“What?” I asked, a bit annoyed that she’d interrupted my private Zen moment.
“No one likes organic chemistry. It’s, like, the worst requirement there is for pre-med.”
“Well, maybe I liked it because I’m not going to be pre-med.”
“No, you’re planning to be a field hand.” Cassidy rolled her eyes.
“Obviously. I’ll operate on a seasonal schedule. I’ll call it Spring Gleaning.”
Cassidy whacked me with her notebook.
After an unexciting philosophy lecture on something called consequentialism, we walked back to the Town Center. It was around noon, and the weather had turned scorching. The sky, which was a brilliant blue directly overhead, lightened to white gray as it stretched over the mountains.
I took off my button-down, which I’d worn over a T-shirt in case it was a date.
Cassidy glanced over as I stuffed the collared shirt into my backpack.
“What happened to your wrist?” she asked.
“Nothing, it’s just a brace,” I said, not wanting to get into it.
“So it’s some kind of jock fashion statement?” Cassidy teased. She pushed her sunglasses up into her hair, suddenly becoming serious. “Is that why you always wear long sleeves?”
“No,” I said, mocking her. “I always wear long sleeves because it’s some kind of jock fashion statement.”
She stuck out her tongue, which made her look like a little kid.
“Very mature,” I said. “I thought we were pretending to be college students.”
“Not anymore. Class is dismissed. Now it’s lunchtime.”
We got sandwiches at Lee’s, one of those chains you grow up thinking must be everywhere, but in reality exists only in California.
At Cassidy’s insistence, we took our sandwiches across the street to this little slope of rocks and grass that ran alongside the man-made creek and had our picnic in the shade of an oak tree. On the trail above us, bicyclists whizzed by on their narrow path, and across the water, I could see another couple spreading out their picnic. Not that Cassidy and I were a couple.
I turned up the speakers on my phone and put on an old Crystal Castles album while Cassidy rooted through the grass, picking tiny white flowers and knotting them together into a crown.
“Here,” she said, leaning in to place the circlet on my head.
Her face was inches from mine. I could see the freckles that dusted her nose and the gold flecks in the disquieting blue of her eyes.
When she pulled away to study what I looked like with the crown of flowers in my hair, I had the brief impression that she knew how much she confused me and was enjoying it.
“When can I take this off?” I asked.
“When you tell me where you’re applying to college,” she said mischievously.
I shrugged. That question was easy.
“Probably here, maybe some other state schools.”
I could tell instantly that I’d said the wrong thing.
“So that’s it?” Cassidy asked. “You’re fine with spending your whole life in the same twenty square miles?”
Wordlessly, I took off the crown and examined it.
“Well, it isn’t as though I’m going to be recruited anywhere.”
“Oh.” Cassidy’s cheeks reddened, and she fiddled with her napkin for a moment. “Sorry. I hadn’t realized.”
“No, it’s fine. One state school’s as good as the next. I wasn’t exactly aiming for the Ivy League.”
“Why not?” Cassidy asked curiously. “Everyone from Barrows is.”
It wasn’t the sort of question I was used to encountering: why not Harvard or Yale? The answer was obvious: because no one expected me to attend schools like those. I’d never shown a serious interest in academics, and I’d played tennis hoping our team would make All State, not training for the Olympics. The vast majority of my classmates, myself included, had never even seen it snow.
“I don’t really think I’d fit in,” I finally said.
“No, of course not.” Cassidy’s tone dripped scorn. “You’d prefer to fit in with the brainless jocks who win high-school popularity contests and the vapid girls who worship them.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t exactly fit in with them, either.”
Cassidy started laughing.
“Ezra,” she said slowly, “everyone has noticed.”
I leaned over and placed the crown of flowers onto her head, letting my hands linger in her hair just a moment more than was necessary.
And I suppose I should have tilted her face up toward mine and kissed her then, but I didn’t. I couldn’t tell if she was just trying to see if I would, or if she really wanted me to, and I didn’t want to find out.
Instead, I told her about how it had been for me ever since the accident. I told her how I’d spent nearly two weeks in the hospital while the rest of my classmates finished junior year without me; how I’d missed prom and the student government elections and the Junior-Senior Luau; how the first surgery hadn’t worked and my mom had cried when she found out I had to have another; how my tennis coach had come by the hospital and I’d heard him fighting with my dad out in the hallway, blaming me; how my so-called friends had sent a cheesy card they’d all signed, rather than visiting; how the doctors made such a big production of telling me that I’d never play sports again that I thought they were going to say I’d be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life; how the worst part was having to go back to school with kids I’d known since kindergarten, and the only thing that had changed was me, because I didn’t know who I was anymore, or who I wanted to be.