9
I met Cooper at the street corner by the Ritz in downtown Jax Beach at precisely 10:09. I’d been noticing little details like that lately, I didn’t really know why. More little details I couldn’t help but notice: he wore khaki pants and a dark green shirt, and his hair was combed and looked much sleeker than last time. He looked beautiful in an almost irritatingly easy and carefree way, and once again it baffled me that he was even meeting me.
“Well, hey,” he said after he hugged me. He looked weirdly happy to see me, or maybe that was wishful thinking on my part. “You look great.”
I wondered if I would ever get used to him lying. I was wearing a lackluster blue dress, and my dark-blonde hair looked like it always did. A disastrous attempt at a trendy bob last year meant that it was currently just past shoulder-length, with super long bangs that I often found myself trying to drape over my scar when I felt embarrassed. But I smiled anyway.
“Thanks, sir. So do you.”
“Ha.” He held out his arm. “Shall we?”
I locked my elbow with his as a thrilling little shiver ran up my side. “We shall.”
And off to the bar we went – but not before flirting with disaster. I looked away when the bouncer took my ID and inspected my face with the flashlight, and he got all mad and told me to look back at him because he suspected I was avoiding him because I was underage, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it because I felt awkward, and the whole thing was just generally an uncomfortable mess on every level. (And was it a job requirement for bouncers to be the the most deplorable cretins on Earth, or was that just at the Ritz?) But Cooper barely noticed, thank God, or at least he pretended not to notice, which I’ve learned is the same thing. After the bouncer finally let us in, we made it to the bartender, and Cooper ordered us two Bud Lights without asking me what I wanted. I didn’t really like that, but then he paid for them, which I did like. Next we found a quiet-ish spot in one corner of the winding bar that populated the center of a huge, wood-paneled room. Then the silence came. People were walking by and glancing from Cooper to me and then giving us weird looks, and I felt a little strange. Seeming to notice, he gave a furtive little look and turned to me.
“So, I have a confession to make: I lied.”
“You did? About what?”
He smiled. “When I agreed to come here as just friends, I was lying. I don’t wanna be just friends with you, Summer.”
I turned away. “Oh.”
Could he see what I was feeling? To plow through the weirdness I sipped my beer. It wasn’t easy, and it kind of felt like trying to squeeze a large boulder through a Chinese finger trap, but somehow it stayed down. “Thanks. And thanks for the beer.” I took a breath. “…And sorry for my little meltdown the other day, by the way.”
“Meltdown? There was no melting down involved. You were fine, Sum. We all have our moments.”
“Sum? My mom calls me that!”
“Damn it, I thought I just made it up.”
“Not quite.” I looked around a little. “So, do you Spark a lot? Is that even a word? Or should I say Spark-ize?”
“Yeah, no, I believe the verb is the same as the noun, like fish. And no, I don’t use it much. What about you?”
“You’re the first,” I said, and he smiled. “Why is that a good thing?”
“I don’t know – I just like being the first, for some reason.”
I looked away, praying I wouldn’t vomit from either nerves or butterflies or Intresia, as another Saviour song came on called I’m Here, a more hip-hop sounding one where she murmur-rapped over a gigantic beat. I watched as Cooper mouthed every single word along to the song:
I’m coming
Fuck what you thought, I’m coming
Fuck what they said, I’m coming
Laugh at my youth all you want
I’m coming
I’m not what you think I should be
Girl in the clothes of a boy, with the brain of a freak
But fuck y’all, and fuck what you think
Your prescribed notions of what a human should be
Just ‘cause I’m young doesn’t mean I haven’t been knocked off my feet
And just ‘cause I’m small doesn’t mean I haven’t been out on these streets
I came up from nothing, and that is no small feat
‘Cause the chase for glory is what makes the muscle in this chest beat
So I’m coming
With this thing here I wrote, I’m coming for the future I’m owed
You may think I’m owed zero, but my talent made it so
Got a hum in my bones, a rumble in my ears
Gonna be brave like my brother, rise up, face these fears
So I’m coming
Fuck it
I’m here
“You’re really interesting,” I said, letting it spill out before I could stop it, the beer already in my bloodstream.
“Thanks. So are you.”
“No, like, really.” I knew that in the morning I was going to regret this like I regretted my first email address, but I pressed on. He was a twenty-five-year-old guy who knew a Saviour song, for God’s sake. “I mean, like, a lot of people you meet every day are the same. But you’re not. I know we just met, but from what you were saying over texting and whatever, it seems like you…see things differently. It’s almost like you’re seeing the world through different glasses, or something? I don’t know.”
“Well,” he laughed, “for the record, my eyesight is remarkably bad.”
