Severed Heads, Broken Hearts

by Robyn Schneider

  Cassidy led me into the trails, explaining as we went that we were searching for a geocache, or tiny capsule. They were hidden all over the United States, and you had to solve puzzles to find them.

  “Sometimes they have nothing inside, and sometimes they’re filled with little treasures,” she said. “But if you take something, you’re supposed to leave something in its place.”

  “The law of conservation of geocaches,” I said.

  “Why yes, Mr. Illiterate Jock, exactly like that.” Cassidy smiled at me, her hair fiercely red in the sunlight. There was a little smear of sunscreen below her ear.

  “Wait,” I said, reaching to wipe it away. “You had sunscreen on your cheek.”

  “Did you get it?” Cassidy asked.

  “No, I smeared it bigger.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “At least I don’t have sunscreen in my hair.”

  “It’s not sunscreen. You’re turning my hair white.”

  I navigated us through the hiking trails, telling Cassidy stories about the invisible world Toby and I had concocted there when we were kids. We found the geocache behind a loose brick on this wall down by the back of the Catholic Church. It was filled with junk—cheap fast-food toys, mostly. But it didn’t matter what was inside, just that the hiking trails really were filled with buried treasure.

  And I understood then that Cassidy was making it up to me. That this adventure was her apology for what had happened at the debate tournament, because simply saying sorry was too normal for a girl like Cassidy Thorpe.

  “Don’t you want to sign the log?” I asked, motioning toward Cassidy’s phone, which had finished playing this little congratulatory fanfare and was displaying a list of names.

  “Why?” Cassidy asked.

  “So the next people who find this know we were here?” it sounded lame even as I said it. But Cassidy’s eyes lit up.

  “Hmm,” she said, grabbing the phone and typing quickly.

  “My turn,” I said, taking it back. But then I frowned at what she’d written. “Who’s Owen?”

  “My brother,” Cassidy said sheepishly. “We used to do this, to mess with the universe.”

  “So you signed each other up for weird newsletters and stuff?” I asked.

  “Everyone does that. We’d switch library cards, put each other’s names on blog comments, screw with the grand cosmic record of who did what.”

  “Why?” I asked, confused.

  “The world tends toward chaos, you know,” Cassidy said. “I’m just helping it along. You could too. Just write down a made-up name, or even a fictional character. And to the next person who finds this geocache, it’s as though things really happened that way. You have to at least allow for the possibility of it.”

  “Fictional people?” I teased. “Only you would think of that.”

  But I know now that isn’t true; history is filled with fictional people. And even the epigraph Fitzgerald placed at the beginning of The Great Gatsby is by a writer who doesn’t exist. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary—made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn’t whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it’s whether or not you want to.

  “I think I’ll stick with reality,” I said, handing Cassidy back her phone.

  She stared at it, and then me, disappointed. “I’d think you of all people would want to escape.”

  “Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners,” I said, which was apparently the right thing, because Cassidy slipped her hand into mine and told me more about Foucault as we walked back toward the park.

  THAT NIGHT, WHEN Cassidy clicked on her flashlight to say hello, I did the unthinkable: I replied by text message.

  Actually, I was stunned that it worked. But after a relatively short back and forth, she’d given me her address and agreed to wait outside while I drove over. When I pulled up, Cassidy was leaning against a streetlamp, bathed in its soft orange glow. She carried the green sweater she always wore, one sleeve trailing.

  “Hi,” she said. “Where are we going?”

  “You forgot about team dinner,” I joked, throwing the car into reverse.

  Cassidy laughed, buckling her seat belt. Her hair was wet, and its wetness had left an abstract pattern across the shoulders of her blue blouse. I told her that I wanted to show her something, and that it was a surprise. I reached for her hand, and we drove like that, in the reassuring quiet of Sunday night in Eastwood, all the way to the freeway, listening to the Buzzcocks.

