It was an unearthly hour and my body screamed at me along with my alarm the next morning. Who set their alarm in the summer anyway? I thought about hitting snooze and forgetting my plans. But I knew I couldn’t. I was already behind in completing my experiences if I wanted to finish my list before Mr. Wallace picked the final artists. And since I hadn’t found a stranger to accost the day before, I needed to do something else from the list to stay on track.
It was four in the morning, still dark outside. Cooper would probably kill me if he knew what I had planned. Or not come. That’s why I wasn’t going to text him. It would be easier for him to refuse a text. I would just show up at his house. I left a note for my mom on the counter and quietly lifted the keys off the hook by the front door.
Nobody in Cooper’s house was awake either. The porch light was still on and all the windows still dark. I decided it was best to let myself in through his window like I sometimes did. I hoped he hadn’t taken to locking it. He had a window facing the front of the one-story house. A fact his parents really should’ve been more concerned about, knowing Cooper. However, they apparently still hadn’t even noticed there was no screen. That had been taken off two years ago, when he set up a middle-of-the-night game of parking-lot bowling with Justin and a couple of other guys from school. I shone my phone light on the window and slid it open. Unlocked. I took a breath of relief before I became irritated. Any criminal could just waltz up here and have instant access to his house.
I hefted myself inside. It had been a while since I’d done this, and my knee scraped along the casing, scuffing my skin. I sucked in some air, and one foot found the carpet. My other leg, while swinging in, found a baseball trophy on his nightstand and knocked it to the ground. I cringed, but Cooper didn’t stir.
I turned on his nightstand lamp and sat on the bed next to his shirtless body. When had he started sleeping without a shirt? I really should’ve just texted him. I shook his shoulder. “Hey, wake up.”
He grunted and turned onto his side, away from me.
“Cooper,” I whispered, running a finger along his back.
“I’ll clean my room later,” he said.
I shook his shoulder harder. “Wake up. It’s me. Abby.”
“Abby?” he asked, rubbing his eyes and squinting against the light.
“Yes. I thought of a way to check another item off the list.”
He sat up, his eyes finally coming into focus. He glanced at the window over my shoulder. “You’re right, waking up before the sun is a huge fear of mine. Go ahead and check it off.”
“Nope. This doesn’t count for that.”
He lay back down and pulled the blankets over his head. “Then let me sleep.”
“Seriously, Cooper. Wake up. I didn’t account for this taking fifteen minutes. We have a time constraint here, and if we miss the window, I’m going to be back again tomorrow at four thirty.”
“It’s four thirty?” he asked in exasperation.
“We are going to see life come into the world.”
“Someone is having a baby right now? Who?”
“Of course not.” I pulled off his covers. “Get up. Put a shirt on. Brush your teeth and meet me outside.”
I quickly averted my gaze as he climbed out of bed, boxer shorts and all, and pulled on the pair of jeans that were in a crumpled heap on the floor beside his dresser.
“I hate you so much right now,” he said.
I smiled and headed for the still-open window. “I’m okay with that.”
“This better be good,” he said when he came out through the front door and joined me outside five minutes later.
“It will be.” I tugged on his arm, pulling him to my car.
“Like, life-changing good. I don’t even wake up this early for school.”
As I drove I explained. “So, we have seen about a thousand sunsets.”
“Yes. We live by the beach. Ocean sunsets are pretty much unavoidable.”
“You act like we should try to avoid them. They are gorgeous.”
“No, I just mean, if we’re at the beach when the sun is setting, that’s it. It’s the ocean and the sun. It cannot be missed.”
“Yes. But when have you ever watched the sun rise?” I grabbed hold of his bicep and gave it an excited shake to try and sell my pitch.
He was silent for a minute before he said, “Never. I value my sleep.”
“Exactly. Me too. But besides that, there’s nothing spectacular about it, because of all the houses and buildings and stuff in the way.”
“True.”
“So we are going up the mountain. We are going to see it rise in splendor. We are going to see life come into the world.”
“Ah, look at you being all metaphorical and stuff.”
I smiled.
“I still hate you.”
I laughed.
I had researched this well. The perfect spot to watch the sun rise that was less than an hour away from our houses. Did I not tell my mom and grandpa because it felt a little like a romantic gesture? Maybe. I could imagine the look my mom would give me and the joke my grandfather would make, and had decided I just didn’t feel like dealing with either. Besides, it wasn’t romantic. It was on my list. I’d committed to doing my list. This was another event to bring me depth. That was the mantra I kept mentally repeating that made this all seem perfectly normal, at least.
When we arrived, I pulled a blanket out of my trunk.
“Why didn’t you bring two blankets? You are a notorious blanket hog,” Cooper said.
“What? I am not.”
“Do I need to go down the list of times you’ve hogged the blanket? Most of them involve movie nights.”
I pointed to a bag in the trunk. “Stop whining. I brought you doughnuts.”
“You brought doughnuts?” He snatched up the bag and opened it. “And chocolate milk too? Okay, I don’t hate you anymore.”
“That’s what I thought.”
There was a picnic bench, and Cooper sat down immediately and started to pull out a doughnut.
“Wait! Don’t touch. We’re not there yet.”
