5
Cooper’s house was just north of mine in Atlantic Beach, in a cute but ramshackle part of town behind Dairy Queen. He apparently lived in a little guest apartment atop the detached garage of a rambling beach house with peeling sea foam green paint, and I loved it immediately. It didn’t bother me that he seemed to live with his parents, because half the guys my age did, too. That’s what happened when an entire generation grew up into a world that didn’t know what to do with it.
Park behind me, on the grass, Cooper messaged me after I pulled up behind him. He drove a black Volkswagen Beetle, which, like, somehow worked for him for some reason? I was beginning to suspect he could make anything work. He was certainly doing a number on my heart, sweat glands, and central nervous system already. Or was I just dehydrated?
I took out my syringe and grabbed a fresh can of Instamilk from among all the mess on my passenger’s side floorboard.
Give me five, I responded. Girl stuff. Then I parked under a magnolia tree and tried to hide myself in the shadows as I transferred the milk into the syringe.
I won’t ask, he said, and that was soon followed by a silly, smiley emoji, which should’ve been weird coming from a stranger but wasn’t for some reason. My face mirrored the emoji’s as I lifted up my shirt, unclasped the end of my feeding tube, and inserted the milk, giving me the fuel I would need for whatever was going to happen tonight.
“Hey, sorry,” I said after I’d hid everything under my seat and met Cooper in his front yard. The sun had set, and the sky was this perfect shade of pinkish lavender broken up by a few golden-orange clouds. You could hear the waves crashing on the sand two blocks to the east, and a middle-aged woman walking her chocolate Labrador across the road smiled and waved at us. God, I loved our forgotten little corner of the world sometimes.
“Oh,” he said as he looked into the dim garage, sounding a little worried, “I wanted to remind you again – my mom’s here. Is that cool? Play it cool. We’re cool.”
“Cool,” I laughed. What was the big issue? As far as his mom knew, I was just a random friend. And how could anyone play it cool around Cooper Nichols, anyway?
We climbed a rickety outdoor staircase and entered a cramped kitchen. You know how when you were little, your senses were stronger and you could practically put on a blindfold and still tell which of your friends’ houses you were in just by how they smelled? Cooper’s house had this very bold and distinct scent, something like driftwood, dust, and sandalwood. I looked over and noticed his mom, who was reading a book on the couch while halfway watching Dr. Phil. She was long and maybe a little on the thin side of healthy, but wow, she was pretty. She looked like one of those models from the ‘70s that my mom used to worship, with the kind of face that made me want to crawl into a hole: high cheekbones, little button nose that curved up at the end like a ski slope, the whole works. Honestly, I was a little mad that she looked too sweet for me to hate without feeling guilty about it. Her only flaw was her slightly weathered skin, which looked almost too wrinkly to be due to the Florida sun alone.
“Hey, Mom,” Cooper said. “This is Summer.”
I studied him. He didn’t say “my girlfriend,” but then again he had no reason to call me that and we’d just met and God, I was a psycho for even thinking that. But he didn’t say “my friend Summer,” either, which was how I usually got introduced, just so people knew not to assume I was dating their kids. But still…hmmm.
His mother looked over and then glanced at the air above me when her eyes were naturally drawn to my scar. I smiled to let her know it was okay.
“Hey, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Summer. Cool house, by the way. Very rustic.”
She smiled back as she took my hand. She didn’t get up off the couch to greet me, which frankly came off as a little rude – until I noticed how thoroughly her arm trembled as she took my hand. I scanned the room, spotted a wheelchair in the corner, and guessed multiple sclerosis. And I wasn’t surprised that she still hadn’t been able to make eye contact with me, either. Disease did not necessarily make its sufferers any more or less empathetic or able to deal with things than anyone else. Only they could do that.
And just like that, a few things I’d been wondering about Cooper clicked into place.
“Oh, thanks, yeah, I love it, too,” she said, stuttering and halting as she spoke. “It’s nice to be so close to the water. And great to meet you, as well. I’m Colleen.”
