The girls next to me in the library had been talking loudly, so I’d resorted to headphones. Which is why, when my phone rang, I almost missed it.
“Yeah?” I said, lunging for it.
“Dude, you missed a sick party!” Toby sounded incredibly caffeinated, like someone should have pulled him away from the Red Bull two cans ago. “Ah! Faulkner! You should have come! Everyone wishes you were here. Except Luke, because last night he got so drunk that he peed the bed.”
“How much pee are we talking?” I asked, gathering my things. The girls sitting nearby gave me an odd look, which I supposed was justified.
“If his bed was the gulf, this was an oil spill.”
“You are a magnificent friend for telling me this.” I passed through the turnstile, nodding to the girl who always let me through without ID.
It was cloudy outside, not so much overcast as overcome by fog. It happened sometimes. A huge beast of a cumulous would swallow Eastwood whole, and for a day or two we’d live in the belly of the cloud, unable to see more than five feet in front of us.
Toby drew out the story of Luke’s hour of shame, and I stared at the fog and listened to him laughing over how Luke had not only peed the bed, he’d peed the bed in another team’s hotel room. I laughed along once or twice, because I knew I was supposed to, but I was starting to get the feeling that Toby wasn’t telling me something.
“How bad is it?” I blurted.
Toby paused. We knew each other too well, and I knew that silence. It was a serious one.
“I talked to some people on the Barrows team today,” he said, trying to play it off.
“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.