The Summer Remains by Seth King (13)

13

 

Three weeks later, I fainted.

It went like this: I was just getting out of my car at a beach access to watch Cooper surf, which I’d been doing more and more. I’d just gotten out of the car when a strange, silvery, lightheaded feeling struck me, and the last thing I remember was noticing a crushed can of Sprite lying next to a fence lined with overgrown sea plants when everything went out.

When I woke up a few moments later, I was staring at the sand dunes, my cheek against the grass. I’d simply fallen sideways onto soft soil, but I’d missed a metal bench by inches. I brushed myself off, got up, and walked towards the sea. I wasn’t going to let my issues stop me, whatever they were. Not yet. After a lifetime of winter I was finally stepping into summer, and I would let no one – not even Dr. Steinberg – make me go back.

I had an early-morning checkup meeting with Steinberg a few days after the fainting incident. In all the Cooper business, I was almost forgetting that I was, you know, maybe going to die. (Almost is never enough, unfortunately.) It was so good to see him, even under the circumstances. His hair was white like the snow I’d only seen in books, and his eyes were warm and crackly like a summer bonfire. He said my team of doctors were fine-tuning their approach and asked me how I’d been feeling, and I kind of embellished the facts a little. Skipped over a few details, you could say. I didn’t mention the fainting, the fatigue, the mental fog, the way it was starting to take all the effort in the world just to open my car door, and so forth. I didn’t want him to get concerned and throw me into a hospital room out of caution and lock away the key when I was having the time of my life out here in the world. And besides, I was as fine as I ever was.

I hoped.

But best of all, Steinberg had news for me: it seemed he’d found a girl in Germany who’d survived a surgery very similar to mine. I checked out her blog on my phone after I left the hospital, and sure enough, she was now my age and – get this! – married to someone she’d met after the procedure. She could eat food and run marathons and do everything she’d only dreamed of as a sick person. And for the first time since March, I really let myself imagine a future for myself. Not necessarily with Cooper, just in general. As I drove down Third Street after the appointment I imagined all the events of a normal life, all the Facebook milestones like an engagement and a marriage and a baby and a mortgage, unfurling themselves out in front of me like waves on the ocean. It was really possible after all – life was possible. Cooper was possible. And imagining the possibilities of what he and I could build this summer left me, for the first time in my semi-adult life, absolutely giddy with excitement.

I shivered at a stoplight and let the surgery melt into the shadows of my mind just a little bit more.

 

And the summer of my dreams barreled on. I worked part-time, I injected myself with milk four times a day and spent as much time with Shelly and Chase as I could, but besides that, Cooper was becoming my whole routine. If I wasn’t working during the day, we’d surf or fish – or rather, he’d surf or fish, while I’d sit in the tide pools getting lost in my Kindle. When the afternoon rains came we’d run back to his house and get ready for lunch. Sometimes he’d eat at home, and sometimes we’d go to local Jax Beach spots like Angie’s Subs or TacoLu or this little Filipino place on Lemon Street. It rained every other day in Jacksonville in the summer at, like, four PM, and not just passing showers, either, but these giant, black super cells that invaded the city like those alien spaceships from Independence Day. I loved to go sit on my driveway and watch the rains come in, the slate-grey clouds spilling in from the west, the olive green oak leaves on my street throwing up their silvery undersides to welcome the storms; I lived to feel the balmy breeze on my face and breathe in the scent of distant rain falling on distant marshes and watch the way the electricity in the air made my arm hairs stand at attention. Then I’d go inside and lay on the couch to read a book or watch TV while the storm hit, the pitter-patter on my windowsills lulling me into some kind of summer-storm-induced nirvana.

After one of these weirdly heavenly afternoon storms, I was getting dressed in my room when I saw Cooper pull into my driveway through my window. As he got out of the car, I gasped, because he looked good. Like, I mean goooood, with five O’s. A cashmere black sweater than was just tight enough, a pair of dark jeans, and brown suede shoes. All of this was set off by his tan, which was exactly the color I imagined the color of a villa in Tuscany to be, weirdly enough. That was Cooper: lighting up my world so thoroughly, I was imagining things I’d never even given two shits about before.

“Who’s here?” Shelly asked after I came out into the living room. “I thought you had Anti-Support tonight.”

My mom’s affection for him aside, she was getting more and more frantic and scatterbrained as the surgery loomed closer, and she was growing increasingly suspicious about my absences. I’d try to claim that I was meeting Autumn for coffee or doing anti-support group stuff or whatever, but I’d never been a very good liar, and I was also quickly running out of excuses. I could tell she was onto me.