She looked over at her son, still totally confused. A little too confused, honestly. I was used to even my mediocre-looking guy friends’ families being perplexed with a capital P whenever I was brought around, but this took the cake. (Mmm, cake. I wanted Funfetti in or around my mouth immediately.)
“Well, I’m just finishing up my reading,” she said. “Have fun, you two. How’s your birthday going, Coop?”
He blushed and looked away, cringing. I faced him.
“What? It’s your birthday? Why didn’t you…?”
He angled his body further away, and Colleen sort of politely looked at me like I must’ve been some random chick off the sidewalk for not knowing it was his birthday. This was getting very awkward, very quickly – but at least I now knew the reason behind Taryn’s text.
“It’s going well, Mom, but I’m trying not to make a big deal of it, so let’s not do that,” Cooper said, and seeming to understand something, Colleen nodded and got back to her show. “The medicine’s in the back, Summer. Follow me.”
I followed him down a dark hallway, and something told me to look over my shoulder. Sure enough, Colleen was still staring at me, and before she got all startled and looked away, I noted genuine surprise on her face.
“In here,” Cooper said as he turned into a back room and bent into a cardboard box with BEACHES VETERINARY HOSPITAL – FIDO’S FIRST CHOICE written on the side.
“Cool. Happy birthday, by the way!” I said after a pause. “Wish you would’ve said something, I would’ve ordered an ice cream Sunday or whatever.”
“Ah, thanks, but I really wasn’t trying to make anything of it. You know how parents are.”
“Yeah. Um, is your dad home?” I asked to move things along, but the expression on his face told me I shouldn’t have. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know anything about your dad situation, or, like…sorry,” I blushed.
“Nah, it’s fine,” he said. The air suddenly became very heavy and sort of sad – Waiting Room Air, I called it. “My dad situation is that I have no dad situation. My mom was stoked when I was born, but my dad, not so much. He pretended to care that I existed for a few years before leaving one day to ‘work on an oilrig off the coast of Louisiana’ to ‘make a better future for me,’ or so he said. A postcard from New Orleans was the last thing we ever got from him. I was eleven. We think he’s probably dead now, but nobody really knows for sure.”
“Wow, that’s – I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. I hated him. He drank himself nearly to the point of liver failure and we had to take care of him a lot or whatever, so his departure wasn’t a huge heartbreak. He was so draining to be around. He left my mom the day she got diagnosed with MS, actually, the dickwad.”
“Wha – you’re kidding me, right?”
“Wish I was,” he said, a hard edge in his voice. “She started getting shaky, dropping things in the kitchen, stuttering her words, you know the rest, and then she went in for testing. When she came home from the hospital with the paperwork one day, he got drunk, grabbed his things, and left. Said it wasn’t his burden, and that he didn’t want to leave even later down the line and make things even worse for her. It happened on my birthday, actually, which is why I’m still weird about it. I feel like I’m celebrating her pain or something.”
I tried not to focus on the last part. “Good god – what an asshole.”
“I know. Being my mom’s sole caretaker was…not easy, to say the least, but we made it work. Anyway, what about you? Family?”
“Yeah, I kinda know how all that can be,” I said, thinking of the little brother I was basically raising as my own, since my mom was always off trying to find a boyfriend and get remarried. Or had been, until The Big News, at least. “Sorry again. But what about me? Um, I live with my mom and my little brother, Chase. He’s in fourth grade and he’s the coolest. He likes video games and reading and kickball. My parents got divorced when I was eight. No dramatic story to tell, they just sat me down in the Florida room one day and told me they didn’t love each other anymore. Equitable division of their meager assets, visits at dad’s house every other weekend, etcetera. Nothing too interesting.”