I took a breath. Suddenly I wanted to know everything about Cooper, and see everything he had ever seen, and experience every feeling he had ever felt, and that scared me. A lot.
“So what did you do today?” I asked him.
“Helped with my mom, pretty much. We had a hospital bed installed, so I was pretty busy with that.”
For someone who had been raised by a team of nurses and counselors just as much as my parents, that seemed a little off. “Oh. Didn’t insurance install it? Don’t you have, like, helpers?”
He avoided my eyes. “Well…it’s a weird situation. That’s part of why we moved here, actually. She lost her insurance last year, and we couldn’t afford our house anymore, so we had to find a place up here that was closer to her new Medicare hospital.”
“So you’re the only one who helps? Wow. I can’t imagine.”
“Yeah,” he said with a distant frown. “I love my mom, and I would never complain, but…yeah. It’s hard. Middle-of-the-night errands, grabbing things for her all day, it goes on and on. She pushes me to the edge sometimes, bless her heart, but God, I love her.”
Suddenly a drunken guy stumbled into the wall and then fell hard at my feet, knocking his head against the wooden base of the bar.
“Oh my God,” I said, leaning down to help him. I brushed off some of the beer he’d spilled all over his leather jacket and then helped him up. “Are you okay?”
“Thanks,” he slurred, his eyes vacant. “Turns out forgetting Jobeth wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be.”
“Huh? Jobeth?”
He mumbled another thanks and then went on his way, and as I watched him go I thought about how Forgetting Jobeth sounded like the title of some tragic, poetic novel about a man escaping to the mountains to get over his dead girlfriend or something. Then I felt eyes on me and turned to see Cooper watching me, some weird look on his face.
“What is it?”
“That was just nice of you,” he said. “Most people would’ve scoffed at that guy and looked away.”
“It’s whatever,” I said as the last of I’m Coming faded away.
“No, really, it was. You’re a good person. Why are you cringing so hard?”
“Oh, um…sorry. I’m just not used to people looking at me like that, I guess. Or at all. Sorry.”
He tilted his head. “You know, I don’t get the way you talk about yourself, Summer. Not at all. You’d think you were Quasimodo or something.”
“Ugh,” I said as I shook my head and motioned at myself. “That’s not it. It’s just that, like, I know I’m not pretty, and I have this scar, and sometimes it gets awkward. I’m not trying to get all Debbie Downer on you, but, like, I have some issues, and I’m not attractive. I get that.”
“I know you’re not attractive,” he said. “You’re above that: you’re hot. You’ve got that whole hazel-eyed, dark-blonde, freckled, beachy girl thing going on. I’m into it.”
“What? I-”
I paused. I had never been called “hot” by a boy before, and especially not one that I would call hot, too. Was it crazy that I didn’t hate it?
…And that I actually kind of loved it?
“Thanks,” I said. “But it’s fine. I get the whole ‘scar’ thing. It’s just weird sometimes. You’re probably used to the platinum blonde Jax Beach bimbos. Girls that…I don’t know, girls that glow,” I said as I impersonated their prissy little arm movements.
“Is that right?” Cooper asked, looking amused for some reason. “Girls that glow?”
“Yeah, and it’s no big deal, but, like…”
“Come on,” he said as he headed for the door. “I already paid for the drinks.”
“What? Wha – where are we going?”
He turned around with some weird smile on his face. “Do you trust me?
“I mean, yeah, I guess?”
As much as I can trust a total stranger I just met on some dating app, I added to myself.
“Come, then.”
“But why? What is with you and your physical inability to stay in one place for longer than five minutes?”
He smiled down at me just as You Know I’m No Good by Amy Winehouse started thumping from the DJ booth. “I’m gonna make you glow.”
~
We walked down to the boardwalk along the beach and then turned south. It was super dark, the surf shops and touristy restaurants mostly closed up for the night, but I felt pretty safe. Outside the only crowded bar, a group of Jesus people yelled stuff at the partiers on the porch and waved signs reading “GOD FORGIVES – REPENT NOW, SINNERS” and “EVEN THE WICKED LIKE YOU CAN FIND REST IN HEAVEN.” Hailing from a shadowy corner of Christianity, the group came to Jax Beach to scream and hand out Jesus pamphlets about one night a month, and their habit of attempting to recruit people to join God’s ranks at a bar of all places struck me as equal parts bizarre and hilarious. Cooper and I exchanged knowing glances as we passed them, and I giggled despite myself, wondering if he knew how badly I wanted him to take my hand. We finally turned at the entrance to the fishing pier that jutted out a quarter of a mile into the waves of the Atlantic.
“We’re going fishing?” I asked.
