Severed Heads, Broken Hearts

by Robyn Schneider

  “Um, sorry,” she said, glancing back down at her schedule. “First period is supposed to end at nine thirty-five, but the bell didn’t ring until nine fifty—”

  “It’s the pep rally,” I told her. “Break is canceled and we go straight to third.”

  “Oh.” She pushed her bangs to the side and hesitated a moment before asking, “So, what do you have next?”

  “AP American Lit.”

  “Me too. Can you show me where that is?”

  Ordinarily, I could have. On the first day of junior year, I’d even stopped to help a few confused-looking freshmen in the quad, who’d stood gawking at the maps in the backs of their day planners as though they were stuck in some sort of incomprehensible labyrinth.

  “Sorry, no,” I said, hating myself for it.

  “Um, okay.”

  I watched her walk away, and I thought about how most of the girls at Eastwood, or at least the ones worth noticing, all looked the same: blonde hair, lots of makeup, stupidly expensive handbags. The new girl was nothing like that, and I didn’t know what to make of the shabby boys’ button-down tucked into her jean shorts, or the worn leather satchel slung over her shoulder, like something out of an old-fashioned movie. She was pretty, though, and I wondered where she’d come from, and why she hadn’t bothered trying to fit in. I wanted to follow her and apologize, or at least explain. But I didn’t. Instead, I grappled with the stairwell near the faculty lot, crossed the quad toward the 100 building, and opened the door of AP American Lit several minutes in arrears of the bell.

  I’D HAD MR. Moreno before, for Honors Brit Lit. He’d supposedly been writing the same novel for the past twenty years, and either he genuinely loved teaching or he’d never outgrown high school, because it was sort of depressing how hard he’d tried to get us psyched about Shakespeare.

  Moreno hadn’t cared that I was late for class; he hadn’t even noticed. The DVD player wasn’t working, and he was on his hands and knees with a disc clutched in his teeth, prodding at the cables. Finally Luke Sheppard, the president of Film Club, arrogantly stepped in, and we all sat and watched The Great Gatsby—the original, not the remake. I hadn’t seen it before, and the film was old-fashioned and sort of bored me. The book had been our summer reading, and the movie wasn’t nearly as good.

  What I hated, though, was the part with the car accident. I knew it was coming, but that didn’t stop it from being any less terrible to watch. I shut my eyes, but I could still hear it, hear the policeman telling the crowd of onlookers how the sonofabitch didn’t even stop his car. Even with my eyes closed, I could feel everyone staring at me, and I wished they wouldn’t. It was unsettling the way my classmates watched me, as though I fascinated and terrified them. As though I no longer belonged.

  When class let out, I briefly considered the quad, with its harsh sunlight and café tables. My old crew sat at the most visible table, the one by the wall that divided the upper and lower quads. I pictured them in their new team uniforms, the first day of senior year, telling stories about summer sports camps and beach vacations, laughing over how young the freshmen looked. And then I pictured sitting down at that table. I pictured no one saying anything, but all of them thinking it: you’re not one of us anymore. I wasn’t class president, or tennis team captain. I wasn’t dating Charlotte, and I didn’t drive a shiny Beemer. I wasn’t king any longer, so it was only fitting to take my exile. Which is why, instead of gambling my last few chips of dignity, I wound up avoiding the quad entirely and decamping on that shaded stairwell out near the faculty lot with my headphones on, wondering why I hadn’t known it would be quite this bad.

  THERE WAS ONLY one senior-level Spanish class, which meant another year with Mrs. Martin. She’d urged us to call her Señora Martinez back in Spanish I, but that was completely ridiculous on account of her husband being the pastor of the local Lutheran church. She was one of those cookie-baking, overly mothering types who festooned her sweaters with festive holiday pins and treated us all like second graders.

  I was the first to arrive, and Mrs. Martin beamed at me and whispered that her congregation had prayed for me after the accident. I could think of so many more worthwhile things they could have prayed for, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

  “Gracias, Señora Martinez,” I muttered, taking my usual seat.

