“I think I’ll stick with reality,” I said, handing Cassidy back her phone.
She stared at it, and then me, disappointed. “I’d think you of all people would want to escape.”
“Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners,” I said, which was apparently the right thing, because Cassidy slipped her hand into mine and told me more about Foucault as we walked back toward the park.
THAT NIGHT, WHEN Cassidy clicked on her flashlight to say hello, I did the unthinkable: I replied by text message.
Actually, I was stunned that it worked. But after a relatively short back and forth, she’d given me her address and agreed to wait outside while I drove over. When I pulled up, Cassidy was leaning against a streetlamp, bathed in its soft orange glow. She carried the green sweater she always wore, one sleeve trailing.
“Hi,” she said. “Where are we going?”
“You forgot about team dinner,” I joked, throwing the car into reverse.
Cassidy laughed, buckling her seat belt. Her hair was wet, and its wetness had left an abstract pattern across the shoulders of her blue blouse. I told her that I wanted to show her something, and that it was a surprise. I reached for her hand, and we drove like that, in the reassuring quiet of Sunday night in Eastwood, all the way to the freeway, listening to the Buzzcocks.
The moment I merged onto the 5 North, the quiet was replaced with the emptiness of the freeway at night, and we rolled down the windows, shedding music like ballast. After a couple of miles, I began to hear it in the distance—the dull thud of what we’d come to see.
“What’s that noise?” Cassidy asked suspiciously.
“Just wait.” I grinned, enjoying the suspense.
And then a firework burst over the Harbor Boulevard overpass. It hung there, shimmering in the night sky before blinking into a cloud of smoke.
“A firework!” Cassidy turned toward me, delighted.
Three more fireworks shot up over the freeway, contorting into purple stars as they burst against the dissipating smoke. The sky was stained the color of charcoal, and the fireworks kept coming, louder now, and enormous.
“Disneyland fireworks,” I said, exiting the freeway. “I thought we could park and watch.”
There was a diner right off the freeway, open more out of optimism than demand. I pulled into the empty lot and Cassidy reached up to open the sunroof. Her smile was luminous, even brighter than the fireworks, as she shimmied out the sunroof, her legs dangling. One of the laces on her Converse had come untied, and it swished gently against the hand brake.
“Climb up!” she insisted, and I did, because she was waiting for me beneath the fireworks shaped like planets and stars.
We sat there, side by side, holding hands in that childhood way with our fingers zipped together, our faces turned toward the sky. The fireworks sparkled overhead, pounding like drums.
“Hey,” Cassidy said, nudging me with her shoulder.
“Hi.”
“This is nice.”
“Very nice,” I agreed. “The nicest parking lot I’ve ever seen.”
Cassidy shook her head at my terrible attempt at humor. Three fireworks burst in tandem: purple-green-gold.
“There’s a word for it,” she told me, “in French, for when you have a lingering impression of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explodes and lights up the smoke from the ones before it.”
“That’s a terrible word,” I teased. “It’s like an excuse for holding onto the past.”
“Well, I think it’s beautiful. A word for remembering small moments destined to be lost.”
And I thought she was beautiful, except the words caught in my throat, like words used to, back when I sat at a different lunch table.
We turned our attention to the fireworks display, although I was having trouble concentrating, because my fingers were laced with her smaller ones, and the leg of my jeans was pressed against the pale cotton of her skirt, and the breeze carried just a hint of her shampoo.
“Wouldn’t it be incredible,” I said, “if you could send secret messages with fireworks? Like Morse code.”
“Why?” Cassidy asked, her face inches from mine. “What would you say?”
I closed the distance between us, pressing my lips against hers. We kissed like we weren’t in a parking lot in a not-so-nice part of Anaheim, sitting on the roof of my car on a school night. We kissed like there was a bed waiting for us to share at a debate tournament, and it didn’t matter if I’d remembered to pack pajamas. And then we kissed again, for good measure.
She tasted like buried treasure and swing sets and coffee. She tasted the way fireworks felt, like something you could get close to but never really have just for yourself.
“Wait,” Cassidy whispered, pulling away.
Sillage, I thought. The lingering impression of a kiss having ended.
She dropped through the sunroof, crawling into the backseat with a mischievous smile and motioning for me to follow. I learned three things that night: 1) sharing a bed isn’t nearly as intimate as making out in a too-small backseat, 2) inexplicably, some bras unhook in the front, and 3) Cassidy hadn’t known I was Jewish.
19
I DROVE CASSIDY to school every day that week, pulling up outside her house with two travel mugs of coffee and waiting for her to slip out the front door, swinging her leather satchel as she hurried down the front walk.
Her house was enormous, one of those Spanish-tiled villas with a four-car garage, the kind you’re almost certain is two houses attached, because of the oversized symmetry. I remembered when they’d built this subdivision, two years after mine, and how I’d woken up every morning in the fifth grade to the sound of the workmen, not even bothering to set an alarm after a while. I remembered the eerily quiet Monday morning when the hammering finally stopped, and how my mom had yelled at me for oversleeping.