14
So, above all, I was still a rational person, and the way I saw it, I had three options: I could turn away from Cooper for good, cold turkey, just delete his number and forget I’d ever known him. I was also rational enough to know that this would make me go fucking crazy. I was in too deep now. So, option two: I could always just tell him about my diagnosis and confess about lying and see what happened. He would either get mad at me for lying and then ditch me, or…
Or. That was the key word: there was no Or. I didn’t really see an option besides that. I had misled him by not telling him, and that was wrong, and he’d probably never forgive me for it.
But there was also a third option. A dangerous one. And that option was to say nothing and hope the surgery would be successful and therefore make all of this worrying unnecessary. I’d disappear for a few weeks in September, and then poof, I’d be back, cured and mended. The German girl was proof – maybe the procedure could fix me, and maybe I was getting all worked up over nothing.
And maybe, just maybe, my health was cratering and I was ignoring the signs and I wouldn’t even make it long enough for any of this to matter, and trying to find love before death was as futile as a crab trying to stand against the rising tides and hope to stay in place.
I gave myself a week to decide.
Sure enough, Autumn was furious with me for neglecting to tell her about the Cooper thing, and she called me in the middle of the week and ordered a Starbucks session to investigate. After she commandeered a prime corner table in the coffeehouse, she peered through the window toward the passing cars on Third Street, but it seemed like she was looking through them instead of at them.
“So what’s up?” I asked after a moment. “I thought this would be an interrogation session, but you look totally weird. You didn’t like him?”
“No, no, of course I liked him,” she said, snapping back to the present. “I mean, God, have you seen the kid’s forearms? Holy shit. You could carve wood with those tendons. No, it’s just that that night, like, made me sad for some reason, that’s all.”
“What? Why?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. The way he looks at you…I just want someone to look at me like that. To love me like that.”
“Love?” I asked. “Um, we’re not using words like that yet, Pollyanna. It’s been, like, a month or two, at most. Who do you think I am, one of the Facebook psychos we make fun of?”
“Yes. Apparently you are. I mean, come on – sneaking around, showing up at Anti-Support with someone like him? I feel like I barely know you. And it is love,” she continued, searching me, as she shook her head. “I could see it. I could feel it, almost. Do you know what you’re doing, though?”
“What do you mean?”
Her eyes strip-searched me down to the bone, and suddenly I wondered just how much she knew. “You know what I’m talking about, Sum. Your surgery and everything – it’s pretty big, and maybe he deserves to know. I told you to be slutty and everything, but this is clearly becoming…something. Does he know what he’s getting into?”
“Stop.” I ignored the shiver that ran up my back at her words. “I’m figuring it out as I go, I promise. Lay off me. You got to have all the fun forever. Please don’t tell him anything – I just want to enjoy him for a bit, especially since the Fourth is coming up and all.”
“Okay,” she said, glancing away again, the far-off look in her eyes making a whole new ocean of anxiety well up within me. It’s not like I thought she’d run off and tell him everything to purposely hurt me, but that was the thing about Autumn: sometimes she couldn’t help herself.
After I sat with her for a few more minutes we started drifting towards the door. “Here,” she said as she threw away her empty cup, “take a hug before you go off with Cooper again and I lose you.”
“Thanks,” I said as she embraced me with a Patented Autumn Hug. “I needed that.”
“You needed what? Hugs, or your boyfriend?”
“Both,” I said. “Always. And that kind of terrifies me.”
The Fourth of July in Jacksonville Beach was absolute heaven, even for a Cynical Cindy like me. Thousands upon thousands of people hit the streets on bikes and skateboards and scooters, parties and cookouts and Slip N Slides filled every driveway and yard in town, and fireworks popped in the sky from sunup to midnight. Usually I rode the back of Autumn’s bike from cookout to cookout until we got tired and went to take a nap, and then we’d walk down to the pier at sundown and watch the fireworks shoot off the end. They’d zoom up and explode over the shimmering black seas, burning red and blue and gold and white against the dark sky for one brilliant moment, and at the end of the fifteen-minute firework show I’d always find myself convinced that there was beauty in the world again. Then I’d take that hope and fortify myself with it for the next year until I could see the fireworks again on the next Fourth and refill my dwindling Hope Reserves once more.
