DECEMBER 11
Back in December, I pause, because I’m noticing something about myself. Summer told me this all the time and I never believed her, but suddenly I’m starting to agree with her. If all else fails, if it all falls away, if I end up throwing myself off a pier in a few days, at least I’ll have this…
I’m kind of fucking good at writing.
I take a bathroom break, and as I pee, I lean against my wall and stare out the window. I see the pier again – our pier – and for some reason, it doesn’t fill me with dread and gloom this time. It just makes me smile. What if I could write about that pier someday? What if I don’t kill myself, and words and thoughts could flow out of me again, immortalizing that stupid pile of sticks forever?
What if I’m not done yet?
The next day, my best friend Kevin texts me and tells me to meet him at Summer’s pier and catch up. God knows I have nothing else to do, so I grab some flip-flops, kiss my mom on the forehead as she watches TV, and slump my way down to Fourth Avenue.
“So where the hell have you been, weirdo?” he asks after I hug him a little. “Have you forgotten how to answer your phone? It’s like you’ve dropped off the edge of the Earth or something.”
I look away. It’s not lost on me that I am probably not even fit to be around people yet. Grief grabs hold of you and doesn’t let go, and it is everywhere and everything. It is the awkward silence with an old friend, the lingering weirdness with your mom in the morning before breakfast. It is a part of you, clawing out to escape its black home in your chest and make its vile presence known.
“I’ve been…nowhere,” I finally say. “My room, mostly. And also: I hate to break it to you, but the Earth has no edges.”
He sighs at the sea, ignoring my joke. I half-expect him to pat me on the back with kid gloves, to comfort me with some false bullshit. But I hate when people say it’s all gonna be okay, because it won’t fucking be okay. My girlfriend is dead. That is not okay, and neither am I.
Instead, he just levels with me. “Dude, you gotta stop this.”
“Stop what?”
“You know what. All this doomy, gloomy stuff. Cheer up!”
“Okay. Do you have a Xanax and a handle of vodka?”
The look he gives me shuts me down pretty quickly. Being around a recovering addict is a constant dance, and they hate it when I step over the line.
“Okay, fine,” I say. “Sorry.”
“Seriously, though – you gotta get out of the house and start doing stuff.”
I didn’t know what to say. “I don’t want to do anything,” I tell him. “I just want Summer. Sometimes I don’t even want to…”
We both stare out at the endless ocean as what I hadn’t said hangs in the salty air. He looks at me a little nervously and then clears his throat. “Ugh. Man, I’m sorry. I can’t even speak to that. I don’t even…yeah. It’s just so…senseless. Like for such an awesome, pure hearted, badass person to just…”
“Die on an operating table during an elective surgery?” I ask. He stares down at the weathered boards of the pier.
“Yeah. Makes you question, like, everything.”
“I know.”
He spits over the railing. “Ugh. I hope her family sues that doctor to Timbuk-fucking-tu.”
“I hope they do, too. Just for the sake of closure.”
“And I just can’t believe it’s over for you guys,” he says a minute later. “You two were supposed to last forever.”
I stare out at the blue sea. “Oh, trust me, it’s not over. I’m going to see that girl’s face in every crowd I look into. Forever. And maybe a few forevers after that.”
He cries a little after that, but I try not to draw attention to it. “You know I really liked her,” he says soon.
“Yeah. So did I.”
He studies me. “I noticed. I could see it in your eyes, even in the beginning.”
I slap a fly away from my shoulder. “Ugh. Fuck everything. What a waste of a beautiful human.”
“Yeah,” he says. He’s silent for a few moments, and then turns to me. “Actually, I am gonna say something. Her life ended, Cooper. It’s over, and that sucks unlike anything else in the history of suckage. But do you really want that jackass doctor’s mistakes to end two lives instead of one?”
“Oh,” I say, taken aback. As he finishes I think I see a shark slicing through the water, but there’s also a good chance I’m imagining it. “Oh.”
After we talk a little more, he walks down to the sand and starts surfing – but instead of his usual routine, walking slowly through the waves out to sea while looking awkward and terrified the whole time, he runs out as fast as he can and dives right in, laughing like a crazy man all the while.
“Hey? Whatcha doing?” I yell. I put my hands together and mimic a shark swimming through the water, which is his biggest fear in the world. He just shrugs.
“We’ve all got sharks in our lives,” he calls back. “You know? Summer was brave enough to take her chances and face hers. I’m gonna face mine, too. Even if I get bit.”
He turns and surfs as the tide rolls in.
Swim towards your sharks, I think as I walk home. That’s something Summer did. She ran straight for what scared her, even when it was a mistake. What else have I forgotten about her? What else could I learn from the book?
After I fall into bed, I look outside at the dimming day. A rabbit is in my front yard – there are millions of them living in the sand dunes, or so it seems – but it doesn’t know where it is. Suddenly the lights framing my front walk turn on automatically, showing the rabbit the way back across the yard, illuminating the pathways for all who want to walk them.
And right then and there, I realize: I’m as blind as the stupid rabbit, and I have no other choice but to read the stupid book. The whole book. Because this can’t be the end of the road for Summer. There has to be a point to all this. To her life. To her lovely melancholy. I am mostly a pragmatic person, and I assume the world at large is, too – that means the world had to have a point to her short and beautiful and very fucked-up existence, besides to turn me into the planet’s most depressing person. But what was it?
I grab the stupid book and tell myself that if this doesn’t make the world bearable again, I will leave it.
But this isn’t just any chapter. This is the chapter where I meet Summer.