My prize was behind door number one: Charlotte, some guy I didn’t know, and a scene which, if I’d captured it via camera phone, could have been mistaken for p**n , although that wouldn’t have been my artistic intention.
I cleared my throat. Charlotte cleared hers, though this required quite a bit of effort on her part. She looked horrified to see me there, in the doorway. Neither of us said anything. And then the guy cursed and zipped his jeans and demanded, “What the hell?”
“Ezra, I—I—,” Charlotte babbled. “I didn’t think you were coming.”
“I think he was about to,” I muttered sourly.
No one laughed.
“Who’s this?” The guy demanded, looking back and forth between Charlotte and me. He didn’t go to our school, and he gave the impression of being older, a college kid slumming it at a high-school party.
“I’m the boyfriend,” I said, but it came out uncertain, like a question.
“This is the guy?” he asked, squinting at me. “I could take him.”
So she’d been talking about me to this douche-canoodler? I supposed, if it came down to it, he probably could take me. I had a helluva backhand, but only with my racquet, not my fist.
“How about you take her instead?” I suggested, and then I turned and walked back down the hallway.
It might have been fine if Charlotte hadn’t come after me, insisting that I still had to take her to prom on Saturday. It might have been all right if she hadn’t proceeded to do so in the middle of the crowded living room. And it might have been different if I hadn’t babied my car, parking all the way over on Windhawk to avoid the scourge of drunk drivers.
Maybe, if one of those things hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have inched out onto the curve of Princeton Boulevard the exact moment a black SUV barreled around the blind turn and blew through the stop sign.
I don’t know why people say “hit by a car,” as though the other vehicle physically lashes out like some sort of champion boxer. What hit me first was my airbag, and then my steering wheel, and I suppose the driver’s side door and whatever that part is called that your knee jams up against.
The impact was deafening, and everything just seemed to slam toward me and crunch. There was the stink of my engine dying under the front hood, like burnt rubber, but salty and metallic. Everyone rushed out onto the Beideckers’ lawn, which was two houses down, and through the engine smoke, I could see an army of girls in strapless dresses, their phones raised, solemnly snapping pictures of the wreck.
But I just sat there laughing and unscathed because I’m an immortal, hundred-year-old vampire.
All right, I’m screwing with you. Because it would have been awesome if I’d been able to shake it off and drive away, like that ass weasel who never even stopped after laying into my Z4. If the whole party hadn’t cleared out in a panic before the cops could bust them for underage drinking. If Charlotte, or just one of my supposed friends, had stayed behind to ride with me in the ambulance, instead of leaving me there alone, half-delirious from the pain. If my mother hadn’t put on all of her best jewelry and gotten lipstick on her teeth before rushing to the emergency room.
It’s awful, isn’t it, how I remember crap like that? Tiny, insignificant details in the midst of a massive disaster.
I don’t really want to get into the rest of it, and I hope you’ll forgive me, but going through it once was enough. My poor roadster was totaled, just like everything else in my life. The doctors said my wrist would heal, but the damage to my leg was bad. My knee had been irreparably shattered.
But this story isn’t about Toby’s twelfth birthday, or the car wreck at Jonas’s party—not really.
There is a type of problem in organic chemistry called a retrosynthesis. You are presented with a compound that does not occur in nature, and your job is to work backward, step by step, and ascertain how it came to exist—what sort of conditions led to its eventual creation. When you are finished, if done correctly, the equation can be read normally, making it impossible to distinguish the question from the answer.
I still think that everyone’s life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst—the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere—it’s what comes after that determines the result.
2
SO WHO WAS I in the aftermath of my personal tragedy? At first, I was a lousy sport when it came to the chipper attitudes of the pediatrics nurses. And then I was a stranger in my own home, a temporary occupant of the downstairs guest room. An invalid, if you will, which is probably the most horrific word I’ve ever heard to describe someone who is supposed to be recuperating. In the context of a mathematical proof, if something is considered “invalid,” it has been demonstrated through irrefutable logic not to exist.
Actually, I take it back. The word was fitting for me. I had been Ezra Faulkner, golden boy, but that person no longer existed. And the proof?
I’ve never told this to anyone, but the last night of summer before senior year, I drove over to Eastwood High. It was late, around eleven, and my parents were already asleep. The landscaped lanes of my gated community were dark and inexplicably lonely, in the way that suburbs sometimes get at night. The strawberry fields on the side of the road looked as though they stretched on for miles, but there wasn’t really much left of the old ranch lands—just the small orange grove across from the Chinese strip mall, and the center dividers where last century’s sycamore trees grow in captivity.