Severed Heads, Broken Hearts

by Robyn Schneider

Toby snorted, and Cassidy snickered through a mouthful of cupcake.

  “Oh come on,” Phoebe continued. “You’re asking for it. Pale skin, black clothes, no lunch, and that whole brooding thing? It’s hilarious. You should get some body glitter and go after an unsuspecting freshman.”

  “You should!” Cassidy agreed. “Tell her you’re a dangerous monster. And mention how good her blood smells.”

  “Wrong time of the month on that one, and I’m getting slapped,” I muttered, and everyone laughed.

  “You’re funny.” Phoebe passed me the last chocolate cupcake. “And I always thought your friends were laughing over their own farts.”

  “Ninety percent of Eastwood’s male population laughs over their own farts,” Toby said. “Present company excluded, naturally.”

  “How many points would I lose if I farted right now?” Luke asked with a chuckle.

  “Don’t even think about it!” Phoebe warned, preemptively scooting away from him.

  I peeled the wrapper off my cupcake and glanced toward my old lunch table, where Charlotte had climbed onto Evan’s lap. She was texting, her ponytail spilling over one shoulder. Evan’s hand was on her thigh. Suddenly, she looked up and caught me staring. She nudged Evan, who glanced over as well, clearly wondering what I was doing at a different table. But it turned out they didn’t really care, because half a moment later, they were sucking face.

  “Come on, new girl,” Phoebe said, standing up. “Let’s go to the bathroom.”

  Once Phoebe and Cassidy had gone, Luke chuckled and shook his head.

  “Can someone please explain why my girlfriend is going to the bathroom with Cassidy Thorpe?”

  “I know nothing about the intricacies of female pack behavior,” said Sam. “But I do know that we need to expand Friday’s guest list.”

  Luke shot Sam a dark look.

  “Sorry,” Sam muttered, glancing guiltily in my direction.

  “What the heck?” Austin said. “I thought she disappeared, and now she’s at Eastwood? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What doesn’t make sense?” I asked.

  “Any of it.” Toby balled up his cupcake wrapper. “But then, Cassidy always liked it that way. You know how I said she was unbeatable at debate? That’s not the half of it. She never seemed to try. She’d show up to tournaments in blatant dress code violations, throw a picnic in an elevator, and not even bother to come to the awards ceremony. She competed for this really snotty prep school, which made it even stranger. But she quit after winning the State Quals last year. Gave up her spot at the State championship four days before the tournament, and the rumor was that she’d left school suddenly, just completely disappeared.”

  “Did you ever find out why?” I asked.

  “Like anyone can get a straight answer out of Cassidy.” Toby laughed.

  “Incoming,” Austin muttered, nodding toward Phoebe and Cassidy.

  Everyone turned to stare at them guiltily, but I was watching something entirely different—the spectacle of Charlotte and Evan, and their all-too-public face sucking.

  When the girls rejoined us, Phoebe glanced at my uneaten cupcake before reaching across the table to pat my hand.

  “Don’t worry,” she teased. “There’s some nice O positive in the nurse’s office if you’re thirsty.”

  8

  I DON’T KNOW if you’ve ever been in line at the drugstore or somewhere, and the person behind you is chewing gum directly in your ear, and it’s so repulsive that you suspect they’re doing it on purpose and you’re a complete pushover for standing there and taking it. There was something about Evan and Charlotte that made me feel exactly like that. Something so deeply and personally offensive about the two of them all over each other that I just couldn’t handle it, even though the initial shock of it had originally fooled me into believing that I didn’t care.

  So I might as well admit that, deep down, I’d known what I was doing when I decided to eat lunch with Toby instead of sitting with my old crew. Over the course of the week, I went out of my way to avoid my old friends, as I’d done all summer, and they seemed baffled by it, and more than a little bit hurt. I couldn’t figure out why they even cared. They couldn’t really have thought I’d turn up for that game of paintball or that last-minute rafting trip, or any of the other ridiculous things they’d texted me about. I mean, not one of them had even bothered to visit me in the hospital.

  Anyway, Evan and Charlotte were together now, had been together for what seemed suspiciously like a few months at least, and it was plain what that meant. In the grand scheme of seniors worth gawking at, they should have topped the list. But they didn’t. Instead, I was the recipient of far too much attention for my liking. And when everyone wasn’t whispering and staring at me, they were whispering and staring at Cassidy.

  Stories that the debate team had only hinted at spilled out into the schoolwide rumor mill: that Cassidy had turned up at a debate tournament dressed as a boy, complete with an enormous fake mustache, and still won. That Cassidy had organized a flash mob where more than one hundred strangers showed up at a graveyard in San Francisco dressed as zombies and had an enormous pillow fight. That you could purchase T-shirts with a pop art print of Cassidy’s face on them from a Spanish fast-fashion retailer. That she’d spent a summer modeling for teen book covers.

  In our tiny, nothing-ever-happens town, Cassidy was an oddity, and even though the stories might not have been true, they were more likely to have happened to her than to anyone else.

  She never let on that she knew about the rumors, though. And for all I knew, she didn’t. Our lunch group had plenty to talk about without resorting to petty gossip, and I was grateful to sit with them, though I could have lived without the unobstructed view of Charlotte and Evan’s lunchtime foreplay-dates.

