28
We crept into the service fifteen minutes late and sank into foldable chairs at the very back of the overcrowded, musty-smelling hall. I guess because the crowd was so big, the service was running behind, too, and there was still a line waiting to see her. Summer didn’t want anyone to worry and had kept the surgery news pretty quiet, but still, little bits and pieces of information had trickled out to her extended family and friends over the past few months, so they’d known something was coming – but nobody had expected this. It was like we’d braced for a thunderstorm and gotten a blizzard instead. An air of quietly stunned confusion surrounded the random assortment of second cousins and distant friends and former neighbors as they stopped at the casket, awkwardly looked down at Summer’s remains, and said a few quiet words, looking totally unsure of themselves the whole time. I almost got up to say something when some blonde lady stopped at the casket and said what a shame it was that “Sarah” had died so suddenly “from her cancer,” but my mom grabbed my arm.
The funeral home people started to clear out the crowd and ask everyone to sit, and my stomach churned harder than ever as an organ started playing from the corner. I still didn’t know exactly what I was going to say, and how I was going to say it. The thoughts were swirling around in my head but I couldn’t stick them together in any way that made sense, and so I just stared at the edge of the casket, thinking about life, and how much I still loved her, and all the things she would never get to do, and all the things I would get to do, and how both of those things infuriated and devastated me all at once.
I noticed Kevin’s teenaged sister typing away on Facebook a few rows up, posting God only knew what in an attempt to drown out the noise. Noise, I thought. Just what were we drowning out? Why were we running from our human-ness and masking our beating hearts with Beats headphones? What was so wrong with, as Summer had put it, “living in the dark?” What was so good about shouting about yourself from the heavens? Did that really make your feelings deeper, your relationships more important, your life more vital? Why did my generation have to throw our lives under lights to make them feel real?
I thought of how poor Summer had always stuck earphones into her own ears to drown out what she herself was feeling: I am alone. I will die young and lonely, leaving zero obnoxious wedding posts to signify that I was here, since love seems to be my era’s main signifier of life. So upon hearing her diagnosis she’d finally fought against her instinct to isolate herself and had made one last dash to reach out and find love. In reality this was a rash and ill-thought-out decision, but at the time, it had made perfect sense. Not that I regretted her actions – I was hers and always would be – but not according to the standards of a society that demanded you tie up your love in a white ceremony in front of the world. Maybe I could rectify that, though.
When I was in the seventh grade, my favorite teacher ever, Mrs. Gregory, came up to me and told me the story I was writing was getting away from me. “Too many random things are happening,” she said, her red hair shining in the light from the windows facing the bus loop, “and you’re losing control. Take back the narrative, Cooper. Take charge. I know you can.”
Summer was dead. Her story had been written for her, her narrative overtaken by odds and ends and careless doctors. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t take back control of her story and write one final chapter. I knew she didn’t believe in happily ever after – it was the “after” portion that had always scared her – and yet here we were, After Summer, and it was time for the Ever part. Two out of three wasn’t bad. After all, who’d ever said that both parties needed to be alive for the “ever after” part to ring true?
My leg shivered with a gathering adrenaline as I sat in the back of that sweaty funeral hall. This wasn’t over. Not yet. Not until the fat lady sang. Not until the sad-eyed boy gave Summer her last speech.
After we listened to a hymn about walking through some flowery meadow or some bullshit, Autumn read So It Goes by Saviour, which just killed me. Pun intended: Summer liked dark humor. The poem, written for Saviour’s friend who had died of cancer at fifteen, went like this:
you are a
Dandelion wish
A prayer sent out into thin air,
a hymn that came back cold
A sunset sinking into treetops too early in the day,
blurring greenery
A whisper on the surface of time
all too brief.
you were
Love between bones:
dust to bone, bone to love, love to dust
as it came,
So it goes:
drenched in love.
Then some pastor dude said a few words about how she’d never stopped fighting and kept her dignity until the very end or whatever, which was all true, but still – bullshit. Then he asked the eulogizers to get ready. The first was Autumn, who told some funny stories about Summer’s past to try to lighten the mood. I guess she could be counted upon to do that. Then a few more people from Summer’s group came up, and after the one-armed army guy Hank started his speech by saying “Summer Johnson’s compassion saved my life,” I started crying too hard to listen, and focused my attention on a plastic tree in the corner until he stopped talking. After Hank was Kim, who had to have the microphone handed down to her because she couldn’t get up the stairs in her wheelchair. “Summer was the only person in the world who ever made me feel pretty,” she began, and then I stopped listening to her, too, because I was breaking inside.