  The moment I merged onto the 5 North, the quiet was replaced with the emptiness of the freeway at night, and we rolled down the windows, shedding music like ballast. After a couple of miles, I began to hear it in the distance—the dull thud of what we’d come to see.

  “What’s that noise?” Cassidy asked suspiciously.

  “Just wait.” I grinned, enjoying the suspense.

  And then a firework burst over the Harbor Boulevard overpass. It hung there, shimmering in the night sky before blinking into a cloud of smoke.

  “A firework!” Cassidy turned toward me, delighted.

  Three more fireworks shot up over the freeway, contorting into purple stars as they burst against the dissipating smoke. The sky was stained the color of charcoal, and the fireworks kept coming, louder now, and enormous.

  “Disneyland fireworks,” I said, exiting the freeway. “I thought we could park and watch.”

  There was a diner right off the freeway, open more out of optimism than demand. I pulled into the empty lot and Cassidy reached up to open the sunroof. Her smile was luminous, even brighter than the fireworks, as she shimmied out the sunroof, her legs dangling. One of the laces on her Converse had come untied, and it swished gently against the hand brake.

  “Climb up!” she insisted, and I did, because she was waiting for me beneath the fireworks shaped like planets and stars.

  We sat there, side by side, holding hands in that childhood way with our fingers zipped together, our faces turned toward the sky. The fireworks sparkled overhead, pounding like drums.

  “Hey,” Cassidy said, nudging me with her shoulder.

  “Hi.”

  “This is nice.”

  “Very nice,” I agreed. “The nicest parking lot I’ve ever seen.”

  Cassidy shook her head at my terrible attempt at humor. Three fireworks burst in tandem: purple-green-gold.

  “There’s a word for it,” she told me, “in French, for when you have a lingering impression of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explodes and lights up the smoke from the ones before it.”

  “That’s a terrible word,” I teased. “It’s like an excuse for holding onto the past.”

  “Well, I think it’s beautiful. A word for remembering small moments destined to be lost.”

  And I thought she was beautiful, except the words caught in my throat, like words used to, back when I sat at a different lunch table.

  We turned our attention to the fireworks display, although I was having trouble concentrating, because my fingers were laced with her smaller ones, and the leg of my jeans was pressed against the pale cotton of her skirt, and the breeze carried just a hint of her shampoo.

  “Wouldn’t it be incredible,” I said, “if you could send secret messages with fireworks? Like Morse code.”

  “Why?” Cassidy asked, her face inches from mine. “What would you say?”

  I closed the distance between us, pressing my lips against hers. We kissed like we weren’t in a parking lot in a not-so-nice part of Anaheim, sitting on the roof of my car on a school night. We kissed like there was a bed waiting for us to share at a debate tournament, and it didn’t matter if I’d remembered to pack pajamas. And then we kissed again, for good measure.

  She tasted like buried treasure and swing sets and coffee. She tasted the way fireworks felt, like something you could get close to but never really have just for yourself.

  “Wait,” Cassidy
whispered, pulling away.

  Sillage, I thought. The lingering impression of a kiss having ended.

  She dropped through the sunroof, crawling into the backseat with a mischievous smile and motioning for me to follow. I learned three things that night: 1) sharing a bed isn’t nearly as intimate as making out in a too-small backseat, 2) inexplicably, some bras unhook in the front, and 3) Cassidy hadn’t known I was Jewish.

  19

  I DROVE CASSIDY to school every day that week, pulling up outside her house with two travel mugs of coffee and waiting for her to slip out the front door, swinging her leather satchel as she hurried down the front walk.

  Her house was enormous, one of those Spanish-tiled villas with a four-car garage, the kind you’re almost certain is two houses attached, because of the oversized symmetry. I remembered when they’d built this subdivision, two years after mine, and how I’d woken up every morning in the fifth grade to the sound of the workmen, not even bothering to set an alarm after a while. I remembered the eerily quiet Monday morning when the hammering finally stopped, and how my mom had yelled at me for oversleeping.

