The next night they had a date. A real date. He showed up at eight, wore his best shirt, and so on – the whole works. Autumn had never been treated like she mattered so much, and it was both alien and wonderful to her. She was nervous, so she made them walk to a bar after dinner, where she ordered a Fireball shot and promptly began oversharing. Then she made Hank get one, too, because she didn’t trust a person she’d never been drunk around at least a few times. She was almost trying to scare him away, in a weird way – why not show him the worst of herself right off the bat and see what happened? Autumn was so unused to being treated like a real person that she was almost annoyed. She actually liked the casual anonymity of online dating, where you chatted to a nameless face for a few days before the line went dead. It kept her safe, it kept people far away. But Hank was a real boy, in the flesh, and he went by none of those modern rules. So she acted as annoying as she could. And to her immense surprise and great pleasure, it did not drive him away – he just seemed to think it was funny.
“What are you doing for the rest of the night?” he asked after the check had been paid. She smiled, saw guards falling down, bricks crumbling. But she knew she would not sleep with him tonight, even though she really wanted to. She was a lady with morals, and also, Hank hadn’t given her any gifts yet.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m really tired and I’m feeling kind of lazy, and even though I’ve got a million things to do, I kind of just want to fall into bed and listen to my TV while I refresh my Instagram feed for an hour. What’s that emotion called, anyway? Is there a German word for that?”
“Doubtful,” he smiled. “And by the way: it dissolved.”
“What did?”
“Yugoslavia. It’s not a country anymore. Hasn’t been since 2003. So it’s not anywhere.”
“You really think you’re smart, don’t you?”
His eyes were two black diamonds. “I actually had to Google it, but for the record, you’re the one who asked.”
And so it went, for a week. And then two. Slowly first, and then faster and faster until Hank and Autumn were really good friends who also enjoyed making out sometimes. Autumn found herself wanting to know random things about him, and when she skipped an episode of Barefoot Contessa where Ina was making éclairs to go watch Hank play his violent video games and fly his drone around taking pictures of the ocean, she knew was in deep.
Not that all was smooth sailing, though: as they hung out more and more, they started squabbling about little things, like where to park, or who the forty-second President was. But soon they were fighting about everything under the sun. They could not have come from more different perspectives: pragmatic and even-keeled, Hank liked to watch CNET videos and old reruns of Star Trek for fun. Autumn made a hormonal preteen look logical and levelheaded, and she was given to daydreaming of abandoning her life to chase a series of random pipe dreams, like becoming a well-known makeup vlogger or moving to Los Angeles to become a famous voiceover actress (which, Hank pointed out, was not even a real thing). Hank wanted to play video games after work, Autumn wanted to go shopping at Sephora. He liked horror movies and foreign films, she preferred rom-coms. She loved eating out and going to the bars, he liked to stay in and watch Netflix and read nerdy books about the universe. But they had absolutely one thing in common: they were getting lost in each other. He brought her down, and she brought him up. They met in the middle, and that middle became their own little heaven. They didn’t care if they were rejects in the eyes of the rest of the world: to each other, they were perfect. And for now, that was enough for them.
Autumn didn’t mind the drama. Okay, let’s be real: she loved the drama. Drama to Autumn was like a charger to an iPhone: it just kept her going. She had always guessed it would be like this when she found someone she really loved, anyway, as she had always known she was difficult. What she’d never imagined was finding someone else who just as difficult. They fought about which movie to see, about where Autumn’s cats should sleep when he stayed the night, about anything and everything they could. And when he started sleeping over even more, the fights got worse. Sometimes the rage would boil over and she would throw the nearest small object on the floor and run out to the driveway and pretend to cry on the front path until he came out to kiss her on the forehead and beg her to come back to bed. If he took too long she’d take out her phone and check TMZ until he came out, at which point she’d hide her phone and start crying again. She would object, whimpering, until he’d take her hand and tell her that he liked her. Then she’d wipe her face and follow him inside. Mostly, however, they just fought to distract themselves from the hole Summer’s departure had left in each of their lives.
