20
We drove an hour straight to my hospital, back to where this had all started. Dr. Steinberg was eating dinner downtown when we arrived, so to stabilize me they immediately admitted me and wrapped so many bandages around my midsection I looked like an Egyptian mummy. When Steinberg got there I was put to sleep and they performed an endoscopy, and I awoke the next morning to some bad news. I was basically okay, but I’d done way too much in St. Augustine, apparently, and some internal bleeding originating from my stomach had set off a chain reaction, and…the result was not good. Dr. Dill was being called to Florida, and my surgery was being moved up. I now had thirty-six hours until the Hail Mary. So much had been accomplished with Cooper in St. Augustine, and yet I felt like it had all been wiped away in a moment again, sending us back to square one. So it goes, right?
They dressed my stomach tube with bandages again and sent me home for two nights. Cooper drove me to Shelly’s, wracked with guilt all the while. Obviously my latest setback wasn’t his fault, but he wouldn’t listen. Still, he kissed me quietly in the driveway under the oaks before heading back to his mom’s, saying he wanted to give me time alone with my family, which I understood. I spent the rest of the day at home with them. My dad dropped by from Orlando and sort of awkwardly sat there making the smallest of small talk for a few hours while Chase played video games and my mom and my aunt silently glared from the kitchen. Shelly’s much older half-sister, Susan, didn’t have much going on in her life, and we’d sort of absorbed her as part of my family since she was a divorcee with no children of her own. Ever since my parents’ split she had shown her sisterly support by hating the shit out of my dad, and it struck me as a weird and awkward and selfish thing to do around me. Divorce: another thing that sucked almost as much as health problems. Why did I always have to feel like the only adult in the room, again? Why couldn’t Aunt Kathryn, my dad’s sister who was totally normal and respectable and dignified, have come instead? Ugh.
I ended up passing out on the couch while everyone watched Home Alone for some reason, and the day before my surgery arrived bright and humid, just like any other day, except it wasn’t any other day. Not to me, at least. My pierced stomach was in knots from the second I woke in a panicked sweat at six in the morning. I wanted to make time slow down, but I was in such a panicked cloud of anxiety, nothing would work. I was on a collision course with fate, and there would be no jumping off this train, wherever it was headed.
At around ten most of the Anti-Support Group showed up and congregated in the dining room with my mom and Susan while different members came up to see me one by one. One last meeting, I guess. Because the whole surgery process had been sped up so majorly, things felt pretty thrown-together, but still, I think people knew what they had to do.
First to approach me was Hank, the one-armed veteran.
“So, I hear the chances may not be great,” he said, in lieu of a greeting.
“They are certainly not astounding, no.”
“Yeah,” he said. “This is really shitty.”
“I know. Life’s just shitty sometimes, until it’s not life anymore, I guess.”
“Uh-huh. Listen, I want you to have something.” He took a short, rusted, jagged piece of metal out of his pocket. “Um, I know this might sound weird or whatever, but this a piece of shrapnel they removed from my shoulder after my truck drove over an IED, and, uh, I wanted you to have it.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it. “Um, thanks, Hank, but…why?”
“Because you saved my life,” he said simply.
“I…what?”
“Six months ago I had a plan to kill myself,” he said flatly as he stared down at me. “I was going to tie a cinder block around my ankles and jump off the end of the pier at night. I had the block, the rope, everything. And then I met you in Publix that day and you invited me to the group, and everything changed. You were the only person in my life who ever listened to me, Summer. The only one. Everyone else fell away, got sick of listening to me complain, whatever, which I kind of understood, but then I found you, and you sat there and listened to me pour my broken heart out every Thursday – in my own way, at least. Anyway, feeling like you’re being heard is a huge thing for a person. The hugest, probably. I can’t even…yeah.”
I shuddered, and he continued. “Anyway, you were the only person who made me feel like I mattered, and you made me decide to stay. So, because you saved me, I thought I’d give you the thing that almost killed me, because you need to know that people can overcome things – because you will overcome this surgery. I know it. Oh,” he added, “and I also wanted to give it to you because I’m kind of in love with you?”
He’d added on that last part so casually, I almost hadn’t noticed it. I sort of squirmed a little and then reached up to hug him, whiplashed. He returned the hug, perhaps a little too enthusiastically.
“Oh, uh, thank you, Hank!” I said as I sort of patted him on the shoulder with one hand and took the shrapnel with the other. “Thanks so much. God, I don’t even know what to say, that was all so nice of you to share with me. And thanks for this, um…shrapnel?”
“No problem,” he said. “Oh, and Summer?”
“Yeah?”
“Tell that pretty boy from the meeting to take good care of you, because if he doesn’t, I would love to in his place.”
“I’ll tell him,” I nodded through a fake smile as he turned and went back to the kitchen.
Kim wheeled up after that.
“Well look at us now,” I said as she stopped beside me, motioning at our chairs. “We match. We’re wheelchair sisters now.”
“I love it,” she laughed in her high-pitched voice. “Speaking of that, this is for you.” She reached into her purple purse and took out a small vanity mirror.
“Um, thanks,” I said as I took it. “But a mirror? What is this for?”
“I don’t need it anymore,” she said. “You know, before the Anti-Support Group, I used to sit in my house all day staring into that thing, hating how I looked, hating my whole life and stuff. But after I met you, I stopped. You listened to me, and you introduced me to friends, and you were the only person who ever made me feel pretty. I mean, I get compliments, but fake ones. Everyone else talks down to me like I’m a little puppy because of the wheelchair and everything. But you’re the only person who talks to me like I’m an actual person, not some charity case, and makes me feel like I’m really loved by someone. My parents don’t even make me feel like you do, Summer. I’m really glad I met you. Really. And just know this: whatever happens now, wherever you go, I’ll be waiting.”