And the prospect of never experiencing all this again just broke me in the worst way. Not in the way Cooper’s smile broke me or a photo of a baby Yorkie broke me – just broke me, thoroughly and senselessly, like when you drop a glass bowl from pretty high up and it doesn’t even bother with cracking or shattering, it just makes that pop! sound and explodes into a million tiny shards. And since my self-imposed deadline was Monday the Fifth, I figured I’d try to let myself enjoy one final weekend before making the big Cooper decision. I had to. I couldn’t live without the summer.
The first Thursday of the holiday weekend I went over to his place while his mom made a late breakfast. This may sound creepy, but I loved to watch the way his mom looked at him, and admire the way her eyes lit up when she did so, and think about why they did. And as he picked at a Nutella pancake a while later, his mom watching Discovery in the next room, I kind of gently asked about her prognosis. Long story short, it wasn’t good – her MS was advancing quickly, and it wouldn’t be too long before she’d have to be sent off to some expensive nursing home. The only thing keeping her out of one, I guessed, was Cooper’s presence. Barely anyone in her situation had an able-bodied young man at her beck and call, and I got the sense that he knew it, but still couldn’t stay there and wait on her forever. Nobody would be able to. I’d seen the same silent battle being waged in my mother’s eyes my whole life – should I sit here with my child and nurse her for another week, or should I go out and get back my life before it’s too late?
Anyway, Colleen’s disability checks from the government were helping to keep both of them afloat, but Cooper’s savings from his newspaper days were about to run dry – which was all the more incentive for him to take his chances at getting a book published, in my eyes. But what did my opinion matter?
“But it’s fine,” he said after he finished explaining, as he pushed around the remains of the pancake on his plate. He ate a lot, and very often, and although I had no idea how his body stayed so perfect, I kind of hated him for it. “She’s fine as long as I’m here. That’s why I got her that geode necklace.”
I smiled. I’d noticed the necklace before, actually, a beautiful geode with purple crystals inside that had been sliced in half and then strung from a fine silver cord that dangled from Colleen’s neck.
“Just wanted to remind her that beautiful things can grow in ugly places,” he told me. “She lived in a bad situation for a long time, but she has me now, and she always will. At least…I hope she will.”
Cooper sank into himself, his frown shading his features. He did that a lot, disappear in front of me, and lately he’d been doing it more and more for some reason. He’d done a good job of acting sparkly and light and happy-go-lucky, that dazzling boy from Joe’s Crab Shack, but now I knew the truth: he was lost. I could see it in the shadows in his bottomless eyes; hear it in the silences he let drag on for far too long during our conversations about his life. He was just better at hiding it than I was. It all made so much sense now: of course he wrote stories about people who dreaded the future; of course he constantly obsessed over these Big Life Issues like death and fate and legacy. He was stuck in the past, dwelling on the ruins of his dreams and dealing with his ailing mother every day, unable to move forward. They said that people stopped maturing at the exact age of the onset of their health problems, frozen in time by the pity that suddenly descended upon them like molasses, but I’d never imagined the same being true for that person’s family members, too. Perhaps this explained my dad’s flight from our family like a college student who had impregnated a one-night-stand and then run for the hills; my mother’s shaky emotional state; my little brother’s immaturity and lack of self-confidence and weight issues. Cooper was exactly like me, a girl frozen at the age of her diagnosis, held back from truly experiencing adulthood by a smothering but well-meaning mother and sympathetic strangers and by having to literally feed myself milk every day like a baby. In a world of already-stunted growth, we were practically children. I’d had no idea we were so alike.
“That’s so sweet. But are you calling yourself beautiful?” I asked to swivel the conversation toward a heart-melting direction.
