Dad stood at the kitchen island wearing one of Mom’s silky bathrobes. The fridge was ajar and there was a can of whipped cream and strawberries chilling on the counter. Based on my dad’s tone, I knew I needed to do some fast talking to avoid being imprisoned in my bedroom until graduation.
“I got into a fight chasing the girl of my dreams and my shirt got covered in blood so I had to borrow this shirt from the girl’s ex-boyfriend, who tricked me into drinking a ton of rum and climbing out a window, which isn’t as easy as it looks on TV.”
Dad tapped his finger on the tile counter and stared at me. I couldn’t read his expression, which was always a bad sign. “Are we talking about that Cassie girl?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I came home only so that I could get something that would prove to her that I really love her.”
I thought Dad was going to lock me in the attic, but instead he got a bag of peas from the freezer and tossed it at me. He sat down on a bar stool and motioned for me to do the same. I wanted to tell Dad that I didn’t have time to sit, but I knew that would make the situation much, much worse. So I sat and held the peas to the lump on the back of my head. The cold hurt so good.
“You and I never really talked about girls—” Dad couldn’t look me in the eyes and it was all I could do not to run screaming from the conversation. Solitary confinement might have been preferable.
“I’m sorry for the drinking,” I said. “For the fighting and all of it, but this is important. I’ve waited a long time to tell Cassie how I feel and now I finally have my chance.” To Dad’s credit, he turned off Dad mode and treated me like a man.
“So you really believe this is the right time for you to tell her that you’re in love with her?” I nodded, hoping that Dad would see the urgency of my situation and let me go. Instead he sighed and said, “Simon, I’m afraid I’ve failed you as a father.”
That wasn’t the response I’d expected, and I didn’t know how to react.
“Do you know how I met your mother?”
“In college,” I said, annoyed. Time was running out. Every second I was here, Eli was there. With Cassie. “You had a class together or something.”
Dad nibbled on a strawberry. “Sort of,” he said. “The only reason I took Renaissance literature was because of this girl I fancied.”
“ ‘Fancied,’ Dad? Really?” I tossed the melting bag of peas on the counter and pushed back my stool. “The girl was Mom and you fell madly in love. The end. Can I go?”
“Sit.” Dad pointed at the stool and I dropped back onto it. “The girl was Nancy Stadler. The first time I saw her was in registration. I bribed her roommate to give me Nancy’s schedule.”
It was difficult to picture my dad bribing anyone. He was the kind of guy who wouldn’t even jaywalk. “How very Mission: Impossible of you.”
Dad gave me a wry smile. “It took me all semester to talk to her. I memorized this poem. ‘Come live with me and be my Love—’ ”
“This walk down Old Geezer Lane has been fun and all, but the clock’s ticking.”
Dad gave me a look that told me I was lucky to get a story and not a beating, so I shut my mouth. “Anyway, I waited until class ended and then I stood on my desk and began to recite the poem. What I failed to notice was that Nancy had left and I was wooing an empty room. When I realized I was alone, I hopped down off the desk, slipped, and hit my head on the wall. Your mother saw the whole thing from the hallway and helped me up. We’ve barely been apart since.”
I stood up again, and this time I wasn’t going to sit back down. “So what you’re saying is that I inherited my sense of timing and balance from you?”
“What I’m saying,” Dad said pointedly, “is that sometimes love hurts, but it shouldn’t be so hard.”
“Thanks for the words of wisdom and the hilarious mental image of you crashing into a wall. Can I go now?” Somewhere, in the undamaged part of my brain, I knew that my dad was trying to tell me something important, to have a big father-son moment that would change the course of my life, but that part was buried too deeply for my father’s dubious wisdom to penetrate.
Dad sighed. “Fine. But tomorrow you and I are going to have a discussion about drinking.” He paused. “We can keep your mom out of it.”
“Thanks, Dad.” I looked around the kitchen. “Speaking of Mom, is she asleep?”
Dad’s eyes flicked to the whipped cream and strawberries and he turned the color of the fruit on the counter. I wished I’d never asked.
“Dad! Gross!”
