The Beginning of Everything

by Robyn Schneider

“But I didn’t do any of that,” Cassidy insisted. “Ezra, the girl you’re chasing after doesn’t exist. I’m not some bohemian adventurer who takes you on treasure hunts and sends you secret messages. I’m this sad, lonely mess who studies too much and pushes people away and hides in her haunted house. You keep wanting to give me credit because you finally decided you weren’t content with squeezing yourself into the narrow corridor of everyone’s expectations, bu...

We move through each other’s lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed.

Please, Ezra, misremember me.”

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn’t a metaphor. It was the greatest failing of everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her, because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.

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 e...

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 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. O...