But nothing could prepare me for Shelly. I hadn’t seen her since the day of the operation, but I’d heard she was in bad shape. She’d already lost a good deal of weight, and her skin was as pale as her whitish-pinkish dress, which I knew she’d worn because of Summer’s roses in her front yard. And I don’t know if this will sound mean or even make sense, but this was the first time I had seen her and thought that she looked like an adult.
She stopped at the podium and cleared her throat, her eyes sullen but determined.
“You know, a lot of people are angry today,” she began, sounding surprisingly strong. “A lot of people are frustrated. A lot of people are confused. My daughter’s death feels senseless. It feels random. It feels pointless. It feels like we are being manipulated by the world. But Summer of all people knew that sometimes the most senseless mistakes can teach us the most about the world, and about who we are in the world, and about what to do with who we are in the world.” A few people gasped.
“According to a good friend of mine who is going to be a very famous author one day, madness is going to strike,” she said, and that’s when I realized she was partly reading from Eighty Eight. She glanced at me, and I swore to God, I thought I saw her wink. I blushed, but when a few people in the crowd assumed she’d been talking about me and looked my way, I shook my head and listened in. This was Shelly’s moment.
“Things will fall apart,” she continued, “and you will get some bad letters in Scrabble and, hey, maybe your doctor will even put up the wrong chart before your surgery and kill you. But this is why you must start living today. People often fear the future until they realize the future is now, and that they are living in it. Time will come – that’s what it does. You can push against it, run from it, fight it like you fight the snooze button on a groggy morning, but still, it will run at you like it stole something. It’s how we react that counts. And damn it, my daughter made the most out of her short little life.”
She wiped her eyes as her voice cracked. Everyone waited for her to gather herself, and finally she glanced up at the ceiling one last time, as if pleading for Summer’s help, and then returned to her notes.
“Everyone is scarred on the way to adulthood, but my daughter had to wear her scars on the outside, and she wore them honestly and openly. She didn’t live long, but she did live wide, leaving no stone in the field of life unturned, and all of us in this room were touched by her open arms. She was brave enough to dream her fantasies into reality, and that is human triumph.”
Shelly swallowed hard. “You know, I will never get over the way Summer was taken from us, but I do know I know I will get past it. Because she left me with the strength to walk forward. She was the most fearless person I ever knew, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t afraid. It means she was brave enough to set her shoulders back and walk straight towards what scared her. She took the card she had been dealt in this life and played it to the best of her ability – no whining, no fussing, just quiet acceptance and progress.”
Rage bubbled up into her voice, but I saw her shift her shoulders and swallow it.
“I know that no amount of words can make this any easier or better. My daughter is dead. But we can still try. I know some of us would like to place blame on certain people and let the fury consume us, but I am here today to tell you that the second you let the monsters see you cry, you lose, and that living well and standing tall is the bravest form of revenge of all. There is unspeakable horror out there, that is true. There is heartbreak and loss and misery and loneliness and disability and hatred and Monday mornings. But there is also beauty and goodness and innocence and generosity and sweet tea, and those are the things we must focus on – the world demands it of us. They can take everything away from us, but they can never take away our spirit. Summer had the worst of the world thrown at her, and she shrugged and walked on – I wish the same for all of you. Also, I urge you all once again not to be angry at the people who took her from us. God knows they will live in the hell they have created for themselves.” She paused. “I love you, Summer. I miss you, and I will spend the rest of my life thanking God for the twenty four years I had with you.”
She glanced at me. “And to Cooper: thank you for granting my daughter her one last wish, and thank you for your unwilling help on the eulogy I just read. Colleen did a great job raising you, and I am going to love you forever. I will do everything in my power to get your books published, I promise. And by the way, you should stop leaving manuscripts in hospital chapels for doctors named Steinberg to find two days later.”
She faced the general crowd. “And to the rest of you: carry on. That is all any of us can do in this very large and messed-up world. As I read in a book called Eighty Eight, the only two choices humans are given are to sink or swim. I, for one, am about to swim for my life. Thank you.”
