The earth didn’t move, the sky didn’t light up with spontaneous fireworks, I didn’t see my future with Cassie spread out before me like a slow, winding road. None of the things I’d expected to happen happened. I’d fantasized about kissing Cassie for longer than I could remember, and yet now, I felt nothing. It was a good kiss, a nice kiss. Cassie had soft lips that tasted a little like peanuts and she knew just what to do with her hands.
I should have been ecstatic. Over the moon. I was standing atop a rock, in front of a couple hundred of my peers, kissing the girl of my dreams.
Only, this was real life, and I’d finally woken up.
“Simon?”
I looked toward the house, scanning the crowd for the one person I’d been thinking about while I kissed Cassie. But Stella was gone.
“Simon, what’s wrong?”
Cassie was looking at me like I’d slapped her in the face. I felt like a dick. I’d been such a moron, but it had taken kissing the girl I’d loved forever to realize that forever isn’t so long after all. That love isn’t always what you think it ought to be.
“You’re perfect, Cassie,” I said. “Just not perfect for me.”
I turned to climb down off the waterfall when Eli sucker punched me in the nose and I fell backward into the pool, his grinning mug the tombstone that leaned over my watery grave.
Living the Dream
Movies will make you think that when you’re about to die, your entire life flashes before your eyes so that, if you live, you’ll know all the mistakes you made and be able to spend the rest of your days fixing them and being the man you were meant to be before you made some bad choices and turned into a magnificent asshole.
That’s all bullshit, of course. After I hit the water and began to drown in Cassie’s pool—a victim of my misguided need to save Cassie from the drunken machinations of Blaise, who’d only wanted to soak Cassie as revenge for punching him in the face and ended up nearly killing me instead—my life did not, in fact, flash before my eyes. I panicked, I swallowed a gallon of chlorinated water that one of Sia’s actors had very likely peed in, I even looked up Cassie’s skirt, though the water blurred out all the good bits, but I didn’t watch any of Simon Cross’s funniest home videos as my oxygen-deprived brain slowly shut down.
What I did do was black out. And the next thing I remembered with absolute clarity was making out with Cassie. She was sitting on top of my chest, bouncing up and down while she kissed me. Before I opened my eyes, I thought about how I’d dreamed of kissing Cassie for years and that the reality was pretty much a letdown. Cassie kissed like she was having a go at hoovering off my lips with her mouth.
Cassie kept yelling my name and I wondered how she could be kissing me and talking to me at the same time. Maybe when she kissed me, we developed spontaneous ESP. I could hear her in my mind and she could hear me.
Then she wasn’t kissing me anymore. My chest burned. Cassie was stabbing me with a sword made of wasps. My lungs screamed. I had to breathe, but Cassie was on me. She wasn’t kissing me, she was stealing the air from my body, slowly starving my cells.
I tried to fight back but my limbs wouldn’t move. Someone was restraining me.
“Simon!” Cassie called again. But I knew it wasn’t in my mind this time.
When I tried to ask Cassie how she could kiss me and speak at the same time, no words came out, but I turned to the side and coughed. Suddenly nothing in the world was more important than breathing. Than getting whatever Cassie had put into my lungs out. Someone slapped my back and I hacked so hard I felt my lungs tear. When I was able, I dragged in the deepest breath possible, unsure whether Cassie was going to try to steal it from me again.
And then I opened my eyes.
Cassie stood over me, her face ashen, tears running down her cheeks. Coop and Ben knelt at my feet. I’d never seen either look more scared. But they weren’t the ones I really saw. It was Eli Horowitz to my left. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and asked me if I was all right.
“What the fuck?” I said weakly. My chest felt like someone had hit me with a car. And was that rum I tasted?
“Don’t talk,” Cassie said. “Eli saved you. You were drowning and he gave you mouth-to-mouth.” She sounded awed. Scared. My life hadn’t flashed before my eyes, but I was willing to bet Cassie’s had.
“Blaise?” I asked.
