“And?”
“Dude, are you sitting down?”
“Dude, tell me!” I pleaded.
“Christ, I’m trying!” Toby insisted. “Okay. Well, you know Cassidy’s brother?”
“Six years older? Big-shot debate champion? Went to Yale, then med school at Hopkins?” I filled in, wondering what Toby knew that I didn’t.
Toby sighed, his breath crackling through the phone.
“Cassidy’s brother is dead.”
“What?” I choked. Because whatever I’d been expecting Toby to say, it wasn’t that.
“He passed away last year,” Toby said. “That’s when Cassidy dropped out of school—and debate.”
I’d never heard Toby sound the way he did when he told me that. Not just sorry, but ashamed of himself, like he’d been too hard on Cassidy, misjudged her, misread her somehow in the worst possible way. That the big mystery of the legendary Cassidy Thorpe wasn’t the sort of story anyone would want to tell.
“How did he die?” I asked, breaking the silence.
“Some heart condition, apparently? It was really sudden. There was a whole article about it in his school newspaper. It’s—ah, hold on.”
There was some scuffling, and then Toby came back on.
“Sorry,” he said. “Listen, I have to get to the award ceremony, Ms. Weng is frog-marching me in as we speak. But I can still text—only kidding, Ms. Weng—”
“Go,” I said. “It’s fine. I’ll come over later.”
I hung up and stared down at my phone, at the little flashing time display of how long it had taken Toby to thoroughly wreck everything I thought I knew about Cassidy Thorpe. I saw now the way she’d talked about escaping the panopticon—what she’d really been doing was talking about everything besides the fact that her brother already had.
31
I DROVE HOME that evening with the strange impression that whatever had happened between Cassidy and myself wasn’t about us at all. It was about her brother. His sudden death—the way she’d left school, moved home for senior year. It was like she was trying to find some place where she could escape from the fact that it had happened, or perhaps come to terms with it.
So many missing pieces of Cassidy Thorpe clicked into place. The boys’ clothes she sometimes wore, the ghostly house, the concerned lady pulling her aside at the debate tournament, the desperate way she’d made sure to lose.
I knew what it was like to have people stare at you with pity. For everyone’s gaze to follow you through the hallways as though you were marked by tragedy and no longer belonged. And I could understand why she hadn’t wanted that. Why she would have kept her brother’s death to herself. Why she would choose a town where she barely knew anyone, and a boyfriend who knew how broken felt.
Suddenly, I realized what an unforgiveable dick I’d been at the psychiatrist’s. No one’s dead, I’d told her. I couldn’t have picked a more horrible thing to say if I’d tried.
And then it occurred to me: It wasn’t that Cassidy didn’t want to date me, she just didn’t want to tell me. But now I knew. I knew why she seemed so deeply miserable sometimes, why she’d pleaded with me to just let it go.
It had all started the night of the homecoming dance. She’d been fine before then. Even on Friday, when Mrs. Martin had us plan an ideal vacation, and Cassidy had gotten carried away telling me about this art concept hotel where you slept in coffins. Actually, yeah, that was pretty morbid.
“But if we stayed there, we wouldn’t be able to share a bed,” I’d said. “A coffin. Whatever.”
“Oh, we’d figure something out,” Cassidy had assured me, putting her hand on my leg even though we were right there in Spanish class.
It was only the next day that everything had curdled.
So there Cassidy was, on the afternoon of the homecoming dance. Maybe she’d started to get ready. Painted her nails or whatever it is girls do. Cut the tags off her dress. Picked up the phone after I’d made that joke about getting her a lei. And then she’d remembered something. The anniversary of her brother’s death? No, it hadn’t been long enough for that. Maybe she’d forgotten something instead. His birthday? Some tradition they had? And suddenly the dance didn’t matter anymore, nothing mattered except the fact that he was gone and he wasn’t gone because she couldn’t escape his death no matter what she did.
So she’d gone to the park, because Cassidy liked parks, because that was where she went when things needed to be said or thought through, and that was where I’d found her. It had gotten dark and she hadn’t realized, and then it was too late to explain the truth that she’d been hiding from everyone for so long. She hadn’t expected to get close to anyone at Eastwood, and now that I was there, what could she say so that I’d leave?
So she’d lied. Of course she’d lied. I’d caught her off guard and she didn’t have time to make it good. So it was her boyfriend she was there with, and I was just an amusement. It was a lie inspired by the very story I’d told her about how Charlotte and I had ended, and she hadn’t realized how completely it would shatter me. She’d tried to take it back—changed her mind—but I was already leaving. And when she’d finally had the courage to go back to class and face me, she hadn’t been able to face me at all.
I played this explanation over in my head as I drove home against the purpling sky, past the endlessly pristine golf courses that lay between Eastwood and Back Bay. If I’d gotten it right, then Cassidy had pushed me away because it was easier than explaining that her brother was gone, and there was nowhere else to run to pretend that it hadn’t happened. If I’d gotten it right, then we were never meant to break up that night in the park, and we were both hurting because of it.
MY FATHER STOPPED me when I got home.
“Come on in here a second, champ,” he said, beckoning me into his home office with a schmoozy grin.
I shrugged out of my backpack and took a seat on his sofa. The scent of dinner cooking drifted in from the kitchen—it smelled suspiciously like Italian food, which couldn’t be right.
“Is Mom making lasagna?” I asked hopefully as my father tabbed between multiple Excel files.
“Gluten free.” He swiveled his chair around to face me and steepled his fingers.
“Maybe it tastes better.” I somehow managed to keep a straight face.
“First step: lasagna; next step: pizza,” my father said, winking. And then he crossed his ankle over his knee, and got down to business. “I hear you’ve been keeping busy these days.”
“College applications,” I said. “It’s easier to get them done at the library.”
He said he was happy to hear I was being proactive about my future, and I nodded and listened while he launched into one of those endless stories about his good old days as chapter president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. When he finished, he beamed at me, waiting I suppose for me to confirm my ambitions to follow in his footsteps like we’d always planned. But I didn’t.
Instead, I told him I was thinking of going East. I named a string of schools whose brochures I had stashed in my desk drawer. His eyebrows went up at a couple of them, and I didn’t blame him. Mentioned history, English, chemistry. Mentioned that I thought I could do better than state college, and that I wanted to at least try.
“Well, I’m surprised,” my father said, scrutinizing me. “You’ve grown up a lot this year, kiddo. You’ve had to, and I’m sorry about that. But I’m glad to see that you have a plan.”
“You mean you’re okay with it?” I asked, hardly daring to believe it.
“I don’t presume to speak for your mother.” He smiled wryly. “But I think it would be good for you. And of course my old fraternity has chapters at most schools.”
I laughed, for once finding one of my father’s pseudojokes funny. And when my mom called us in to dinner and stood beaming over a platter of only mildly healthy-tasting lasagna, we finally had something to discuss besides light fixtures.