7
The next day my best friend Autumn stopped by after work, which I guess lifted my spirits a little.
“And speaking of Tyler, did you see his ex Michelle Braun’s wedding album?” she asked ten minutes into a rambling story about the latest guy she was trying to date. “That girl is so over the top. I mean, a dove release after your vows? Really? Ugh.”
“Yes, unfortunately my eyes were assaulted by that album the other day,” I told her as I flipped channels from the couch.
“Ugh. I swear, if that girl were any more low-rent, she’d be a spring break destination!”
I laughed as Autumn took another dramatic sip of her Diet Coke in an attempt to send her quip off into history with appropriate flair. Autumn was…interesting. She was about my age and was a year past her second round of chemo for an outrageously vicious, and early-striking, form of breast cancer. She was sort of in remission, but her doctors had been worried lately, and you know what that meant. We’d met at the hospital when she was first diagnosed and had clicked immediately. Even though her mouth sometimes moved faster than her brain, she was my best friend – one of my only friends, come to think of it, since adulthood seemed shrink my Circle of Friendship smaller and smaller every year – and I loved to meet up with her at Panera and listen to her bitch about life. Basically she was unsinkable, the cancer doing nothing to her famously buoyant personality, except perhaps make her sense of humor even more pointed. She was always going on about the latest gossip, but a lot of the time I felt like she was talking at me instead of to me. And this might sound mean, but she had a lunch lady body and wasn’t exactly as pretty as she thought she was, but that was sort of the point of Autumn in the first place: her delusions of grandeur were strangely endearing. (And I know – best friends named Summer and Autumn? That only happens in impossibly-twee YA novels with cupcakes on their covers, right?! But our seasonally-themed names were one of the first things that had drawn us together, and besides, her name wasn’t even really Autumn at all, but Atushmati or some other Indian name that had proved so unpronounceable to Americans that she’d had to Americanize it after moving over at age six.)
“And why does it seem like there’s a new wedding or baby announcement literally every time I check Facebook?” she asked, and I frowned. Bitching silently was one thing, but I was kind of annoyed that Autumn would talk about this to someone who was obviously nowhere near attaining marriage, either.
“Because we’re twenty-four and that’s the logical next step,” I told her. “To some people, at least.”
“Yeah,” she said vacantly, picking at her lilac nails. “I guess. But whatever, screw everyone and their dumb weddings. I wanna go to Key West.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m miserable here and everyone was just posting spring break selfies from the Keys and I’m dying of FOMO and I just really wanna go to Key West.”
“Comparison is the enemy of happiness,” I said, as I simultaneously wished I could take my own advice and stay the hell away from Oak Tree of Love girl’s profiles. “Stop measuring yourself against the world. And you can’t just run away somewhere to get away from yourself. If you go to Key West and sit on a beach with a pina colada in your hand, you’re just gonna be unhappy on a beach in Key West with a pina colada in your hand. That’s just relocating misery. Not to mention the whole cancer thing.”
She blinked and shook her head. “Whatever, Therapist Johnson. I’m sick of staring at a screen, watching strangers live the life I wanted to live. And anyway, I was-” she paused and leaned forward. “Wait. You’re distracted, and you’re acting all weird and stuff. Or, like, weirder than usual, at least. Are you hurting?”
I fidgeted with my arm and then pawed at my scar out of habit. I’d put myself on strict orders not to tell anyone about the seriousness of my diagnosis, meaning Autumn knew only that there was a surgery, and that there would be a long hospital stay involved. I hadn’t mentioned the mortality rate to anyone. After all, there was a chance I could survive, and freaking everyone out by telling them about the stakes involved would just be needlessly placing a burden on them, even though to be totally honest I found myself craving the attention at times. Sometimes the grosser parts of me almost wanted to draw people into dark rooms and confess my life-changing news and then soak up the sympathy and tears while they reacted. Growing up, I wasn’t the girl all the boys chased around the schoolyard, and eventually I formed some sick, parasitic relationship with sympathy, because sometimes it was the only kind of attention I could get. I guess that’s why I shunned all sympathy and emotion now – my disgust at my own attention-seeking ways had forced me to veer in the other direction, perhaps too forcefully.
“No, no,” I said. “I’m fine.”
She looked down at my chest region. “Um. I just noticed you’ve lost some weight. Or some more weight, I should say, you skinny bitch. Are you sure you’re fine?”
I wrapped my arms around myself. The truth was, I kind of was hurting, but I always hurt, so I’d learned to ignore it, and if not ignore it, then overlook it.
