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 typed 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.”