“I do have Group tonight. And I don’t know who it is,” I lied.

“It’s that tall boy with the crooked smile,” she said, peeking through the curtains. “Tell me the truth. Who is he?”

“A friend,” I said.

“A friend that makes you blush and giggle and forget things?”

She pointed down at my top, which I noticed wasn’t even buttoned at all.

“Friends blush at each other,” I said as I reached down to fix my mistake and hide my scars.

“Okay, well, then, when am I going to get some of this time you’re giving this friend?”

I sighed and dropped my shoulders. “Shelly, listen. I am living my life while I can, and I need you to back off. I can make my own decisions. Can you do that, please?”

A tear unexpectedly came to her eye. “Just be careful, Summer. That’s all I’m asking. You remember Travis Gibson and-”

“Yes, Shelly,” I interrupted. “Of course I remember Travis Gibson And His Bet.”

In sixth grade the worst thing ever happened. Like, the worst thing. A cute, popular boy named Travis started flirting with me and telling me he liked me and stuff, and I fell pretty hard. He asked to be official and everything, and we’d even hold hands when we walked down the hallway, which was like a totally huge deal in a middle school relationship. But anyway, about a week into things, I found a note from Travis’ friend Logan asking him how much money Logan owed him that day. It turned out Travis was being paid to date me all along as some sick kind of joke for the popular kids to laugh at. He even got a bonus for every time he touched me, since I apparently grossed him out so much that he couldn’t bear physical contact. I spent two weeks in bed after that.

That was also the year I started covering up my scar with concealer full-time. The Asshole Deflector, I called my little jar of makeup. If I couldn’t control people’s reactions to me, I could at least hide myself as best I could, as a preemptive strike against douchebaggery. (Which had made my choice to download Spark all the more strange for me, I guess. But desperate times, desperate measures, desperate-for-attention Facebook brides, etcetera.)

“Shelly,” I said, trying to close down the conversation before it got even more embarrassing, “I appreciate the concern, but I am twenty-four. Please stop micromanaging my personal life like I’m some slutty tween getting felt up in the back of a movie theater. I’ve got it covered.”

“Oh, baby,” she said in her faint Savannah accent as she stepped forward. “I’m sorry. I really am. I just don’t want to see you, or anyone else, get tricked or hurt again.”

Hot rage licked at my scarred chest. “So that’s what this is?” I asked. “I’m so thoroughly unlovable that the only reason a boy would like me is to make fun of me, like Travis?”

Her jaw fell open a little. “No, I…I love you, Summer. I love you. And I don’t want to see any hearts being broken. That’s all. And by the way,” she said pointedly over her shoulder as she turned for her room, “it wasn’t you getting tricked that I was worried about.”

 

“If you’re gonna look so good,” I said after I shook the Shelly drama off my shoulders and opened the door, “can you at least tell me the occasion?”

I was getting a lot better at talking to him, and at pulling off this double in general: Broken Woman-Child at home, Healthy Femme Fatale with Cooper.

“Whaddyou mean?” Cooper asked, rubbing his hands together and bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. His excitement reminded me of a five-year-old before a soccer game. “I thought we were going out to eat tonight, for the holiday weekend?”

I racked my brain and came up empty. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“You…you agreed the other night, remember?” he asked, his shoulders falling a bit. “You said you wanted to watch me eat at Outback while cursing the Throat Gods for not letting you participate in the greasy carbfest of glory known as the Bloomin’ Onion?”

This rang a bell.

“Oh, damn,” I said. “Yeah, I thought we were talking about doing that on Monday.”

He sort of turned away a little and motioned at his car. “Um, I mean, I can leave, if you want…?”

“No,” I said, “no, it’s not that, it’s just that I…I had plans already.” But how in the world could I tell him about the Anti-Support Group?

His eyes lost their sparkle completely. “Oh. Were you hanging out with someone else, or…?”

“What?” I asked. Why would he even think there could possibly be someone else? I was clearly, embarrassingly obsessed with him, and everyone knew it. I was also, you know, not very attractive, so there was that to take into account, too. “No, it’s this thing I do every Thursday night,” I said quickly. “I, like, didn’t want to say anything because I thought you’d think it’d be weird or something.”

“Well,” he said, a little relieved, “weird is a relative term for me. Is it, like, Scientology meeting weird, or tetherball practice weird?”