“Ha,” Cooper said as he found two small boxes of something and started removing them from their packaging. I felt a familiar twinge on the back of my neck as I watched. To be honest I still felt guilty about my parents’ divorce and knew I was mostly to blame, not that I would ever tell anyone that. Everyone wanted to think that families heroically Banded Together and Rose Up and Overcome the Odds whenever their kid got sick or had problems, but the reality was that it sucked, and that it was hard on everyone involved. My poor parents had probably envisioned spending their first few years of marriage and parenthood going to dog parks and taking me to the aquarium and going to the beach on the weekends and stuff, not sitting with me in a dark hospital room while we waited for throat tissue to grow. I couldn’t even imagine the stress of settling down and starting a family and then promptly having your firstborn spend months at a time in a hospital bed. So it all became too much, and they drifted apart. My dad remarried, of course, and moved to Orlando and acquired two young stepsons through his marriage to Cindy, whom I vaguely liked, I guess. She was nice enough, but she was from the North and she wore a lot of beige and shook hands instead of hugging and didn’t eat carbs and/or celebrate most major holidays, so…yeah. Not exactly a match for someone like me. My dad was a cruise ship captain for Royal Caribbean, which was, like, one of those random jobs that nobody ever thought of people having, but that had to get done nonetheless. Cruise ships couldn’t park themselves, and everyone couldn’t be doctors or lawyers, you know? It annoyed me sometimes, actually. Why didn’t anyone ever think of the cruise ship captains instead of the doctors, the Esophageal Intresia sufferers instead of the cancer patients?
“Come, let’s go get Hadley,” Cooper said.
“Hadley?”
“The dog.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
We hit the stairs again and went into the dank, faintly mildew-smelling garage below his house. Cooper made a kissy sound, and after a minute a decrepit old miniature dachshund with long, light brown fur came limping out of the shadows. Cooper dropped to his knees and held out his arms, and after throwing a fearful glance at me, the dog rested between his knees.
“Come here, little babykins.”
“Aw,” I said as I watched.
“I’ve had her since I was thirteen,” he said as he scratched her. “She was my aunt’s, and after she got too old to take care of her, she gave her to us. And for whatever reason she latched onto me. She has a tumor in her shoulder, and she won’t last much longer.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “We try to keep her in the house, but she always escapes and comes down here – my mom thinks the cold concrete floor feels good on her fur, I don’t know. It’s not like anyone ever parks in here, anyway. The owners of the house are snowbirds,” he said, referring to the term Floridians used to describe Yankees who spent November to March in Florida and then left once the heat and humidity and hurricanes became too much for their delicate souls. “Hadley’s a total weirdo, but I love her. This medicine is just supposed to make her transition peaceful. And God, how am I even gonna get her to take this, since I forgot to stop and get some of that beef jerky she likes? It’s like my mom says: sometimes you just gotta jump, and then make your parachute on the way down.”
I shivered as Cooper awkwardly stuck some pills into a hunk of some kind of weird doggie salami he’d found in a box in the corner and then coaxed Hadley into eating it. After she’d finally swallowed it with a grimace, he smiled.
“Good girl,” he said as he patted her. “You know, this medicine should buy her time, but not much. The vet told us she might not even make it to the Fourth of July.”
I fought off the shivers and stood tall and tried to act like I wasn’t in exactly the same boat as his dying dog. “Ah. That, um, really sucks. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said, love flowing out of his eyes as he smoothed her fur. “She’s happy. She’s a happy girl.”
He got up, grabbed a leash, and turned to me. “Come. Let’s take her out before it gets too dark.”
“With me?”
He looked around. “…Unless there is some other person standing in this garage that I cannot see?”
“Oh.”
He wanted to spend more time with me. What a strange and wonderful concept. “But just as friends, right?” I asked, and his beautiful face lit up like the moon. His smile was effervescent; wrapped in so much charisma, you could’ve surfed on it.
“Friends walk alone on the beach in the dark.”
A playful, electric silence followed. “Sure they do,” I said finally. “Just let me put my bag in my car.”
The sky was almost black when we hit the beach, or maybe more of a deep purple, but the moon was bright and the bars along the beach were spilling light out onto the sand. Our journey was kept slow by the dog, who was barely waddling along, but I didn’t mind.