Coop tried to talk but he couldn’t. Ben said, “That freshman chased him off. Kid’s got balls. But if I see Blaise—”
“Yeah,” I said. I tried to stand up, but I didn’t have any strength in my legs so I propped myself up on my elbows.
Cassie wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “Simon. About what you said—”
Coop threw up his hands. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Coop, chill.” Ben put his arm around Coop but Coop ducked it.
“Don’t tell me to chill,” Coop said. “Simon nearly died; he needs to go to the hospital.”
I managed to sit up all the way. “Coop, just give us a minute. Just a minute, I swear.”
The guy was my best friend for a reason. No matter what he said or what I did, Cooper Yates and I would always be friends. “Whatever.” Coop and Ben went back into the house.
But Cassie and I still weren’t alone. Everyone who’d come out to see Sia’s version of Romeo and Juliet had decided Cassie, Eli, and I put on a far more entertaining show. “Let’s go over there,” I said, pointing to the couch. “It’s more private.”
“Private” was clearly a relative term to describe the patio, but it was our best option short of going inside, which I didn’t feel strong enough for. After all the abuse my body had taken, I figured I was going to need a year to recuperate.
Eli stayed by the pool as Cassie helped me totter over to the couch, but he made it clear that we weren’t through. I felt like a douche. He’d saved my life and thought I was going to repay him by stealing his girl.
When Cassie and I sat down across from each other, she touched my hand and looked into my eyes and liquefied my carefully planned speech. I forgot everything in that moment. Cassie was sweaty and flushed and the night had been unkind, but she was still beautiful. Still the girl I loved.
“Simon,” Cassie said. “What’s this?” She turned over her palm and revealed the blue golf ball. I’d lost track of it when I’d taken a header into the deep end.
“You know what it is,” I said.
“And?”
I sighed. “And it belongs to you.”
Cassie turned the ball over in her hand. It was the proof that I loved Cassie, and I saw the recognition of that in her eyes.
“Do you love me?” Cassie asked in a voice so near a whisper that a stiff breeze could have snatched it from me. I didn’t need to answer her question to hold up my end of our barter; Cassie held my reply in her bruised fist.
“Yes,” I said anyway. Because I had to say the words, and Cassie had to hear them. “But there’s someone who loves you more.” I looked over my shoulder at Eli. Romeo and Juliet had resumed, and he was pretending to watch.
Cassie frowned. “Eli?” This was not the direction Cassie had expected our conversation to take. I was triumphant. I’d proven my love to her, but it wasn’t enough anymore.
“He loves you, Cassie.” I took Cassie’s hand and held it between my pruney fingers. “I can’t begin to know what you’re going through right now. All that stuff with your parents and your house. But Eli—he knows who you are even if you’ve forgotten, and he’ll be there for you no matter what.” I couldn’t believe I was talking about Eli Horowitz, my nemesis. He’d stolen Cassie from me in ninth grade and I was sending her right back into his arms.
Cassie didn’t appear to believe it either. She’d seen only half of what I went through to get to her, but that half was pretty impressive, and it was inconceivable that, in my moment of triumph, I’d concede.
“I thought you loved me.”
“I do. I probably always will.
”
Without another word, I stood up. Adrenaline alone kept me from collapsing into a bag of bones and allowed me to walk away with my dignity mostly intact.
For me, the party was over. Sure, it would probably go on until the cops showed up or Cassie realized that she’d only thrown it to get back at her parents for ruining her life, but I had had enough.
As I marched inside, people opened a path for me. They weren’t going to do song and dance numbers in my honor, but my peers seemed to look at me with a newfound sense of respect. I didn’t need to be Superman or SIMON CROSS. Plain old Simon was good enough.
At the sliding glass doors, Eli stopped me. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said. “Thanks for saving my life.”
Eli nodded. “We’re even, then.” When I looked at him quizzically, he said, “I use a ladder when I climb in and out of Cassie’s window.”
The part of me that wasn’t bruised wanted to laugh. I wouldn’t have believed he had it in him, but when it came to Cassandra Castillo, there didn’t seem to be anything the boys who loved her wouldn’t do.