  “Yo, Faulkner.” Evan nodded in greeting as he and three guys from the tennis team slid into seats around mine as though nothing was the least bit changed. They were carrying Burger King bags and wore matching tennis backpacks, the pro kind we’d been begging Coach to approve for years. I was so distracted by their backpacks that I failed to notice two things: that they’d all gone off campus for lunch and that Evan’s uniform sported an extra line of embroidery.

  “Aren’t you going to congratulate me on making captain?” Evan reached into his bag and unwrapped a massive double burger. The smell of warm onions and clammy meat patties filled the classroom.

  “Congratulations,” I said, unsurprised. Evan was the most likely choice for it, after all.

  “Well, someone had to take over for your gimp ass.” Evan’s surfer baritone made the insult sound strangely friendly.

  Jimmy, who was sitting behind me, held out what had to be a full-sized bucket of fries. “Want some?”

  “Sure you can’t finish that yourself?” I deadpanned.

  “Nah, I got enough for everyone, in case Señora Martin gets mad.”

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed.

  “Dude,” Evan said, clapping me on the shoulder. “You in for Chipotle tomorrow? Taco Tuesday, gotta get some tac and guac!”

  “No one calls it that.” I shook my head, grinning.

  It was strange, my crew acting the same as they always had, and for a moment I wondered if it was really that easy. If I could go for Mexican food with a team I no longer belonged to. If I even wanted to hang out with them, now that I’d gone from leader to liability.

  And then Charlotte waltzed over in an all-too-familiar cloud of fruity perfume and grabbed a handful of fries from Jimmy’s bucket. She perched on top of the desk next to Evan’s, her Song Squad skirt swishing against her tanned thighs.

  “Where are my fries?” she demanded, poking Evan with her shoe.

  “Well, Jimmy got enough for everyone.” Evan’s face fell as he realized he’d screwed up.

  “But I didn’t ask Jimmy to get me fries, I asked you,” she said, pouting.

  “Sorry, babe. I’ll make it up to you.” Evan leaned across the aisle, going in for a kiss, and if I hadn’t figured it out before, I knew it then: they were dating.

  “Not right now, my hands are greasy,” Charlotte said, turning away. “Did you at least get any napkins?”

  “Oops. Forgot.”

  I suppose it should have been painful to see them together, my ex-girlfriend with one of my best friends. That I should have wondered not just how but when it had happened, but I felt oddly detached, as though it was too much effort to care. I sighed and took a packet of tissues from my backpack, passing it to Charlotte.

  “Thanks.” She couldn’t even bear to look at me, and I couldn’t tell whether it was out of guilt or pity.

  Jill Nakamura joined us then, still wearing her sunglasses. She gave Charlotte a hug before taking a seat, like they hadn’t just seen each other at lunch.

  “Ugh, we have like two classes together this year,” Charlotte complained.

  I allowed myself to smirk as Jill made up some excuse about Student Government screwing with her schedule. The truth was, Jill and I had been in the same honors courses since tenth grade, but we had an unspoken understanding to keep quiet about that sort of thing.

  I watched as Charlotte put the packet of tissues into her handbag—my packet of tissues, actually.

  “Oh my God,” Charlotte said, zipping her bag with a flourish. “Look! It’s like she robbed the lost-and-found bin.”

  “The boys’ lost and found.” Jill stifled a laugh.

&nbs
p; The new girl stood in the doorway, surveying the mostly filled rows of seats. I could see her trying to be brave about the unwanted attention. Thankfully, Mrs. Martin stepped to the front of the classroom, clapped a short rhythm for silence like we were all in the third grade, and called “Hola, class!”

  I’d always been fairly ambivalent about Spanish. Usually, I could waste a good five minutes pondering Mrs. Martin’s pin-of-the-day, and occasionally we got to sit back and watch Spanish-dubbed Disney movies. But when Mrs. Martin told us that we’d be interviewing a classmate and introducing them to the class en espanol, I realized that Spanish had the capacity to be even worse than that morning’s pep rally.

  I watched as everyone around me, who had been so friendly only minutes before, partnered together. In the past, I’d always had someone to work with. But clearly, things had changed. And then I caught sight of the new girl staring down at a blank page in her notebook.

