3
Welcome, the app said in big red letters. Create your profile. I pushed away a particularly frilly pillow and then wrote a short message under the picture Facebook had already linked to my profile:
Hi. I’m Summer. As you can see in my pictures, I’m kinda mangled. Childhood accidents suck. If that’s something you can get over, swipe right. If you chew with your mouth open, count NASCAR races among your hobbies, take mirror selfies, or refer to girls as “sluts,” “bitches” or “cum catching slut bitches,” then swipe left. If not, I’m your girl. I like reading, confetti cake, cynicism, hate-watching the Kardashians, and not much else. Come dislike the world with me.
I submitted my profile and then decided to wait to start getting matches. Or not get matches, either one. No point in fretting when there was reading to be done.
What did the dog say? the first eligible bachelor to message me, a kid with floppy blonde hair named Austin, said after about ten minutes.
I don’t know, I responded, perking up. A guy was really messaging me already? You tell me, I said.
I don’t actually know, he typed, I just wanted to say WOOF to you, because yikes. And PS: I’d shell out for a makeup artist if I were you – you look like a clown with all that white powder and shit
I hid my face with my hand, blocked the asshole, and returned my focus to the stray issue of Cosmopolitan I’d found on a side table, since apparently I was a basic bitch who enjoyed being told how to land my dream job by teasing my hair in a perfectly flirty way instead of, you know, actually going to school and getting a degree like a normal human.
Did it hurt? a kid named Todd asked about five minutes into an article about – you guessed it – VaJazzling. Warily, I typed a short response:
Did what hurt.
When your mother punched you in the face in the womb, he said, because that’s the only way I can imagine how a face like that exists.
Cringe. Block. Repeat. The next message came soon after, from some hipster-y guy named Richard:
Do you work on a chicken farm?
I knew better than to respond, but my morbid curiosity got the best of me.
No…?
Oh, he said. Because you sure look like you know how to handle a cock.
Okay, I thought with a little smile, at least he gets a few extra points for inventiveness. I laughed a little, blocked Richard, and then returned to my magazine. But after two more similar messages, one of which mentioned an extremely vulgar act involving peanut butter and a Golden Retriever that I do not even care to repeat, I was starting to get discouraged.
I guess I hadn’t really imagined it going like this; the boys being this awful. But then again, my mother had always taught me to never underestimate the shittiness of humans, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. And it’s not like I didn’t know I was damaged. I mean, I wasn’t exactly Unwell, like one of those people you see in the movies who lie in an infirmary all day muttering to themselves about the cruelty of the universe while a machine kept them alive or whatever; I was just sort of flawed. The gist of my issue was that I was born with a particularly annoying defect called Esophageal Intresia, which basically meant my throat was broken. Like, I had an esophagus, it just didn’t link my stomach and my mouth in the way that a normal esophagus should have – it just disappeared halfway down my throat. Imagine the pipe linking your kitchen sink to your sewer or whatever, and then imagine severing that pipe in half. Pretty inconvenient, no?
So when I was twelve hours old my doctors went in and tried to fix it and join the two pieces together. And it didn’t work. So they tried to fix it again. Eighty times. And after eighty-one surgeries (and counting) to create a throat passage and make my esophagus wider so I could swallow and eat, they still weren’t able to fix things that well. They patched things up, if you will, but the whole throat situation never really reached one hundred percent. Throat tissues were flimsy and delicate and notoriously difficult to work with – imagine sewing together a wet sponge – so currently I had a thin mesh tube installed in my throat to keep the narrow, artificially-created passage open, which was exactly as comfortable as it sounded. I could eat some softish foods – sometimes – but I didn’t really like to because I usually just ended up throwing everything back up ten minutes later anyway, which 1. was gross and embarrassing and inconvenient, and 2. could be damaging to my already-fragile throat tissues. (Funfetti cake was the only thing I would consistently sacrifice potential throat tissue damage for, because Funfetti cake was throat-tissue-sacrificing good.) Anyway, I stayed alive with the help of a little white plastic feeding tube protruding from my abdomen. Four times a day I stopped, hooked up a syringe to the tube, and pumped one can of Instamilk into my stomach, this cloudy, vitamin-y stuff that delivered all the nutrients I didn’t get from the food I couldn’t swallow. It was a hassle, I guess, but, like, being born as one of those poor featureless blobs you see being wheeled around Disney World by their depressed-looking families would’ve been even more of a hassle, so I didn’t think about it too much. The feeding tube was my own version of normal, whatever that word meant, and over the years I’d gotten scarily used to it. I even used to have this joke where I pictured myself having to halt my future wedding as I walked down the aisle (God, isn’t that a scary word? Wedding?) to pull up my dress and inject myself with Instamilk, but my mom didn’t find it funny, and she’d get all quiet and weird and stuff whenever I told it, so I’d stopped telling it.