  How could I have known, back then, that the white house across the park would belong to Cassidy Thorpe? That out of a row of nearly identical McMansions, there’d be one window in particular I searched out every night before bed, looking for secret messages?

  It took about five minutes for everyone at school to figure out we were together. I suppose we were lousy at keeping it a secret, or maybe we weren’t even trying. I’d dated Charlotte for such a long time that I’d forgotten how these things went, how everyone would stare as we climbed out of my car in the Senior Lot in our sunglasses, carrying identical mugs of coffee.

  Word had definitely gotten around by break; it felt as though the entire quad was watching as we sat down at our table with the rest of the debate team.

  “Honestly,” Phoebe said, giving me a stern look, “I wore sweatpants today. You could have warned me this was going to happen.”

  I assumed Phoebe meant the, uh, camera phones aimed in our table’s general direction. It was unsettling, being newsworthy at this particular lunch table, being entirely certain that you were the reason everyone was staring, and being unsure whether it was envy or disapproval.

  The stream of attention slowed to a trickle over the course of the week as everyone realized that Cassidy and I weren’t going to climb onto each other’s laps and mash faces at the table. That’s not to say we were totally innocent of any public displays of affection; there was some hand-holding and the occasional hurried good-bye kiss on even days, when we had different sixth periods.

  During break on Wednesday, I went into the main office and asked Mrs. Beams, the school secretary, for an elevator key.

  “Ezra,” she said, leveling me with a stern glare over the top of her rhinestone reading glasses, “you were supposed to pick this up on the first day of school.”

  “I forgot?” I tried sheepishly, although a more accurate answer would have been that I’d made it my top priority to avoid doing so.

  “It’s almost October, young man,” she chastised.

  “You’re right, I know.”

  She handed over the key, and I put it into the pocket of my jeans, trying to look extra pathetic on my way out of the office, in case she had second thoughts. I didn’t use the key until that afternoon, when the bell rang for fifth period. Cassidy started to walk toward Mrs. Martin’s classroom our usual way, via the staircase by the faculty lot, but I stopped her.

  “Actually,” I said, “let’s go around the other side.”

  Cassidy raised an eyebrow, but went along with it. I took out the key and twisted it into the call slot for the handicapped elevator, trying not to look too pleased with myself.

  “Ladies first,” I said grandly.

  “What’s going on?” Cassidy asked suspiciously, stepping inside the dented metal elevator.

  I shrugged and waited for the doors to close before sliding my arm around her waist.

  “Ever wanted to make out in an elevator?” I asked, grinning.

  WHILE THE REST of the school quickly became obsessed with watching Cassidy and me, our lunch table was obsessing over news of a silent rave in Los Angeles that Friday. Toby volunteered to drive, and Phoebe promised she’d try to get out of babysitting, and by the time I got up enough nerve to ask what exactly a silent rave was, everyone stared at me like I was crazy.

  “It’s a type of flash mob,” Cassidy explained. “Hundreds of strangers gather in a public place, put in their headphones at exactly the same moment, and start dancing.”

  I tried and failed to picture it, but I had to admit that it sounded more interesting than a three-hour historical musical about depressed German teenagers, which had been the last thing they’d all gone to LA for.

  “So there’s one tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Yep. And we’re going to be in the middle of it,” Toby informed me.

  Luke and Sam already had plans to go paintballing with some guys from their church, and Phoebe couldn’t get out of babysitting after all, so it wound up being Toby, Austin, Cassidy, and me who piled into the Fail Whale after school on Friday.

  Toby made us stop at a gas station for snacks so it felt like a real road trip, even though the drive was two hours at most. Cassidy got a pack of licorice, and Austin dumped an energy shot into a cherry slushie, which we all made fun of.

  “It’s good,” Austin protested. “Honestly, haven’t you ever had a Red Bull slushie?”

  “I don’t see the point in caffeine without coffee. Or coffee without caffeine, for that matter,” I informed him.