A passing man smiled at us and fanned at his face, joking about how humid it still was.
“Summer and January,” Cooper smiled, referring to the local joke about how our only two seasons were Stiflingly Hot, and Too Cold For The Beach. The man laughed and passed.
“So how come I’ve never seen photos of you around or anything?” I asked Cooper as a way to get him to talk about himself, praying I didn’t sound too awkward.
“I don’t know. I’m not really on social media.”
“Really? Why not?”
“I just think our generation is way too into all that, and it’s embarrassing,” he shrugged. “Some things should just be kept private, you know? At the end of the day, who really gives a shit about your boyfriend or your lunch or any of that?”
“Whoa.”
“What?” he asked, and I realized I was staring at him like a crazy person.
“Oh, nothing,” I said as I looked away, “I just agree, trust me. That’s an impressive amount of self-control – I should be more like you. Not that I’m loading selfies every hour or anything, but still, the pressure to be out there kind of gets to me sometimes, I guess.”
“Wow,” he breathed as we drifted into some light from a hotel.
“What?”
“You’re just beautiful.”
I smiled despite myself. Honestly, this was all a little much – it was like he was reading from a script or something. “Why do you say stuff like that?” I asked, clawing at my left elbow with my hand.
“Because it’s true. You’re beautiful, and beautiful things don’t demand attention. It just gravitates to them.” He smirked. “And I also have a pathological inability to keep my thoughts in my head, so I guess that factors in there somewhere, too.”
“Ah, well, that’s understandable.” And for at least the second time in one night, I wondered if there was a sudden oxygen shortage on Planet Earth. Was the Amazonian deforestation happening more quickly than expected?
But I still couldn’t help it – out of instinct, I turned away and hid my scar with my hand. “You only think that because it’s dark,” I said under my breath.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” I said as I turned back to him, urging myself not to let my insecurity sabotage this perfect night. “You’re not bad, either.”
He didn’t say anything. We passed a large group of people walking along the edge of the ocean, some swigging from bottles of beer in brown paper bags, some looking up at the stars, others talking quietly. Cooper sighed. “God, I love walking along this beach and seeing all these different people. Isn’t it weird to think that every random person you see, every stranger you pass on the street or whatever every single day, is their own person with their own life and problems and hopes and dreams and heartbreaks and defeats and triumphs, none of which have anything to do with you?”
I was silent for a minute.
“I mean, yeah,” I said finally. “I haven’t really thought about it like that. But yeah.”
He pointed at a sixty-ish woman in pink capris walking up on the boardwalk. “See, what kind of lady walks alone along the ocean at night at that age? Did her husband recently die? Or was there ever a husband at all? Was she a circus performer who lost her husband in a freak joint trapeze accident? Like, don’t you just walk down the street and wonder about people sometimes?”
I bit my lip. To be honest, I really didn’t. Not very often, at least. Over the years my condition had forced me to deal with what was right in front of me every day, nothing more, nothing less. I didn’t have enough wiggle room for peripheral vision.
But like the terrible person I am, I lied. “Yeah, actually. People watching is, like, my thing. It’s especially good in Florida.”
“I know!” Cooper said, his childlike enthusiasm intoxicating. “I have, like, a master’s degree in people watching. You can learn anything you need to know about the world just by sitting on a pier at sunset, opening up a beer, and paying attention.” He paused and then pointed a finger at me. “True or false, Summer: ignorance is bliss.”
I shivered in the pre-summer heat once again. “What’s with all the questions?”
“Just tell me.”
“Well, setting aside the fact that I cannot stand annoying, oversimplified clichés like that, I would say that it is absolutely, one hundred percent true, unfortunately.”
“Explain.”
Trying not to let him read my face, I looked at the sea again and thought back to the person I was when I was young and thought the world was mostly good.