“Oh, Kim.”
I leaned over and wrapped my arms around her bony body. Sometimes words weren’t enough. Just hugs.
The younger members came and went, unable to really say much about my situation, which was fine. Last to come over was Autumn, which was a relief, since I knew there would be no waterworks with her. I lit up as she threw her arms around me.
“Hey, bitch,” she said as she sat on the coffee table and crossed her legs. “Good to see you again. Hope you had fun in St. Auggy. And sorry for, you know, nearly ruining your one great chance at love, or whatever that whole thing was.”
“Yeah, about that…not your best moment.”
“Ugh, I know. My mom had literally just told me that morning, and when I ran into Cooper, I just kind of…lost it. But honestly, it’s not my journey to comment on, and I should’ve kept my nose out of it, as usual. Whoops. Sorry again.” She rested a hand on my knee and let out a long, dramatic sigh. “So, the shy girl used Spark to land the hottie after all. I still can’t believe it. What was it like? What happened after I blabbed and it all fell down? Was that, like, real the other night, or were you just acting like you weren’t mad at him to be polite?”
I stared out of the window at my cat as she chased around a lizard in the bushes, just trying to get by in this too-big world. I breathed for a moment and pictured that night of chaos in the garage – the night he’d finally let me in.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I had this vision of him as some knight on a horse, this outrageously perfect boy who never got it wrong or stepped out of line.” I tried to hold in the tears. “And then he had that meltdown, and dropped all the cheesy, affected lines and everything, and I got to know the real Cooper a little bit better, and let me tell you…the reality of him was so much better than that. The version of him I found under that façade was even better than anything I knew before. The way he stuck with me in the hospital, the way he took me off for that little vacation…ugh. Maybe I should thank you, actually.”
She started crying, and I followed suit. I’d been wrong: there would be waterworks.
“God, look at us,” she finally said, “we’re a mess. All I came here to do was say thanks for dealing with all of us losers every Thursday in the group.”
“You’re not losers,” I laughed with wet eyes. “Because if you are, then I’m, like, below loser status, and I don’t even know what that is. Part-time Taco Bell employee, maybe?”
She laughed her big, goofy laugh that made me feel like a teenager in a mall again.
“Listen,” she said, “there is another thing. I know I’ve seen you, like, every day this summer, and will probably see you again before surgery, but since bringing a present has become, like, ‘a thing’ today and all, I wanted to give you something, too, since I am nothing but a brainless lamb who also uses too many run-on sentences. Hold on.”
She walked to the foyer and then brought back a garment bag. “So,” she said as she lifted something pink out of the bag, “like, I know I always complain about not having a fiancé or whatever, and God knows I’m not any closer to getting engaged. Like, at all. I’ve had one date lately, come to think of it, and the guy literally left the bar early because I wouldn’t stop asking him what he wanted to name his firstborn, which wasn’t exactly the best first-date behavior on my part, looking back on it. But anyway, whatever happens with the surgery, I just wanted to make sure you’ll still be a bridesmaid at my wedding, if it ever happens, God willing. Because I am a psychopath, I already picked out my bridesmaids dresses years ago, and yesterday I got one for you.” She held up the dress. Pale pink and floaty, it was actually bereft of the Ugly Curse that seemed to befall most bridesmaid dresses, and it was actually kind of pretty. “So, Summer,” she said, “whatever happens tomorrow, will you take this, and will you still be in my wedding?”
“I would love to be in your completely theoretical wedding,” I said as I laughed through the tears falling from my eyes and took the dress. “There would be no greater theoretical honor.”
“Awesome!” she beamed. “And I promise not to get too emotional during the vow exchange, I know how you hate cheesy stuff. I’ll keep it to, like, three crying sessions, I promise.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And Autumn?”
“Yeah?”
“I forgive you for the Cooper thing. Really. I don’t want to be on a bad note with you, or whatever.”
“Good,” she said as she kissed my forehead. “And I’m sorry, once again, for being such a drunken, big-mouthed bitch.”
“All is forgiven. But, actually: one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Please go talk to Hank and distract him,” I said as I threw a glance over at the dining table. “He’s basically raping me with his eyes right now, and I really have to call my Uncle Earl and pretend like I remember what the hell his homemade pepper sauce tastes like, so…yeah. I need a break.”
She cast a flirty look over at Hank. “Wait – you mean he’s horny?” she asked, a new light in her eyes. “Maybe I should go investigate this. Besides that whole one-armed thing, he really is kinda cute. I’ve always liked depressed bad boys, after all.”
“Okay, you did not just say that. Are you really trying to pick up a dude at our final goodbye session?”
She ignored me and pranced toward the dining room with a determined smile on her face.
Night came at light speed, and soon it was time for my last supper, or maybe-not-last supper, or whatever this was. Dr. Steinberg had arranged for Last Great Hope to send me out to dinner, and I’d decided on this place called Ruth’s Chris in Ponte Vedra, the fancy part of my city. This was both because I’d really liked steak on the few occasions I’d been able to swallow pieces of it, and also because I wanted to go to the most expensive restaurant I could think of and hit up Last Great Hope for all they had. (My own little way of getting revenge on the world, I guess.) And I instantly knew who I wanted to go with.
Of course, Shelly really didn’t want me to leave and begged me to spend every possible moment with her, but I overruled her. In the end she relented and helped me get into my dress for the night, this golden thing I’d worn to my senior prom. I’d gone with a group of girls I barely knew who had invited me out of pity, and the whole thing was awful and miserable, but hey, at least I’d gotten a good dress out of it. After Shelly did my makeup she stood back and tried to figure out what to do with my hair. It was basically falling out in clumps now since my damaged stomach wasn’t digesting any nutrients from the milk, and what did remain was dry and brittle as a bone left out in the sun. So Shelly decided to just grease it and put it in a bun, and when she was done she wheeled me over to the mirror to see how I looked.