  I claimed the seat next to hers and grinned in the way that girls usually found irresistible. “So what’s your name?” I asked.

  “Don’t we have to speak in Spanish?” she countered, unimpressed.

  “Mrs. Martin doesn’t care, as long as we do when we give our presentations.”

  “How challenging.” She shook her head, opening to a blank page in her notebook. “Well, me llamo Cassidy. Como te llamas?”

  “Me llamo Ezra,” I said, writing her name down. Cassidy. I liked the sound of it.

  We fell silent for a moment, listening to one of the groups around us struggle on in tortured Spanish. Everyone else was using English because, as I’d said, Mrs. Martin didn’t much care.

  “Well,” Cassidy prompted me.

  “Oh, sorry. Uh, de donde has venido de?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Dondo de la Barrows School de San Francisco. Y tu?”

  I hadn’t heard of the Barrows School, but I imagined it as some sort of rigid prep school, which only made her appearance at Eastwood High even more odd. I told her that I was from here.

  “So, um, es una escuela donde duerme uno con el otro?” I asked. My Spanish was rusty, and not that great to begin with.

  She burst out laughing, in that unencumbered way you sometimes do at parties or lunch tables, but never in a quiet classroom. Charlotte and Jill whipped around to stare at us.

  “Sorry.” Cassidy’s lips twisted into a smirk, mocking me. “But you seriously want to know if all of the students sleep with each other?”

  I winced. “I was trying to ask if it was a boarding school.”

  “Si, es un internado. A boarding school,” she replied. “Maybe we should switch to English.”

  And so we did. I learned that Cassidy had just completed a high-school summer program at Oxford, studying Shakespeare; that one weekend, she’d nearly gotten stranded in Transylvania; that she’d been teaching herself how to play guitar on the roof of her dormitory because of the acoustics of gothic architecture. I’d never been out of the country—unless driving the three hours to Tijuana with Jimmy, Evan, Charlotte, and Jill last spring break counted. I’d certainly never been to the Globe Theatre, or had my passport stolen by gypsies at Dracula’s castle, or climbed out of my bedroom window with a guitar strapped to my back. Everything I had done, everything that defined me, was stuck firmly in the past. But Cassidy was waiting patiently, a fountain pen poised above the pale lines of her notebook.

  I sighed and gave her the standard Spanish-class answers: that I was seventeen years old, my favorite sport was tennis, and my favorite subject was history.

  “Well,” Cassidy said when I had finished, “that was certainly boring.”

  “I know,” I muttered. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t get you,” she said, frowning. “Practically everyone goes out of their way to avoid you, but they can’t stop staring. And then you sit with that crowd in the corner like you’re the freaking prom king or whatever it’s called and all you can say about yourself is me gusta el tennis, which, I’m sorry, but you obviously can’t play.”

  I shrugged, trying not to let it show how much it unnerved me that she’d noticed these things.

  “Maybe I was the prom king,” I finally said.

  This infuriated her. I tried not to laugh at how ridiculous it seemed now, that stupid plastic junior prom crown and scepter gathering dust on my bookshelf, when I hadn’t even made it to the dance.

  We sat there studiously ignoring each other until it was our turn to present.

  “Yo presento Cassidy,” I said, and Charlotte giggled loudly.

  Mrs. Martin frowned.

  “Butch Cassidy,” Charlotte stage-whispered, sending Jill into muffled hysterics.

  I knew what Charlotte could be like, and the last thing Cassidy needed was to become the new object of her torture. So I made up a boring story about how Cassidy’s favorite subject was English and that she liked to dance ballet and had a younger brother who played soccer. I did her a favor, making her forgettable, rather than giving Charlotte further ammunition. But clearly Cassidy didn’t see it that way, because, after I finished, she grinned evilly, pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, and calmly told the class: This is Ezra. He was the prom king and he’s the best tennis player in the whole school.

