“Oh my god, why do you use such big words?” she demanded in exasperation.
“Sorry,” I apologized, realizing she was the sort of girl who got upset when someone used an unfamiliar word, rather than learning what it meant.
“You’re really weird sometimes,” Charlotte accused. “Like tonight, when everyone dressed as zombies, and you wore that. I mean, don’t you want to be like everyone else?”
“Not particularly,” I said, willing her to finally understand how much I had changed, and how very little she knew about me.
Charlotte considered this for a moment, and then her face broke into a sly smile.
“Very funny,” she announced, and then she launched herself at me.
“Charlotte,” I said, pushing her off and climbing to my feet. “I said no.”
“How was I supposed to know that you meant it?” She seemed tremendously offended all of a sudden. “You can’t agree to talk someplace private at a party and that’s it.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize . . .” I winced as it dawned on me that she’d thought I’d wanted to be alone with her, too.
“You never do.” Charlotte said with an exasperated sigh. “You can be a real jerk sometimes, and you don’t even see how you are. I used to think you did it on purpose, so I flirted with other guys to make you jealous.”
I laughed hollowly.
“That’s what you call it? Flirting with other guys? My mistake. At Jonas’s party, I should have realized you were just flirting.”
“No, what you should have done was sucked it up and dealt with it on Monday and taken me to prom like everyone expected,” Charlotte fumed.
“Prom?” I didn’t think I’d heard her correctly. “Do you know where I was the night of prom, Charlotte? I was in the hospital, wondering if I’d ever walk again. And we both know how I got there.”
It got really quiet for a second, and I think we both expected some drunken couple to stumble through the door and interrupt us, rescuing us from the uncomfortable silence, but none did.
“If we both know, then why does it feel like you blame me?” Charlotte demanded. “I wasn’t even there.”
“No, you weren’t there,” I said. “The paramedics found me all alone. And you just left me like that. You left me.”
Charlotte’s face had gone pale, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to look at me.
“We were drunk,” she said defensively. “I didn’t have a ride, and everyone was shouting about the cops coming because of the accident, and I’m terrible with blood, I probably would have fainted.”
“‘I’m sorry’ would have been enough,” I told her. “Look, it’s late, and I think we’re done here. Why don’t you go find Evan or something?”
“Are you going to tell him what I said?” she asked nervously. “Because I only said I’d dump him if—”
“No, Charlotte, I’m not going to tell him,” I said drily. “The hymen of your integrity remains intact. Your precious jewel of a reputation is un-besmirched.”
I left Jill’s party thinking that sometimes it isn’t worth confirming what we already know about people we understand so well. Because what Charlotte had wanted that night wasn’t me. It was some imaginary version of the boy she used to date but had never bothered to really think about as a person. And maybe the imaginary Ezra would have gone back to her and tried to forget the last five months. Maybe he would have convinced himself that he was happier for it, that neither of them were terrible people in the end, that it was possible to retreat into one’s popularity and carelessness and never have to acknowledge the harm they’d caused to those around them, or the lies they believed to make their happiness possible.
But it doesn’t matter what the imaginary Ezra inside Charlotte’s head would have done, because he wasn’t real, and he certainly wasn’t me. What I did was drive home, past the egged stop signs and toilet-papered poplar trees, and coax Cooper off the kitchen mat where he was still sulking over not being allowed to play with the trick-or-treaters, and fall into bed without even bothering to wash off that ridiculous body glitter.
29
COOPER WAS ACTING strange on Sunday night, his expression uneasy, his head cocked as though listening for something just beyond the mosaic tile of our leaf-strewn pool.
“It’s all right, boy,” I told him, absently patting the top of his head as I sat at my desk flipping through college catalogues.
They were filled with pictures of a world that reminded me of her, a place brimming with unknowable possibility and almost certain adventure. For a moment, I let myself imagine what it would be like to go East, where leaves turned golden and snow coated the rooftops, where libraries looked like castles and dining halls were straight out of the Harry Potter films. But the brochures all seemed to blend together with the same promise of New England, and I realized that there’s a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.
THE COYOTES WERE back in Eastwood again, and somehow Cooper had sensed it. Two housecats were dragged off over the weekend, and a coyote had been spotted in Terrace Bluffs. The local newspaper’s headline hinted that our town was being “terrorized”—as though the streets were filled with nocturnal wolves gliding through the shadows, preying on the old and the sick.
In the way that some places have a rash of burglaries or hubcap thefts, we have coyotes. It’s not that surprising when small animals disappear, and every once in a while I would see something slink past the tennis courts while I was practicing after dark. Occasionally the neighbors’ koi ponds were depleted overnight, or a jogger would spot a coyote watching him on one of the trails, but no one had ever been killed by coyotes. It was an absurd idea, like something out of those novels filled with vampires and witches.
Still, there was an Animal Control van parked by the side of the football field on Monday, and every day that week, we’d watch officers comb the trails through our classroom windows.
I sat at Toby’s lunch table again, where little was said about my reappearance. Austin looked up from his iPad long enough to flick his bangs out of his eyes and announce that it was about time I was back, and had I seen the new Nintendo console?
“No, but did you know there’s an eight-bit Great Gatsby game?” I asked.
“You’re making that up.” Austin furiously started typing.
I glanced over toward my former lunch table, where Jimmy had pulled a roll of Mentos out of his pocket and was threatening to dump them into Emma’s soda bottle. Evan roared with laughter, and Trevor started a chant of “Do it and you’re cool!” When Jimmy inevitably succumbed to the temptation, the boys backed away laughing as Emma’s soda shot a geyser of fizz into the air.
“Oh shit!” they muttered gleefully.
The girls stood there, dripping and indignant as the fizz explosion turned to a trickle. The pavement under their lunch table was drenched, and the front of Charlotte’s Song Squad uniform was soaked. Evan looked up and caught me watching. He flicked his chin, telling me to get over there, but I just shook my head.
“Emma’s going to kill him,” I said, breaking off a piece of Phoebe’s Pop-Tart.
“Their relationship’s fizzed,” Phoebe said, belatedly swatting my hand away from her breakfast.
“Ten points to Chang,” Toby said.
“He should probably keep that soda as a mementos mori.” I smirked, and our table went totally silent.
“Get it?” I asked. “Mentos, like, memento—”
“We got it,” Toby assured me. “Jesus, Faulkner. Was that poetry? In Latin?”
“That was fifty points,” I told him. “Unless any of you can do better?”
“Pop-Tart sharing privileges activated,” Phoebe said, offering me another piece.
“Dude!” Austin looked up from his iPad. “There really is an eight-bit Gatsby! Why are you guys looking at me like that? What’d I miss?”