Severed Heads, Broken Hearts

by Robyn Schneider

“That was fifty points,” I told him. “Unless any of you can do better?”

  “Pop-Tart sharing privileges activated,” Phoebe said, offering me another piece.

  “Dude!” Austin looked up from his iPad. “There really is an eight-bit Gatsby! Why are you guys looking at me like that? What’d I miss?”

  ANIMAL CONTROL GAVE up their search on Wednesday, and our homeroom teachers distributed a safety precaution handout that culminated in a laughable series of true-false questions about coyote attacks. I rolled my eyes and turned it over on my desk, not caring that we were doing popcorn reading, since no one would dare to popcorn me.

  My school was big on using recycled paper, and it took a moment before I recognized what was on the backs of our Preventing Coyote Attacks! handout: leftover fliers for last year’s Junior-Senior Luau, complete with a poorly photocopied picture of the class council in sunglasses and leis. If you held the handout up to the light, the photo of us seeped through, creating this disturbing impression that it was a picture of attack victims, that we were the cautionary tale.

  When I drove over to the medical center later that afternoon, the sun was just beginning to set, and these shafts of golden sunlight slanted through the magnolia trees that divided the rows of parking spaces. In that light, the leaves looked fake, like they were made of wax. Cassidy would have loved them.

  I was slightly early when I pushed open the door of Suite 322 North: Cohen and Ford Group Mental Health Practice. The receptionurse smiled at me blankly, and asked which doctor I was there to see, and if I was a new patient. I told her Dr. Cohen and I’d been before, and she typed something into the oldest functioning computer I’d ever seen, and said the insurance stuff was taken care of and I should just sit and relax.

  One thing I’ve noticed is that the only places people insist you relax are the least relaxing places on the planet. Airplanes, the dentist, psychiatric waiting rooms, those little curtained-off areas in the hospital where you have an IV put in. Anyway. I sat, waited, considered how incredibly unrelaxed I felt.

  The whole place, and I really mean all of it, was decorated for Festivus. There were non-denominational snowmen, and seasonal snowflakes, and glittering garlands of enormous plastic peppermints. It was pretty terrible. Plus there was this older lady already sitting there, wearing a sari and an I’m-waiting-for-my-kid expression as she flipped through a decrepit magazine.

  She coughed and shifted in her chair, making the peppermint garland rattle. A small avalanche of glitter sloughed off, and I wasn’t lucky enough to avoid it. I made a face and tried to wipe it from my shoulders, but there was no use.

  The receptionurse poked her head through the vestibule and let me know that Dr. Cohen was running about twenty minutes behind. I sighed and put on my headphones, taking out the college app I was working on. The lady with the magazine was being pretty nosy, and after about five minutes, she finally decided to come out with it.

  “Are those college applications?”

  I nodded.

  “Where are you applying?” she asked shamelessly.

  “Um, this one’s for Duke,” I said, “and this is for Dartmouth.”

  “You must be a smart boy.” She said it like I was some three-year-old, which wasn’t actually reassuring.

  “Not really.” I shrugged. “But it’s worth trying.”

  “My daughter was a National Merit Scholar,” she said, as though this fact was at all relevant to our conversation.

  “That’s great.” I fiddled with my headphones, hoping she’d lose interest.

  I’d just started back on my application when the door to Dr. Ford’s office opened. I glanced up, figuring it was going to be the nosy lady’s daughter and she’d make us awkwardly introduce ourselves, but it wasn’t.

  Cassidy Thorpe walked into the waiting room, something in the cast of her shoulders suggesting this visit was routine. Her eyes were slightly red, as though she’d been crying, and her white sweater slipped off one freckled shoulder. Her trench coat was bundled in her arms, the belt dangling.

  When she saw me, she paled. Bit her lip. Looked like she wanted to disappear.

  We stared at each other, totally embarrassed, since the waiting room in a mental health clinic isn’t the best place to run into your ex, particularly when it’s decorated with a thousand glittering pieces of fake candy. I had no idea what she was doing there, but I was damn well going to find out.

  “Hi,” I said, taking off my headphones.

  The papers on my lap slipped onto the floor, and Cassidy and I stared at them like I’d carelessly broken a vase in someone else’s house.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “Selling Girl Scout cookies,” I deadpanned.

  Neither of us laughed.

  “No, really.”