She nodded and left the podium. This was it. It was time. My vision tunneled and my heart contracted in my chest as I gave myself one last chance to back out. The task before me was impossible.
But then I saw Summer smiling big and proud in her wheelchair and stood up. I wouldn’t run like my father. I would face this.
Life is a game of odds. I knew that much by now. It is Scrabble on steroids. There is no order, symmetry, or destiny. We are on our own. Sometimes you win dazzlingly and sometimes you fail spectacularly. That’s just how it is. I learned all that from someone I loved a lot. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find order in the numbers; miracles in the odds; magic in the madness. Summer was the miracle I found in the random chaos of the world, a spirit in the dark. I don’t have to wonder about God anymore, because I found my own religion on the streets of Jacksonville Beach this summer. And now it was time to send her off in style.
As I got up and walked up the aisle, though, I thought of something strange I’d noticed: everyone had talked about Summer in the past tense, with pity in their voices, when there she was, right in front of us in that casket, flesh and bones and love, for one last time. Why not talk to her instead of at her?
So I tossed my little speech aside as I approached the podium, my surroundings blurring together again like the air was melting. I felt hundreds of eyeballs on me, and I could hear the murmurs spreading through the crowd as I turned and leaned into the microphone. I spotted Eighty Eight under me on the lectern, winked at Shelly, and straightened my coat.
But as I did so, the crowd erupted into whispers. “There he is,” I knew they were saying. “There’s the dead girl’s boyfriend. Poor thing. I can’t believe she led him on like that.”
Just love, I told myself in Summer’s voice, to combat the fear welling up within me. If you ever lose your way, just love someone. The rest will fall into place. It has to.
“Summer Martin Johnson was and is the love of my life and the best person I ever knew,” I said as I reluctantly faced the crowd, pushing down the ball of terror rising into my throat. “Her love changed me, and made me push myself up on my feet and wish for more, and bla bla bla, you know how these speeches are supposed to sound. But here’s the thing: too many people talk about the dead, and not to them. So I’m gonna talk to you, Summer.”
I swiveled a little until I faced her casket. Seeing her like that brought up the anger again, but I did my best to swallow it.
“Hi, Sum,” I said. “I hope it’s nice where you are. Weather’s fine here, maybe a little muggy. I suspect you may be somewhere, based on something you once told me. You know, that little thing about how people create their own heaven and their own hell by the way they live their lives? I know you’d be somewhere beautiful, because you’re beautiful. So beautiful. You were an Earthly paradise. You were good and honest and lovely and sweet and empathetic and you transcended your humanity and rose to the highest level of being by loving unconditionally and, oh God, it sucks so much that you’re gone. But you’re not nowhere. I know that. And I know what my heaven looks like, actually. You’re there. So is beer and my dog and the sea. I hope to see you all there one day.”
I choked down an angry sob. It was so hard not to be mad, but I was trying. By this point I was totally crying, the tears mixing in with the snot draining from my nose, soaking my white Oxford and the lapels of the black tuxedo jacket I’d just changed into.
“I don’t know why I’m here, Summer,” I said once I’d regained myself. “I don’t know why I’m so lost or why I can’t grow up or why everyone is so awful or why I can’t find anywhere that feels like home or why this place is falling apart or why I even try anymore sometimes. But I do know you were the first thing I thought of when I woke up every morning into this burned-out world, and that you were beautiful, and that as long as I had you by my side, I didn’t care that I was lost. I would’ve wandered with you anywhere.”
I breathed.
“Don’t ever be mad about what happened, Summer. Let it go, baby. We’re fucked without you, I can’t lie – please excuse my language, children and Jesus – but eventually we are gonna be okay. We’re okay down here, you hear that, Summer? I forgive you. I forgive you. I’m gonna take good care of your mom, whether she wants me to or not, and even though I’ve only met your brother a few times, I can already tell he’s gonna be a better man than me. I’m gonna make sure of it. I hope I can teach him about you, and how perfect you were, and the summer we spent together, and how you lit up Jax Beach with your grace.”
I found Chase in the front row, chubby and shy and broken in his collared shirt, desperately in need of a father figure, and an idea came to me.
“By the way, Chase, that room you liked at my house when you came by that one time, that storage room overlooking the pier? We cleared it out for you, and it’s yours, whenever you wanna come over and have a weekend with your new big brother. Got it?”
Chase gave me the biggest smile I had seen since before Summer’s death. Smiles – I missed those.