What was more of a hassle was The Scar, as I not-so-lovingly called it, or Scarlett O’Hara when I was in a better mood. During one months-long stretch in the hospital when my doctors had tried to take a piece of my intestines and create a throat out of it (spoiler alert: they’d failed), some nurse had stuck a tube up my nose and run it down my throat to keep the passage from closing again. After I pulled out the tube one too many times, she stitched it to the skin beside my nostril to keep it in place. Well, she messed up badly, because one night I pulled out the tube, including all of the stitches, and sort of ripped a gash in my face from just below the right side of my mouth, up my cheek, almost to my eye. They’d tried to fix this, too, and had failed once again, meaning I currently had a scar the color of my lips running up half the length of my face. The scar didn’t feel bad and I barely noticed it, but because of my scar everyone treated me like I was scarred, which did feel kind of bad. Strangers’ eyes would track away from my face mid-conversation, shopkeepers would say Hi a little too enthusiastically when I walked in to look at lamps or whatever, and waitresses often looked at my mother when asking for my order because they couldn’t face me without feeling awkward. Over the years it had almost become this annoying, unavoidable buffer between me and the rest of the world. I got it, trust me, but like, I also didn’t get it get it. It was both understandable and infuriating, but so were lots of things, life included, and like I said, shit happened all the time and at least I wasn’t a Disney World Blob, so usually I just bit my lip (get it?) and dealt with the hand I’d been dealt in this fucked-up poker game on acid called life.
My phone buzzed, pulling me out of my thoughts. I picked it up expecting to see another hate message. Maybe this one will at least be cleverly worded, I thought as I scanned it:
Hi Summer
Hi, I repeated to myself silently. Hi. So informal and breezy. Hi could mean anything. But what did his Hi mean?
I pulled up the sender’s profile and groaned: another prankster. He had to be. He was beautiful, and I didn’t throw that term around. He had a Shy Smile and Sparkling Eyes and Messy Brown Hair and lots of other patented features that were specifically designed to make girls go weak in the knees and spend hours Facebook stalking and get pulled under by their emotions and do all kinds of other crazy things that I’d only ever seen in the movies. It was a face you could fall in love with, that was for sure. And for a moment, just a moment, I closed my eyes and wished that I was a normal girl, a girl this boy could be with, and not just make fun of.
And then I opened them and saw the world for what it was.
Hi, Cooper Nichols, I typed after reading the name on his profile, deciding to just get to the punch line and get this over with. Bizarrely, his response came almost immediately:
So I have news.
I frowned.
Yes? I responded.
I both agree with, and reject, your profile, he said a moment later. My head tilted.
Uh. Explain?
Well, he typed, I also dislike selfies, and also dislike men who refer to women as “sluts” – but not entirely for some Feminist Knight On A Feminist White Horse reason. I’m also just OCD about words, and I hate how that particular word sounds coming from the mouth – it’s right up there with “juicy,” my other most-hated word. They’re just ugly words, IMO.
That’s crazy, isn’t it?
It’s crazy.
I’m crazy.
I forgot about the stupid magazine and sat up straight. As someone who had fought a lifelong campaign against the use of the phrase “moist towelette” for exactly the same reasons, my interest was piqued.
But still, I waited a little to respond, just so he’d think I was busier than I actually was.
It’s not crazy, I finally said. I wasn’t good at flirting, but I figured I’d at least try. You’re not crazy. I’m listening.
Okay, and now for my disagreement with your profile, he continued. I *would* like to meet with you, because you seem cool and stuff, but I would *not* like to dislike stuff with you. Negative outlooks on the world, even when approached through the prism of humor, are damaging to the psyche, and I steadfastly refuse to engage in any mutual Psyche Damage.
