The Beginning of Everything

by Robyn Schneider

You got the impression that her friends made fun of her to her face, and she didn’t quite understand why they were laughing.

I’d felt as though I’d woken into a nightmare. Hearing Cassidy say those things was worse.

The death of a relationship. At least I was dressed for the wake.

This is how they bury you, I thought. In your best suit, the one you wear to weddings and funerals, a suit that girls have draped over their shoulders on cold nights and dry cleaners have absolved of all stains.

There was something wrong with the clock, not with time itself. That weekend, there was something wrong with time.

It frustrated me, listening to conversations that consisted mostly of gossip and unfunny jokes told at someone’s expense, holding back my clever remarks and pretending to enjoy myself. It was as though I’d gone off on epic adventures, chased down fireworks and buried treasure, danced to music that only I could hear, and had returned to find that nothing had changed except for me. But maybe it was better this way,

remembering those few months at the beginning of the year as this wonderful thing that was over now, rather than living in Cassidy’s world without her.

She was right, though. I didn’t belong here, in a dorm room ten miles from home, falling asleep every night to the only slightly more distant thud of the Disneyland fireworks. I guess I half hoped to see Cassidy exiting a building, wearing jeans and sneakers, her disguise. I pictured her looking up, secretly glad that I’d found her. We’d sit down on one of those wooden benches and she’d tell me how she was sorry, and it had all been a mistake. But things like that never happen, except in really awful movies.

By the time I packed up, I wondered if I’d really been looking for Cassidy after all, or if I’d been hoping to find myself.

But there was something comforting about the pain of getting around without it. Something reassuring about having a physical ache to hold on to, this pain that was a part of me independent of Cassidy. I thought about the metal in my knee, replacing this piece of me that was missing, that no longer worked. And it wasn’t my heart, I kept telling myself. It wasn’t my heart.

You act like that day at Disneyland was my big tragedy, but you’re the one who lost your best friend. You’re the one who started eating lunch with the popular jocks and forgot how to be awesome because you were too busy being cool. We could have still hung out after school if you’d asked, if you’d wanted to. But you just dropped me because everyone expected you to. And you’re doing it again, and it sucks.”

To his credit, he gallantly avoided her shoes—and they say chivalry’s dead.

She stared up at me through her eyelashes, and I realized that the conversation had turned uncomfortable, and we were at one of those parties no good ever comes from, and she wasn’t wearing all that much, and I was covered in body glitter.

because this was the way things were with Charlotte: so impulsive, and so meaningless.

For a moment, I wondered if I should just tell her that she was a selfish, reckless girl who thought the world owed her something simply because she was pretty, and that I didn’t want to be around when she discovered it didn’t. But of course I couldn’t. Around her, I found it impossible to conjure much of anything worth saying.

“How can you hate Eastwood? It’s perfect.” “You see perfection, I see panopticon.” “Oh my god, why do you use such big words?” she demanded in exasperation.

“Sorry,” I apologized, realizing she was the sort of girl who got upset when someone used an unfamiliar word, rather than learning what it meant.

“If we both know, then why does it feel like you blame me?” Charlotte demanded. “I wasn’t even there.” “No, you weren’t there,” I said. “The paramedics found me all alone. And you just left me like that. You left me.”

I’m sorry’ would have been enough,”

“The hymen of your integrity remains intact. Your precious jewel of a reputation is un-besmirched.”

Because what Charlotte had wanted that night wasn’t me. It was some imaginary version of the boy she used to date but had never bothered to really think about as a person.

that neither of them were terrible people in the end, that it was possible to retreat into one’s popularity and carelessness and never have to acknowledge the harm they’d caused to those around them, or the lies they believed to make their happiness possible.

since the waiting room in a mental health clinic isn’t the best place to run into your ex,

“Selling Girl Scout cookies,” I deadpanned.

“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.”

Cassidy scowled at this, but I didn’t care. I was furious with her for being

there, for being miserable, for refusing to explain.

and when she glanced up at me, a tropical storm was churning in her eyes.

not meaning it but not caring.

We’d been so good together once, and then we’d rotted, like some corpse with a delayed burial.

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 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.

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.

“She called you a washed-up, podunk, unoriginal townie.” “I remember,” I said drily, hoping Toby was going somewhere with this that didn’t contribute solely to his own amusement. “And you want to show up at her front door with flowers?”

A snowman in a town where it didn’t snow, made by a boy who couldn’t wait to leave, and given to a girl who had never belonged.

“You just found the riddle.” But I was sick of riddles, and I was sick of Cassidy’s unpredictable moods, and I was sick of never, ever being good enough for her.

“You and me and Cooper. We’re like a positively charged molecule, the rate we’re attracting tragedy.”

“It’s just . . .” I said, and then started over. “I don’t get why you had to lie about it that night in the park. I would have understood that you didn’t want to go to that stupid dance for whatever reason, but you just pushed me away, and it hurt like hell.”

“The thing about Owen,” Cassidy began, “isn’t how we’d mess with the universe or talk about subversive graffiti artists or sneak me into college classes. It’s how all that stopped when our parents forced him into medical school and it wrecked him. He’d call me, convinced his cadaver was someone he knew, an old teacher or someone. He’d break down on the phone over stuff like that, how he was trapped in that lab, expected to cut open human flesh and fill out charts before washing the blood off his clothes, and to tell people that they were dying, or their loved one was dead, or their insurance wouldn’t cover it, or there was nothing more he could do to take away their pain, and he was just completely terrified that this was going to be the rest of his life. He started showering a lot, because he said that no matter how much he washed, there

were bits of the dead and the dying and the sick that clung to him, and little by little he was turning into a ghost, but he couldn’t take it back because he’d already wasted college studying the requirements for this, and he was too afraid of our parents to tell them that he wanted to quit.”

“No,” I said as the full weight of it hit me head on. I was slammed back into the memory of that night, the jolt of our collision, the sickening skid of everything I’d wanted and everything I’d had slipping through my outstretched hands. It was the answer to the wrong mystery—the mystery I didn’t ever want to solve.

And so we sat there in the sickening sillage of the truth, neither of us angry,

or upset, just muddling through this shared sorrow, this collective pity. And as much as I wanted to sound my tragic wail over the rooftops, and let go of the day, and crawl back toward that safe harbor, and give in to the dying of the light, and to do all of those unh...

We’re two sides of the same tragic coin. It’s like we were tied together before we even met.”

“No,” Cassidy said fiercely. “It’s not like that. Don’t you see? We can’t ever be together. When I look at you now, all I see is Owen. I see him dead in you. The way you’re sitting with your leg out, I see him crashing that car into you. And I think, how can I introduce you to my parents? The boy their dead son cripp—injured, sorry. So we can’t. Not ever.”

aching to hold her close to me but knowing not to.

Maybe part of me had already started to understand that reaching for Cassidy was the same as pushing her away. Maybe I’d already guessed that the physics of us didn’t defy any laws of gravity, and with her, there was always an equal and opposite reaction.

We’re so good together, and it’s a tragedy in its own right to throw that away because of something neither of us did. Because the way I figure it, everyone gets a tragedy.

Otherwise I wouldn’t be applying to East Coast colleges, or on the debate team, or any of those things, because I wouldn’t have met you.”

Manic pixie dream girl