I paused to look up at the damp ceiling tiles.
“You know, I’m pissed, Summer, and I want to punch a lot of people in the face right now. But it’s also a time to be happy, because you won at life. You won at life, you hear me? You won. You were good and beautiful and pure and I am standing in a room full of people who loved you, and in the end there is no greater testament to a life than that.” It was getting hard to speak, but I shoved down the tears. “I know you died young and unnecessarily and that it’s the most unfair thing I’ve ever known, but don’t ever think your life didn’t change things, Summer. You left love behind – that’s all anyone can ask for. And I love you, and you made me happy, and if a human makes even one other human happy and leaves love behind, their life was a success.”
I cleared my gravelly throat. I knew I was totally rambling now, but I didn’t care – this was my last chance to get all this out, and I wasn’t going to let Summer down now.
I gestured towards the casket proudly. How could I not be proud of that girl, and want to show her off? She was mine.
“I wrote my first book about that girl, you know,” I sort of smiled. “Because people like Summer deserve to have books written about them. She was a hero in every sense of the word, but she wasn’t like the rest of them, nope. Most heroes throw their good deeds under lights and expect praise to be lavished upon their glories, but Summer was different. She loved people in the dark and rescued them in the silence, never asking for recognition, never even telling anyone of her deeds, and in the end, there is no greater act of heroism than that. Oh, God, I’m gonna miss her.”
I wiped the snot off my lip, an angry lump rising into my throat as I thought of her scar. “You know, I’m sure you’ve all seen someone like Summer,” I said, a new idea in my mind. “You pass them every day: they’ve got a scar, maybe a touch of disease, a cleft lip, a hint of a limp. Something is just different, and what do you do? You veer away, because that’s another thing humans do, a shitty thing – we run from what is different. We are all middle schoolers walking down a hallway and nervously laughing while the weird kid with the funny voice gets made fun of by the class bully for having a rolling backpack. We join in and laugh because the backpack kid is Different, and making fun of him makes us Just Like Everyone Else, and God, the worst thing in the world would be being left out of the pack, right? So we cut our eyes and close ourselves up to the plight of the underdog. I know that, because I used to do the same thing – until my mom, bless her heart, became paralyzed and taught me that skin was nothing but a flaccid membrane encasing a human soul. Summer was the most remarkable surprise of my life, that is true, but she was a surprise I would’ve overlooked had I not learned that lesson. After this loss I will make doubly sure to never again avoid the eyes of someone whose body was born different from mine, even though God knows I will never find another Summer again. Which brings me to this.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek as the energy in the room shifted and deepened somehow. “You know, like Shelly said, accidents and anomalies and mess-ups can strike whenever they want, but love is not conditional. The fact that Summer is lying in a casket does not change a thing. I have screamed at the heavens and cursed the ground I stood on and shouted at the gods, if they exist at all. But I do not, nor will I ever, regret the summer I spent with Summer Martin Johnson. And to prove that to her, in front of her family and friends and maybe God himself, I’m gonna do this. If everyone will excuse me, I’ve got a wedding to attend.”
I grabbed my book and stepped away from the microphone as a stunned silence fell over the room. I watched as Summer’s group, Kim included, left their seats and arranged themselves in a semicircle around me and the casket just as I had instructed in a text on the way here, forming one last meeting of Summer’s Anti-Support Group, creating a barrier between us and everyone else in the room – except this time, the freaks would be on the other side.
Just like Shelly had said, everyone had laughed at Summer when she’d shared her spring wish of finding love by autumn. Everyone. And here it was, happening a few weeks early, in front of her family and her friends – Summer’s last wish, come true in a way Summer could have never imagined, but fate had ensured. And fate: what was fate, anyway? Who spoke the stories of our lives? Did the universe really smile on goodness, or was it all just a shot into the darkness of this doomed galaxy?
I looked at Autumn and thought that maybe some people were born to laugh and make jokes and spill secrets and puncture clouds of sadness. I saw my mother in the crowd and knew others were born to wheel around a kitchen and cook casseroles and smoke cigarettes on a porch and be mothers. Shelly’s face reminded me that some people were born to fret and fuss and smother you with comfortable love. Frank’s grimace reminded me that others were born to frown and complain and be there for people, quietly and relentlessly. And then I glanced back at Summer in her casket, the miracle I’d found in this probably-godless universe, and knew that some people were born to make people happy. Summer was born to love and be loved, and her death had not changed that.
