The Beginning of Everything (24 page)

But I didn't tell her any of those things. Instead, I acted as though I believed her, because what else could I do? It was that poem she'd given me that day at the creek, about everything dying at last, and too soon. It was both of us asking the unanswerable question of what else we might have done.

“I don't want us to be over.” It wasn't a question.

“Ezra,” Cassidy said, sounding tremendously sorry. “You're better off without me. And I don't want to be around when you realize it.”

She shrugged out of my jacket and draped it over my shoulders. I watched her do this, not really comprehending until she stepped back and sniffled, trying to be brave. I could feel the good-bye hovering between us, heavy and final, and then the vet appeared in the doorway, his expression grim.

“Mr. Faulkner? Could you step back here for a moment?”

“Oh, good. He's fine, right? He's going to be fine?” I asked.

The vet looked down at his clipboard, not daring to meet my eyes, and in that moment, I knew. I followed him without looking back, and just like that, Cooper's tags were pressed into my trembling hand, as though asking me to mourn him as a hero, and Cassidy disappeared from my life.

33

FOR MORE THAN
a week, the urn containing Cooper's ashes sat on my desk, and whenever my mother gingerly revived the subject of moving it somewhere more discreet, I glared at her and wordlessly left the room.

Eastwood was distorted for me, a picturesque place meant to lull its residents into believing that behind our gates and beyond our curfew, nothing bad could ever happen with any sort of permanence. It was a place so fatally flawed that it refused to acknowledge that any such imperfection was possible.

The impeccable rows of homes marched onward, little soldiers on the front lines of suburbia, hoping valiantly they would never meet a tragic end. But so many of them did. So many identical houses behind identical gates bore the marks of tragedy, and it was from those houses that the determined few left Eastwood and all its empty promises behind forever.

Toby and I scattered Cooper's ashes over the hiking trail one afternoon in late November, even though it was illegal. In eulogy, I read from my dog-eared copy of Gatsby, reciting that famous line about the foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams as I emptied the funerary urn into the wind.

As Toby and I walked back toward the park, my cane sinking into the freshly watered grass, the light was on in Cassidy's bedroom, and I remember glancing at it and wondering. I wondered what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.

When Cassidy failed to show up at school for the spring semester, I wasn't particularly surprised. I'd been expecting for some time that she'd go back to boarding school, returning to the panopticon that she had never truly escaped, and it was just as well. The finality of her leaving allowed me to reclaim the places that had once been ours as mine, to say good-bye to my childhood parks and hiking trails rather than grasping for lost moments with a lost girl who refused to be found.

I'm at college now, and it's been some weeks since the leaves turned to memory beneath our feet and trays began disappearing from the dining hall, smuggled out under wool coats in anticipation of the first snow.

Incidentally, it's snowing again as I write this, the fat flakes drifting past the window of my dorm, which faces out onto a gothic quadrangle. Toby came down from Boston over the weekend, and my room still bears the unmistakable signs of his visit; some art book on Magritte his boyfriend insisted on sending along for me, even though I can't imagine where he got the idea that I'm a fan of surrealist art. An inflatable mattress, which I've meant to return to the girl down the hall for days, except our schedules never seem to match up. And this fantastic picture from my eighteenth birthday that Toby taped up over my desk when I went to rinse out the French press in our hall kitchen.

Phoebe took the picture, twisting around in her seat on the roller coaster at the last moment, even though the Disneyland cast member was yelling at her to face front. It's a blurry shot of Toby and me in the back row of the Thunder Mountain Railroad. Toby's laughing at something Austin just said, and I'm almost but not quite looking at the camera. I'm smiling at Phoebe, at the whispered promises of that last summer, and the profound reluctance I'd discovered for leaving good people behind. But we had plenty of time for youthful indecision, both apart and together, for limping into the future past the unforgettable ash heaps of our histories.

I often wonder what will become of Cassidy Thorpe. She was the first of us to leave Eastwood, returning to the Barrows School that senior spring with what I can only imagine to be tales in which we're all elaborately misrepresented. I can't say I forgive her for refusing to indulge the perhapsness of what we might have been, but I understand why she chose to do it, and she never asked for my forgiveness.

She was right, though, in the end. I never should have given her so much credit. It all got tangled together, her appearance and Toby coming back into my life and the first time I ever read a book that spoke to me, and the question of who I wanted to be in the aftermath of my personal tragedy. Because I made a decision that year, to start mattering in a way that had nothing to do with sports teams or plastic crowns, and the reality is, I might have made that decision without her, or if I'd never fallen in love with a girl who considered love to be the biggest disaster of all.

The truth of it was, I'd been running the wrong experiment my whole life, and while Cassidy was the first person to realize, she didn't add the elements that allowed me to proceed down a different path. She lent a spark, perhaps, or tendered the flame, but the arson was mine. Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that's all. I don't know if he's right, but I do know that I spent a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.

Acknowledgments

If thank-yous were notes, I'd probably sing them off-key, so be glad I haven't awarded each of you a literal thank-you note. Instead, I have condensed you—like soup!—into this handy little list.

First, to my agent, the wonderful Merrilee Heifetz. Your unwavering faith in both me and this little book has quite honestly changed my life. Sorry for emailing you so many pictures of giraffes sticking their tongues out (although I still maintain that you enjoy it). To my editor, Katherine Tegen, for helping me to give this book a super-cool plot mohawk and for being the best thing on Facebook. Sarah Nagel, for being delighted by everything to do with this book and for conspiring to send me a stuffed sloth when I was in the hospital. Liane Graham, for sitting on Brooklyn rooftops with me and talking about love. If books can be written as presents for people, this one's for you. Kaleb Nation, pretty much the only reason I go on Skype.

Philo, the indirect inspiration for everything, but particularly Sam and Cris, for being consulting, Ezra-gendered people and letting me smash a piano with a hammer and joking that I'm a manic pixie dream girl—but obviously not meaning it, ahem. The YouTube crowd, Paige, Karen, Adorian, Kayley, and Alexa. My roommate, Jennifer, for editing it before you were an editor and before it was a book. And everyone at HarperCollins, I can't thank you enough. If I were allowed, I'd link a GIF here, but probably my acknowledgments shouldn't be quite so Tumblr-like, so I'll resist.

About the Author

ROBYN SCHNEIDER
is a writer, actor, and online personality who misspent her youth in a town coincidentally similar to Eastwood. Robyn is a graduate of Columbia University, where she studied creative writing, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where she studied medical ethics. She lives in Los Angeles, California, but also on the internet. You can watch her vlogs at youtube.com/robynisrarelyfunny and follow her on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Instagram.

 

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Credits

Cover art and design © 2013 by M80 Design/ Wes Youssi

Copyright

Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

The Beginning of Everything

Copyright © 2013 by Robyn Schneider

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schneider, Robyn.

    The beginning of everything / Robyn Schneider. — 1st ed.

        p.    cm.

    Summary: “Star athlete and prom king Ezra Faulkner's life is irreparably transformed by a tragic accident and the arrival of eccentric new girl Cassidy Thorpe.”— Provided by publisher.

    ISBN 978-0-06-221713-4 (hardcover bdgs) — ISBN 978-0-06-227550-9 (int'l. ed.)

    EPUB Edition JUNE 2013 ISBN 9780062217158

    [1. People with disabilities—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Debates and debating—Fiction. 6. Family life—California—Fiction. 7. California—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.S36426Beg 2013

2012030976

[Fic]—dc23

13  14  15  16  17    CG/RRDH    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

FIRST EDITION