“Oh my God, you’re a vision!” she cried. We both tried not to notice how sunken in my eyes were, and how obviously the dress hung off my skeletal frame, and how I was aging at warp-speed. We both failed.
Cooper was late, which was unusual for him, and so I buried my attention in my phone and pulled up Facebook to shamelessly search for validation see who was pregnant, who was engaged, and who was going nowhere fast like me. The comments had been pouring in for days, because when Shelly Johnson is involved with something word travels quickly, and I clicked on my notifications to see if anyone had said anything new. There was only one comment, from me and Autumn’s old high school art teacher, a sweet older lady who had become sort of a mentor to us over the years:
So sorry about your health setback. Jim & I have been praying nonstop. Remember that in art, the brightest colors always show up next to the darkest lines. Your brightest shades are on the way, sweetie. Blessings & Love, Miss Patti.
I responded with a short little comment underneath, trying and failing to believe in her polite sentiment. I had just as good a chance at never seeing color again as I did at swimming in the stupid shades of the rainbow, and I knew it. Then I went to another messaging app and signed in under my username, arbitraryonlineusername. I found a message from Scott, this guy from school that I’d “talked to” for two minutes last year before he’d ditched me for some bimbo named Chrissy:
Hey, sorry we haven’t spoken in a while. I’ve been so busy with work and everything, you know how it is. Anyway, I heard from my neighbor about what happened, and I’m really sorry. I would say good luck, but you’re a warrior and you’re gonna be fine. Thinking of you. Bye.
I went back to Facebook and clicked on his profile. He wasn’t busy with work, he was busy getting engaged. And his bride-to-be looked like a total nightmare, staging cheesy photo shoots for every single wedding-related event. They’d even held an elaborate photo op just to capture them putting their save-the-date notices into the mailbox. Gag.
Suddenly I was interrupted by Aunt Susan throwing open the front door and saying a few words to someone I couldn’t see. Then she looked back at me and scream-whispered, “Sum, a boy’s here for you! A hot boy!”
“Susan!” my mom scolded.
“What? He’s gorgeous!”
“Let him in then, and don’t say a word to him!”
Susan smirked and then stood aside. Cooper walked in, his gorgeousness dampened temporarily by confusion, looking like a kitten that had just stumbled into a lion’s den. I instinctively sat taller in my wheelchair and fussed with my hair.
“Uh, hi there, ma’am,” he told Susan. “I’m, uh, Cooper. A good friend of Summer’s.”
“Hi,” Susan breathed, batting her lashes. “I’m Susan. Her aunt. Her very young aunt.”
“Um, hi. Nice to meet you, Summer’s Very Young Aunt.”
He greeted my mom quietly but politely and then made his way over to me. There he was, all six feet whatever of him, dressed in a black suit that didn’t quite fit him that well, a red tie with white stripes, and a bouquet of pink flowers. But he was still gorgeous. Too gorgeous for the broken girl in front of him, and we all knew it. He was strong and I was weak and he was beautiful and I was scarred and he was captivating and I was unremarkable, and that had never been more apparent than now. It all fed into this fear I think all girls have, this irrational little voice that says, Sure, my guy wants me now that we’re twenty and I look okay in a bikini, but what the fuck’s going to happen when we’re fifty and I look like shit and he’s George Clooney? My situation was just sped-up: here I was, aging at light speed, decaying in front of his eyes, and here he was, apparently as devoted as ever. I could not comprehend it, so I didn’t even try.
His face lit up when he saw me, giving me the fireworks I’d missed on the Fourth. Every time he looked at me was a thrill. Still. Even after all this.
“You look…I can’t. Hi, Summer.”
“I guess ‘I can’t’ is a good thing?” I asked.
“A great thing. A wonderful thing. And oh, shoot, I forgot something. Hold on.”
He disappeared outside again and then returned behind a sleek, expensive-looking wheelchair that he’d painted this icy, silvery shade of blue. It even said SUMMER-MOBILE on the seat in his terrible handwriting. “This is for you. My mom didn’t need it anymore,” he blushed, “so I grabbed it and, like, painted it for you, or whatever. I know you like that shade of blue.”
“Wait, how?” I asked in disbelief. Transparent blue was my favorite color, because it was the color of the sky just before the sun rose and immediately after it set. It reminded me that whatever you were dealing with in the present, you had survived your past and had no choice but to face your future, so you’d might as well square your shoulders, chill the fuck out, and deal with what life has put in front of you.
“Um, I don’t know. Your phone case and your comforter are both ice blue, I guess?”
I ran my hand along the wheel as tears burned my eyes. Here was the knight I’d never believed in, steering a wheelchair instead of a white horse, but still – he was here, and I was a believer.
“Cooper, it’s…amazing. I’m gonna be the most stylin’ wheelchair lady in town,” I laughed, trying not to cry. “Can you help me get in it? I’m sweating like crazy in this vinyl hospital contraption.”
After some maneuvering, he lifted me by the armpits and set me down gently in the chair. It was embarrassing, but I didn’t say anything. It’s not like I had any dignity left to lose after that hospital stay and St. Augustine trip, anyway. This chair was much less clunky than the hospital chair and much easier to push, not that he let me push myself, anyway. As he led me to the foyer I tried not to think of how surprisingly strong he was, and of how good his hands felt on me, and of how much I already missed his touch.
“Shall we?” he asked.
“We shall.”
