn’t just have to get to know Cassie so that I could kiss her; I had to find out what was going on so that I could help her save herself.
“I love her,” Eli said.
“I know,” I said. Eli was little more than an annoyance now that I thought I understood the seriousness of Cassie’s problems. “Me too.”
But Eli wasn’t going to be dismissed. He grabbed my wrist in an iron grip. “You don’t get it, Simon. I love Cassandra. Love. The way she walks and the way she gets all furious when she hears about animals being abused and how she’s only ticklish when she’s in the mood to be tickled and how she knows how to make me happy when no one else can and how she uses my hand to shield her eyes from the scary parts of movies. I love her. I suck at saying it. I can never make the words sound
the way they do in my head, but I love her and I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone like I love her.” Eli didn’t sound drunk anymore. He spoke from a place inside him unaffected by the rum he’d consumed or the pain he’d endured since Cassie had broken his heart. Maybe his heart wasn’t broken. Maybe it was only fractured and could be repaired.
“Tell her,” I said. “Just like you told me.”
“I can’t.”
My neck hurt from the awkward angle I’d slouched into and I pushed myself into a sitting position so that I could look at Eli dead-on. “You mean to tell me that after all the stuff I’m sure you guys have done, you still can’t tell her that you love her?”
Eli shook his head. “I can tell her. Just not the way I want to.”
“You’re a pussy,” I said. The force behind my words shocked even me, but like drinking the rum, the first time was the hardest and each subsequent swallow got easier and easier. “If Cassie loved me like she loves you, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to show her.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for his reply. There was a chance said reply was going to come via a fist to the face, but I was prepared to accept the consequences. See, if I’d learned anything tonight, it was that Cassie was seriously fucked-up. I wanted to be the one to help her—doing so would be all the proof she needed that I truly loved her—but I wasn’t delusional enough to believe that I could do it. If I was unable to pull Cassie back from the brink of self-destruction, I was putting my remaining chips on Eli Horowitz.
Instead of punching me or getting pissed, Eli simply stared at me for a tense moment before heaving himself to his hands and knees and crawling around the bed toward Cassie’s closet. He disappeared into the deep recesses and I briefly entertained the notion that he’d gone in there and passed out. But he returned a minute later holding a cigar box in his hand. He found the indent his body had left in the carpet and settled back into it before handing me the box.
“Cassie will castrate us both if she finds out I showed you this.”
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