“No, none of those. Um, it’s just that I hold a meeting for people with health issues every other Thursday night, called the Anti-Support Group?”

“Anti-support?”

I hesitated. Most people couldn’t handle this stuff. I knew that. A quote-unquote “normal” person was just not equipped to go sit with a bunch of ill and broken people, some of them terminally so, and listen to them complain. Because that’s what we did in my group: complain. I just wanted to create a space where other people like myself could complain about their problems without exhausting people, and so I’d banned all inspirational sayings, cheesy pep talks, sappy quotes, over-the-top Jesus stuff, etcetera, and instead I just let them vent to me. Because venting was an extremely important part of being a damaged person. Most people didn’t want to sit there listening to others bitch about their health situations, for many reasons. They didn’t understand, it grossed them out, and saddest of all, most people just didn’t care about other peoples’ problems that much, especially when someone’s whole life basically revolved around One Big Problem. And if people did want to talk about this stuff with you, they were usually Church Lady types with big crazy eyes who circled hospital waiting rooms like vultures and feasted on drama and pity and despair and heartsickness like most people feasted on Thanksgiving dinner. Not cute, in my opinion. So once a week I simply invited a bunch of people my age in varying states of unwellness and/or disability to sit in a room for an hour and bitch at me.

But to be honest I wasn’t sure if I wanted Cooper to know about all this. For one, he already saw me as Different enough, and the other day he’d even walked in on me as I’d fed myself in his laundry room. He’d tried to act like it didn’t bother him, but I kept seeing his eyes tracking toward my abdomen the rest of the day, and it had bugged me to no end. We’d revealed a few embarrassing things about ourselves in the past month or two – I’d let him see all the celebrity gossip magazines peppering the floorboard of my car, and he’d shared his weird habit of watching Cartoon Network every morning – but this was a little much. I didn’t like to tell “normal” people about my problems, mostly because that was weird, and also because I hated people who sat around moaning about all the things that had “happened to” them, in passive tense. Living actively – e.g., happening to the world instead of letting it happen to me – was a big priority for me.

And plus, I just didn’t want to be one of those people who always had to have A Story, with a capital S, you know? Everyone knew of someone with A Story: like, say some girl on your Facebook’s dog dies or something, which is admittedly sad and terrible, but then she never lets it go and makes literally everything about the dead dog for the next year. Like six months later she’llpost a sunset selfie and caption it “This is so beautiful, just wish my baby could see it,” or post a random Buzzfeed video and be like “My dog would’ve loved this soo much.” Like, it sucks that your dog bit the dust, but children are dying in Sudan and get the hell over it, you know? At the end of the day I guess I just didn’t want My Story to be That Girl Who Didn’t Eat Food. Like, make me That Quiet Girl in the Corner Who’s Always Reading or That Girl With The Fashion Sense of a Blind Substitute Teacher, whatever – make me anything but That Girl With The Medically Induced Anorexia.

So I sort of explained what I could to Cooper, minus a few of the more intense details, and when I finished, he stepped forward and grabbed my face. My entire body went tingly at his touch, just like they talked about in the books.

“Summer Martin Johnson,” he said as he planted a kiss on my forehead, “I would like nothing more than to spend my Thursday night listening to people complain about their problems with you.”

“You would?” I asked as I got the succinct feeling that my skin had melted. He hadn’t kissed me like that since a walk to Dairy Queen a few days before, and I was starting to miss his touch, and want more of it, in different ways.

“’Course,” he said. “Something tells me I’d do almost anything if it involved you.”

I didn’t need any more convincing. I grabbed a sweater and told him to get in my car.

 

After a jittery drive to the converted fire station that served as our community center, I stocked a flimsy card table with some pretzels and Diet Coke and then put up a sign saying SUMMER’S ANTI-SUPPORT GROUP: POSITIVITY FREE ZONE, BITCHING WELCOME on the front door and waited. Someone barged in looking for a gardening club meeting and then saw me and politely said “Oh, sorry, this is the room for that cancer group,” and left the way he’d come. I glared after him, because this fed into another issue I had with my issues. Don’t get me wrong – cancer sucks, and watching my great aunt Tess slowly die of breast cancer was one of the worst things ever. Ever. But, like, people understand cancer, right? People grasp cancer. People have heard of cancer. You hear the phrase “cancer patient” and you immediately get this image of a bald-headed warrior sitting in a chemo clinic Fighting the Good Fight, Not Giving Up, etcetera. Like, it’s terrible and random and it strikes anyone, but people expect that cancer can unexpectedly come at any second, you know?