“Hold on, Mr. Nichols,” my mom said. They’d apparently bonded in waiting rooms and hallways during my bout of unconsciousness after the Fourth, and lately she couldn’t go an hour without mentioning him. I could tell she was afraid of what would happen to him if the surgery failed, but what could she do? She was powerless against his charms, just like everyone on Earth, basically.
“Yes?” he asked, and she called him over and started whispering to him.
“Set a good example, please. Don’t eat too fast or too much in front of her. She needs to pace herself or she’ll be sick all night.”
“Oh, wouldn’t dream of being insensitive about her eating issues, Ms. Johnson,” Cooper said loudly as he winked over at me. “The guilt would just eat me alive. I’d never be able to swallow all that.”
“He literally wouldn’t be able to stomach hurting my feelings,” I chimed in. “I’m going to stand on my own two legs today, I don’t need guidance.”
“But if you ever need a leg up,” he said, “I’ll be right beside you.”
Shelly stared at us for the moment and then shook her head and walked into the kitchen. “Whatever. You two are seriously weird.”
We left my leering Aunt Susan at the little kitchen table and headed into the sticky night.
We valeted his car at the restaurant, which was a first for me. It took super long for Cooper to lift me out of the seat and lower me into the wheelchair, and we tipped the guy a little extra for waiting. There were no hostesses around, so Cooper held open the door for me and sort of awkwardly maneuvered me through the doorway with one hand. He was so attentive. Ruth’s Chris looked just like any other fancy restaurant, dark and sleek and quiet, with big windows that overlooked a lake and a highway. After we sat at a table near those aforementioned windows, someone showed up with a bottle of Rosé out of nowhere, and we smiled and accepted it.
“So,” Cooper said after we settled in, a foreboding sense of finality settling over our little table. This was it. There would be no more days at the beach for us; no more St. Augustine getaways. Fate had contracted our time together before the surgery to this one final night, and whatever I didn’t tell him tonight would perhaps never get said at all.
“So,” I said, figuring I’d start with the easy stuff.
“Yeah. God, I can’t even believe we’re here. Was it just me, or has this all come at light speed?”
“I know. It doesn’t even make sense.”
“What’s it like?” he asked quietly.
“To not eat?” I asked, motioning at the bread on the table. “I don’t know. Food to me is like the glass of water the waiter puts in front of you whenever you first sit at a table. You could drink some, or not, or whatever. That’s how I see food.”
“No,” he said with hesitant eyes, “to…to know…”
“Oh, to know that I might die in a day?”
His shoulders fell. “I mean, when you say it like that…”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “I mean, this situation isn’t fine, it’s royally fucked up, but your question was fine.”
“I hate to ask,” he said, “and I know you hate talking about stuff like this, but…I just want to know. Looking at you in that wheelchair, I feel so helpless, and I want to know so I can feel how you feel. I want to be right there with you. I wanna go there, too.”
“Hmm. Let me think.” I stared out of the window, comforted by the hum of the crowded restaurant. The day was winding down, giving me perhaps the last sunset I’d ever see. Something that was either an alligator or a large soft-shell turtle – you could never quite tell in Florida – sat on the muddy bank, and cars screamed by on A1A beyond it.
I finally turned to my beautiful Cooper. “First of all, that’s a moot point,” I said. “The first time I heard that song Live Like You Were Dying, I couldn’t roll my eyes hard enough. To live with the shocking, Earth-shattering news that you’re going to die one day? News flash: we’re all going to die one day, every single one of us, be it tomorrow or a century from tomorrow, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Might as well start living while you’re not dead, you know? And humans’ obsession with death baffles me anyway, because literally everyone dies the same way: your heart stops. A lot of different things can cause that, from cancer to old age to getting run over by an overweight bicyclist to Esophageal Intresia, but still, every human’s death certificate should say ‘cause of death: heart failure,’ since every death occurs because of a heart stopping. An Internet billionaire living in San Francisco, and Britney Spears, and that homeless guy at the end of your street? They’re all going to die in exactly the same way. What counts is what they did before that to make them different.”
“You’re different,” he said quietly. “No texts this time – I wanna say this face-to-face. You’re the most graceful person I’ve ever met.”
“Stop,” I told him. “Thanks, but stop. I don’t want to cry tonight.”
His eyes got sad. “Okay.”
“But to answer your death question,” I said, “well…okay. You know when you’re still asleep and you’re at the tail end of a dream, and on some level you know the morning has come and you need to wake up, but then you pull yourself under again to get some more sleep because you’re not ready to face the world yet?”
He nodded.
“This feels like that, but…backwards. That’s the only way I know how to explain it. My soul doesn’t want to acknowledge that it might be going to sleep soon. The whole ‘death’ thing is in the back of my mind, sure, but the rest of me doesn’t even want to consider it a possibility yet. So it still doesn’t seem that real. More sur-real than anything. And trust me, I’ve tried, but I still can’t really grasp it. Ugh, I don’t know – it’s all so hard to put into words.”
“Yeah,” he said as he looked down at the table.
“And also,” I said, my voice picking up, unable to shut my mouth, “I guess it’s all just kind of the same fear of the unknown that any other twenty-four-year-old feels, you know? I’m not that special. We all think about this stuff. Am I ever gonna find a job? Am I ever gonna get married? Am I ever gonna find a place in this world? Am I gonna die during stomach surgery tomorrow? In a weird way, it’s the same. It’s all, like, peering around a dark corner, terrified of what you’re gonna see, terrified to even begin imagining a future for yourself because you haven’t even figured out the present yet. My situation is just on steroids. All I can do is just deal with it and hope for a good outcome.”
“You’re my best friend,” he announced out of nowhere, his eyes wide and glassy and unblinking. I looked away.