Eli and I were no longer enemies—no longer two men on a collision course toward the same beautiful prize—but that didn’t make us friends, either. I knew that the only reason he was even talking to me right now was because he wanted to know what Cassie had said to me. No, he needed to know. I’d seen only a small portion of Eli’s story that night, but I suspected he’d overcome his own share of obstacles to get to this moment. That didn’t entitle him to the details of my private conversation with Cassie, but it was the reason I said what I said next.
“Cassie doesn’t need a boyfriend,” I told Eli. “She needs a friend. That’s how you show her that you love her.”
When I walked back into the house, I should have felt like a failure. The only lip action I’d gotten had been from Cassie’s ex-boyfriend. Instead I felt like a champion. Sure, maybe my night would have turned out differently if I’d taken Coop and Ben’s advice and talked to Natalie Grayson—who was passed out on the couch next to Ewan McCoy. He’d snaked her phone and was posting fake status updates to her Facebook. According to her feed, she’d pooped her pants twice. But I was coming to terms with everything that had happened. I felt like my life had been on pause since that night at Pirate Chang’s and I was finally ready to play again.
Coop and Ben found me in the kitchen. Ben threw his arm around my shoulders, babbling about how awesome the party was. Coop was less enthusiastic but he gave me a solid grin, which was exactly what I needed. Once the hub of the party, the kitchen was now a wasteland. The keg was empty and there were red cups perched on every surface. Someone had raided Cassie’s cupboards and spilled a bag of yellow rice on the tile floor. The grains crunched under my feet.
“Buck up,” Ben said. “We’ll find you another girl. Maybe even one who doesn’t mind if you don’t shower for three days and that your idea of cooking a gourmet meal is microwaving Hot Pockets.”
“Whatever,” I said. “It’s cool.”
Coop was looking at me the way he looked at pictures of naked girls, with curiosity and confusion. “Why?” he asked.
I knew the why he was speaking of. It was the why that had defined my life for years. If anyone deserved an answer, it was my long-suffering best friend. “When I saw that Urinal Cake kid up on the waterfall, I realized he was me. That I was a fool. I took a shot of tequila, jumped on a bed, fought a psycho, got trounced at beer pong, drank a shit-ton of rum with Eli, fell out a window, and nearly drowned. My dad was right: Sometimes love hurts, but it shouldn’t be so damn hard.”
Neither Coop nor Ben said anything right away. Coop probably wanted to do the dance of joy, but he held his glee in check for my benefit. Instead he took Ben’s hand and kissed the top of it. They were in love. They had to work at it, sure, but it wasn’t a titanic struggle. The way they knew what the other felt and fell into each other’s sentences. That was real. That was love.
I knew I’d really been in love with Cassie and that maybe she could have loved me too, but it wasn’t enough. Love wasn’t always enough. That thought should have brought me down, sunk me into a deep depression, but it actually made me smile. Because if Cassie wasn’t the girl for me, then maybe that girl was still out there somewhere, being awesome.
“I know what’ll cheer you up,” Ben said.
“This better not be like the time you tried to order me a Russian bride on the Internet.”
“Kasia loved you,” Ben said. “And you rejected her. Do you know how that made her feel? Do you?”
Coop chuckled, and the pall that had settled over us burned away like morning fog. “Rewind, baby. What’s the plan?”
Ben rubbed his hands together, making sure he had our attention. “Strawberry-stuffed French toast,” Ben said. “Smothered in syrup. And cheesy fries. And maybe a burger. I’ve been craving a burger for like an hour. And water. I’m parched.”
As we left, I saw Eli sitting on the couch with Cassie, letting her cry into his shoulder.
The rest of the party people were outside watching the best version of Romeo and Juliet ever staged in our shithole town. A couple of hours earlier, I might have thought it was beautiful that Romeo was willing to kill himself for the girl he loved, but now I realized how stupid that sentiment is. That isn’t romance, it’s mental illness. No girl is worth dying for, not even Cassie.
I looked at Coop and Ben—my best friends. Everyone I wanted to hang out with was right here in this room.