But there is no gallows glamour in somebody’s body not working correctly. It seems like every few months there’s a sweetly melancholy movie about some dude finding out he has eight months to live before a brain tumor makes him bite the dust, and then he sets off on a sweetly irreverent journey where he Chases His Dreams, Checks Off His Bucket List, parasailing on that beach in Australia like he’d dreamed of as a snot-nosed kid, etcetera. Either that, or the tried-and-true tale of adorable cancer-stricken teens finding love. But there are no darkly funny stories about a girl with no throat and a death sentence just trying to live her life. There are no books entitled Esophageal Intresia And Me: Living a Full Life with Half a Throat and Three Months to Live (And You Can, Too!). When people broach the subject of People Who Are Not Entirely Well, they want a story they’ve heard of, something they can understand, something they can wrap up in a cute little Ribbon of Disease and keep on their shelf for a rainy day. Cute White Kids With Cancer Fall Into Doomed Love in the Suburbs is the title of the story they all want. When family members of other sick people look over at me in waiting rooms and ask me about My Story, they sort of perk up, half-expecting to hear some tale about a heroic battle against an evil tumor in my heroic sinuses or something, but as soon as I explain that no, I’m not Fighting the Good Fight, and yes, this is my real hair and not some chemo wig, it’s just that my body just sort of doesn’t work correctly, I watch their eyes glaze over immediately. There was no drama in being born incomplete, with parts that didn’t work, pieces that didn’t add up to a whole. Even the phrase “birth defect” struck me as almost unbelievably callous – like, I’m a human, and you’re calling me “defected,” like some flawed model to be sent back to the factory to be fixed or something? Guess what: there was no factory. It was like the hero of an action movie dying in the middle of the film from a stray bullet: so senseless, it was just boring. Every sad story had to have rhyme or reason. Mine had neither, it just was. And sometimes that made me feel more broken than anything. Once I was even exiting my doctor’s office with an Intresia pamphlet in my hand when a girl and her father commented that it “must be one of those cancer books.” I wanted to turn and tell them that fuck no, it wasn’t a cancer book, that there were other maladies in the world besides cancer, and that my condition had nothing at all to do with cancer, but I turned and left like the coward I was. But still, deep down, I kind of wanted my boring story to matter. I wanted people to care that I had something other than Cancer with a capital C. I just didn’t know how.

Guests slowly started to trickle in, but the turnout wasn’t great. I guessed people were busy with summer, or just busy getting dead, either one. So I got going. Although we didn’t have any new people, we always started the meetings by going around the circle to tell our stories and share anything new about our conditions, and so at 7:10 I welcomed everyone, mentioned that Cooper was just a curious friend tagging along (the intensity of the stares coming from the girls in the group warranted an explanation) and asked the member closest to me how he was doing.

“Alright, I guess,” said Victor, who’d been paralyzed in a car crash when he was just a kid.

“That face you just gave me doesn’t look alright,” I said. He swallowed.

“Well, it’s…it’s my girlfriend. It was fine at first, and it seemed like she didn’t really care that I was immobile, but I can tell she’s sick of reaching for things and getting my TV remote for me and stuff. She’s sort of pulling away.”

I nodded. “Yeah. That sucks. And I hate to say this, but there’s a chance she might dump you.”

His mouth fell open.

“Victor, sorry, but being broken makes us different,” I told him, throwing an uneasy glance at Cooper. “You know that. That’s just how it is. Whenever we walk into a room – or roll into one, in your case, sorry – people glance. It’s their nature to glance, just like it’s our nature to slow down when we see a really bad car wreck. We are the car wreck, and we just have to accept that, or else we’ll never get anywhere in this world. Do you get that?”

He just sort of nodded. “Yeah, I get it. It just sucks.”

“Welcome to life,” I said. “It sucks. And by the way, this girl sounds like a total bitch, so she wouldn’t be much of a loss anyway.”

A few people laughed, Cooper included. I didn’t even want to wonder what he thought of all this, so I kept going.

“Who wants to complain next?” I asked, and Scotty raised his hand. He was around my age, had “beaten” leukemia at around fourteen, and came to the meetings to help others who hadn’t yet healed and were still stuck in their problems.

“Not a problem, just a contribution,” he said. “People suck. Get used to it.”

“Why thank you for that uplifting comment,” I said, and he sort of bowed in his seat. I looked to his left. “Hey, Kim.”