So, to answer a question I’d asked Summer herself many times: we created our own destinies. Our actions did. Maybe you didn’t have to die Facebook famous to leave a legacy. Maybe we did that ourselves through the ways in which we lived and loved and died; writing our own inscriptions for our gravestones, leaving only the dirty work for the stonemason. But what was I going to write for my stone? What would people say at my funeral? Would I be frowned upon as a once-promising failure, or would I be admired as a normal man of normal heart who had gathered his strength and risen to the occasion?
I walked up to Autumn, who wiped her face and gave me a quietly devastated smile. She’d been holding hands with Hank when I approached, and it made my guts feel warm. “I got your message,” she said. “We’re all in wedding attire, just like you asked, or as close to it as we could find in twenty minutes’ notice, anyway. And also, the Funfetti cake we were planning for the wake at Shelly’s house is in the corner – we figured it’d be a nice wedding cake,” she said with tears on her cheeks and stars in her eyes as she motioned at the towering white cake in the corner. Then she reached over and patted my shoulder, and I could feel love in her touch. “Send our girl off in white, Coop.”
“You got it, kid.”
I turned and approached the wooden box that contained the love of my life. I stopped, squeezed my eyes shut, and then opened them and looked down at Summer in her long ivory dress. My unsinkable Summer, too young and too beautiful to have met this fate, sunken at last. She looked cold and still and stiff, and her face was different and hard to look at. It was impossible for my brain to comprehend that she was there, but not there. I didn’t get the sense that she was Watching, you know, in some big dramatic heavenly sense, but I told myself it would be nice to believe she was. They’d arranged her mouth into an unnatural smile and hidden her scar under way too much white powdery makeup, just as she had in life, but still, she was my Summer. She would always be my Summer.
“You are so beautiful,” I whispered as I leaned down and ran my finger along her scar to wipe off the makeup. “You still are. Please believe me this time.”
The crowd’s murmuring grew into a dull roar. I could see them craning their heads, trying to look past the Anti-Support Group in front of me, but I didn’t care that they couldn’t see me – the real measure of a human was what they did in the dark, when nobody was watching.
“I’m sorry, but I lied to you during our last night together,” I told Summer. “When I said I would be your boyfriend forever, I didn’t mean it. I want to be your husband.” I reached into my pocket. “This is for you – and no pulling away this time,” I said as I slid my grandmother’s heirloom wedding ring onto her left ring finger. She was stiff with rigor mortis and it took a little pushing, but it roughly fit. Then I took the bouquet of pale pink roses I’d just picked from the bushes in Summer’s front yard and placed them atop her clasped hands. “Please don’t be mad at me, but I just wanna make this thing official.” I straightened the bouquet and smoothed my bride’s golden blonde hair in her coffin, where she would lie for eternity in her bridal best. Death couldn’t take this from me. From us. This love was timeless.
“I know this isn’t your ideal wedding situation, but you look beautiful,” I told her. “And there is a bright side – no selfies will ever be posted of this ceremony.” Then I placed my hand, warm and living, atop hers, cold and dead. “I, Cooper Nichols, take you, Summer Johnson, in the presence of a God that may or may not exist, our family and our friends, to be mine. I offer you my solemn vow to love you unconditionally, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, and to cherish you for as long as we both shall…”
I couldn’t go on. But I knew it was enough, even though I was kneeling at a casket instead of an altar. Love was enough. It was all so clear to me now. Summer was in me, every bit of me, and as long as I remained, this boy she had put back together, so would she. And maybe these were the remains of the loved ones we lost – not the bodies their souls cast aside on the journey to the other side of things, but those wonderful little bits of them embedded into all of us like stardust floating in the Milky Way, every smile every laugh every tear every whisper every shout every bit of love they ever emitted, little slivers of them that sank into us and reminded us that they were here. They may have been gone, but as surely as the dead of winter gave way to the sun-soaked glory of spring every year, they were here once, and Goddamnit, they had lived.