“What? It’s perfectly natural for your mother and me to have relations.”
I covered my ears with my hands. “Jesus, Dad, can you never say the word ‘relations’ again?”
“Sex is a beautiful thing between two adults who love each other.”
“La la la la!”
We were saved by Coop, who popped his head in the door without knocking. “Hey, Mr. Cross.”
“Cooper,” Dad said. “I trust you haven’t been drinking this evening.”
“Sober as a stone,” Coop said. My parents trusted Coop more than they trusted me, and my dad just nodded. “Simon, if we’re going to go back to the party . . .” Coop sounded like he would have preferred not going back, but that option wasn’t on the table. Not for me.
“Yeah. One second.” I ran up the stairs and tore my bedroom apart until I found what I’d been looking for. When I showed it to Cassie, she’d know that I loved her. She’d be able to tell me what was going on, and we could be together. It was perfect. Nothing could stop me now. I was panting when I got back to the kitchen, but I ignored every ache, every pain.
“You and Mom have fun,” I said to Dad before I left.
“Remember what I told you,” Dad said, but I was already out the door.
No one spoke as we left my neighborhood. It wasn’t until we got up to the beach road that Coop asked me what my plan was.
“I’m sort of improvising,” I said.
Ben laughed. “You don’t improvise well. Remember that time—”
“Fuck!” Coop slammed on the brakes as something white ran into the middle of the road. It looked like an albino raccoon. A girl in a yellow tank with bright red dreads chased after the animal. The seat belt bit into my shoulder and I cussed up a storm.
“What was that?” Ben asked, but Coop was too busy yelling out his window to answer.
The girl in yellow scooped up the furry white animal that had nearly become roadkill and ran back to the sidewalk.
“Did that just happen?” I asked.
Coop drove off in silence. We were almost back to Cassie’s house when Coop said, “Are you sure you want to go back to the party, Sy? We can go to Howley’s. Get some loaded fries, crash at my place.” It was the kind of question Coop had asked me a million times because it was the sort of thing we’d done a million times. But his voice had an urgency to it now that I didn’t comprehend.
“That’s low,” I said. “Tempting me with loaded fries.” I was joking, but when I caught Coop looking at me in the rearview, I knew that he wasn’t. Something was going on that had nothing to do with fries. I pulled out of my pocket what I’d gone back to my house for and held it up for Coop and Ben to see.
It was the blue ball from Pirate Chang’s Booty and Mini-Golf. The one I’d sunk on the eighteenth hole. I didn’t have to tell them what it was. They knew.
“We’re going to this party,” I said. “And I’m giving this ball to Cassie. The rest is up to Fate.”
Ben actually looked impressed. Coop, not so much. “It’s okay, baby,” Ben said. “We can go to Howley’s after Simon humiliates himself.”
Coop shook his head. “No, we can’t.”
I didn’t know what he meant by that and I didn’t have time to unravel the enigma that was Cooper Yates, because we were back at the party and the only person on my mind was Cassie.
I’d found my paper clip. It was time to go turn it into a house.
Reality Bites
<
br /> I felt like I was living in a pop music video as I descended the stairs into the belly of the party. While Stella and I had been hiding in Cassie’s bathroom, tricking Eli into handcuffing himself to the bed so that I could make my move on Cassie, the party had continued without us. Whatever semblance of civility people had arrived with, they’d shed it and devolved into a PG-13 hedonism that would have sent their parents into apoplectic fits. Shane Durban streaked from the front of the house to the back, his hairy ass disappearing into the chaotic tumor of dancers in the family room, screaming about the end of the fucking world. Shane was a straight-A Mormon vegan who I’d never seen wear anything other than khaki pants and button-down shirts. Tonight, he’d gone native.
And he wasn’t the only one. The lights in the library were out and the distinct sounds of sucking face told me that the game of Contact Scrabble was over. Kids were dancing on the tables. Various articles of clothing hung from sconces and door handles, their owners nowhere to be seen. The party had peaked and the air was thick with laughter that was too loud and screams that were too shrill. Soon, it would collapse under its own weight. A fight would break out or the cops would show up. People would try to grab their dignity and scram, but I was sure that photographic evidence was already on Facebook, telling the whole sordid story of the night.