“Hi,” she said, typically shy. Because of her spina bifida, she was in a wheelchair, too, and couldn’t do much.

“You doing okay?” I asked.

“I mean, yeah, I guess.”

“What’s the ‘I guess’ for?”

“I don’t know. There is one thing. Feeling pretty is a struggle every day.”

“Well that’s stupid,” I told her. “You’re gorgeous.”

“Agreed,” Cooper smiled, and I looked over at him. “Your hair is beautiful, by the way. Are those highlights?”

Kim blushed, reached up, and patted at her dishwater blonde hair. No hairstylist in the world would’ve given someone that color, and he knew it.

“No, this is all natural, I swear.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Cooper told her casually. “Looks professional. Where’d you get it done, anyway? Can I have the stylist’s number? My hair’s been looking a bit shaggy lately, and my mom teases me relentlessly about it.”

Kim laughed, and they went on and on. And the thing was, his interest in her didn’t come off as condescending or patronizing in any way at all – he was just talking to her, in the same way any human talked to any other human. It’s just that Kim was never spoken to like a human – in the eyes of most people, she was a pile of pity in a wheelchair. Compliment her, do your good deed of the day, and then move on and forget she’s an actual human who wants to talk about anything other than her issues – that is what most people thought when they looked at Kim.

But not Cooper.

A lull finally came in their conversation. Before I could tear up, I turned to the guy next to her.

“Anyway, Hank! Hi.”

“Hiiii,” Hank groaned. Hank was a dead-eyed soldier a few years back from Afghanistan with a missing arm and a major hole in his psyche to show for it. He had a dark, vaguely irritable demeanor, like a dog that had been rescued from a bad owner. I grew up around the corner from a nasty dive bar called Ginger’s and I knew Hank because I grew up watching its patrons come and go whenever I got bored. They were all just like him: broken, carved-out people who sat around looking to the past because they were haunted by their present and resigned at best about their futures.

“Anything you wanna bitch about?”

He shrugged, as usual, so I turned to Autumn. “Okay then. Hey, Autumn. How’s it going?” (For the sake of inclusiveness, Autumn and I tried not to be too buddy-buddy at meetings. I knew she was confused as hell about Cooper’s presence and would be cornering me about him as soon as she could, but I tried not to think about it just yet.)

“Shitty,” she said, deadpan. “Like, shittier than a Mormon who accidentally walked into a porn convention. That shitty.”

“Explain.”

“It’s just so fucking unfair, all of it,” she began. She usually saved her biggest rants for these meetings, so I settled into my chair and braced myself. “Like, I’m twenty-four years old, and all my friends are looking forward in life, buying rings and wedding dresses and baby cribs and starter houses, while I’m having consultations with plastic surgeons about potentially having my breasts removed. Give me hot guys, give me a wedding, give me Key West – give me something. Shit, I’ll even take an unwanted pregnancy at this point. I just feel like I’m…stuck, you know? I’m sure you know.” She looked right at me as she said it. I bristled, feeling Cooper’s eyes on me.

“Um…yeah. I know.” The conversation was hitting too close to home, so I moved onto someone else. “So, hey, Ethan, let’s talk about-”

“Like, seriously,” Autumn said, refusing to let me drop it. “Why me? Why now? I’m sick of being the heroic cancer fighter. This has really been bugging me lately, especially now that literally everyone in my life is coupled up. Or so it seems.” She threw me a mean glance, and I looked away. “Like, if my family had stayed in Sri Lanka, I’d still have cancer, but at least I wouldn’t be getting bombarded by engagement stories every week, since they’re so conservative about marriage or whatever. But still – I’m jealous. Like, I really want the chance to buy a fucking overpriced wedding dress and select ugly centerpieces and get into passive-aggressive email fights with my bridesmaids, you know? Why can’t I at least get the chance?”

My lips curled into my mouth. I felt vaguely dizzy but I pushed it down. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “None of us knows. But that’s why we’re here. To find some sense in a totally effing senseless situation.”

“Oh boo hoo,” Hank suddenly said. Because he barely ever said anything, everyone looked at him.

“Go on,” I said.

“You’re sitting here moaning about not having a boyfriend?” he asked in Autumn’s direction. “Well, get over it. I know you have cancer, and it sucks. But at least you’re alive, unlike some previous members of this group, and at least you have two arms.”

“Excuse me?” Autumn asked after a brief, and very shocked, silence. “Um, I’m complaining about a lot more than being single. There are new wedding albums being posted every weekend. This is a major problem! And for your information, I’m not even totally single. I’m talking to someone!”

