“My bedroom’s the one with the fake balcony. It’s right above our pool with the fake waterfall,” I added, earning one of Cassidy’s rare smiles.
“I’ll send you secret messages,” she promised. “In Morse code. With my Hello Kitty flashlight.”
“You better.”
Suddenly, Cassidy’s phone buzzed. She slipped it out of her pocket and I glimpsed a list of missed calls.
“I should get back,” she said, standing up. “Pop your trunk so I can get my bike?”
“I don’t mind driving you.”
Cassidy shook her head. “I’d rather bike. It’s like, my mom’s already pissed? I’m not used to living at home, and I forgot to check in.”
“Well, if you’re sure.”
“I’ll see you at school,” she said, and then grinned evilly. “Unless I’m attacked by nocturnal wolves, in which case you’ll just have to live with the guilt.”
She scooped up her shoes, and I watched her silhouette as she ran across the grass, and I thought about how it usually wasn’t like this when it came to me and girls.
9
I SUPPOSE I’D better explain about Charlotte Hyde and how we’d started dating. I asked her to be my girlfriend in October of our junior year, during a scorcher of a weekend when we’d all driven out to Laguna Beach for the day. It was the usual crew piled into the usual cars, about fifteen of us.
Jimmy had packed a cooler of beers, bought with his older brother’s ID. In typical Jimmy fashion, he’d forgotten to bring anything that might disguise the open containers, so the guys kept sneaking them into the public toilets. The cops parked out on Beach Boulevard must’ve thought they all had the shits.
The girls wanted to sunbathe, as usual. They rarely did anything besides recline in beach chairs and flick through magazines, and it baffled me how anyone could go to the beach to willingly engage in the same pass-the-time activities that passengers suffered through on airplanes.
The seniors in our crowd put Evan and me to work grilling hot dogs on a public barbecue near the lifeguard stand. Evan complained about being a grunt, but I honestly didn’t mind. It was peaceful standing there, the heat from the coals drying my bathing suit, the sun slanting off the water. It was the beginning of junior year, and we had everything to look forward to.
After we ate the hot dogs on hamburger buns (“No one f**kin’ told me what kind of buns,” Evan had protested) and the girls pretended to be upset over it, Brett Masters, the captain of the water polo team, challenged the tennis guys to five-on-five volleyball.
They destroyed us because, unlike tennis, water polo plays all on the same court and knows how to pass the damn ball. I’d managed a pretty spectacular spike out of sheer luck, but Jimmy and Evan were drunk enough that it was actually entertaining to watch them fumble and curse at their own ineptitude.
The sun had begun to set during the game, the ocean breeze turning cold. The girls put back on their sundresses. Charlotte unhooked her bathing suit top and removed it from beneath her dress as if by magic. She caught me looking and grinned, sensing that I was under her spell.
“Ezra, come over here,” she demanded, pouting cutely.
Dutifully, I went.
“Jill and I found this quiz in Pop Teen magazine about how to tell if a guy likes you,” she said, and before I knew it, the girls had trapped me on their matching hot pink towels and were making me take the quiz from their magazine. The questions were ridiculous, and when we finally reached the last one, Charlotte insisted on looking up my horoscope.
“Love is in the cards for all of you stubborn Tauruses!” she told me, and then frowned. “Well, what do you think?”
“I think I just learned the plural form of Taurus,” I joked, and Charlotte pretended to be upset that I wasn’t taking the horoscope seriously.
Ever since the end of sophomore year, I’d suspected that Charlotte liked me, but that day at the beach was the first time I sensed that she wasn’t just flirting for the fun of it—that she had something specific in mind.
“You’re so sweet,” she murmured, leaning into my shoulder as we sat side by side on her towel. “It’s a shame you’re not over Staci.”
Staci Guffin and I had broken up a month earlier, for reasons I didn’t fully understand and didn’t particularly care to. She’d traumatized me with a Sex and the City DVD marathon when I thought I was going over to her house for, uh, something more orgasmic than shoes. Maybe she’d just wanted to break up so she could have an ex-boyfriend to complain about to her friends. I honestly didn’t know.
“Trust me,” I said, glancing down at the long blonde hair piled on top of her head, and her endless, tanned legs, dusted with a fine layer of sand. “I’m definitely over Staci.”
I didn’t know much about Charlotte back then, just that she was gorgeous and sexy and always had gum in her purse that she’d offer me with a smile, like she’d brought it just for me. I didn’t know that she listened to her iPod in the kitchen while she made elaborate cookies and cupcakes from gourmet baking blogs, or that she thought it was bad luck to eat the batter. I didn’t know that she’d danced since she was three, that she did yoga with her mom before school, or that she collected everything to do with ladybugs. I didn’t know that we’d be together for more than eight months, the longest relationship I’d have in high school.