(Although my favorite beer, Guinness, could also be described as damaging to the brain, but I wouldn’t mind engaging in that sort of damage with you.)
I laughed a little, but then I frowned again. This boy was cute and funny and smart, sparklingly so. Why was he talking to me?
Okay, I have to be honest, I typed. I assumed you were messaging me to prank me. So if you’re going to do it, why don’t we just cut to the chase here.
I swallowed some air and pressed Send. It was a risky message, and I reached up and bit my nails as I sat on the edge of the couch waiting for his response. Seriously, what was it about cell phones that made us vomit out all our deepest thoughts and most urgent fears and say everything else we would never even DREAM of telling another person face-to-face? It wasn’t like I’d ever be able to talk to this hottie in person. (It wasn’t that I was quiet, per se; it was just that I was afraid of my thoughts getting out and scaring people.)
Okay, he said.
I’ll prank you.
…What did the fox say?
Ugh, I groaned. Not some cheesy pickup line or insult. I thought he was better than this.
I don’t know. I typed, hoping my choice to end the sentence with a period would convey my disappointment.
Um… he said.
(Okay, I’ll admit it. I actually have no idea what the fox said, I’m just really bad at cheesy pickup stuff, and I just wanted an excuse to keep talking to you.)
So he did have a flaw, I thought with a smile. He was a little awkward – but it was seriously adorable.
Okay, Cooper. You have my attention.
Lucky me!
Even though you should be less hesitant.
Why is that, Cooper?
Just because, he said. Is it a categorical impossibility that I simply wanted to chat you up?
I paused.
Love yourself, I kept thinking. Your problems do not place you beneath this boy’s attention. Talk to him. Try this.
I’ve never been good with numbers, Cooper.
That was a good thing to say, I thought after I sent it, even if it wasn’t exactly true – I loved numbers. But still: that was a good thing to say that I said. I knew I kind of liked me!
Okay, I’ll give you a number, he responded. Two. That’s the number of beers I’d like to buy at Lynch’s tonight.
(That’s one for me and one for you, since you claim you do not happen to be mathematically inclined.)
Well, I thought as I sat even taller. Well well. I just got invited to a bar. By a hot boy. Me, in a bar, with a hot boy.
But then I told myself to chill. Lynch’s was a dark, smoky dive bar, AKA it was probably very easy for someone to get drugged and raped in there, and it wasn’t exactly a place to rendezvous with a guy I’d just met on a sketchy iPhone app, however charming and smart he may have been. And wait, was meeting on the first night even standard for Spark dating? God, I was clueless about this stuff. And what was I doing, anyway, letting the dangerous vortexes of self-pity known as Facebook wedding albums get to me like this? What if I’d had a totally undiscovered calling in life and I’d missed out on it because I’d spent every damn second of my free time on social media? Like, I could’ve been destined to cure Alzheimer’s or win an Oscar or something, but I’d have no idea because I was too busy stalking Instagram and talking to this boy. Ugh.
Was I too forward…? Cooper asked after I didn’t say anything.
No, no, you’re fine, I said. It’s just that I thought you weren’t good at the pickup.
Well you tell me how good I was, then. Yes or no?
I bit my lip. Hard. Love yourself. Love yourself.
Make it Joe’s crab shack and I’m game, I finally said.
Joe’s…? he responded, and I cringed. Joe’s Crab Shack? What was wrong with me? We could’ve met anywhere, and I’d picked some trashy tourist trap with tchotchke-covered walls and plastic neon crabs hanging from the ceiling?
I tried to cover my faux pas:
You’ll understand once you try their Long Island. Sound good?
Better than good, he said. I’m in a white jacket. See you soon. Here’s my number.
With a dizzying breath of air I saved his number under IMPROBABLY CHARMING AND INTELLIGENT SPARK BOY (PROCEED WITH CAUTION) and then headed inside to get ready to meet this total and complete stranger like the genius I was.
“Shelly, you’re gonna have to make dinner,” I said as I grabbed my car keys half an hour later. Cooking had always soothed me, even though I couldn’t eat, so I usually made dinner – but not tonight. And yeah, living at home sucked, like I said, but it’s not like I had another choice. After one disastrous year of sharing a townhouse with a random roommate named Crystal who’d smoked cigarettes in the kitchen and stolen all my bath towels, I’d boomeranged back home and hadn’t left since. (My perennially empty bank account was also not helping move the situation along, to be honest.)