Soon they started talking about Summer, even though it hurt like a root canal. They began to find solace in their shared misery, because being tossed into hell together had seemed to forge a bond between them that neither of them could begin to explain. Grief was the ultimate washing machine, turning on and off whenever it pleased, slamming you around in circles and then going still just as quickly, leaving you to float through the cold dark water alone, drifting in a womb of your own horror. But now they were floating together. Hank didn’t really like to talk about it – he preferred to grieve in dignified silence – and since Autumn had literally never done anything silently before, she very much liked to get her thoughts out there. But they both learned it was necessary to let out steam a little at a time instead of letting things cook and swelter and explode. So they shared their memories and talked about what they missed about her and one day Autumn even went back in her texting history and read some messages from Summer aloud, which for both of them felt like someone was peeling back their skin like a banana. But it helped, and soon they weren’t so angry anymore. Not on the surface, at least. When Autumn needed to rage on someone about Summer’s surgeon, Hank was her punching bag, and when Hank needed to disappear down the boardwalk and get lost in thoughts of Summer, Autumn let him. And for the first time since Hank could remember, he was sleeping through the night.
They were being hurled into the zenith of summer, that high time in August when the rains stop and the days are still and stifling and the heat stages one last brutal stand before retreating and giving way to the fall, and they were healing each other, slowly but surely. Because if you can’t heal alone, heal together. And soon they were growing content. They were getting to happy. They were hovering dangerously close to love. For the first time since Summer died, Autumn had a partner. She was no longer alone. And as all new couples do, they opened up their pasts, letting the ghosts fly out. It turned out that more girls had been interested in Hank before his accident than Autumn had expected, which wasn’t totally surprising. (He had to have learned that tongue work somewhere, after all.) Autumn, of course, embellished her own past romantic life, adding much color and flavor and drama to what had actually been a barren prairie. She spoke of knockdown fights that had never happened, a stalker that had not actually existed. Hank knew most of it was lies, and he just smiled and let her keep talking. Because she entranced him. After years in the Arctic, she was the Amazon, even if she got too hot to handle sometimes.
Soon they were spending every single day together. Autumn was rebuilding her life around Hank, and everything suddenly made so much more sense when molded around his shape. She couldn’t get enough of those thrilling things that came with infatuation, like the way she had to take a breath and plant her feet on the ground every time she saw him. People around town grew accustomed to seeing them together: they became a package deal of a couple. It was what Autumn had always wanted, to be half of that obnoxiously cute pair on the sidewalk that everyone scoffed at but was secretly jealous of. After years of raging against such couples, she had become half of one, and she treasured it. All day at work she couldn’t wait to get home and parade herself in front of everyone she could possibly find, and so in the evenings they’d go to Starbucks, Publix, the dog park, anywhere she could kiss his neck and look around to see who was pissed off about it. The world was made just for them, and Jax Beach was a city of color blooming only for Hank and Autumn.
And one day, as they passed a fondue restaurant, something occurred to Autumn: she’d been denied a table there just a few months before, by some bitchy hostess with a pinched-up face that always looked like she was sniffing something rotten. Autumn had come in trying to get an early dinner, and the hostess looked at her like a homeless woman who’d just announced her candidacy for president.
“Oh, I’m sorry, this is a restaurant for couples,” the hostess told Autumn. “Reservations have to be made in pairs.”
“Excuse me?” Autumn said, throwing a glance at her nametag. Milbrey: even her name was hate-able.
“Ma’am, there’s a reason it’s called Fondue for Two,” she said in a tone that sounded like getting whacked over the head with a stick. “It’s a specialty restaurant – it’s for honeymoons, dates, proposals, things like that.”
“…And you can’t sit me at the bar or something?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. A rule is a rule.”
She didn’t even wait for a response before shifting her attention to the next couple in line.
And today, it was with a devious glimmer in her dark eyes that Autumn grabbed Hank by the arm and steered him into the restaurant. She had never been able to conceal her thoughts, starting with her elementary school Thanksgiving play. She’d wanted to play the English princess, but her teacher, Miss Valerie, wouldn’t let her.
“Why not?” she asked during their final dress rehearsal.
