The Beginning of Everything

The next morning, Ezra is behind two giggling freshmen girls in line at the coffee cart, one of whom is Toby’s sister, Emily. She shyly asks Ezra if he remembers her. He says “of course” but can’t remember her name (46). Cassidy joins him and, when the freshmen scamper off at the sound of the bell, tries to chat with him. Ezra, still annoyed about Cassidy’s Spanish presentation about him, ignores her attempts at humor but eventually acquiesces, and they walk to Ms. Weng’s debate class together. Toby is already in the classroom and, after enthusiastically greeting Ezra, he sees Cassidy. Toby and Cassidy are both shocked to see each other. Ezra, confused that they know each other, expresses his surprise, to which Toby cryptically says that Cassidy is “a fencer” (48). Later, Cassidy explains that a fencer is a debate term for someone who places first in every round at a tournament—the row of ones resembling a picket fence.

Toby, as captain of the debate team, tells the class about an upcoming tournament and passes around a signup sheet. At the top, Toby has entered Ezra’s name with an inside joke scrawled underneath. Ezra bursts out laughing and scribbles Cassidy’s name under his as payback for the Spanish class. As class empties out, Toby asks Cassidy and Ezra to join him for lunch. Ezra replies that he’s going to Chipotle with Evan and Jimmy, knowing full well that he is not, and he takes no offense when Toby just laughs and tells him to hurry up.

Evan, Jimmy, and the rest of Ezra’s old group did not go to Chipotle. Ezra sees them sitting in their “popular group” at their usual prime table in the quad. Luke Sheppard calls Toby over to join him and the rest of the debate team at the table with the “resident eccentrics,” Sam Mayfield and Austin Covelli (53). Toby gestures toward Cassidy and says, “Look who I found” (53). Both Luke and Sam are stunned and happy to see her. Cassidy sits down and signals for Ezra to join them, which he sheepishly does. Phoebe Chang, another debate team member, joins the table. Toby introduces Cassidy and mentions Ezra, to which Phoebe dramatically says what everyone is thinking, “I’m five minutes late and I miss the most historic lunch-table switch in the annals of the upper quad” (55), which is quickly followed by a series of crude jokes by Luke, Phoebe’s boyfriend. The jokes continue, with Phoebe teasing Ezra about his pale skin, dark clothes, and no lunch, calling him a “teenage vampire” (55). When Ezra glances at his old table, he makes eye contact with Charlotte, who is sitting on Evan’s lap. Charlotte and Evan briefly look questioningly at Ezra, before going back to “sucking face” (56). When Cassidy and Phoebe go to the bathroom, the debate team tries to figure out what happened to Cassidy. All they know is that she quit debate after winning the state qualifiers, giving up her championship spot four days before the tournament and disappearing. No one knows why.

Ezra tries to avoid his old friends and acknowledges that it is mostly because he can’t handle seeing Charlotte and Evan fawning over each other. He knows that his friends are confused and hurt when he snubs them, ignoring invitations to join them in various activities, but he also dwells on the memory that none of them bothered to visit him in the hospital. Cassidy becomes the new focus of school gossip, and fantastical stories about her abound, but she seems not to notice or care. Ezra runs into Cassidy after school as he is on his way out from a meeting, so they walk to the parking lot together, chatting about what they usually do on Friday nights. Cassidy shares that they used to have secret parties in the science labs at her old school, which Ezra thinks sound much cooler than their backyard keggers at Jimmy’s house. When they get to the parking lot, Ezra asks Cassidy where her car is; she laughs and tells him she rides a bike. It’s dark and there are coyotes in the area, so Ezra drives Cassidy and her bike home. They live on opposite sides of the park, and their bedroom windows face each other, so they joke about communicating by Morse code before moving onto a conversation about Toby and the “severed-head thing” (67).

Ezra discovers that Toby and Cassidy spent a lot of time together at debate tournaments and finds himself wishing that he had been there instead of Toby. Ezra is struck by Cassidy’s beauty. He is falling in love with her and cherishes these moments with her, sure that she would never choose to be with someone like him. Not wanting to go straight home, they go to the park, where Cassidy tells Ezra about Foucault, a philosopher who wrote about a prison called the panopticon. In the panopticon, Cassidy explains, there is constant surveillance, but you never know when you are being observed or by whom, so everyone follows the rules. There are watchers and prisoners, but even the watchers are watched, theoretically making everyone a prisoner. Cassidy then runs to the swings. Embarrassed, Ezra explains that he can’t swing, so Cassidy playfully tells him to push her instead—which he willingly does. Ezra pushes the swing until Cassidy cannot go any higher, at which point she gleefully jumps, landing at the edge of a sandbox. They sit chatting on the swings until Cassidy gets a call from her mother to go home.