“Sounds awesome,” I said. “I’m done here.”
Reality Bites
As I sat on the pool steps, letting the watery blood stream out of my nose while Eli and Cassie argued behind me and Sia tried to corral her actors back into position so that she could finish Romeo and Juliet, I admitted to myself the one thing that I wouldn’t have admitted to anyone else: I’d deserved what I’d gotten.
I’m not just talking about the bloody nose. Though I did have that coming. Not only had I lured Eli into his ex-girlfriend’s bedroom and tricked him into handcuffing himself to her bed, but I’d kissed Cassie right out in the open where I knew he’d be able to see.
It was more than that, though. Because I’d dicked over Natalie, pissed off my best friend, and lost the one girl who might have actually liked me. My phone had taken on more water than the Titanic when Eli had punched me and I’d fallen into the pool, so I couldn’t even text Stella and apologize for being an asshole. Maybe she was still around the house somewhere, but I wasn’t sure if she’d want to talk to me, especially not if she and Ewan were making out, a thought that turned my stomach.
I was dateless, friendless, and phoneless, and my nose felt like it was filled with bees. There didn’t seem to be much lower to go. Clearly I was wrong.
Cassie sat down next to me and sighed. “Did you really dress up like a girl and kiss Eli?”
“What happens at spring break parties, stays at—”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Cassie said. I thought she was going to throw me out of her house, but she laughed and patted my arm. “How’s your nose?”
I shrugged. It felt surreal to be sitting here talking to Cassie like nothing else had happened all night. Like we were friends now or something. But it was cool. Realizing Cassie wasn’t the girl of my dreams didn’t diminish the feelings I’d carried for her all those years. I still loved her. I simply wasn’t in love with her. When I imagined my future, Cassie was still in it, just off to the side, a supporting character who got less screen time as I grew older.
“I’ll survive.”
“Where’s Coop?”
“Lost track of him,” I said. “Maybe he left.” The truth was that I didn’t know. After he’d saved me from Blaise, I hoped that Coop would come to his senses and decide not to end our friendship, but as I sat there in the water, I wasn’t sure I deserved to have a friend like Cooper Yates.
I was staring at the water and the way the ripples reflected the moon, but when I looked up,
Cassie was smiling at me and doing that thing with her tongue and the gap in her teeth. It was still sexy as hell. “You’re different,” Cassie said. “I like it.”
I’d waited years to hear Cassie say something like that, but the thing was that I didn’t feel any different. Older, wetter, bloodier, but still like a total fuckup who seemed destined to do the wrong thing in every situation.
“You gonna be okay?” I asked.
Cassie looked over her shoulder at Eli. He was sitting on the couch in his boxers, watching my every move. I suspected I’d made an enemy tonight; not that I thought Eli and I could have ever been friends—not really. We’d loved the same girl, and in a competition like that, there are rarely any winners.
“He wants to get back together.” Cassie looked at me again. “But I don’t know. I think . . . I think maybe I need some time alone. You know, to figure things out.” She looked embarrassed. “When my parents told me about the house and college—I sort of lost it.”
“Are you going to finish the year?”
“I’m going to try,” Cassie said. “You know Aja Bourne, right?” I nodded. “We’ve never been good friends or anything, but we had a couple of classes together. Earlier, she told me that if my parents had to move, I could stay with her until graduation. Isn’t that weird?”
Aja was just full of surprises tonight, and all of them amazing. “You should do it,” I said. “Aja’s a cool chick. And her grandma used to be a chef in France and cooks shit you can’t even believe.”
Cassie gave me a curious smile. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Cassie glanced back at Eli again. “I should go. . . .”
“Yeah,” I said. “I should look for a ride home.”
“What about that girl you came with? She was cute.”
“She’s with . . . someone else.” I shrugged and looked back toward the house, hoping I’d see Stella. I didn’t. “It’s cool.” Losing Stella to Ewan was another thing I deserved. My myopic focus on Cassie had kept me from seeing the amazing girl that had been right in front of me.
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