As much as I felt like I was in the middle of a memory I’d carry with me for the rest of my life, I also felt out of place. These people, compatriots with whom I’d gone to war in hell, were lost, whereas I was finally found. They were drifting aimlessly through the party, pulled in whatever directions their amped-up hormones deemed gave them the highest probability of getting laid. But I, I had purpose. And I moved through the party with one thought in my head: Find Cassie.
Okay, okay, that’s not entirely true. I was also thinking about the last thing Stella had said to me before she’d gone to find Ewan. The part about me being perfect. What the hell did she mean anyway? She didn’t know me. She didn’t know a damn thing about me except that I was gullible, which wasn’t exactly a state secret. If Stella knew me, she’d know that I wasn’t perfect. There were so many things wrong with me that I’d given up keeping track of them a long time ago. If Stella thought I was perfect, then there was something seriously wrong with her. No wonder she’d never kissed a guy before.
Stella wasn’t around, though. She was probably trading those humiliating pictures of me in drag for that stupid video game. Whatever. The only thing she’d done all night was distract me from my true purpose. It didn’t matter if she thought I was perfect or the pope. Stella Nash was not Cassandra Castillo.
With that settled, I continued my hunt for Cassie, but I didn’t get another step before someone pulled a pillowcase over my head, and calloused hands grabbed me and yanked me off my feet. I heard muffled laughter but I couldn’t make out what the voices were saying. I struggled, kicking and clawing—I even bit someone who was stupid enough to put their hand near my mouth—but my captors were strong and I couldn’t break free.
In less than a minute, it was over as I was thrown onto grass. I scrambled to my feet and pulled off the pillowcase. I recognized it from Mr. and Mrs. Castillo’s bedroom.
“He don’t look like a girl,” Derrick Fuller said. He wasn’t the brightest kid on the best of days, but drunk, he was a total moron.
Blaise stood at the apex of his idiot brigade, his brutish grin aped by his minions. Derrick Fuller and Seth Portnoy on his left, and Jesús Gomez and Fat Duke on the right. Everyone called him Fat Duke because he was fat. Really fat. And the way he held his thumb told me that he was the unlucky bastard I’d gotten a mouthful of. Urinal Cake stood off in the shadows, watching me with a satisfied grin. Part of me wished I’d helped him earlier.
“I’m telling you, he was wearing a skirt and he tried to grab my dick.” Blaise’s words wove and stumbled, but I knew I was screwed no matter how drunk he was. Alone, I might have been able to outrun Blaise, but five against one was a recipe for a serious beat down. The funny thing was that I wasn’t worried about broken bones or bruises. My only thought was that my opportunity to tell Cassie I loved her, bought and paid for with my humiliation, was slipping away.
I couldn’t let that happen.
“Do I look like I’m wearing a dress?” I asked, pleading my case to a jury of half-wits. “Blaise is so lit he probably felt himself up.”
Fat Duke laughed, but a vicious snarl from Blaise silenced him.
“I know it was you, Cross.” Blaise pointed at me. “And I’m going to fuck you up.” Blaise motioned at one of his guys, and Derrick grabbed me by the neck and pulled my left arm up behind my back. Bombs of excruciating pain detonated in my shoulder and I bit my tongue to keep from crying out.
I glanced up at Blaise, blinking away the tears that formed in my eyes. He looked triumphant, like he could already taste my apology. But I wasn’t ready to surrender. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I said. “My best friends are gay. I just don’t like you that way.”
Blaise punched me in the stomach with a lead fist. It knocked the breath from me and I would have crumpled to the ground if Derrick hadn’t been holding me up. He wrenched my arm back even farther and the pain in my shoulder offset the agony in my gut. Or it did, until Blaise followed his right hook with his left.
“Tell ’em you were dressed like a girl!” Blaise yelled. “Tell ’em you grabbed me on the stairs.” Blaise hocked a loogie and spit it in my face. The mucus hit my eye and slid down the bridge of my nose.