  “Well, I was in this accident.” I was still trying to make a joke of it. “So I have to go through the hassle of convincing doctors that I’m not experiencing a crippling bout of clinical depression. Get it, crippling?”

  “Stop,” Cassidy insisted, like what I’d said made her feel even worse. It was strange, since she used to laugh at stupid puns like that.

  She knelt and picked up my papers. I muttered my thanks and zipped them back into my bag.

  “You’d hate Dartmouth, by the way,” Cassidy said.

  “Wow, really? We’re talking about this right now?” It was out of my mouth before I could think it through, floating there sarcastically, and I instantly wanted to take it back.

  “Okay, well, see you in school.” Cassidy started to walk off, but I wasn’t having it.

  “No way,” I said, standing up. “You don’t want to sit next to me in class, fine. You want to sulk in the library, be my guest. But I run into you here, you’re telling me what’s going on.”

  I didn’t care that the lady in the sari was spying on us from behind her magazine. I didn’t care that my T-shirt was lousy with glitter. I just wanted her to trust me, for once, to tell me what it was that had turned our smooth-sailing relationship into a total shipwreck.

  “Stay out of it, Ezra.” Cassidy’s eyes were pleading, but it sounded more like a warning than anything else. And that infuriated me.

  “Make me.”

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” Cassidy asked in exasperation.

  Her expression was the one she’d worn a lot lately, full of this sadness that had lurked there for far longer than we’d been together. And I was tired of wondering why.

  “I don’t know? Screw with me?”

  “Excuse me,” the receptionurse said, poking her head through the vestibule. “Is there a problem?”

  “We’re fine,” Cassidy and I said in unison, both of us sounding terrifically not fine.

  “Hallway?” I suggested.

  Cassidy glared but followed me anyway.

  “What?” she demanded once the door had closed behind us.

  “So, do you come here often?” I tried not to grin at how ridiculous it sounded.

  “It’s none of your business,” Cassidy shot back, clearly not seeing any humor in this.

  And if she wanted to play it that way, it was fine by me. Because I was tired of whatever we were doing, of whatever it was between us being this vast and unbreachable wasteland of misery.

  “Of course not. But you know what I think?” I asked, not waiting for an answer. “I think you were alone that night in the park. That your ‘boyfriend’ didn’t exist.”

  I’d been privately toying with that theory for a while and hadn’t planned on making the accusation, but the moment I said it, I knew I was right.

  “Why would I make something like that up?” Cassidy demanded, avoiding the question.

  “Did you?” I pressed.

  “What does it matter, Ezra? We broke up. Not all nice things have happy endings.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out what I did to make you act like this. Seriously, Cassidy, what tragedy occurred that made you wish we’d nev
er met?”

  Cassidy stared at the carpet. Tucked her hair behind her ears. Smiled sadly.

  “Life is the tragedy,” she said bitterly. “You know how they categorize Shakespeare’s plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it’s a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it’s a tragedy. So we’re all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn’t with a goddamned wedding.”

  “Well, thanks for that. That clears everything up nicely. We’re all prisoners. Wait no—we’re living tragedies, just passing time till our funerals.”

  Cassidy scowled at this, but I didn’t care. I was furious with her for being there, for being miserable, for refusing to explain.

  “No one’s dead, Cassidy,” I said harshly. “I can’t decide whether you’re just crazy, or a liar, or someone who likes hurting people. You’re all riddles and quotes and you can’t give me a straight answer about anything and I’m tired of waiting for you to realize that you owe me one.”

  I hadn’t meant to go off like that, and I wasn’t exactly using my indoor voice when I said any of those things. Cassidy studied the carpet for a long moment, and when she glanced up at me, a tropical storm was churning in her eyes. Two tears slid down her cheeks.

  “I don’t owe you anything,” Cassidy sobbed, “and you’re right, I do wish we’d never met.”

  She rushed past me, taking the stairs, where she knew I couldn’t follow.

  “Yeah, well, so do I!” I called after her, not meaning it but not caring.

  The door to the stairwell banged shut in response.

  I took a deep breath, and ran a hand through my hair, and kept my shit together long enough to go back into that doctor’s office and calmly tell the receptionurse that it was probably best if I rescheduled.