“Stop. Not now. Not tonight. Put it in a text or something. I’ll cry.”
“You are so beautiful,” he continued, his voice catching in his throat. “You are so special and important and elegant and smart and kind and worthwhile, and you are so much better than me and everyone else I’ve ever known in every single way, and you are the only truth I have ever found in this lying world, and I love you to the floor of me, and it breaks me to imagine a future without you in it, and I just want you to know all that, just because.”
“Oh, Cooper.”
I just stared at him for a while before finally snapping out of it, shaking my head, and reaching for my glass. “I’m think I’m gonna need some more of that Rosé.”
“What are you thinking?” he asked a little while later, after our appetizers. I’d managed to eat a few bites of raw tuna despite Dr. Steinberg’s orders, and I was proud of myself for breaking the rules.
“I don’t know. I-”
We heard giggling and both looked over at the next table. A group of teen boys celebrating a birthday quickly looked away, their faces pink like my favorite roses that grew in my yard. I’d noticed them gawking earlier while Cooper had transferred me from my wheelchair into my seat, but they’d kept quiet until now.
“Hold that thought, I have to go to the bathroom,” Cooper said absently as he got up and set his napkin on the table. “Be right back.”
He didn’t come right back.
Where is he? I wondered after ten or fifteen minutes. At twenty-one minutes, a group of waiters appeared with a large cupcake adorned with long, fancy sparklers. Figuring it was something the hospital had set up, I smiled as big as I could.
“Happy engagement to you,” the waiters sang in the tune of the birthday song. “Happy engagement to you! Happy engagement dear Ashley, happy engagement to you!”
They all stared down at me, this little broken girl sitting at what might have been her last meal with the boy she loved, and I started crying. And that just made me even more upset, because I hated to be that chick who couldn’t control her emotions – but this level of humiliation was just beyond.
“I…I’m not engaged,” I said. “I’m not Ashley.”
Slowly they all exchanged horrified glances.
“Oh my God, we came to the wrong table,” one girl whispered, her mouth falling open. “This…this is the cancer girl from that hospital program.”
“Esophogeal Intresia!” I snapped, the girl’s words hitting me like a truck. “Get my life-threatening condition right if you’re going to mention it at all! Cancer is not the only malady in this world, you know!”
They all hung their heads, equal parts chastened and confused. The host looked down at his chart. “Oh my God – we were supposed to go to table eighty-four, not forty-eight.” He looked over at me as the others cringed. “We are so, so, so sorry. Oh, wow.”
“Oh,” another said, “we didn’t…we didn’t know…”
“We’ll comp your meal,” the host said quickly.
“It’s already been comped,” I told him.
“Then we’ll…we’ll make it up to you somehow. Oh, God. Sorry. So sorry.”
They all turned and crossed the room, and I watched as they waved the same exact sparklers and sang the same exact song for this blonde girl who clapped her hands to the beat and jumped up in her seat so everyone could see, her fiancé watching with a politely mortified smile. I wanted to escape this horror show, but I knew I couldn’t get to the wheelchair alone – Cooper had already parked it in a back hallway – and so I just sat there and sort of stared down at the table, alone as I ever was.
What a joke. What a fucking joke. As if I hadn’t been marginalized enough in the eyes of society with my scar and my stomach tube, why not add a wheelchair, a desperate wish for marriage, an embarrassed boyfriend, and a death sentence to the equation? And if I did die, I wouldn’t even get the chance to leave behind a little blonde-haired baby girl like Steinberg’s girlfriend had. There would be no last-minute miracles for me. My life was a joke and everyone knew it, and I would be totally forgotten the minute I left this place.
I didn’t even care if God was real or not anymore – I hated him just the same.
Finally Cooper returned with a muffled apology about his grandma calling him in the hallway and talking his ear off.
“What’s wrong?” he asked as he sank into his seat. I couldn’t explain, so I just glared at my plate, which was empty because I couldn’t fucking eat. He looked over at the girl celebrating with her stupid engagement cupcake.
“Oh, no, I’m so sorry,” he said. “That’s really insensitive of her to celebrate in front of you like that.”
“No, it’s not,” I said, looking up. “She doesn’t even know who I am. She doesn’t know why we’re here tonight.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
I wanted to make Cooper hurt as much as I hurt, and so I told him what had happened, right down to every humiliating detail. I wanted to twist the knife and watch it cut him just like it had cut me. When I finished he just stared down at his feet, and instead of feeling vindicated, I just felt like a stupid asshole.
“That’s terrible. I’m sorry I left and abandoned you,” he said finally. “I…I hate when people look at us.”
“Oh, so now you finally admit you’re embarrassed?” I asked, anger winning out over goodness once again. “Why not do it a month ago and save yourself the trouble?”
He made this sound like he was sucking air in a vacuum. “Summer…Summer. I wasn’t embarrassed. I was angry that people were looking at us, so I left, because I didn’t want to fight someone and ruin your night. Because I would have fought them, trust me.”
This just made me cry harder. He reached over the table and wiped a tear from my face, and in an attempt to stop crying, I smiled a little.
“Don’t be sad,” he said. “Don’t. You’re going to be fine. See, you’re smiling, it can’t be that bad.”
“No,” I said through gritted teeth. If love was the ultimate kaleidoscope, one glorious entity capable of refracting itself out into the world in the form of a million different emotions, the current one I was feeling was absolute rage. “I’m smiling because I’m miserable and I kind of hate you right now,” I told him. “I may be dying, but I am still a woman.”
He took back his hand. “Oh.”