“Is this like the last guy you tried to date, who barely knew your name?” he asked. “Just because I’m quiet doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention.”

“‘Tried to date?’” Autumn asked in disbelief. “We spoke! In person! Twice! And he even gave me his Snapchat username! He didn’t exactly add me back when I friended him, but I’m optimistically waiting!”

“I rest my case,” Hank said.

“And…so do I!” Autumn cried. “I forgot what my case is, but I rest it! It is very well rested, trust me!”

“Whatever.”

Autumn crossed her arms and looked away. Hank tried to do the same, remembered he only had one arm to cross, and then sort of awkwardly hugged his shoulder while everyone else stared at the walls.

“Well,” I said. “So! Moving on. Um, Ethan, how about you? Anything new in Ethan Land worth complaining about?”

Ethan was seventeen and fighting a rare blood cancer that was famous for the almost unendurable pain it inflicted upon its sufferers. He broke my heart to pieces every time I looked at him. I’ll never forget the first thing he said to me when we met a few years back, after his parents had heard about the group and asked me to go visit him in the hospital to talk some fight into him. After I walked into the darkened room where he was being partially subdued by straps to keep him from dis-attaching himself from the torture machines keeping him alive, he politely greeted me, pulled me down to his eye level, and asked me in the softest, most angelic voice I had ever heard if I would please kill him.

He was a tad better now, and had been weaned off some treatments, but I still cursed the world every time I saw him and thought of everything he had to deal with. He would be lucky to grow old enough to one day be legally allowed to drink in a bar.

“I’m doing, like, okay, but the thing I hate more than anything is the guilt,” he said, and a few people nodded. “It feels like all I am is a problem or something. My dad can barely be around my mom because she cries so much about me, and my friends are pulling away from me to save themselves from my death. I just feel like, I don’t know. Like I’m not worth the trouble.”

“Have you ever had a dog that died?” Cooper suddenly asked. I looked over at him, confused, but he nodded ever-so-slightly to signal that it was okay.

“Um. Yeah, I think?” Ethan said. “My family poodle, Pork Chop. When I was, like, twelve or something.”

“And did you love him?” Cooper asked.

“I mean, yeah?”

“And when Pork Chop died, were you furious at him for dying? Did you punch the dirt at his grave and curse him for daring to grow old and leave you? Or were you grateful for every second you got with that little dog?”

For a moment Ethan just stared and blinked.

“I…I get it now,” he finally said, his blue eyes large. “I get it now. Thanks.”

 

Soon Autumn started to complain about destiny again, and patience was wearing thin. I was feeling weirdly barf-y, too, so that wasn’t helping me pay attention, either. Why was boob cancer Autumn’s destiny, she wondered aloud, while every other girl’s destiny was to prance down an aisle at twenty-three? “And I’m starting to think that I’m just like, doomed,” she ranted, “and I don’t even know how to-”

“Or you can just accept that that there’s no sense in anything,” Cooper interrupted. Everyone looked over at him again, myself included.

“Care to explain?” I asked.

“Okay, well, my health is fine,” he said, “and I don’t want to feel like I’m, like, speaking to your situation or whatever, but I’ve been re-forming some of my opinions lately due to some new insight from the smartest person I know-” he winked at me- “and for me, things started to feel a lot less terrifying when I accepted that life is a happy little accident. Optimistic nihilism, I call it.” Another wink.

“Go on,” I told him, trying not to blush.

“Well. Like. We are not the descendants of two naked creatures created in a garden for the amusement of some bearded man in the sky,” he began. “I’m pretty sure of that now. We are one cell that evolved into another cell that evolved into a creature that learned to live in water and then crawled out of a pond and then started walking and then turned into lizards and other animals that adapted into monkeys and then those monkeys happened to leave home and evolve into humans, and now here we are. All of those coincidences and accidents and random occurrences led to us sitting here, in this fire station, young and beautiful and damaged, trying to rise up into a sunken world, and so we’d might as well stop trying to find any sense in the chaos and just deal with the particular set of accidents we’ve ended up with. That’s my advice, at least.”

Silence fell upon the room. That is, until Autumn cleared her throat and raised her hand a little.

“So, um…are you sure you’re not single?”

 

The drive home was tense. I could feel my feelings for Cooper, like, deepening in a really weird way, putting down roots. And it terrified me, to be honest.

He reached over and absently ran his fingers up and down my arm, making me wince and pull away. He looked over at me.