  30

  THERE’D BEEN ANOTHER sighting on the hiking trail behind Meadowbridge Park, and the coyotes were all my parents talked about, eclipsing even the subject of whether or not they should return the new light fixture in the downstairs guest bathroom, which had arrived with a slight imperfection in the glass.

  Even my friends made jokes about it, with Phoebe in particular relishing how, and I quote, “deeply ironic it is that our school mascot, a supposed emblem of pride, has become emblematic of our collective fear.”

  Some of the tennis guys at my old lunch table had taken to making fake wolf howls, and Connor MacLeary landed himself two days of in-school suspension for it, which we all found hilarious, because the school was literally forcing him to skip class.

  There was a debate tournament that weekend up in Santa Barbara, and of course I wasn’t going. Sign-ups had been weeks ago, back when we were all still obsessed with the homecoming dance, and Cassidy hadn’t wanted to. I hadn’t pressed her on it, since I figured we’d probably spend the weekend together. But one interesting thing Toby told me was that the Barrows School was on the tournament list. I assumed Cassidy had known that back when she’d suggested we both sit this one out, that the way she avoided certain things was another part of this maddening mystery.

  Toby went all out, wearing his suit to school on Friday, swaggering through the quad with this purple pocket square and peacock-printed tie, and even Luke and Sam joined us sheepishly at lunch, sporting matching American flag pins in their lapels. It felt wrong, the six of us, like we were two groups that had never been a cohesive whole. And it was strange, thinking that Cassidy had been the glue connecting us.

  “Still here, Faulkner?” Luke sneered.

  “Still doing that terrible impression of Draco Malfoy?” I asked.

  Everyone at the table cracked up, and even Sam was trying not to laugh. Luke muttered something under his breath, dragging Sam off to the breakfast line.

  “It’s sort of sad, when you think about it,” Austin mused.

  “What is?” I asked, figuring he was probably talking about some video game.

  “How no one ever invites Luke to anything because his brother’s a cop. Man, he takes it so personally.”

  “Whoa. Please be a human being more often,” Phoebe begged.

  “What’s the point? I’m never going to make the leader boards.” Austin shrugged philosophically, retrieved his phone from the pocket of his suit jacket, and returned to his game.

  “So Faulkner,” Toby said. “Anything specific you want me to ask the Barrows School when I see them at the tournament?”

  “I guess about last year?” I suggested. “About what happened?”

  “Well, it’s your call.” Toby put on his sunglasses and leaned back to catch the sun. “You know her better than anyone.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was starting to think I didn’t know her at all. And that maybe whatever Toby found out wouldn’t help anything. Because the thing was, after what had happened at the medical center, I wasn’t sure if we were worth fixing. And I didn’t know what answers would make me know whether I even wanted to try.

  I kept seeing it over and over again in my head, Cassidy’s eyes filling with tears as she announced that she wished we’d never met. The way her hair streamed behind her as she ran away from me, confident I wouldn’t follow. The stupid lie I’d shouted after her.

  We’d been so good together once, and then we’d rotted, like some corpse with a delayed burial. I read somewhere that the hair and fingernails on dead bodies don’t actually grow, it just looks like they do because the skin contracts as the body dries out. So it’s possible to lie even in death, to deceive people from beyond the grave. I wondered if that’s what this was. If I was staring at the rotting corpse of what Cassidy and I had once had, wrongly convinced there was still life in it, grasping onto an uninformed lie.

  I watched my friends climb into the team van that afternoon, their luggage filled with baguettes and liquor and Fruit by the Foot, and then I went home and played this useless video game with the sound off so I wouldn’t miss it if Toby called.

  MY MOM MUST have felt sorry for me, because she let me sleep in on Saturday. I finally got up around noon, after having decided that, as far as monogamous relationships go, I could probably do worse than marrying my bed.

  Since all of my friends were up in Santa Barbara, I wound up at the library again, halfheartedly working on college applications but mostly checking my phone like a madman.

  There was no point in bothering Toby, since he’d have debate rounds all day, and I found myself wishing I’d gone to the tournament. I pictured Austin with his endless supply of entertaining YouTube videos, and Phoebe passing out contraband snack foods (“nineties nostalgia guaranteed”) and even Sam rolling up his sleeves to mix massively intoxicating cocktails. And Toby, with his thrift-store suit and stubborn insistence that we call him “O Captain My Captain.”

  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 la
ughed 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.