I looked over at the engaged couple again as they took selfie after selfie. They were our age, perhaps even younger, and I started thinking about how different the blonde’s path was from mine. What I wouldn’t give to be worrying about bridesmaid gowns and cake tastings and venue options and lighting schemes instead of broken throats and leaky stomachs and major surgeries. I rolled my eyes as I imagined the Facebook posts that were no doubt going to be uploaded later tonight. Stupid bitch.
No, I told myself. No. Don’t think like that. I was being ridiculous. This girl had no clue that I even existed. She was simply a girl in love, following along with a society that told her to throw herself out there and get validation in the form of a big white wedding. I needed to take my own advice from the day of my surgery news and chill the fuck out.
“Let’s just run,” Cooper said after a while, a stubborn glint in his eyes. “We can still do it. Let’s just get away from all these monsters.”
“And…and what?” I asked. “Skip the procedure? Die in my sleep? I need this surgery, if you haven’t heard.”
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice cracking. “I…I just want to take us away. We’ll escape them and we’ll get away from here and we’ll make our own little heaven, just you and me, maybe forever, if you want.”
“Oh, Cooper,” I said, the hard ball of anger in my chest cracking a little as tears pressed against my eyes. “Isn’t it beautiful to think we could?”
Soon the manager arrived with a hundred-dollar gift certificate that I might never get to use. I took it with a scowl and looked outside just as a single crow took flight and disappeared into the low clouds.
Our last stop was the pier. Our pier. I didn’t know why, and it’s not like I could swim, but since I was so used to all of Cooper’s crazy ideas by now, I didn’t say anything. Just like the first night, he tipped his head at the guard, who gave us a sad smile and opened the gate. He wheeled me a little too fast, and going over the bumps on the old weathered boards was a little painful, but I didn’t complain. All I could think of was the sea, and how it gave me life, and how good my prince looked in the moonlight here in the tail end of this dream.
When we made it out the end we turned around and just looked at the general gorgeousness of a shimmering Jacksonville Beach for a while.
“Are you okay now?” he finally asked. “I don’t want you to be mad.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Sorry for flipping out. That was just, like, beyond mortifying.” I took a breath. “I’m fine now. You know what I was thinking, actually?”
“What?”
“Last time we came here, I remember looking at the apartment buildings along the water and thinking, ‘Man, I would hate to have their cleaning bills every time a hurricane came by and flooded everything.’ But tonight I looked out and thought ‘Shit, I’d love to have one of those apartments, how beautiful.’ I think these last few months have made me less of a pessimist – is that possible?”
“I guess it is,” he laughed, brushing me off, but I knew the truth. Yes, I was still dragged down by the horrors that went on in the world, and yes, there would probably always be a part of my soul that was dark with the knowledge that this life was unfair. But loving Cooper had wiped so much of that away. Love could fix a lot, it seemed.
Cooper looked over at me. “I want you to cry now, Summer.”
“What?”
“I want you to cry.”
“I heard that, but what are you talking about?”
He sighed. “You can say whatever you want, but I know you’re tired. I see how the world treats people sometimes. You are so brave to act so unaffected by it, and not just show it and get it out there. But it’s there. The sadness. I know it’s there. I could see it back in the restaurant. And I want you to get it out.”
I tried to ignore him, but suddenly I started shivering all over. Oh my God, he was so right: I was sad, as much as I tried to be in denial about it. Every time someone looked away from me or treated me a little differently or asked me who had slashed my face – I was sliced open by every word, and I carried that sadness down to my bones. I had never let myself acknowledge it, though. Not until now. Not until the chaos of the last few days had cracked me open like this.
I took Cooper’s hand and cried tears of ancient misery into the sea.
Twenty minutes later. The wind in my ears and nothing else.
“God, it’s so bizarre being here again,” he finally said. “Tell me, what did you think of me, when we first met?”
I fidgeted a little, my nose still running. “Basically, I was just thinking, Oh god oh God oh God this boy is thought-scatteringly hot oh God what do I do shit I’m gonna faint oh God.”
“I’ll accept that reaction,” he smiled.
“…And what did you think of me?”
He paused. “I don’t know. I thought you seemed like a good, genuine person, and after a while I started feeling like I was…I don’t know. Sinking into something.”
“Good,” I smiled after a few moments. “I was pretty sure I was acting like a psycho and you were all freaked out or something.”
“Never,” he said. “I’ve loved you since the moment I met you, Summer. I know that now. I just wish the world would give us a million more. And I think it will.”
We didn’t say anything for a while. But eventually he cleared his throat again.
“You know, I’m happy with the way I spent this summer, and it breaks my heart to think you don’t believe me when I say that. But are you happy with it, though? Did you do everything you wanted to do?”
I wanted to believe him, I really did, but I wasn’t so sure. “I think so,” I said. “I mean, I met you, didn’t I?”
A nervous smile flickered on his face. “Beyond that, I mean. If you had, like, a bucket list or whatever, what would be on it? Hypothetically speaking?”
“Oh, God,” I said as I leaned back. “That’s so weird to think about. I don’t even know. I’ve always thought about adopting a baby. But like, later in life, obviously.”
“Really? Why?”
I took a breath. “Well, the prospects of me ever carrying a baby to term and everything aren’t great. But if I can’t make a life, I’d still like to save one.”
He was silent again for a while.
“But that’s not all,” I continued. “I’d probably want to do all the stuff I’d never been able to do because of my health problems, too. And to live actively.” He gave me a weird look. “Well,” I explained, “when people talk about people with disab – I mean, about people like me – they tend to speak passively, or put the problem in front of the person. They’ll say ‘the wheelchair girl’ instead of ‘the girl in the wheelchair,’ ‘the cleft palate boy’ instead of ‘the boy with the cleft palate,’ etcetera. And that just feeds into something I decided very early on – I never wanted to let my problems define me. I wanted to put them out there and then just forget about them. So many people let the circumstances of their lives drag them down – they let the world happen to them. But I wanted to happen to the world.”