“Sorry,” I said, “I’m just not used to that. Here, do it again.”

I returned my arm to where it was, and he got right back to it.

“And I’m sorry about Autumn,” I said to break the quiet. “She’s the only person I know who would go to an illness support group to pick up guys. Sorry.”

“Ha,” he said. I could tell he wasn’t really listening.

“Where are you right now, Cooper?”

“Listen,” he said suddenly, throwing me the most nervous glance I’d ever seen. “I want you to tell me the truth about something.”

Oh no. He’s dumping me. He snapped out of this trance where he finds me attractive, and he’s done with me.

“Yeah?” I asked, as he fidgeted with his shoulder.

“Well, the thing is…if you hated it, I just want to know, so I can…so I can throw it away, and just forget about it, and…yeah.”

“What?”

What did that mean? Was he trying to push me away so he could shake the blame from himself? Was this leading to this classic it’s not you, it’s me bullshit conversation?

“The book,” he said, looking like he hated himself. “If you hated it, I just want to know. Just lay it out there, please.”

I felt like my body had melted into my seat with relief. We hadn’t discussed Eighty Eight yet, or even mentioned it, really – I got the sense that he felt too awkward to talk about in person.

“No, Cooper,” I said. “Nooooo. No no no. It was amazing. I mean, like…yeah. I cried like a baby. It was good. Really good.”

“You think so?” he finally asked, stupefied. How could he be so oblivious?

“Yes. It’s amazing. Trust me, I read hundreds of books a year. It’s like you painted a portrait with words instead of paint. Why aren’t you pursuing this?”

He said nothing. When he did speak, his voice was shy and quiet, his head turned down, towards the floorboard. “Because I just, I already tried once, at the newspaper, and I blew it, and I don’t think…I don’t think anyone would want to read a book by a loser, or whatever. I already put my thoughts and fears and desires out there once, and I failed and got fired. Why do it again?”

My chest shattered for him. I wanted to reach out and take his hand, but I couldn’t. I was still too locked up within myself. “Cooper,” I said. “This story is as good as, or better than, ninety percent of the stuff I come across. You have a gift. Use it. Live your purpose. Don’t let one failure stop you. And of course people would want to read something by you. You’re…you. Humans try things, and we fail sometimes, and then we get back up and try again, and then we win, hopefully. That’s what we do.”

“So you really think it’s good?”

I shook my head. “Ugh. Are you serious right now? I’m not a good liar. You should see when my little brother shows me his watercolors. I try to be nice, but my reaction is…yeah. Slightly less supportive, you could say. Seriously, though, how do you not know how good you are?”

He angled himself away, a V between his brows, and my insides caved in for him. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” he said. “I was wondering something else, too. Something I noticed.”

“Yeah?”

He bit his lip. “What makes you angry, Summer?”

“Um, I don’t – what do you mean?”

“Your anger,” he said. “That thing that bubbles up sometimes. Like back there, when you were talking to that one kid. You got kind of…rude, to be honest.”

I thought hard. Honestly, being happy for me wasn’t that easy most of the time. In my eyes, empathy was the ultimate double-edged sword: I was blessed with the ability to care deeply for people, and cursed with the knowledge that they would nearly always choose the worst for themselves. 

“So much makes me mad,” I said. “Everything. Mostly suffering. And the knowledge that the world is unfair. The fact that somewhere out there some kid is crying in the rain with no family and no hope. The fact that the world contains hatred and bigotry and injustice and hunger and Justin Bieber. All of it. I literally sit there being angry at the planet sometimes, just because of how unfair it all is. That’s probably why I started the group. And I’m not saying I did it out of some obnoxious, self-serving Mother Teresa-type quest to be better than everyone, either, I just – I don’t know. I wanted to do something, you know? Anything.”

“I can see that,” he said, and then he let out a long and lazy sigh. “You are a remarkable person, Summer Johnson. Better than me, that’s for sure. Honestly, what I saw back there was the most amazing thing I’ve ever witnessed. You were wonderful.”

“I was?”

He ignored me. Instead of responding, he picked up my hand and kissed the back of it. “Did you know there are about 7.94 million seconds in a summer, Summer?”

“No,” I breathed.

“Well there are. But the thing is, you don’t get to spend all those seconds actually enjoying yourself. So, take out a couple million seconds to sleep, maybe a few hundred thousand to eat, and subtract another couple hundred thousand for running errands and whatnot, and a few thousand in August so you can watch Shark Week, which I never miss, and then that leaves me with…still not enough seconds to spend with you.” I froze and looked over at him. “You’ve lit up my summer, Summer, as horrifically cheesy as that sounds. I was just…dark before you came along.”