“Of course I am. Have you seen this ass?”
“Touché. And sorry for asking about your mom,” I said, and he shook his head.
“Don’t be. It’s whatever. But seriously, like I was saying before, I really want you to have fun today when we go to the beach.”
I gave him a weird look. “We’ve gone to the beach, like, ten times. Of course I will.”
“No, like, really,” he said. “We’ve done what you like to do, now it’s time to do my routine. It’s Florida, and it’s summer, and that’s what people do in Florida in the summer, Summer. Swim, boogie board, run around – they don’t just sit there in their clothes reading books, like you.”
I swallowed hard, imagining a crowd of beachgoers awkwardly staring at my many surgery scars and the plastic tube protruding from me. “Thanks, but you know I….I can’t do that,” I said. “I have a one-piece, but my tube still pokes out, and it’s weird. People stare, and it gets awkward and stuff. Like, I don’t care, but I don’t want you to feel weird or anything.”
Cooper looked away. “Oh, um, well, speaking of that, I, um, got you something.” He went into the living room and then brought back a bag from Dillard’s, the local department store.
“Cooper! It’s not my birthday or anything,” I said as he put it on the table in front of me.
“Yeah, but I saw it and I, like, thought you might like it, or whatever.”
I took a box out of the bag and opened it. Inside was a brown one-piece bathing suit with a white sarong.
“I just know you can be self conscious about your feeding tube and whatever,” he said, looking away from me, “and I, uh, got you something to maybe help fix that.”
I took out the bathing suit. It was super brown, and nothing I would ever buy for myself or anything – but it was still the most perfect thing I’d ever gotten.
“It’s great, Cooper. Thank you. I can’t believe you did this.”
“You don’t think it’s weird or anything?”
“It’s not weird, Cooper, it’s…”
Suddenly I spotted a handwritten note in the box and took it out. All I want is to show you off, it said in his trademark awful script. Please let me now.
I looked up and smiled. “It’s not weird. It’s perfect. You’re perfect.”
“Good,” he said. “And before we – wait. Are you okay? You’re looking a little pale. You’re almost green, actually. Everything good?”
“I’m fine,” I said, messing with my arm in a weird little way. “This whole ‘not eating’ thing does take its toll every once in a while, I guess. But I’m splendid.” I took the bag and stood up. “Okay, I’m gonna go out to the car to get something and change and stuff. I’ll meet you downstairs in-”
“Hold up,” he said as he held out a hand. “I know where you’re going. You’re getting your makeup kit.”
My shoulders fell. “Um…yeah. And?”
“And I refuse to allow you to keep hiding under all that stuff. You’re beautiful. You don’t need it.”
“Oh,” I said. “But-”
“There is no but,” he said as he got up and kissed my cheek, his stubble scratching against my skin, reminding me that I was a human capable of feeling things, no matter how hard I’d been trying to avoid that fact up until now. “You’re hot and you need to show it. And plus, it’s the beach. Who puts makeup on to go to the beach?”
“You do have a point,” I smiled. “I guess it is kind of tacky.”
I turned for his tiny bathroom with the fake wooden walls. After I changed into my new super-brown bathing suit that I loved completely, a spare tube of concealer fell out of my bag and rolled under the sink. I turned and left without picking it up.
I followed Cooper to the pier and waded in a tide pool while he fished. In Jax Beach the water was usually a muted slate color, but sometimes it changed with the light of the sun like a pair of hazel eyes, and today it happened to be a beautiful shade of dark green, like an emerald in the shadows. The beach was crowded but not many people were by the pier – they were too afraid of the sharks that congregated there because of all the bait in the water. (Typical of us to head straight for the danger.) The weather was on the humid side of comfortable, as was often the case in northern Florida in the summer, and after I got out of the water I sat right on the edge of the sand and put my feet in the cool sea to fool myself into thinking it wasn’t so gross out. By now I’d figured today’s “fishing trip” was actually just an excuse for me to meet Kevin, Cooper’s best friend. I’d told Cooper there was no rush, that I was sure I’d meet him eventually, but for some reason he was, like, weirdly insistent on introducing me to all his different friends and family members, which was cute I guess.