“You happened,” Cooper said. “Trust me, you happened. What else do you want?”
“To shine,” I admitted with a nod. “I feel so gross admitting that, but it’s true. To be noticed. To be seen. To have grown up the way I did, to sit and watch everyone else breeze past me and fall in love and get married and the rest…it made me feel so small, so unnoticed, like nobody would care that I was ever alive.”
I looked over at him. “But I was so wrong, Cooper. The way you’ve loved me…you know, we’ve posted zero selfies, uploaded no Instagram pictures, and yet I am so happy with the way you’ve loved me. I don’t care if anyone sees this. This is real.”
He frowned, his fresh scent catching my nostrils in the wind. There were still so many things I wanted to know about him. What lived under those chocolate eyes?
“What is it?” I asked.
“I just…like. I don’t know. I don’t like to hear you talking like that, Summer. Even if the worst does happen and it all goes dark, you’ll…people will…”
He wiped a tear off his cheek and jumped up. “Speaking of colors, I wanted to remind you of something.”
He walked over to the railing and started pulling on a rope that was tied to a post. Soon he procured a bucket that had been submerged in the ocean.
“Sorry I was a little late picking you up today, but I had preparations to make,” he said as he lugged the bucket over and dropped it in front of me. “Since you couldn’t go in the ocean, I thought I’d bring the ocean to you. Take off your shoes and put your feet in.”
“Are you serious?”
“Totally.”
I slid off my shoes and dipped my feet into the perfectly cool water. Sure enough, the bucket lit up with the beautiful blue-green glow of the plankton.
“You glow, Summer,” he smiled. “You’re glowing. Still. Even in that wheelchair, you’re still so beautiful to me.”
“I’m glowing,” I breathed as I looked down into the bucket with endless and timeless wonder.
After that we just sat there for a while, enjoying the universe. It was a little cloudier than I would’ve wanted, and the breeze was a little chilly, but the moon was almost full and the light on the water was so beautiful.
“True or false,” I said, thinking back to our first Spark date, when he’d said the same thing to me. “True love lasts forever.”
“Ugh, do we really have to go there?”
“Excuse me for having it on my mind under these circumstances. And besides, that weird old dude at the Oak Tree of Love got me thinking.”
“Okay,” he said after a while. “Okay. Ugh, you know, I’ll never forget when my grandmother died. I mean, I’ll remember it for obvious reasons, but there was more than that. She had really bad Alzheimer’s and she declined for a long time, and by the time she had a stroke and the end was coming, she was literally a vegetable, lying there with no clue what was going on. But even during all that, my grandpa never left her room, and he only ever called her ‘his bride.’ Like, even as she lay there dying, he’d say things like ‘where’s my bride? Has anyone seen my little bride?’ and stuff. Yeah, it was tough. So then she had a bigger stroke and they called us to the hospital the day she started shutting down, and as her breathing slowed and she started taking her last gasps of air, my grandpa leaned in and whispered, ‘I was so lucky to have you.’ Even after all that, even after years of her having Alzheimer’s and staring up at the ceiling and not knowing how to eat or talk or fucking breathe sometimes, he was still grateful. It blew my fucking mind.”
I was crying now. Again. But I didn’t try to stop this time.
“I’m sorry, I’m not trying to make you sad, Sum. But I definitely think love can conquer death. I mean, words are energy, and who’s not to say that my grandfather’s words – and his love – aren’t reverberating out there in the universe somewhere right now, finding new life in some star a million galaxies away, giving new love to some alien couple sitting on an alien pier on their alien planet?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The odds of soul mates and everything, it just doesn’t-”
“You talk about odds?” he interrupted. “Us seven billion humans weren’t even supposed to happen according to you, remember, Mrs. ‘Life is an Accident?’ My grandparents, us, nobody. The word ‘fate’ comes from an old Latin word meaning ‘it is spoken,’ but who spoke it? Where’s the proof that someone made us happen like this? And what were the odds of us happening? Nothing, and nada. We are a brilliant little series of happy accidents – you taught me that. So, humans appeared on a watery rock spinning around a ball of flames suspended in the middle of an endless ocean of nothing, and yet you still tell me you don’t believe in a miracle like the idea of soul mates? If all that can happen, and all these weird wonderful humans can accidentally pop up on a little blue ball spinning in the dark, can’t you find your one and only true love? Seems like small potatoes in the scheme of things.”
I didn’t say anything. Soon he punched the wooden deck.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just wish there was someone whose ass I could kick over all this,” he said. “I mean, there’s a villain in every story, you know? At least I could blame a disease, like Alzheimer’s, with my grandma. But there’s no bad guy in your story. There’s nobody to fight.”
“Oh, but there is,” I said. “Life. Life is our villain.”
“What?”
“You know, car crashes don’t kill us. Cancer doesn’t kill us. Esophageal Intresia doesn’t kill us. Life kills us. We all die in the game of life. Every one of us. It’s a game of numbers and we all lose in the end. That’s why we need to get to winning while we’re still here, and bla bla bla, I am impossibly full of clichés, so sue me.”
“I guess,” he finally said, taking a deep breath.
“Random question, but have you ever been in love before, Cooper?”
“No,” he sighed. “Never been in love. I mean, I thought I’d come close, but no. Nothing compares to…this. To us.” He looked over and rested an arm on my wheelchair. “To you. I’m just…stuck in you, Summer.”
We stared out at the water again. I was shocked at the amount of affection that could flow between us sometimes. We just…got each other, I guess. He was on my team.
“Why do you ask? Have you?”