“Okay, well, I was kind of a sickly kid,” I began. “And I’ve seen a lot of fucked up stuff in my life. Like, I’d seen things that would’ve traumatized an adult by the time I blew out five candles, as sucky as that is. And sometimes I wonder what I’d be like if my life had been…normal, for lack of a better word. Would I be, like, lighter? Less cynical? And is wisdom a burden? If I could choose to un-see the things I’ve seen and un-know the things I know, would I?” I took a breath. “And at the end of the day, I do think I’d go back and change it all, because sometimes it gets hard being…like this.” I glanced at him. “But in some cases, I think ignorance is a good thing, so…who knows.”
I stopped myself, knowing I was getting too deep for first date material, or whatever this was. Around guys I had to constantly check myself to make sure I wasn’t, like, revealing too much, letting the Floodgates of Emotion open up too early, but Cooper didn’t seem to mind.
“Wow,” he said again after a while. “You seem very intelligent, Summer Martin. I like that.”
“Hey, how’d you know my middle name?” I asked, which was my mom’s maiden name, since she’d had no brothers. Cooper shrugged again.
“I don’t know, I guess I noticed it when you flashed your ID to the bartender earlier.”
“Oh. And thanks, but don’t confuse intelligence with, like, world-weariness. I missed a lot of school as a kid and therefore I can’t do geometry or tell you about, like, the fall of the French monarchy or whatever to save my life. But, yeah, if you want to know about Life With a Capital L and The Ways of The World and all that, I guess I’m not a total idiot.”
He flashed that smile again, luminous even in the dark. “Is that so?”
“I guess,” I said, my face warming.
“Good, because naïve people annoy me. What annoys you, Summer?”
“Hmmm.”
I considered bringing up the Facebook wedding thing but then remembered that the word “marriage” was the single worst thing a girl could ever say on a first date besides, like, “I was born a male” or something.
“Lately?” I asked. “Underwear and responsibilities.”
“I get you on that one,” he laughed. “And what are your, like, hobbies?”
“Are you really asking me about my hobbies right now?”
“Indeed I am. The way in which a human being chooses to spend their down time can be surprisingly revealing. How do you fill your empty time?”
“Hmm. I don’t know,” I said as I looked out at the sea. Nobody outside a hospital had ever wanted to know this much information about me, and it kind of felt like diving into the warmest ocean around after the longest, coldest winter in the world. “I don’t have many hobbies, I guess. I like to read and watch TV? Oh, and I love Scrabble, even though I’m not great at it.”
“Blech. Why?”
“I don’t know, I’m just sort of obsessed with odds. They remind me that life is a game of chance, and that you can’t control anything even if you wanted to. It saves me a lot of stress.”
“Interesting,” he said.
“What about you? What do you like to do?”
“Fish, for one,” he said. “The verb, not the noun.”
I gagged a little.
“What? Don’t like seafood?”
“No, I just…this is embarrassing, but I sort of feel bad for the fish. Getting hooked in the mouth and then pulled out of the water to drown in oxygen just all seems so cruel and weird.”
“Actually,” Cooper said, “you would be pleased to know that fish don’t even have advanced enough nervous systems to feel pain.”
“I feel pain, though,” I whispered before I could stop myself. “Too much of it.”
“What was that?
“Nothing. I just said that I’m still being pained, watching their murders. And it seems unnecessarily difficult way to get dinner, too. Why not just go to the fish market and buy it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Life’s supposed to be hard. If your life is too easy, that means you’re doing it wrong.”
I thought about that for a minute.
“Anyway, I also write,” he said. “Opinion pieces. Short stories. A little poetry. Anything.”
“Is this, like, your profession?”
“Ummm…”
“What?” I asked.
“Well, I used to do stuff for the newspaper, or, like, the online version of it, but I sort of stopped.”
“Why?”
“Well, the thing is, I, um…well, you know, the newspaper, it sort of….they let me go, as they say.”
He slumped and stared down at the sand, the human equivalent of a collapsed building.
“Oh, I didn’t…um, sorry for asking.”