“I’m so sick of pretending I care about fishing,” Kevin said as he dropped beside me. We’d already been introduced, but I guess I had to acquaint myself now. With dreads protruding from the half of his blonde head that wasn’t shaved, weird hipster tattoos all over his arms and chest, and gauge earrings, he looked more like an attendee at a Grateful Dead concert than the trendy surfers that populated Jax Beach. I found that odd, since Cooper’s easy confidence had made me picture him as coming from the popular crowd in high school, the kids who sat in the middle table in the cafeteria, soaking up all the attention. Kevin looked more like an emo kid from the corner table where all the skateboarders and rocker chicks sat, shooting spitballs at the popular crowd instead of sitting with them – to be more specific, he looked like my kind of person.
“You mean to tell me a champion surfer doesn’t like fishing?” I asked. “Isn’t that, like, against the rules?”
He gave me a weird look. “Oh, didn’t Coop tell you? I do love surfing, but I’m also totally gelaeophobic, and fishing doesn’t exactly help that. I’d rather not know what was out there if I had the choice.”
“Come again? What-a-phobic?”
“Fear of sharks. I have it.”
“Wait. You’re a surfer with a phobia of sharks? What?”
“Not just that, I’m deathly afraid of the water in general,” he said. “I saw a little girl get bitten by a shark while standing in waist-deep water down in Cocoa Beach when I was ten, and I’ve never been the same. But by that point I had already fallen in love with surfing and there was nothing I could do about it – I was a goner.”
“I know what you mean,” I said under my breath, a chill running up my leg even though the temperature currently hovered somewhere between Inhospitably Muggy and Suicide-Inducingly Hot.
“So what’s your love life like?” I asked to move things along. “Any boy news to report?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I wish. I’d let you know if I had some. The last guy I dated ended up cheating on me with a Spark guy. How tacky is that? Like, as if relationships weren’t hard enough before, now we have to deal with our boyfriends being able to get on their phones and sext whoever they want in secret. Why couldn’t I have been born in the ‘20s, so I could dress like a flapper and not have to worry about Spark?”
“Agreed,” I said with a nervous little laugh. “Even though…”
“I know,” Kevin said as he gave me the side eye. “Coop told me all about the Spark thing.”
I cringed hard. I didn’t think Cooper had been telling people about me, and that. I shriveled into myself a little as I wondered what else Kevin knew.
“It’s fine, though,” Kevin said. “So you had a lonely moment. Who hasn’t? I bet you don’t regret it for one second.” He motioned at Cooper.
“True. I don’t.”
“But seriously, you’re good for him. Better than anyone I’ve seen, actually. He seems…different now. Happy. Less stressed. And it’s good that you’re, like, handling all his baggage – his devotion to his mom and whatever. Most girls are annoyed by it, since it leaves no time for them.”
I watched Cooper’s back muscles ripple in the sun as he tossed out his fishing line. “Something tells me they all got over it.”
“True again.”
“How many girls have there been, by the way?” I asked as matter-of-factly as I could, since I am a monster and sometimes I don’t even know how I live with myself.
“Um, a good amount,” Kevin said, sort of halfway apologetically. “Not by his doing, though. Coop’s the guy who always made all the girls fall in love with him by being so nice and charismatic and, like, smart, and whatever, but trust me, he was clueless beyond that point. He’s the most oblivious guy I’ve ever met, actually. He never really had a male role model in his life, and that sort of hit his confidence hard, I think. He only dated anyone when they pursued him. But, I mean, just look at him – he did get pursued a ton.”
“Yeah,” I said. In my peripheral vision I could see the judgy look Kevin was giving me.
“Does it change your view of him to know that you’re not, like, the first girl to take him for a ride around the block, or whatever?” he asked, and I couldn’t tell if he was testing me or not.