“Psh. Obviously, no,” I said. “There were a few little things that happened here and there, but never love. I actually got dumped by this one guy before we even became official. I didn’t even know that was possible. It was a disaster. He said we was too busy with work and stuff to date anyone, but at a dinner party I overheard him telling his friend that he was basically repulsed by me and only talked to me out of pity.”
“And when he confessed his undying love for men, were you surprised?”
“Stop! It was fine. When he sent me the text saying he wanted his space or whatever, he used this excuse that he ‘didn’t think I was smart enough for him,’ and so I just looked up at the award I’d gotten in seventh grade for winning Florida’s statewide spelling bee and felt nothing at all.”
He stared at me. “See, that’s the difference between you and everyone else. Any other person would’ve torn into him. But you’re different. You operate on a higher plane.”
“Whatever,” I said again. How was it that he believed in me so thoroughly? How did I tell him that he made me feel so brave, I could just get out of my wheelchair and run out into a storm in my best dress and dance in the rain like an idiot? “Cooper, I didn’t…I didn’t know what love was until you. I didn’t know how to feel until I met you.”
“Wow, that gives me some strange sort of satisfaction,” he said, and I pulled in my legs and wrapped my arms around my knees. I was always cold these days. “What’s your biggest regret?” he asked next.
“Not meeting you sooner,” I said, and he smiled. “And also, like…”
“What? Tell me!”
“It’s stupid, but once again, I feel like I was never really heard. Like, I was always marginalized because of the scar and stuff, and I never felt like my voice mattered. You have no idea how isolating it was – there was just this barrier between the world and me, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was so hard to compete against all the Facebook girls with their weddings and everything, with my…situation I had going on. But that’s all stupid stuff.”
“No it’s not,” he said. “Stop talking like that. You’ll be heard, no matter what happens. Trust me. And I have sort of a good feeling about this, anyway. You’re young and strong – relatively, at least. This’ll just be a bump on the road.” He swallowed.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to believe him. “You’re right. I’ll be fine.”
“Wow, so you’re not such a defeatist after all!”
“Wait – really? Do you really think I’m a defeatist?”
He shook his head. “No. I was kidding. I think you are honest, and I think realism is the best armor anyone could ever give themselves in this fucked-up world.”
“Okay, good.”
Suddenly a pair of lovebugs landed by my hand, and I smiled as I watched them cavort with each other – until I realized what was actually going on. They weren’t playing at all, but one of them was hurt, and the other was struggling to get it flying again, and the effort was dragging both of them down.
I looked over at Cooper. “And one more thing,” I told him. “I appreciate you sticking with me after that night in the garage more than words can explain, but still, I am so sorry about this summer. I am so sorry for doing…all of this to you. When you matched with me on that app you thought you were signing up for a summer romance by the sea, and it has been anything but that. I’m sorry.”
“Stop,” he said, but the insistence in his voice sounded flimsy somehow. “Stop. You’re going to be fine, and you’ve done nothing to me, and-”
“No, I’m serious,” I interrupted. “If I could go back and un-download that app and undo all of this to you, undo me to you, I think I would.”
“So we’re still on this subject, huh?” he asked after a pause. “We’re really back to this again? You think I regret falling in love with you?”
I chewed on my lip. “I don’t see many other scenarios.”
He leaned back and let out a long breath. “Your parents’ marriage,” he said. “You liked when they were married, right?”
I stared out at the moonlit sea as the halcyon scenes of my parents’ marriage suddenly stretched out before me, shimmering like the luminous waves. Oh, God, did I miss those days. I’d been thinking about them a lot lately, actually. In my mind’s eye I suddenly saw my parents as the people they’d used to be, before the drifting and the separate bedrooms and the harsh words that would pass over the dinner table. I saw them holding hands during Disney World weekends in July; I saw them stealing glances into each others’ eyes at the pool on Labor Day when they were supposed to be babysitting the neighborhood kids; I saw them kissing in the rows of firs under the Christmas tree tent in the Big Lots parking lot while I giggled with my friends and pretended to be grossed out but secretly shivered with the gleeful, dazzled bravery that can only be felt by a young child of two people lost in deep love. Those times were gone, and I was no longer that little girl with Daddy and Mommy at her side, but the memories remained, and whenever I felt lost in the waves of the world I would sometimes find myself clinging to those scenes with everything in me.
“I mean, yes, obviously,” I whispered.
“And you’re a little mad at the world about how things went down, and you kinda wish they could’ve remained happy and stayed together, right?”
“More than anything,” I breathed.
“And did their eventual divorce make your moments as a happy, whole family any less special? Do those childhood memories blaze any less brightly in your mind because of your anger about how they ended?”
“No,” I said, “but-”
“There is no ‘but,’ Summer. You created one perfect little summer for me, and I’m grateful, and I’m gonna take it with me, no matter what happens. This summer will remain. I promise.”
The wind whispered at our backs, and for the first time, I actually believed what he was saying, and felt a little better about everything. Another pause followed, and then: “Cooper, do you think you’ll ever love again, if…if?”
“Stop,” he said, the muscles in his neck tensing. “Don’t even talk about things like that. That’s not gonna happen.”
I could tell the question troubled him, so I let it go. “You’re right,” I said as I shifted a little in my wheelchair, the breeze chilly on my neck. “You’re right.” There were so many more things I wanted to tell him, so many things I couldn’t put into words because he was still too gorgeous and I was still too awkward and this was still all too surreal, but I made a mental note of how to maybe fix that when I got home. Hiding behind a keyboard one last time wouldn’t kill anyone.
“But if anything does happen,” Cooper finally whispered into the July breeze from beside me, his voice a quiet prayer, “remember this: I’m gonna be your boyfriend forever, Summer Martin Johnson.”