Catherine (29 page)

“It isn’t her brain he cares about.” I fought back the mental picture of the two of
them kissing in Nina’s bed, her mouth on his skin, and the way he’d looked at me,
reveling in the pain he was inflicting. But it was like building a wall of sand to
keep the tide from rushing in: worse than useless.

“She’s nothing compared to you,” Ruben said kindly. “And he knows it.”

I shrugged, feigning indifference. I had thought about making Ruben my messenger,
having him tell Hence that he’d misunderstood what he’d heard, that I needed to speak
to him and clear things up. But when I opened my mouth to ask, there was Hence’s face
again, cruel with his hatred of me. Was I really going to stoop that low, begging
him to hear my side of things?

“I don’t care what he does,” I told Ruben instead. “I’m out of here. As soon as I
finish my classes I’m on a train to Boston. Tell him I’m thrilled to be starting my
new life as a Harvard snob.”

And I meant it—well, the part about being on my way out of New York City, anyway.
Like Dad’s favorite Janis Joplin song said,
freedom
was just another word for nothing left to lose. Now I was so free I could drift like
a balloon over the rooftops and out to sea, and hardly anyone would care enough to
wave good-bye.

After I’d taken my last exam and exchanged tearful hugs with Jackie and her mom, there
was one thing left to do. From the front window of the café across the street from
The Underground, I kept watch until I was sure Quentin had gone out for the night,
and then, journal in the deep front pocket of my sweatshirt, I climbed the creaky
fire escape up to my window. Up in my room for what looked like the last time, I slipped
the journal into its
hiding place, grieving for it as I said good-bye. I couldn’t bear to take it with
me. A reminder of Hence, of Dad’s death, of Quentin turning into a stranger, it was
a part of the life I had to force myself to forget. If I ever saw it again—and the
odds were good that I wouldn’t—it would be because a miracle had happened and I’d
come home.

Cooper’s whisper woke me. “Rise and shine, Chelsea. Let’s get rolling.” My eyes popped
open, everything coming back to me all at once: the concert, my conversation with
Hence, and—most vividly of all—the impulse I’d had to kiss Cooper. “Shhh. Hence came
in a couple of hours ago. We don’t want to wake him.” Cooper was bending over me,
so close I could smell the shampoo he’d used. Dizzy, I shut my eyes. When I opened
them, he was gone.

I sat up, buried my face in my hands, and exhaled with relief. The night before, I
hadn’t done the first thing that popped into my head, for once. I hadn’t kissed Coop,
and he would never need to know I’d had such a crazy impulse. “Hence is here?” I asked
when he returned.

“You were sacked out when he came in.” Damp-haired and
barefoot, Coop swept through the room, straightening it up. “You can shower in the
apartment. I’ll meet you in front of the club.”

By the time I’d dressed and taken the elevator downstairs, Coop was waiting beside
a double-parked silver Jaguar Coupe with a box of doughnuts and two coffees. Much
to my surprise, when he pressed the button on his key chain, the car’s lights flashed.

“That’s your car?”

“Ha. Don’t I wish? It’s Hence’s.” Coop looked cheery and energized, as if he’d had
a full night’s sleep in a comfy bed instead of four hours on a couch. He dug in the
pocket of his jeans and dumped sugar packets and creamers in my hand. “I don’t know
how you take yours.”

“Hence is letting us use it?”

“I told him I needed to drive you back to Brooklyn and run some errands. He wasn’t
upset to see you on the couch, by the way.”

“Amazing.” In the Jag, I fixed my coffee and laid claim to a powdered-sugar doughnut
while Coop programmed my uncle’s address into the GPS system. A line of cars gathered
behind us, drivers swearing at us out their windows.

“I’m going, I’m going,” Coop muttered.

As we pulled away from the curb, I put my feet up on the dashboard. Even if we were
on a serious mission, this was a road trip, wasn’t it? I might as well enjoy it. And
so what if I’d started having bizarre feelings about Coop? They would pass. In the
meantime, I’d act like my usual self around him, and maybe he wouldn’t notice.

“Are you going to give me one of those?” Coop interrupted my interior monologue. I
handed him a jelly doughnut and he made a face. “Not that. One of the glazed chocolate
ones.”

“What did you get jelly for if you don’t like it?”

“I thought you might.” Which was exactly the kind of nice thing Coop was always doing,
come to think of it. I thanked him.

He stole a quick look at me before focusing back on traffic. “You’ve got powdered
sugar on your nose.”

Cooper changed lanes, passed a slow-moving Buick, and fiddled with the satellite radio,
settling on an alternative station. Grungy guitars blasted through the speakers.

“Is this the kind of music you play?” I asked him. “Alternative? I’ve never understood
what it’s supposed to be an alternative to.”

He didn’t answer. Maybe he thought I was criticizing his taste in music? I began again.
“How did you start playing?”

That worked better. “I picked up my best friend’s guitar in ninth grade. I’d tried
other instruments before that. In fourth grade, I played the trumpet. Then there was
the year my mother wanted me to play the clarinet. It just wasn’t me.”

Had Cooper ever mentioned his family before? If he had, I couldn’t remember it.