“Why?” Shelly asked from the couch, where she was now watching recorded episodes of some show where a bunch of desperate chicks threw themselves at some douchey guy in hopes of landing a six-month engagement that would eventually dissolve into a short-lived tabloid scandal. Lucky girls!
“I’m going out,” I said.
Shelly pressed pause and got up from the couch, looking at me like I’d just pledged my lifelong allegiance to the Scientologists.
“But we just got home and…wait, you’re doing what?”
“Going out,” I repeated.
“…Like, at night?”
I turned and pointed to the kitchen window overlooking our tiny side yard and our annoying neighbor Mrs. Duffy’s small pink house. “Yes, considering that it is indeed getting dark outside, that would mean I am, in fact, going out at night, Shelly.”
“…With Autumn?”
“You know, I do have more friends than just Autumn,” I said, who was our other neighbor and my best friend – more on her later.
“Oh, of course you do, I just want to spend time with…wait, are you wearing lipstick?” she asked, inspecting me. “And is that my top? I was dry cleaning that, you know!”
I sighed and looked down at my chest. “It’s the only low-cut top that still covers all my surgery scars, alright?”
That shut her up. She came up to give me a hug, and I smiled when I noticed that her shirt was tucked into her floral cotton underwear. My poor mom. I returned her hug with one arm and, with a little flick of my wrist, fixed the little embarrassing underwear situation behind her back with my other.
“What was that?” she asked as she looked around.
“Must’ve been the wind,” I said as I grabbed my bag off the counter. “I’m out. I won’t be that long, trust me.”
“Okay, honey, have fun!” she called, the unabashed hopefulness in her voice breaking my heart. “So glad you’re making more friends, even though I’ll miss you! Text me!”
“Kloveyoubye,” I said as I headed out the door to my car.
Because I was now shivering with a teeth-chattering case of adrenaline, I sat in the front seat for a minute and tried to get myself together. I pulled down my mirror to check my face again. My scar wasn’t that visible in the dim interior light of my car, but the faint shadow it cast on my skin was, and so I grabbed some concealer off my messy floorboard, did one last touchup on Scarlett just in case, and then prayed to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in for a miracle I wasn’t sure could happen.
~
I drove the ten minutes to Joe’s, a huge tourist restaurant on the beach across from the lifeguard station at First Avenue South, my heart jack-hammering the whole time. I lived in Florida, but not the Florida you think of when you think of Florida – you know, white sands, palmy avenues, shimmering aquamarine waters, people doing bath salts and then eating other peoples’ faces off in Burger King parking lots, etcetera. I lived in north Florida, the Florida everyone forgets about, far from all the face-eating craziness of Miami and Orlando, in a sleepy little suburb of Jacksonville called Neptune Beach. The sands were the color of those Werther’s Originals candies your grandma used to keep in a crystal dish on her side table, the pines and oaks greatly outnumbered the palms, and on most days the color of the sea more closely resembled a rain puddle on a cloudy afternoon than Caribbean blue. But it was home, and it was on the ocean, and the summers were long and hot and humid and stifling in a wonderfully perfect way that made you want to wade into things, and it never snowed or sleeted or blizzard-ed or any of that other nonsense in the winter, which was necessary for a summer creature like me. I loved to get home from work and leave my shoes on my front porch and walk the six blocks to the beach in my bare feet, humming to myself under the oaks on my way to go sit in the sun where the Earth ran out of land. And Jacksonville was also technically in the South, which was nice, because if you ever lost faith in humanity just come down here, where things were slow and people hugged you and everything was enveloped in a fuzzy golden warmth that made you want to hug them back. Oh, and since people were so nice and Southern here they didn’t really gawk at others, at least not openly – and that was important for someone like me.
Speaking of looks, I’ll never forget what I wore that night – a simple black dress from the Target clearance section – mostly because I instantly felt like a gross, hideous mess the moment my eyes met Cooper’s.