“It’s okay,” he said, looking like it was definitely not okay. “They were downsizing, and since I was only a part-time columnist, well…yeah. That was two years ago, and I haven’t worked since.”
“At all?”
“At all.”
“Well, they’re idiots,” I finally said. “I’d never let you go.”
He bit his lip a little, enticed. “Is that so?”
Oh my God. Did I really say that?
“I guess we’ll see,” I said, trying to save myself.
“Here, let’s pause.”
He laid his jacket down on the sand for me and then lowered down beside me. We just stared out at the ocean for a minute, watching the reflection of the moon bounce up and down on the surging black waves.
“Well, looking back on tonight, I’m certainly glad I downloaded that app and then weirdly poured my heart out to you,” Cooper said as Hadley rolled around in the sand beside us. “This definitely beats Netflix on my couch.”
“I’m glad, too,” I said. “And don’t worry, you didn’t rant. If anyone did, it was me. You’re just, like, I don’t know…disarming.”
“Is that so?”
“Perhaps…”
Our eyes met, and, like gravity, our faces started to pull together.
“You know, if I were brave,” he whispered, his cool breath dancing across my lips, “I’d stop myself right now, since you said we’re just friends and all. But I’m not.”
He leaned in to kiss me just as the world lit up. We both turned to see a dazzling firework pop above the sand dunes, casting a golden glow on the sand and sea. People celebrated the Fourth of July in Florida all summer long, and it wasn’t uncommon to see fireworks from spring to August here.
I turned back and saw my reflection in Cooper’s eyes, but mostly I just saw my scar.
Scar scar scar. I’m scarred. I’m scarred and doomed and insecure and Cooper’s not and I shouldn’t even be here.
He leaned closer again as everything faded back to black, and I pushed him away with my hand.
“Oh,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Ugh. This wasn’t right. Everything was messed up, most of all me. I was broken and I was dying and I was a heinous bitch for going on a date with someone the same week I’d learned I had a terminal illness. No matter how hard I was trying to act like one of the flirty Facebook girls with the whole world in front of her, I was a broken adult-child who’d spent most of my life in a hospital, and I just wasn’t built for this.
“Um, I should go,” I said as I got up.
“What? Why?”
I reached down to my left wrist to fumble with the silver bracelet my dad had gotten me on a work trip to the Bahamas, which I did every time I was nervous, but it wasn’t there. I’d lost it. Shit.
I bent over and started darting around in the sand looking for it. “Because it’s getting chilly and I can’t find my bracelet and you’re cute and I’m not and everything is all wrong and I just want to go home and take a bath and forget the world exists.”
Cooper opened his mouth to respond.
“Just don’t ask,” I said as I stopped and held up a hand. “I can’t explain. I’m sorry.”
“Well…I mean, I can see you again, right?”
I stared at him. Had this meltdown not done enough to push him away?
“Um, sure,” I said. “But only if you, like, want to, or whatever?”
“You’re delusional, Summer. Come here.” He walked over and pulled me into a hug. With a shiver I tried to ignore how good my name sounded on his lips, and how badly I wanted to hear it again, despite tonight. “You’re pretty and funny and you’re so empathetic you feel bad for catfish. A dude would have to be far stupider than me not to want to see you again.”
I just stared up at him for a minute, getting the acute sensation that I was being pulled into something.
“You’re someone, aren’t you, Summer?” he said next, his brown eyes searching me as they flashed against the stars.
“What?” I asked, shifting my shoulders a little. “We just met tonight. What do you mean?”
His bottom lip disappeared into his mouth. “Well, I’m a writer, and I’m big on characterizing people. I get the sense that you’re not a supporting player in this world, but a main character – am I correct?”
I smiled at the inexplicable admiration on his face.
Flirt back with him. Just try this.
“I guess we’ll just have to see, won’t we?” I asked.
“I guess we will.”
“Oh, and Cooper?”
“Yes?” he asked, almost breathlessly, as another firework popped in the low clouds.
“Happy birthday.”
I never did find that bracelet. So it goes.