Cooper shifted the angle of his body a little as I watched him, his rippling abdominal muscles casting shadows on one another. I felt my face warm up as I turned to Kevin. “Something tells me I’ll get over it.”
When the sun sank behind our heads, the shadows cast by the palms and hotels along the shore creeping ever closer to the water as the day wound down, Cooper finally came and sat beside me. As I rubbed my leg against his I wondered if there was anything in the world better than this. His hair was getting golden like his skin, which looked spectacular against his warm brown eyes. I guess I was getting sort of sun-kissed, too. In that moment I wished very much that I could sit right here next to him, being that young and that beautiful, forever.
“Sorry,” Cooper said, “this one shark was eluding me and kept eating my bait and then swimming off.”
“Oh no,” I said, mocking disappointment. I liked him so much more when he was unburdened, acting young and easy like this. “How tragic it is that you didn’t get to reel in a deadly shark while standing five feet away from me. The horror!”
“Hey, I like catching them!”
“Why, though?”
He looked out at the sea, puffed out his chest, and exhaled. “I don’t know. They’re trash fish, you can’t really eat them or do much with them, but lemme tell you, they fight like hell.”
“Ah. The fight,” I said. “That explains it. You’re such a guy.”
“No. I’m just a human. And I fight. That’s what humans do. We have to. There is no other option.”
He stared off into the clouds for a long time as I thought about this and watched him. I noticed something in his eyes that reminded me of myself – the sadness, the insecurity, the fatigue. And suddenly I knew exactly how to help make him happy.
I tucked it away into a giddy little corner of my mind and returned to the sea.
I was just about to say something when a wild shriek caught my ears. I looked around, half-expecting to see a shark attack victim limping ashore, when a blonde girl under the pier jumped up and down and accepted a ring from a quite attractive guy kneeling in the shallows at her feet. Of course there was a crowd of friends taking photos from behind one of the pilings supporting the pier – because if Facebook doesn’t see it, it never happened at all – and once the couple made out in front of everyone, the friends stopped taking photos and jumped out to congratulate them.
I shivered a little and then noticed Cooper staring at me.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You look…sad.”
“Oh, no, nothing,” I said. “Good for them! Weddings! Marriage! Yay!”
He said nothing, his gaze suspicious.
“Hey, you wanna try your luck before we leave?” Kevin asked me. “My pole’s over there against that trash can.”
“Nah,” Cooper said casually before I could respond, waving his hand. “She’s not big on the whole fishing thing. Feels bad for ‘em.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it. I’d told him that exactly one time, on our first date.
“And wait,” Cooper told Kevin. “You’ve never offered your pole to any of my girls before. Why now?”
Kevin smiled at me. “Let’s just say that I trust my pole would be in good hands with her.”
“Great,” Cooper said, “now let’s stop talking about your pole being in my girl’s hands and look at the sunset. God, isn’t this view awesome?”
Kevin checked out Cooper from behind and then gave me a knowing smirk, eyebrows raised. “Yeah,” he said as I tried not to laugh. “It is.”
A little wave surged up around us as we sat there, the tide rising quickly, the words girl girl terminal girl repeating in my head. Cooper reached over and splashed me.
“Hey!” I said as I wiped my face, but inside I was suddenly panicking. I didn’t want him to wash off all my concealer and see my scar in all its glory, here in the fading but still impressive July sunlight. “I just straightened my hair!” I lied. “I can’t get wet.”
“You did, huh?” he asked as he got up and stared down at me. “So you wouldn’t mind if I did…this?”
He stuck his leg into a tide pool and kicked water at me. I screamed and rolled to the side.
“Cooper Nichols, how dare you!”
That was it. I pushed myself up – which took more effort than ever – and started chasing him like a child. He ran into the water and I followed, jumping through the waves to catch him, ignoring the dull ache in my side as I did so. I finally reached him and pushed him down under the surface, but he grabbed my arm and pulled me under, too. That’s when I remembered my makeup. I stood up and turned around, hiding my face, as another surge made the water rise up to our shoulders. This wasn’t like the night at the pier – it was still light out, and my scar was totally visible.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Did I hurt you?”