“Because your skin is brown and you look like Pocahontas and it wouldn’t make sense for you to be someone British. Know your lane,” Miss Valerie said, completely offhandedly, before moving on to fix another child’s costume. Autumn never forgot how much it stung. (A grand total of zero people were surprised when Miss Valerie’s husband was outed as a racist activist and lost his job in the school’s front office a year later.) She went home, cried and cried into her pillow, and then decided to never again let someone hurt her with their words. So she marched back to school next day and asked Miss Valerie when they were creating her part for Roseanne Barr, since everyone was only allowed to play people they looked like. She was immediately sent home, but still: Autumn remembered the pleasure it gave her to not let herself be defeated, to get the last word. So she started speaking up and never stopped. If the status quo was wrong, she would challenge it, and that was that.
“Why do you have that look in your eyes?” Hank asked back at the restaurant, growing more nervous by the second. “Autumn, we talked about this, you need to stop going at it with people in public, like when you called that lady a ‘rabid hippopotamus’ for judging you in the Subway line. You’re going to-”
“Shush,” Autumn hissed, silencing him. “Hi!” she told the hostess next, who was standing behind the booth with another girl. “I’m Autumn Mahal. You may remember me from such hits as ‘Getting Cruelly Turned Away From Your Restaurant On The Grounds of Being Forever Single.’ Ring a bell?”
The hostess wavered a little. The girl next to her pulled her lips together, trying not to laugh, and then peered over at her coworker, clearly enjoying the moment.
“No, sorry, I don’t remember.”
“Let me refresh things for you, then,” Autumn chirped. “So, I came in here looking for food, but you told me I couldn’t get a table because I was alone, even though half the fucking place was empty.” She gripped Hank’s shoulder. “Well, the tables have turned, honey, because I have a boyfriend. This is my boyfriend. He’s my boyfriend. Did I mention I have a boyfriend? Because I have a boyfriend. And this is him. My boyfriend. Hank.”
Milbrey blinked, staring at them. The look in her eyes changed, and she stood back from Autumn, a horse deferring to its master. She had braces and terrible eyebrows, and suddenly Autumn almost felt bad for her, as it was her usual policy to never let someone with bad eyebrows tell her about her life. She didn’t feel bad enough to stop, though. “Oh, well, um, let me just slip you in, we’re pretty open tonight-”
“I don’t want your gross fondue, bye,” Autumn said, and with that, she grabbed a free dinner mint, did one last hair-flip in the direction of Milbrey, and sashayed back into the night with Hank at her side.
“Why did you do that?” he asked, glancing back and cringing.
“Because,” she said darkly, “sometimes you don’t realize how hard it was going through life alone until you have someone by your side.”
Hank breathed. “Jeez, how true is that? I wouldn’t go back to that for a million dollars.”
Autumn fell down into him all over again, and all the while a little voice went ignored in her head, a voice saying leave leave leave leave.
She narrowed her eyes at him and sighed. “Then let’s hope we never have to, huh?”
A few nights later, Hank opened up his own war chest. Autumn had already shared her cancer story, more to get it out of the way than anything. It just wasn’t an interesting subject to her anymore. A lump found while changing into a bathing suit one spring day in high school, aggressive chemo, the darkest and coldest days of her life when she should’ve been in the prime of it, spending her life accompanied by the sheer panic of knowing something was blooming inside of her that she could not control, etcetera. What kind of comical freak show got cancer at the age of seventeen, anyway? Autumn had no medical history from her family, since they’d all lived in the third world until a few decades ago. How was she supposed to know that she had a mutated BRCA1 gene, and that it was more difficult for young people to discover tumors because of their firmer breast tissue, and that by the time they usually learned of it, they were already halfway dead? She’d survived, barely, but she hadn’t really survived into a life she wanted. Ever since then Autumn had always had this sense of time rushing, rushing, rushing, flying at her with no way to stop it. Her life was running on borrowed time, unspooling in her fingers like fishing line. Death was around the corner, so you’d better get going. She wanted babies. She wanted marriage. She wanted all of it. She just didn’t know how to reconcile that with the desperate need for independence and isolation that called out to her every day.