Oh, sheesh. My thoughts scrambled like a pan of eggs when I saw him. He was even hotter in person. Actually, hot wasn’t even the word: beautiful was. He was seriously so tall, and his hair was unkempt and his smile was sort of shy but also sort of flirty, if that makes sense? He wore dark jeans and a John Mayer concert tee that peeked out from under a sporty white Nike jacket, and he walked in a way that was so confident it made me think he must’ve been right about himself. His eyes were a clear, open brown and he had on these weird orange flip-flops, which I guess weren’t all that attractive on a guy, but then again when you lived in Florida and it was a humid eighty-seven degrees at seven PM and socks made you sweat like a vegan in a bacon factory, you learned to get over things like flip-flops pretty quickly. Best of all, his sharp chin was softened by a few days’ worth of dark stubble, which I loved. I couldn’t deny it: he was aggressively attractive.
My anxiety reached a panicked crescendo as I got closer and stopped in front of him. He looked at me, and I wondered what he saw when he did so. His eyes fell on my scar and he looked away, just like everyone did.
But then he looked back.
“What’s up, Summer,” he said with an easy smile. His voice was deep and smooth and made my skin feel all cold and shivery. “Good to meet you in person, or whatever.”
I just stared at him. Some kind of static electricity buzzed in my chest, keeping the words in. But before I could even respond he leaned in and hugged me. Hard. His hands were a little too touchy, maybe, and they lingered on my lower back for a moment too long, but after years of people keeping their distance, I didn’t hate it. I could still feel my heart thumping when he pulled away. I didn’t hate that, either.
“You look great,” he said casually. And then he smiled like he meant it.
“Oh, um, thanks. And so do you. Obviously,” I added, but I don’t think he heard me.
“Ha,” he said. “So…shall we?”
He gave me a hopeful look, and I bit my lower lip again. I’d seen enough reality shows to know what came next: this was the part of the whole “online dating” thing where I had decide whether my match was a murderer or not, and whether I wanted to stay and eat with him or run to the police station and file a restraining order instead.
I smiled. “We shall.” Obviously, I added again, silently this time.
“Awesome.”
He turned to the hostess, who had incidentally been eyeing him the whole time. (Just because my face was damaged didn’t mean my eyes were.) “Party of two, please,” he said, but she just laughed and looked down at her tablet.
“Honey, there’s a festival over at SeaWalk Pavilion today, and the beach is packed like church on Easter. You’re looking at a seventy-minute wait, at least. You should’ve called beforehand.”
Cooper turned and threw a funny look at me. “Holiday weekend! Seventy minutes! This simply will not do, will it?”
I shook my head, trying to mirror his fake disappointment. He turned back to the hostess with a million dollar smile. “So, it seems that we have reached an impasse. How about the bar?”
Her eyes flashed, her face softening. Mine rolled in the opposite direction. “Well, actually,” she said in a newly-flirty voice, “I might be able to, like, set you up at one of the patio tables by the bar, overlooking the water, maybe? If you want?”
Cooper smiled again, and I got the feeling he was used to this sort of treatment. This made me roll my eyes again, even though it was sort of attractive on some weird level that I didn’t want to think about because it was embarrassing.
“So, what do you say about sitting outside?” Cooper asked me.
“Um… I’m not sure?”
But what wasn’t I sure of? A table at the bar, or going on a date with this boy while I was maybe/probably going to die?
The tablet beeped, and the waitress looked from Cooper to me. “Looks like I’m getting requests for that table already. Will y’all be needing it, or…?”
I looked at Cooper, my chest feeling like it had shrunken in on itself, my palms all gross and sweaty. “I mean, are you okay with…with me?” I asked quietly, so the hostess couldn’t hear. He turned his head a little, confused.
“What do you mean? With what?”
I looked down at myself. “You know…with…the way I look, and everything? With the whole scar thing?”
He blinked, shook his head, and then just sort of shrugged. “That? I barely noticed it.”
“…Really?” I asked. He frowned and then pointed down at his chest.
“You know, we all have scars, Summer. If yours are only on the outside, you should consider yourself lucky.”
I stared at this strange boy, baffled, and suddenly it seemed like my lungs had forgotten how to process air completely. The world had become a vacuum, and I was sucking oxygen fruitlessly. When I finally gathered my wits and slowed the beating of my heart, I considered my options. I could say yes and lead this boy beside me down a path that could lead to…well, God only knew where, or I could politely decline and go back to my normal, grey life. Back to winter.
I looked over at the hostess, cleared my broken throat a little, and for the first time in my maybe-waning life, chose danger.
“I think we’re gonna need that table.”