  5

  WHEN I GOT home, I changed into a pair of sport shorts and stretched out on a pool chair in the backyard. The cushion was dusty, and as I listened to the water lap against the landscaped rocks that made up our fake waterfall, I tried to remember the last time anyone had actually used the pool. The sun was hot on my chest, and so bright that I could barely read the instructions in my Spanish exercise book.

  “Ezra, what are you doing?” my mom shrilled, startling me.

  I rolled over and squinted toward the house, where she hovered behind the screen door, carrying a yoga mat.

  “I’m coming in, all right?” I called back.

  “What were you thinking?” Mom asked gently as I joined her in the kitchen. She was still in her yoga clothes, which made her look a lot younger than forty-seven.

  I shrugged. “I thought I could get a tan. I’m too pale.”

  “Oh, honey.” She took a carton of lemonade out of the fridge and poured us each a glass. “You know you’re supposed to stay out of direct sunlight.”

  I grunted and took a sip of the lemonade, which tasted awful. Everything my mom bought was healthy, which meant that it was helpfully missing at least one key ingredient, such as gluten, sugar, or flavor.

  She was right though, about the sunlight thing. I was still on painkillers from my last knee surgery and one of the more delightful side effects was increased sensitivity to sunlight. After twenty minutes in the backyard, I was a bit dizzy, but I wasn’t about to admit it.

  “How was school?” She frowned at me, the picture of concern.

  Quietly humiliating, I thought.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Did anything interesting happen?” she pressed.

  I thought about how I’d gotten kicked out of the pep rally over a hypothetical nicotine patch (incidentally, I’d never even tried a cigarette), and about Coach A’s nightmarish AP Euro class. I thought about the new girl, a world away from the disappearing strawberry fields and man-made lake of Eastwood, perched on a gothic rooftop in her funny old clothes, strumming a guitar as she stared out at the bell towers and cobblestones.

  “Not really,” I said, and then I pretended that I was tired and went upstairs.

  OUR HOUSE IS a monstrosity. Six bedrooms and a “bonus room,” all painted the same calming shade of free-range eggshell. It looks like one of those models you walk through in the future subdivisions, full of generically bland showroom furniture, the kind of house that you can’t imagine anyone actually living in. We moved in when I was eight, an “upgrade” from an older gated community on the other side of the loop. A year later, we inherited Cooper, my mad aunt’s massive poodle, when she got remarried and moved into a luxury condo that didn’t allow large pets.

  Cooper
was a standard poodle, the kind that look like furry black giraffes. I used to take him for walks when I was a kid, riding my Razor scooter while he pulled me up and down the streets. I snuck him into my bed when I had nightmares, even though he was supposed to sleep in the downstairs laundry room. He was about eight years old when we got him, and you could tell he considered himself terribly elegant, a regular lord of the manor. All right, I’ll admit it: I loved that crazy dog, and the way his fur smelled like popcorn, and how his eyes gave the impression that he understood everything you said.

  He was waiting for me in my room, curled up at the foot of my bed with his nose on the copy of The Great Gatsby I’d been thumbing through the night before.

  How about a walk, old sport? His eyes seemed to ask.

  I sat next to him and patted his head. “Sorry,” I said.

  And I swear he nodded sagely before settling back down on top of Mom’s old paperback of Gatsby. He just about broke my heart, Cooper. I wanted to grab his leash and take him for our usual jog around the neighborhood, culminating in a full-out race down the steep hiking trail at the end of Crescent Vista. And the thought of how long it had been since we’d done that, and how I’d never be able to take him for a jog again, hit me full force.

  I turned on the same Bob Dylan playlist I’d been moping to all summer and lay down on top of the duvet. I wasn’t exactly crying, but it hurt like hell to swallow. I stayed like that for a while, listening to that fantastically depressing old music with the blinds closed and trying to convince myself that what I really wanted was my old life back. But I’d felt completely hollow that afternoon, sitting there in Spanish with the old crew talking about nothing, about lunch. It was like the part of me that had enjoyed those friends had evaporated, leaving behind a huge, echoing emptiness, and I was scrabbling on the edge of it, trying not to fall into the hole within myself because I was terrified to find out how far down it went.