  “Whatever.” Austin put up his hood as he took his change from the cashier. “One day the world will recognize Red Bull as a legitimate food group, and who will be laughing then?”

  “Everyone,” Cassidy said dryly. “They’ll be too jacked on caffeine shots to do anything else.”

  We piled back into the Fail Whale, which featured—get this—a tape deck. Toby had a bunch of mix tapes he’d picked up at swap meets and thrift stores, so we listened to “Happy Bday Heather!!!” as we merged onto 5 North. It was like playing Russian roulette with terrible eighties music in five out of six chambers.

  “Ugh.” Cassidy made a face. “Switch it. Ace of Base overload.”

  Toby ejected the tape, and Austin, who was riding shotgun, put in a different one and hit rewind.

  “There’s nineties nostalgia,” Austin observed while we waited for the tape to rewind, “and then there’s antiquated technology. Unfortunately, this is the latter.”

  Toby didn’t take well to anyone insulting his car. As he put it, the Fail Whale was “a magnificent relic of the enduring crisis of solidly middle-class suburbia.”

  “Austin, you drive a Jetta.”

  “It was my sister’s!” Austin protested. I could see his face turn red in the rearview mirror.

  I didn’t say anything, since I’d, uh, earned a Beemer by turning sixteen. Cassidy offered me one of her Red Vines, and I accepted it absently, biting off each end before I realized what I was doing.

  “Toby,” I called. “Remember making straws out of licorice at Cub Scouts?”

  “I thought I was the only one who did that,” Austin said.

  “Well, did any of you squish those little paper cups they have next to water dispensers into pots?” Cassidy asked.

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but Toby did.

  “Yeah. You had to blow into them and smash the bottoms at the same time to get it to work.”

  And then we spent the rest of the ride reminiscing over old Nickelodeon programs, and Furbys and I-Zone cameras and Tamagotchis, and how weird it was that everyone did video calling and watched television on their computers.

  “Dude,” Austin said as we exited the freeway, “in fifty years, all of the old folks’ homes are going to be filled with seniors listening to Justin Bieber on the oldies station and talking about how movies used to be
in two-D.”

  “All of our longings are universal longings,” Cassidy said. “I’m paraphrasing, but it’s Fitzgerald.”

  “I don’t think he was talking about Neopets.” Toby’s voice dripped scorn as he edged into the center of the intersection, waiting to turn.

  “Well, he was talking about the human condition,” Cassidy retorted. “And if, for our generation, that happens to be a collective longing for a world before smart phones, then so be it. There’s no sense in speculating on the enduring impact of the recently past; if popular culture was that predictive, everything would be obsolete the moment it came into existence.”

  For a moment, no one said anything. And then Austin laughed. “Jesus, what are they teaching kids in prep schools these days?”

  “Conformity,” Cassidy answered, as though Austin had been serious.

  THERE WAS THIS hectic undercurrent to the shopping center. Everyone was staring at everyone else, wondering who was there to participate in the flash mob, and who was on an innocent shopping expedition.

  We were slightly early, so we went into the Barnes and Noble. Toby and Austin headed for the graphic novels, and Cassidy and I wound up on our own in the art section, where we looked at a book on Banksy, this subversive graffiti artist I hadn’t heard of.

  “What I love about him,” Cassidy said, her eyes bright and excited, “is how he printed up all of this fake money and threw it into a crowd. People thought it was real and tried to spend it in shops, and they were so angry when they found out it was fake. But now, those bills sell for a fortune on eBay. It’s simultaneously real and not real, you know? Worthless as currency, but not as art . . . my brother asked for one of those bills for Christmas a few years ago, and my mom assumed he wanted it framed, and he said he’d just stick it in his wallet because it was one of the few works of art you could carry in your pocket.”

  Cassidy trailed off, closing the book.

  “We should find Toby and Austin,” she said.

  “They can wait,” I insisted, tilting Cassidy’s face up toward mine and stealing a kiss.