“Not where yet?”
We were at the bottom of a trail. I pointed to the top.
“What? You’re going to make me hike?”
“That is not a hike. That is a five-minute walk.”
“Hiking is when you have to walk uphill for any length of time. Therefore that is a hike.”
“That is not the definition of a hike.”
“Then what is the definition?” he asked, reluctantly standing.
“I’m not sure. But not that.”
The sky was lightening and I knew we didn’t have a lot of time. I put the blanket over my arm and led the way. Cooper grabbed the bag full of sugar and followed behind.
The top had a gorgeous view—a valley of green-blanketed scenery. It was hard to believe I’d never been up here before. With the ocean five minutes away from my house, complete with its own set of hills and cliffs and hiking trails, it wasn’t often I went seeking nature in the opposite direction. From here, I couldn’t see the ocean, even though I knew it was somewhere behind us.
I settled against a tree, facing east, and Cooper sat down next to me.
“Can I eat these yet?”
“Yes. Eat.” It was really cold, and the air smelled of pine and dirt. I draped the blanket over my shoulders and watched the sky.
“You want one?” he asked with his mouth full of doughnut.
“In a minute.” I checked my phone. We had more time than I thought. Sunrise was at five forty-three today, and it was just after five thirty.
Cooper held up the half gallon of chocolate milk. “Is this to share?”
“Um . . . yes!”
“Okay, okay, just gauging how much to drink.”
I nudged him with my shoulder and he smiled. If he stopped smiling so much, my life would be a whole lot less complicated. He passed me the carton and I took a drink.
“Chocolate milk makes everything better,” I said.
“I agree.” He leaned back against the tree, then tugged on a corner of the blanket. “Hey, blanket hog. You gonna share?”
I lifted the half of the blanket closest to him and he wrapped it around his shoulder, which pulled me up against him.
“You’re warm,” he said, inching even closer.
“I’ve heard the coldest time of day is right before sunrise—that moment in time when the earth has been without light the longest. And then the sun rises and slowly warms up the world again.”
Cooper reached around my waist and tickled me. “That sounded like a Discovery Channel narration. It would be accompanied by a slow camera pan across a scene like this right before sunrise. Take out your phone. Let’s do that.”
“No. This is a no-technology moment.”
His hand that had reached around my back to tickle me was still there, now resting on my hip.
I closed my eyes for a second and concentrated on pushing feelings down. I’d gotten so good at it this last year it was almost second nature.
“I’m going to take Ris out tomorrow night. Where should I take her?”
My eyes flew open. “Who?”
“Um. You know, that girl I’ve been texting.” He took his arm back, resting it on his knee.
“Right. Ris. Yes, I knew that. I thought you were going to take her to Lacey’s party.”
“I am. But I mean like a real date.”
“Aren’t we going to the movie on the beach tomorrow night?”
“Oh, sorry, I forgot about that. We’ll go next time for sure.”
“For sure.” I wasn’t disappointed, I told myself. This helped even more with that feeling-smashing thing.
“So where should I take her?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know her.”
“I know, but where do girls like to go on dates?”
“You’re the one who takes girls out, not me.”
He huffed. “But you are a girl.”
“I am? Thank goodness I have you to tell me these things.”
He squeezed my knee. “Be serious. Help me.”
I thought back to dates I’d had over the years. They were all pretty basic—movies, dinner, beach. “I don’t know. I don’t go out much.”
“Well, think about it for a minute. Your perfect date. Where would you like a guy to take you?”
A perfect date was different from one that had actually happened. A perfect date required imagination. “My grandpa said there’s this amazing underground garden somewhere close. I think that would be cool.” For me, at least. Things like that gave me inspiration to paint.
“Good idea. I’ve heard about that too. I’m surprised you haven’t been to it.”
“I know. Me too. We’re always busy doing other things.” I turned back toward the view in front of us. “Oh! Shhh. Look. Here it comes.” I gestured toward the mountain in the distance with my head.
“We have to be quiet while it rises?” he whispered.
“Shhh.” For some reason I did want to watch it in silence. He seemed to sense I was serious, because he didn’t say another word, and we both sat, taking it in. The rays came first, stretching across a section of the mountain, making it look like it had caught fire. And then slowly, one millimeter at a time, the sun showed itself. It looked smaller than I thought it would, but the higher it rose, the brighter the sky became. For the first time since we’d arrived I heard birds chirping above us. I had never watched the world come alive like this before. It was gorgeous how something could go from dreary, cold, and gray to full of light in such a short amount of time. I breathed in the air, which was still cold, despite how warm the sky looked.
Beside me, I could feel Cooper draw his breaths too. And with each of those breaths, my body leaned in until my cheek rested on his shoulder.
“How much longer are we staying?” Cooper asked when the sun was well above the mountain.
“I thought we’d stay for a week.”
“Only if we get more doughnuts.” He set the bag with my doughnut inside on the ground in front of me. “This doesn’t mean you’re a morning person now, does it?”
“No way. But I’m glad we did this.”
“Me too.” He looked at me, our faces so close together I could see the flecks of gray in his blue eyes.
“Let’s go,” Cooper said, jostling me as he stood up.
“Yes. Let’s go. . . .”