“Or maybe it wasn’t him,” I said, hardly daring to hope. “There are lots of black SUVs in Eastwood.”
“Ezra,” Cassidy chided, like I was being irrational. “The Friday night before prom, around ten? The roads between Terrace Bluffs and Back Bay? It was him. I couldn’t tell my parents. I haven’t told anyone, except you.”
She smiled sadly, and squeezed my hand again, in a way that constricted my heart.
“Well, I’m glad you did,” I said. “It’s better this way. We’re two sides of the same tragic coin. It’s like we were tied together before we even met.”
“No,” Cassidy said fiercely. “It’s not like that. Don’t you see? We can’t ever be together. When I look at you now, all I see is Owen. I see him dead in you. The way you’re sitting with your leg out, I see him crashing that car into you. And I think, how can I introduce you to my parents? The boy their dead son cripp—injured, sorry. So we can’t. Not ever.”
I considered this. Stared at the industrial clock on the far wall without really seeing it. Ran a hand through my hair. And then I looked over at her, aching to hold her close to me but knowing not to. Maybe part of me had already started to understand that reaching for Cassidy was the same as pushing her away. Maybe I’d already guessed that the physics of us didn’t defy any laws of gravity, and with her, there was always an equal and opposite reaction.
“I wish you’d let me decide what I want to do,” I finally said. “Because I’m serious, none of this changes that I miss you and want you back. We’re so good together, and it’s a tragedy in its own right to throw that away because of something neither of us did. Because the way I figure it, everyone gets a tragedy. And all things considered, I’m glad that car accident was mine. Otherwise I wouldn’t be applying to East Coast colleges, or on the debate team, or any of those things, because I wouldn’t have met you.”
“But I didn’t do any of that,” Cassidy insisted. “Ezra, the girl you’re chasing after doesn’t exist. I’m not some bohemian adventurer who takes you on treasure hunts and sends you secret messages. I’m this sad, lonely mess who studies too much and pushes people away and hides in her haunted house. You keep wanting to give me credit because you finally decided you weren’t content with squeezing yourself into the narrow corridor of everyone’s expectations, but you made that decision before we’d even met, back on the first day of school when you shot your mouth off in AP Euro.”
I’d totally forgotten about that. About the day we’d met, when I’d already gotten kicked out of the pep rally, been a smartass toward my coach, and ditched my friends at lunch. In my memory, it had been her, always her, as the motivating force behind my actions.
“There,” she said smugly, because my expression must have changed. “You see? You’re just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other’s lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed. The popular jock. The mysterious new girl. But we’re the ones who choose, in the end, how people see us. And I’d rather be misremembered. Please, Ezra, misremember me.”
There was a pleading quality to Cassidy’s eyes that I hadn’t seen before, and I realized that it didn’t matter whether any of what she said was true; she believed it so completely that there was no convincing her otherwise.
To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn’t a metaphor. It was the greatest failing of everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her, because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.
But I didn’t tell her any of those things. Instead, I acted as though I believed her, because what else could I do? It was that poem she’d given me that day at the creek, about everything dying at last, and too soon. It was both of us asking the unanswerable question of what else we might have done.
“I don’t want us to be over.” It wasn’t a question.
“Ezra,” Cassidy said, sounding tremendously sorry. “You’re better off without me. And I don’t want to be around when you realize it.”
She shrugged out of my jacket and draped it over my shoulders. I watched her do this, not really comprehending until she stepped back and sniffled, trying to be brave. I could feel the good-bye hovering between us, heavy and final, and then the vet appeared in the doorway, his expression grim.
“Mr. Faulkner? Could you step back here for a moment?”
“Oh, good. He’s fine, right? He’s going to be fine?” I asked.
The vet looked down at his clipboard, not daring to meet my eyes, and in that moment, I knew. I followed him without looking back, and just like that, Cooper’s tags were pressed into my trembling hand, as though asking me to mourn him as a hero, and Cassidy disappeared from my life.
33
FOR MORE THAN a week, the urn containing Cooper’s ashes sat on my desk, and whenever my mother gingerly revived the subject of moving it somewhere more discreet, I glared at her and wordlessly left the room.
Eastwood was distorted for me, a picturesque place meant to lull its residents into believing that behind our gates and beyond our curfew, nothing bad could ever happen with any sort of permanence. It was a place so fatally flawed that it refused to acknowledge that any such imperfection was possible.
The impeccable rows of homes marched onward, little soldiers on the front lines of suburbia, hoping valiantly they would never meet a tragic end. But so many of them did. So many identical houses behind identical gates bore the marks of tragedy, and it was from those houses that the determined few left Eastwood and all its empty promises behind forever.
Toby and I scattered Cooper’s ashes over the hiking trail one afternoon in late November, even though it was illegal. In eulogy, I read from my dog-eared copy of Gatsby, reciting that famous line about the foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams as I emptied the funerary urn into the wind.
As Toby and I walked back toward the park, my cane sinking into the freshly watered grass, the light was on in Cassidy’s bedroom, and I remember glancing at it and wondering. I wondered what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we’d gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.
When Cassidy failed to show up at school for the spring semester, I wasn’t particularly surprised. I’d been expecting for some time that she’d go back to boarding school, returning to the panopticon that she had never truly escaped, and it was just as well. The finality of her leaving allowed me to reclaim the places that had once been ours as mine, to say good-bye to my childhood parks and hiking trails rather than grasping for lost moments with a lost girl who refused to be found.
I’m at college now, and it’s been some weeks since the leaves turned to memory beneath our feet and trays began disappearing from the dining hall, smuggled out under wool coats in anticipation of the first snow.