“My job was to track where we were going to attack – you know, which strongholds and whatnot,” Hank said that night, staring up at a ceiling that looked to be a million miles away and falling in on him all at once. “An area in the north had just fallen. I was riding in a Humvee that got popped by a roadside bomb. I don’t even remember the pain – I just remember a blast so strong, I felt it instead of heard it – it made the air around me move. Next thing I knew, I was sprawled out on the ground, and I looked down and saw blood seeping out of my shoulder. For some reason the first thing I did was laugh – I was fucking out of it, to be honest. Pain does that to you – makes you numb.”
Autumn pulled the sheets over herself. “You’re telling me. What happened next?”
“They flew me to a base in Germany for surgery. Then they tried to save my arm – for ten hours, at least. During the eleventh hour of surgery they gave up. And then…”
He mimicked a saw slicing off his shoulder. Autumn winced.
“This is such a rude question,” she said after a minute, “but what’s it like? They’ve tried to take my boobs, you know, and I want a general idea, just in case…”
“Well, it’s exactly how you’d expect,” he said. “Phantom pains, grief, disbelief, anger, all of it. It was like a death. And this might sound weird, but the hardest part to swallow was that I never got one date after that. Soon I started to resent women for how shallow they were – they went from loving me one day to pretending I didn’t exist the next, all in the time it took for the army doctors to saw off a limb.” He looked down at his arm, hatred in his eyes. “Before I met you, I had not been on a proper date in three years, Autumn. Well, not counting the time I tricked Summer into thinking we were holding a Support Group meeting at Rita’s Italian Ice, and then she showed up and it was just me. But do you know what that’s like, to be that invisible?”
Autumn knew exactly what it was like – her cancer and fat had made her just as invisible, but she’d a faked reputation as the town tramp to deflect all that, and she didn’t want to admit her undesirability. “I don’t know. Yeah. How did you stop hating people, then?”
“Summer,” he nodded. “She was the first person to ever look past the arm thing. And then in her Support Group I learned that everyone didn’t hate me, they were just scared of what they didn’t know, because they were weak.” He smiled. “Also, it helped when I hooked up with my first girl post-surgery and word got out about how big my dick was.”
“I’m not arguing with that,” Autumn smiled. Hank took a bracing breath.
“Yeah. And look, Autumn. All jokes aside, Summer did a lot to fix me. But back in the Middle East…”
He looked at her, and to Autumn it wasn’t hard to see where the shrapnel from the bomb had landed. It was in his eyes.
“I’ve seen things, Autumn,” he said. “I’ve seen things. That’s probably why I was so forward with you. You know how I go from zero to sixty with my emotions sometimes? I’ve seen some fucked up shit, and I get too real. Once you’ve been through the gauntlet like that, you don’t want to sit around and talk about cupcakes and kittens and shit. You can’t, actually. You’re just…”
“Changed,” they said together, sharing a moment neither of them wanted to put into words but both of them understood wholly.
Autumn pushed out a long, slow breath. “Wow.”
“What?”
“That’s just more words than you’ve probably said in years.”
His lips twitched. “Well I finally found someone worth saying them to.”
He smiled, but still she saw a fear she’d never noticed before, terror treading water in his eyes. He reached over in the semidarkness and felt her just to make sure she was still there, and in that moment, she knew that nobody had ever been there for him before, not really. Not like this.
“I try not to think about it,” he said, his eyes closed now, “but I miss it. I miss my stupid arm. I miss being…normal. I miss being able to walk around without feeling a hundred eyeballs on me. You know I thought about…about killing myself, right?”
She glanced away, trying not to wince. “I heard a passing mention of it from Summer, yes.”
“Yeah. I had a plan and everything – I was gonna jump off the end of the pier and not swim back. She’s why I didn’t do it, actually. Summer is why I am alive. At around the age of twenty-two I was nearly destroyed by the sudden realization that life sucks and people are assholes, but she cured me. She found me, she listened to me, she made me feel like my thoughts were…I don’t know, worth something. My family, they’re nice, but they don’t understand. But Summer understood. And that made all the difference.” He stared at her again. “Do you ever think she’s…I don’t know. Watching?”