  On Thursday night, I had a meeting with Ms. Welsh, my advisor: one of those mandatory things for seniors. Of course I was late, since I’d left my math notebook in the waiting room at my physical therapist’s and didn’t realize until I was halfway to campus.

  Ms. Welsh was nice enough, even about my being late. And so I settled into the world’s hardest chair in her office and smiled attentively and listened as she lectured me on the importance of maintaining one’s extracurriculars during senior year and reaching out to teachers well in advance for college recommendations. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that maintaining my extracurriculars was literally physically impossible, or that I suspected Mrs. Martin might decorate my recommendation letter with grape-scented Fiesta Snoopy stamps.

  By the time I finally made my escape after promising to check out some “close to home” colleges I wasn’t particularly interested in attending, I was feeling pretty exhausted by the idea of college applications in general. I’d never really thought I’d have to deal with them. It was a given that I’d be recruited to play somewhere, probably one of the nearby state colleges. My father used to tell me stories about his college fraternity, and how future employers would be impressed if I became president of my frat house. I’d pictured it easily back then, my whole planned-out life: college athlete, fraternity president, getting some suit-and-tie job after school and cruising up to Big Bear or Tahoe on the weekends with my friends. There was more, but you get the idea: the perfectly generic life for the perfectly generic golden boy.

  “Ezra?” someone called, derailing my train of thought.

  It was Cassidy, coming down the stairwell from the 400 building in this blue sundress that perfectly matched her eyes.

  “Oh, hey,” I said, attempting a smile. “College advisor meeting?”

  “Unfortunately. Mr. Choi doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

  “I’ve heard he enjoys jokes where the punch lines are mathematical equations,” I offered.

  “Yeah, he seems like the sort of guy who would get off on a tangent.”

  I snorted. “That’s terrible.”

  Cassidy shrugged as we fell into step toward the parking lot.
/>   It was getting late. The whole world had darkened while I was in Ms. Welsh’s office. The stadium lights were on, bathing the campus in an orange glow and casting the hills into shadow.

  “Tomorrow’s Friday,” Cassidy said, as though I needed reminding. “Wonder what all the cool kids are doing this weekend.”

  “Jimmy’s having a party tomorrow night. I’d give it two hours before someone gets drunk enough to toss the keg into the pool.”

  “Oh wow, that sounds super fun.” Cassidy rolled her eyes.

  “Well, what did you do on Friday nights before you moved here?”

  She shook her head and launched hesitantly into a rambling story about secret parties in the science labs of her boarding school.

  “We’d all have to sneak in and out of the dorms through the old steam tunnels. It was like this mark of prestige if you got burned on one of the old pipes. I think one of my brother’s friends started it, back in the day. I don’t know. It sounds dumb, talking about it.”

  “No, it doesn’t sound dumb.”

  Jimmy’s back-to-school backyard kegger sounded dumb. Only I didn’t say anything.

  The campus was peaceful at night, surrounded by the gentle slope of the hills, with just the two narrow lanes leading back to town. The hills were covered with hundreds of avocado trees, and every once in a while, a coyote would wander down and terrorize the residents of some nearby gated community.

  That was what excited people around here, getting together a mob to shoo the coyote back into the avocado groves, to remove the interloper from our perfect little planned community. No one went looking for adventure; they chased it away.

  When we reached the student lot, there was only my Volvo, Justin Wong’s souped-up Honda, and a truck with a surfboard strapped on top.

  “Um, where’s your car?” I asked.

  Cassidy laughed. “My bike is right here.”

  Sure enough, a lone red bicycle was locked to the rack. It was a decent bike, a rebuilt Cannondale, but I didn’t know much about bikes then.

  “Huh,” I said, staring at it.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I tried not to grin at the image of Cassidy pedaling past the strawberry fields on a bicycle.

  “I’ll have you know that I care about the environment,” Cassidy said hotly. “I’m doing my best to reduce my carbon footprint.”

  I thought about this for a moment.

  “Carpooling reduces your carbon footprint, doesn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So would you like a ride home?”

  I don’t know where the offer came from, but it suddenly seemed presumptuous.

  “There are these coyotes,” I said, awkwardly filling the silence. “They come down from the hills sometimes at night and I don’t want you to get attacked.”

  “Coyotes?” Cassidy frowned. “Aren’t those, like, wolves?”

  “Nocturnal wolves,” I clarified.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “I offered, didn’t I?”

  “All right,” Cassidy relented.

  I had an unfortunate fit of chivalry and told Cassidy to get into the car while I dealt with her bike. It damn near killed me too, getting that thing into the trunk.

  “Thank you,” she said when I climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “No problem.” I reached for my seat belt. “So where do you live?”

  “Um, Terrace Bluffs?”

  “That’s no trouble. I live in Rosewood, I’m right next to you on the loop.”

  She buckled her seat belt, and I threw the car into reverse, realizing how intimate it was with just the two of us, and the empty rows of parking spaces.

  “Rosewood’s the section across the park, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yeah. My bedroom looks out over it.”