Blaise Lewis wasn’t playing around; I’d seriously misjudged the situation. I didn’t have time to dig out the childhood trauma that had turned a silly encounter on the stairs into the catalyst that caused Blaise to lose his damn mind, but I knew that if I didn’t defuse him, he was going to fuck me up.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly.
“Yeah, you are.” Blaise’s lips pulled back into a cruel rictus that had a serious serial-killer vibe.
I was alone. Ben and Coop weren’t going to come to the rescue. Stella was probably inside snogging the face off Ewan McCoy, and . . . that was it. There was no one else.
Blaise pulled back to punch me again and I punted. “Wait!”
“What?”
“It was me on the stairs,” I said.
Seth and Jesús laughed. They were so drunk that they were little more than prop pieces in Blaise’s drama. Derrick and Fat Duke were the ones I had to watch out for.
“It was me, but it isn’t what you thought.”
Blaise relaxed slightly and said, “Yeah?”
I nodded. “Yeah.” And then I made my move. Because I could have stood there and admitted to Blaise and his goon squad that I’d dressed like a woman as part of a bigger plan to ensnare the heart of the girl I loved, but it wouldn’t have mattered to them. So I stomped hard on Derrick’s foot, causing him to loosen his grip on my arm. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to twist free. I launched forward at Blaise and lowered my shoulder, crashing into him and toppling him into Fat Duke. Both boys went down in a tangle of arms and legs. The only person in my way was Urinal Cake, but he stood aside wordlessly.
Without a second’s hesitation, I fucking ran. I heard Blaise screaming for someone to get me, but I had a huge lead and I wasn’t about to let them catch me. I ducked around the side of the house and headed for the patio. I looked behind me and was running so fast that I didn’t see Aja until I nearly ran her down.
“The fuck, Simon!”
I put a hand over her mouth and dragged her into the bushes. Aja didn’t struggle but she gave me a withering glare. A moment later, Blaise and his posse tore by. They didn’t stop. After they passed, I counted to ten and then let Aja go.
“Fans of yours?” she asked.
I nodded.
“What’d you do?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
Aja brushed the grass off her jeans. “I’m betting it has something to do with Cassie, and no, I don’t want to know wha
t it is.”
“This really shouldn’t be this hard,” I said to myself.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Aja and I stood there for a moment, she staring at me curiously and me catching my breath. I still wasn’t used to the idea that Aja and I could share the same air without fighting or making out.
“Sia’s got the drama geeks putting on an aquatic version of Romeo and Juliet,” Aja said. “It’s amazing. Or mental. I’m not sure which yet.” But I could tell that Aja was impressed, which was something many had tried and few had accomplished.
“Why aren’t you watching?” I asked.
She held up her phone. “Had to call Gran to let her know I’m alive so she didn’t send in the Marines.”
“Gotcha.”
“I should get back.”
“Listen,” I said. “I feel like a dick for asking, but have you seen Cassie?”
Aja nodded but didn’t say where. I tried deciphering the expression on her face but she sort of looked like she’d drunk a big cup of rotten milk. Then she said, “If you tell Cassie how you feel about her, she’ll hook up with you.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I just do.”
“Thanks,” I said, and turned to go.
“But not for the right reasons,” Aja called. That pulled me up short, dampened some of my fire.
“Go on.”
Aja got the rotten-milk look again. “You’re not stupid, Simon. You know something’s up with Cassie. She’s a Goody Two-shoes, not a party girl. Until a week ago, she and Eli were married in all but name. Think about it.”
I knew all this. I’d already thought about it. Ben and Coop had warned me. But so what? Yeah, something was wrong with Cassie. It didn’t change the way I felt about her.
“If you know something,” I said, impatient to be on my way, “tell me.”
Aja patted my cheek. “Maybe I was wrong,” she said. “Maybe you are stupid.”
Yells echoed down the narrow passage between the house and the hedges and I flinched before realizing that they were coming from the back patio, probably from Sia’s play, and not from Blaise. “I’m not doing this with you.”
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