“Every day,” Autumn breathed, finally admitting it. “Every single day.”
He laughed. “So…yeah. Here I am. Twenty-six, living in Jax Beach, Florida, lying here with you. 401k Specialist at Merrill Lynch is a pretty good place to land after all that, huh? Guess it helps to have parents with connections.”
“Better than my dead-end joke of a job,” she said. “Ugh, it’s so awful. I know I need to find something better before it’s too late, but I don’t even know where to begin. Study for my GRE, go back to school, start making more cat clothes…I don’t even know what I would do. I’m just…paralyzed. It feels like I have years of work in front of me, so I just do nothing.”
“What were you like as a kid?” he asked.
“Why?”
He latched onto her gaze, and for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to look away. “Because I want to know everything you’ve ever known and see everything you’ve ever seen. Just, you know, normal reasons.”
She paused, savoring his words. “Okay. Looking back, I was such a fucking loser. But at the time I thought I was queen of the misfits – I got rejected by the cool crowd, so instead of kicking the bucket and becoming some pathetic Sorry Susan or whatever, I made my own crowd. Gay boys, drama geeks, this one girl with leg braces and a speech impediment – all the other friendless kids gravitated to me, and we had so much fun. Summer was kind of my sidekick – she was quiet, but everyone knew who she was and really liked her. When they weren’t calling her Scarface, at least. But still she had this weird reverence about her – like, everyone always respected her intelligence and asked her opinion about all these things.” She sighed. “God, I miss her so much, it feels like getting kicked in the stomach sometimes. I would give anything in the world for one more day, one more hug.”
“I know what you mean,” he said, and then he smiled over at her. “But lately it hasn’t felt so bad.”
“Yeah. I guess. The worst thing for me lately is the anger. Like, she died because of a stupid surgical fuck-up – how do you get over that?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Hell, I’m still trying to get over losing my arm. My dad just says not to think about revenge. Revenge is for small-minded losers. The best revenge is living well and finding success – or so he says.”
“Yeah. That, or fucking your enemies’ best friends and/or exes,” Autumn said. “Or punching them in the face and breaking their noses. Who would want to date them after that?”
He kissed her on the arm. She wondered if it was sweaty. “You are too much for me, Autumn Mahal.”
“I’m kidding. I don’t even respond to my enemies. I grew up in the South – I just kill them with a backhanded compliment and then bury them with a passive-aggressive smile. And then I’ll win at life and show them who the real baddest bitch truly is. But only after the passive-aggressive stuff, of course.”
He lifted an eyebrow, and she shrugged. “You think it, I say it. That’s what makes me Autumn.”
Hank laughed, kissed her on the side of her head, and rolled over for sleep. Autumn stared across the bed at the beautiful boy on her mattress, and suddenly it occurred to her that this was her life.
There comes a time in every no-longer-very-young-person’s existence, usually when your early twenties begin to lumber into your mid twenties, when you realize you are sinking into your life. Everything up until that point had just been preparations, studying and interning and living under someone else’s roof, and tomorrow had always been something that seemed forever away. The future was always something that could be totally changed and redecorated and revamped at any moment, if you wanted to. But suddenly you were growing up. You were growing into what you didn’t even realize you’d created. Instead of building a foundation, you were now erecting something right where you stood, and suddenly it was permanent. Were you designing a life you wanted, one you were content with? Were you going to find a better job before you got stuck at your shitty company forever, find a better lover before you built a white picket fence with the one you were already with, become a better person before you became forever crystallized in the human you were? Was Autumn happy with the weird little life she was starting to construct with Hank?
Maybe she would never get the Spark dreamboat. After all, she was twenty-four. The laugh lines around her eyes weren’t going to get any fainter, her hips weren’t going to get any smaller, all the girls in her town weren’t going to get any less sluttier, her body wasn’t going to get any healthier and less cancery. Maybe perfection was a dream that was forever just out of reach. Maybe all she’d ever wanted was right in front of her, and maybe he was a dud. But maybe, no matter what the future held, she needed to make the decision to be comfortable with his love and grow into the moment, right where she stood.
All she had to do now was learn how to accept his love as the gift it was.