Figuring that there was no hiding now, I turned around with my right hand over my cheek.
“My scar,” I said quietly. “It’s just showing now, that’s all.”
The look in his eyes changed; softened. He crept closer, grabbed my hand, and slowly pulled it down, revealing me – all of me. I had never felt so exposed. I wanted to flinch and turn away because I was a monster, an ugly defected mess-up, but somehow I resisted. Finally he leaned in and planted a kiss on my upper lip.
“No,” Cooper said, a few inches from my face, as my nerve endings went wild with electric delight. “You are showing. And it’s okay. You’re alright, Summer Johnson. You’re okay.”
I could tell him, I suddenly thought. I could totally tell him right now – that I’d been lying all summer and that I wasn’t the person he thought I was and that my days were as numbered as the waves were relentless and that, oh God, I wanted more than anything for him to forgive me and stay.
But like the coward I was, I said nothing.
“I know you’ve been nervous,” he suddenly said, and terror sank into me all over again.
Oh no. He already knows. I won’t even have to tell him.
“I have?” I asked.
“About the way we met, on that dating app,” he said, weakening my knees with relief. “I’m not blind – I see it in your eyes, in the way you pull away from me sometimes. Kevin told me you were talking about Spark. It’s freaking you out that we met on some shallow, promiscuous app – it scared me a little in the beginning, too. But I don’t care at all anymore.”
As we waded along with the current, we stumbled into a deep hole in the sand and fell into neck-deep water. When we made it to the other side he stood up and laughed, but then he pulled me closer and got serious again.
“See, that’s the thing about this world, Summer – you can find deep places, here in the shallows.”
I breathed, in and out, in and out, my terror subsiding. We waded there in the sea for a moment, rolling deep in the emerald waves, and suddenly I saw the scene through Saviour’s eyes. For one golden moment we were submerged in a weightless ocean of love, a girl on the way down and a boy on the way up, meeting in the middle for one fleeting summer by the sea before cruel fate would yank us apart again – or hopefully not.
“But we still don’t know each other that well,” I said, making one last attempt at pushing back against this thing that was overtaking us with more force than anything I had ever known before, “and-”
“I know you,” he whispered. “I see you, Summer. I know you.”
I just stared at him. This was it. The moment of truth, from an honest boy and a lying girl. I knew what I wanted to say, but did I really know what it meant? Was I old and adult enough to know what it was? Did anyone even know what it was? My mother was in her middle ages and still had no idea what it meant, and how to get it, or keep it. I knew this was moving too quickly, and I knew I was perhaps headed for the end of the world, but I couldn’t run from this anymore. All I knew for sure was that in the still of the night, in the quiet of my mind, in the shimmering sea of my soul, my thoughts would always run back to him – I figured that was a good enough explanation.
“I love you,” I finally said, tossing out the words like a hot dish from the oven, too exhilarated and terrified to even look him in the eye.
“I love you, too,” he said, a smile in his quiet voice. And then we kissed.
We’d kissed before, obviously, but never like this. My body lit up as he explored my mouth, and then other parts of me with his hands, underneath the water. We only stopped when a few kids tut-tutted near us, making us giggle and come to our senses.
“God, what kind of sick fucks are we?” he asked, shaking his golden hair free of the saltwater, as my heart rate crashed and burned.
“The kind that make out in front of innocent families on summer holidays, apparently.”
Finally he took my hand, and together we trudged through the waves before collapsing onto the sand again. I looped my elbow around his big arm and leaned into his shoulder, thinking about how we were different but sort of the same. We were little crabs scurrying around on the sand trying to find a hole to sink into before a wave came up and swept us away, lost and scared, but no longer alone. The wave was life.
I reached for my towel and checked the date on my phone. Only two more days until I had to make the biggest decision of my possibly-waning existence.