Summer Johnson’s remains were Cooper Nichols. This union was just making it official. I would go on to win and lose and laugh and cry and die, and although I had no idea if I would succeed with my writing or find love or start taking pills again or even recover from this, I knew I’d have one hell of a time finding out. Summer was so right – dying was easy, but living was the grandest and most challenging adventure of all. And I was about to put that theory to the test like nobody in the world before. I’d lost my way over the years, sure, but Summer had made me find it again, an angel drifting elegantly through the chaos of the world, doling out ruinous and redeeming love, love that had blown me open and stitched me back up again. It was the “redeeming” part that I was going to focus on. It was time to swim.
“Gotta kiss the bride, right?” I sort of laughed through my tears as I leaned down and gave Summer one last kiss. “Thank you for giving me something to believe in,” I whispered. Then I slipped in the vial of glowing seawater from our pier that I’d collected that morning, my own little version of an eternal flame for my wife. As it jostled against the satin wall of the coffin, the bioluminescence flickered a little and then extinguished for eternity – but that was fine. Summer glowed enough on her own. Then I took out her last eternal memento, the photo of us under the Kissing Tree, along with a quote of my own – no more Saviour quotes – that I’d written on the back of the picture in my awful handwriting:
Life is brief but love is long. Somewhere between anger and love is an ocean of eternal tranquility. It is there that I will see you again.
I didn’t need the picture anymore, because the old man and his legend had been dead wrong about the two trees dying at extrication – even though we’d been separated, that didn’t mean I needed to die, too. Quite the contrary. I couldn’t wait to see Summer again one day, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t fine for a while. I had quite a bit to do now that she’d changed my path a little. She’d created my path, actually – if she was Jesus, I was Lazarus by the sea.
“Forever,” I whispered as I gave her the photo. “I’m gonna love you forever. I promise. You can be angry at a person’s choices and still love them – you should know that better than anyone. I don’t care if you were sick or broken or damaged – you deserved love. You deserved love because you were a human, and that’s what humans do: we love.” I let out a funny little chuckle. “I mean, hell, if we’re stuck on this little blue ball spinning in the dark and we can’t reach out and feel another beating heart, fall into another soul and claim it as our own, then what in the hell is the point of it all? The love you left behind is so much greater than the regrets your departure created. You were more than worth the trouble. I pray I was too.”
I took a breath and then reached up to close the casket and close the book on us. Our story had been written this summer under the oaks, and there was nothing else for us to do. It was over.
I rested my hand on the lip of the smooth mahogany casket and took one long look at my wife, knowing it would be the last time I would ever lay eyes on her. I leaned down and placed one final kiss on her eyelashes, but this wasn’t the fairy tales she had never believed in, and a Snow White kiss would never wake her. She had been frozen by fate, twenty-four and beautiful forever. As my tears and my love spilled onto her wedding dress I smiled at her and saw a roaring montage of our Jax Beach summer together: I saw us jumping off the pier into the waves as the ocean lit up; arguing in my dim garage under the harsh glare of my ceiling lights; kissing under oak trees, the canopy of leaves protecting us from the brutality of this cruel world; wheeling through the streets of St. Augustine, happy and broken and free at last. Those moments were gone, washed away by the seas of time, but the memories remained. The summer remained.
I stared at her and took a deep breath. “I love you, Summer, and I am about to do everything in my power to make this world deserve you. See you in the stars – I hope. Float on, Sum. Float on.”
I closed the box and turned to the crying crowd. As I stepped away, however, I glanced down and noticed Eighty Eight and This Is Not A Cancer Book hanging from my coat pocket. In all my emotion I’d totally forgotten about them. Autumn caught my eye and, seeing my hesitation, reached for the books with a look of longing in her eyes like I’d seen before. I knew she’d want to read the story of the last few months when Summer and I had loved and wrecked each other by the sea; when she’d found a broken boy and loved him back together. Lots of people would, probably. I thought of my mom’s suggestion to turn it into an eBook, and for a fleeting moment I saw myself sitting at some author’s convention signing copies for mournful readers who’d read the story of my summer on the beach with Summer, and how it’d changed me forever, and bla fucking bla. I’d put it out online, it’d get posted and re-posted on social media as the latest summer read, and my dream of becoming an obnoxious bestselling author would finally be fulfilled. Summer would remain, and I’d be on the right path again, my road to adulthood finally secure.
I smiled a funny little smile, slipped our books into the casket with my bride where they would be our little secrets forever, and walked away. I would find my own way in this world without Summer, and write my own books, about the life I would live after her. But some things, I decided, were just better left unshared.