  “So does mine.” Cassidy grinned. “Maybe we can see into each other’s bedrooms.”

  “I’ll remember to close the blinds next week when I commit a double homicide,” I promised, flashing my brights on the blind curve out of the foothills.

  “I like you like this,” Cassidy said.

  “Like what?” I asked as I merged onto Eastwood Boulevard.

  “Talking. You hold back if there are too many people around.”

  I put on my turn signal, in case a coyote was curious which way I wanted to turn at the deserted intersection, and thought about this. The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I’d learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn’t exactly overlap with my friends’.

  “I don’t hold back,” I protested. “I just don’t have anything interesting to say.”

  Cassidy looked skeptical. “Yeah, sorry, not buying it. You have this maddening little smile sometimes, like you’ve just thought of something incredibly witty but are afraid to say it in case no one gets the joke.”

  I shrugged and turned left onto Crescent Vista, catching the traffic light that made two minutes last even longer than they did in Coach Anthony’s class.

  “Actually, I don’t know which is worse,” Cassidy mused, “when people laugh at things that aren’t funny, or when they don’t laugh at things that are.”

  “The first one,” I said darkly. “Just ask Toby.”

  “What, you mean the severed-head thing?”

  She said it exactly like that, as though we might have been talking about irregular verbs or the Pledge of Allegiance.

  “He told you?”

  “Last year at some debate tournament. We were sitting out on the balcony under a tent we’d made from bedsheets and I’d mentioned how I’d never been to Disneyland. I think it’s hilarious. I called him ‘the catcher on the ride’ for ages.”

  I shook my head over her terrible pun and turned on the radio, trying not to think about Cassidy and Toby keeping each other company late at night in hotel rooms, probably in their pajamas. The Shins drifted through the speakers, and I waited for Cassidy to say something as we sat at that endless light, but she didn’t. Instead, she picked up a straw wrapper I’d stuffed into the cup holder and began to fold it into a little origami star.

  “Make a wish,” she said, cupping the little star in the palm of her hand.

  The glow of the streetlight washed over her, and it struck me almost as an afterthought that she was beautiful. I don’t know how I’d missed it those first few days, but I knew it then. Her hair was thrown back into a ponytail, with these copper-colored pieces framing her face. Her eyes shone with amusement, and her sweater slipped off one shoulder, revealing a purple bra strap. She was achingly effortless, and she would never, in a million years, choose me. But, for the next few minutes, I contented myself with the magnificent possibility that she might.

  The gate guard outside Cassidy’s subdivision gave me the third degree, which, incidentally, is the sort of burn that can kill. When he was finally satisfied that we weren’t about to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting suburban streets, he opened the gate, and I drove through into Terrace Bluffs.

  It wasn’t that different from my subdivision; the houses were all set back from the street, with circular driveways and balconies that weren’t really supposed to be used. There were only four models, like a computer animation that kept repeating. Some little kids had been drawing in the street with chalk, and I felt terrible as I drove over it, as though I was wrecking a second grader’s sand castle.

  “How do I get to your house?” I asked.

  “Do you ever just not want to go home?” Her face was pale in the lamplight, and I could see it in her eyes that she was serious.

  “Yeah, absolutely,” I admitted, even though it was pretty personal. I thought about my mom sitting in the family room, watching the news and worrying over everything. About my father in his home office, a mug of tea going cold at his elbow as he ty
ped out another brief. About my bedroom, which felt as though it wasn’t mine anymore after I’d spent three months sleeping in the downstairs guest room.

  “I have an idea,” Cassidy said. “How about we go somewhere, right now?”

  “It’s Eastwood,” I said. “There’s nowhere to go.”

  “Let’s go to the park,” Cassidy pleaded. “You can point out your bedroom window, and I can point out mine.”

  “All right,” I said, reversing over the chalk drawings.

  The gate guard gave me a dirty look when I pulled through, and Cassidy laughed and flipped him the bird when we were too far away for him to see.

  “I freaking hate that guy,” she said. “Do you read Foucault? What am I talking about? Of course you don’t read Foucault.”

  “Mostly, I just don’t read,” I deadpanned, making Cassidy laugh.

  “Well, Mr. Illiterate Jock, let me enlighten you. There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called the panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be under constant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway.”

  “But how do you know who’s a watcher and who’s a prisoner?” I asked, pulling into the empty parking lot.

  “That’s the point. Even the watchers are prisoners. Come on, let’s go on the swings.” She was already out of the car before I could even put on the handbrake.

  “Wait,” I called.

  Cassidy turned around, her dress rippling in the warm Santa Ana winds. I locked the car and stood there, awash in embarrassment.

  “I don’t think I can go on the swings,” I admitted.

  “Then you can push me.”

  She took off toward the small playground and the bright plastic play set as though we were running a race. I stepped cautiously into the sandbox, feeling my cane sink into the sand like a beach umbrella. Cassidy kicked off her sandals and tied her sweater around her waist. Sitting there on the swing set, in her bare feet and blue dress, her hair slipping out of its ponytail, she was so gorgeous that it hurt.

  “Go on,” she said, twisting on the swing so that the chains made an X. “Push.”