“Shh,” he said. “Brenda,” he nodded as we passed the large security guard, who sat on a flimsy chair reading some sort of romance novel. She looked up, smiled, nodded, and waved us in.
“Cooper, the pier is closed, and it’s really dark,” I said. Somehow his name felt well-worn in my mouth already, like a sweet old lady’s hands or a cruise ship comedian’s jokes. “What are we doing?”
“Just wait and see. Walk with me.”
There was a jump in his step, and it was cute. We walked out into the night, and the sounds of town faded away. Halfway out I looked back and gasped a little: the view was beautiful. The towering condo buildings piled up against the shore like runners at a starting line, their lights blazing white and yellow, as the waves shined a silvery blue in the moonlight.
“Wow,” I said as we walked.
“What?”
“The view. Haven’t you seen it?”
He turned around and looked at me. Really looked at me. I felt even more exposed than when you have to stand in those X-Ray machines at the airport and hold your hands up and try to act like a group of men isn’t staring at an image of your naked body.
“My eyes have been busy doing other things tonight,” he said darkly.
Oh.
When we reached the end of the pier, he stopped and began removing his clothes without explanation. He motioned for me to do the same, and I tried not to look at his thinly athletic body as he took off his shirt.
“Um, explain, please?”
“We’re jumping,” he said.
“Jumping?”
“Yeah, jumping. I’ve done it a million times, it’s fine. You wore a bathing suit, right? I was thinking of going hot-tub-diving later tonight, but this is way better.”
I looked down at my dress. “Um. Yeah. But my clothes, and my phone, and my-”
“Your stuff’s fine,” he said as he stood in his boxer-briefs. “Brenda won’t let anyone else out here. We can walk back out and get it all. It’s fine.”
I stared at him. “You’re seriously trying to get me undressed on our second date, or whatever this is?”
“Of course it’s a date,” he said. “And…wait, why are you looking at me like that?”
The wind whipped between the pilings below us. “Well, it’s just that…um…nobody has ever taken me out on a date before, that’s all.”
His head turned. He wasn’t expecting that, I guess. “Really? At twenty-four?”
I stared at him for what felt like forever, feeling stark naked. Finally he turned, shook his head, and approached the railing. “And fine, don’t take off your clothes. Have fun sinking to the bottom when you are overwhelmed by the weight of soaking wet cotton! Just come on, trust me. I won’t even touch you or look that hard, I swear.”
I hesitated. The thing was, in my haste to get ready, I’d put on a two-piece instead of my usual one-piece, meaning I’d have to show my stomach. But oh well: he was asking for it.
I reached down and lifted up my dress to just below the white tube sticking out of my lower left abdomen and the surgery stars crisscrossing my trunk and lower neck area. The truth was, I was technically disabled, although I had accepted this fact to varying degrees throughout my life. Because being disabled makes you Other, and that erases you, because nobody in the world wanted to be Other. Your genes told you to find a suitable mate, and that meant someone who was strong and capable, someone who carried good genes – not someone defected like me, because I would produce less-than-perfect offspring. So I literally repulsed people on a genetic level – I was logical enough to acknowledge that, and human enough to admit that it broke my heart. But I hadn’t always been like this. By a certain age I’d started trying to hide and deny my disability by doing anything I could to be seen as One Of The Normal Kids. During one particularly pathetic period of denial, I tried to join the track team in high school and then saw my two-week career as a runner go up in flames when I fell on my face during a track meet with the Florida School for the Blind, single-handedly making my school lose the entire meet. Now, losing a running contest to a bunch of kids who could not see was a very specific kind of humiliation that I would not wish on even the most distant of frenemies, but it did lend me a certain humility that I carry with me to this day.
But I was done hiding, if only because I no longer had the energy. So I closed my eyes, took the dress off completely, and waited for his response as I stood there in all of my scarred glory.
“And…?” he finally asked. “What are you waiting for?”
I finally opened my eyes. “This is a feeding tube. I get milk through a tube. I can’t eat, Cooper. Like, at all. Anything. It makes me barf. Just so you know.”
He just stared at me and then grabbed my hand, pulling me to the edge of the pier. “Summer, if you wanna scare me, you’re gonna have to pull some hidden tentacles out of your bra or something. My mom’s in a wheelchair, so a little health issue or two is nothing for me. Anyway, you ready?”
A smile rose from somewhere deep within me and parted my lips. And I couldn’t explain why, but suddenly I felt like the lightest person alive. “Tentacles? Ew. And I guess. I mean, yeah. Let’s do it.”
We climbed the railing. I held my breath. And together, we jumped.
Now that my life had a possible expiration date, why did it feel like I’d only just started living?