“Autumn, the whole ‘not being able to eat solid foods’ thing doesn’t really lend itself to morbid obesity,” I said, and she blinked again.
“Oh, yeah, sorry, I just…oh my God, Spark!”
I jumped and hid my phone under my shirt. Oh, shit. Since I’d been reading and rereading Cooper’s messages all day, I guess she’d seen the app’s telltale red-and-white messaging bubbles on my screen.
“I can’t believe it!” she cried. “You’re one of those.”
“What’s wrong with Spark-ers?”
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have one,” she scoffed. “I’ve just accepted the fact that you are better than me in every way, and I do not approve of you using a hookup app. The big sister in me wants to take you out back and spank you, actually.”
“But you’re younger than me,” I said.
“Uh, yeah, by like three months. Anyway, why did you get it?”
“I don’t know. And, actually, um…I kind of met up with a guy off it the other night – nothing sketchy,” I added after she threw me a look, deciding to just vomit it all out, “just for a drink, and we didn’t do anything, or whatever. We just talked. But he was really cute and nice and funny, and I think I kind of embarrassed myself at the end, and I don’t know how to fix it, or if I even want to fix it. Like, I’m not sure if I should let myself be with him. Because of the stomach tube and stuff,” I said quickly, to keep from tipping her off about the whole death thing.
“Oh, shut up,” she scoffed. “We have just as much of a right to get laid as anyone else out there, healthy or not. But no matter what you do, do not use a winky face.”
“Why not?” I asked, thinking of the winky emoji Cooper had sent me that night.
“Because a winky face is a universal sex invite, everyone knows that. You’d might as well say ‘Hey, I’m just lying in bed in some trashy lingerie, wanna stop by?’ Which is fine, obviously, but you don’t want to give it up too quickly. Personally, I wouldn’t have sex with him until your second hangout session.”
“Second?”
“Is that too long?”
“Ugh,” I sighed. “Never mind. Calm your tits, I haven’t even said anything to him yet.”
“Gross, don’t say ‘tits.’ And who is this boy, anyway?”
“Nobody special,” I lied. He was totally special, but for some reason I didn’t want to say his name out loud. He was my secret to creepily obsess over.
“Well just wait and see what happens. You’ve got nothing to lose, right?”
I looked away.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that, Summer, I just, like…”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I fully understand that I am the most single person that ever single’d.”
“No, no, Spark is good for you! Because they don’t have to meet you right off the bat, and-”
She stopped again. This reminded me of another facet of Autumn, besides her perkiness: she also had some serious problems in the whole “accidentally being horribly offensive” department.
She walked up and gave me a hug. “I’m gonna stop while I’m behind,” she said quietly. “I know we face the same issues. We’re ‘sisters in sickness,’ to quote that annoying chaplain lady at the hospital, God bless her soul. But my foot is so far up my mouth, I’m choking on my knee. I’m taking my fat ass to the elliptical, or I’m gonna try to, at least. See ya later. Text me if you need any more advice.”
“I think any more of your ‘advice’ would make me end up pregnant and in a halfway house. But hold on. Before you leave, check the top shelf of my fridge.”
Autumn went into the kitchen and then came out with a trembling bottom lip, holding the Funfetti cake I’d made for her with the words RIP GRANDPA written in yellow icing on top.
“Summer,” she said. “You remembered.”
“Of course I remembered,” I told her, referring to the one-year anniversary of the death of her grandfather who’d basically raised her, since her parents hadn’t been able to emigrate from Sri Lanka with her right away. “I mean, you made such a production out of the funeral, it was hard not to remember it.”
“Seriously, Summer. You are such a good friend. You’re the best person I know and I don’t deserve you. I’d hug you if I didn’t have this cake in my arms. So go out and slut things up, babe. You deserve someone. You deserve love. And not to mention that you’ve always been the cute one out of this friendship, and I harbor a deep resentment towards you for it, so you’d might as well take advantage of that.”
“Whatever, stop being a weirdo. You know I like making cakes more than I like eating them. For obvious reasons,” I added with a giggle, which she mirrored.
“Okay, well, thanks, and don’t ask for a piece, because this cow is eating the whole thing by herself. Fuck marriage, I’m hungry.”
“Couldn’t if I wanted to!” I called after her, and at precisely the same moment as the door slammed behind Autumn, my phone pinged with a message that made me feel like I’d just been drenched in a bucket of ice water:
It’s Cooper. I know your secret