The panic was rising up, threating to blow me open, but I swallowed it. Instead I pulled into my driveway and opened my door to make the interior lights come on, lighting up the car. “Now you know how I feel,” was my only response.

He kissed me on the cheek and walked to his car. I hurried to my bedroom and slammed the door, too dazed to think anything other than Cooper Cooper Cooper Unclimbable Cooper. In my haste to get ready for bed – or at least several hours of lying in my bed, swimming in my thoughts – I shifted my portable speaker looking for my phone charger and knocked Saviour’s book to the floor, which Cooper had leant me after I’d lost my copy in the depthless pit of doom that was my car. When I cursed and bent to pick it up, my eyes fell on a single sheet of paper on the floor, which I guess had fallen out of the book. I grabbed it and crawled into bed, noticing once again how awful Cooper’s handwriting was. It was obviously something he’d only meant for himself to see, and so like the terrible beast I am, I read it immediately:

 

So. The world kinda sucks, and sometimes it’s important to remind yourself of stuff that makes your soul feel young and alive, because when you hit about twenty, The Feels start to die and your heart goes numb and you sort of forget what you’re breathing for. And in my opinion, it’s important to seek out ways to resurrect those Feels from time to time just so you don’t become depressed and end up, like, killing a bunch of people in a mall or whatever. So, in no particular order, here are the REASONS FOR COOPER NICHOLS TO BE HAPPY AND FEEL STUFF AND NOT MURDER HIMSELF AND/OR OTHERS:

 

• Nutella
• Pancakes
• Nutella pancakes
• July
• Florida
• July in Florida
• Country ham
• Good music + good beer + good people
• Netflix and a couch while the late afternoon rain rolls in
• The way I can still perfectly remember the theme song from Zelda, my favorite childhood video game, even though I haven’t heard it in years
• The fact that I know enough about life to know how important it is to hold onto that memory with everything in me
• That thrill you get the night before leaving for a big trip
• A day of fishing under the pier with nothing to do but a bait bucket to empty and a sunset to wait for
• The unpopped kernels at the bottom of the popcorn bag
• The fact that I’m gonna be a dad one day, and have a doctor hand me a baby and tell me it’s all mine
• My mom, and the way I feel when I’m around her. Like I’ll always have a place there
• My sweet Hadley
• Sweet tea, and grits, and driving through long country roads surrounded by open fields on a Sunday morning, and the South in general
• That thing that happens when you think you’ve forgotten how to feel, and then the feeling comes back
• The thing that makes the feeling come back

 

And then, at the bottom of the page, an additional few lines had been added in a different-colored ink:

 

Post-Summer Addendum:

 

• Her
• Her doe eyes
• The way she looks at me
• The way I feel when her doe eyes look at me
• The fact that she’s making the feeling come back

 

As a growing buzz roared in my ears I looked out of my window and stared at the pale pink roses blooming in my front yard, their petals glowing rose gold in the burning sunset, and that’s when I realized I couldn’t run from it any longer. The impossible had happened.

There comes a time in every relationship when you look over at the other person and suddenly realize: this could break me. You look into their eyes and feel the ancient lonely bones within yourself start to rearrange and shift into something new and golden and thrilling and good, and you know that this person has sunken into you, perhaps irrevocably, and that their happiness is now intertwined with your happiness, possibly forever. And right then you realize there will be no turning back from this, whatever “this” is, because to send them off into the night now would wreck you. And tonight, sitting in the car in front of my house, I felt myself reach that moment – and it scared the living shit out of me. Because the Me he knew, the Me I felt him falling for more and more every day, was a lie. Quite simply, she did not exist. And I had no Earthly idea what to do about it.

A very long time ago I had decided the world was generally a bad place and subsequently locked my soul away for good, figuring the only way to avoid being broken by this cold cruel planet was to turn myself off and drift unfeelingly through the icy meadows until death came, whenever it would come. But all at once, Cooper was making me come alive again – and that wasn’t good. Because we were building a palace on pebbles, and every passing moment was just another moment closer to when it could all fall down. No matter how much my brain had told my heart to run away and save him from my fate, I had let myself drown in Cooper Nichols. Shelly was right: now that he was drowning in me, I needed to get out of fantasy mode and fix this mess before my dream collided with reality and exploded like fireworks in the summer sky.