“But the guitar was you?” I prompted him.

“It felt right in my hands,” he said. “I taught myself a couple of chords and never
looked back.”

“Where did you grow up?” I asked him.

“Beavercreek, Ohio.”

I laughed. “Is that a real place?”

“As real as
Marblehead
, Massachusetts.” And he drew the name out so I could hear how ridiculous it sounded.

“Does it have creeks? And beavers?”

“It’s a suburb of Dayton,” he told me. “Maybe beavers lived there once. Is your head
made out of marble?”

“Why did you leave it?”

“So I could be your chauffeur.”

“Seriously,” I said. “What made you run away from home?”

Coop laughed. “I left after I graduated high school. I wouldn’t call that running
away from home.” He fiddled with the radio presets. “I wanted to see New York City,”
he said. “Find out if I could make it in the music scene. That old cliché. ‘If I can
make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.’ ” He sang that last part. “My mom’s a Frank
Sinatra fan.”

“So you weren’t trying to get away from your family?” I thought of Hence and his unspeakable
past.

“My family’s okay,” Cooper said. “They wanted me to go to college. Dad was gutted
when I didn’t. He’s still worried I’ll never find my place in corporate America. He
calls me every other day to nudge me about it, but he isn’t an ogre. He wants what
he thinks is best for me, even if it doesn’t match what I want for myself.”

I thought of my own father, probably worried to death about where I’d gone and whether
I was okay, and felt a twinge of guilt for leaving him without a word. “Don’t you
want to go to college someday?”

“Sure,” he said. “I took a class at CUNY this spring. And I’ll be taking intro to
psych in the fall.”

“Hence gives you time off from the club?”

“Of course. Anyway, school’s got to take a backseat to my job, at least for now. And
my music. I’ve got an audition lined up next week.”

“You do? I mean… that’s great. I hope you get it.”

Coop resumed playing with the radio, then gave up and connected his iPod. We’d completely
left the city behind. The countryside around us sparkled in the sunshine, and the
Jag was practically the only car on the road. I leaned back and listened to the music.
It was nobody I’d ever heard before, but kind of fun—bouncier and more playful than
the stuff we’d had on earlier. I relaxed in my seat and rolled the window up so I
could hear better. Halfway through the second song I asked who we were listening to.

“What do you think of it?”

“He’s got a nice voice,” I said. “And this song is quirky, but catchy. Who is it?”

Coop didn’t respond, but the look on his face—and the red splotches on his cheeks—gave
the answer away.

“It’s you? No way! You’re actually good.” I meant it as a compliment, but realized
too late that it might not have sounded that way.

“ ‘Actually’?” But Cooper was smiling to himself, not seeming to mind.

“I didn’t realize,” I said. “Is that you on the guitar?”

He nodded. “I play lead.”

“Who’s that you’re playing with?”

“Beavercreek. Don’t laugh—that was the name of my old band in Ohio. The bassist, Pete,
built a recording studio in his basement. You can hear it’s not a very professional
recording, right? This was our demo.”

“What happened? Why aren’t you with them anymore?”

“They didn’t want to leave Ohio, and I wasn’t going to stay. No big drama… we’re all
still friends.”

“But you need another band,” I said. “Maybe you should start one of your own.”

“Maybe I should,” Coop said, but he didn’t sound serious. “You play an instrument?”

I felt myself get flustered. “I don’t have any talent,” I said. “And I’m not just
talking about music. My dad says I never give anything my all.”

“Sounds like something a dad would say.” Coop’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Anyway,
I’ve seen you in action. I think he’s wrong.”

I drew myself upright and folded my legs. “That’s nice of you.”

“I’m not being nice,” he said. “You’re spunky.”

Embarrassed, I reached for the GPS. “I wonder what Coxsackie, New York, is like.”

“Is it a real place?” Cooper quipped, cracking me up. “Seriously, though, I looked
at a map. Coxsackie is one town over from Climax, New York.”

“It would be.”

After that, we talked about who gets to name towns, and wondered why they didn’t pick
names like Alice or Steve. One moment I was thinking how comfortable we were together,
and the next I was wondering if we were destined to always be just friends. Stealing
a look at him out of the corner of my eye—his hands on the wheel, his profile, his
shaggy brown hair all crazy in the crossbreeze—I wondered how it had taken me so long
to notice how cute he was. The inside of my head was a jumble of thoughts. I was working
so hard to not betray any of them that at one point I must
have fallen silent for a while, and when Coop said something to me I had to ask him
to repeat it.

“I said, why don’t you read me the rest of your mother’s journal? You brought it,
didn’t you?”

Of course I had. I reached into the backpack under my seat and tugged it out. But
I hesitated. “There are only a few pages left.”

“You have to read them sometime. Besides, we need every bit of information we can
get, don’t we?”

Buoyed by that “we”—he could as easily have said “you”—I turned to where I’d left
off. The sections she’d written as a teenager had ended; now she was writing from
The Underground, after she’d run away from my father and me. Just as I’d guessed,
she’d come home to find the club boarded up—
like seeing an old friend in a full-body cast
, she’d written—and had climbed up the fire escape and through the fifth-story window.
She wasn’t surprised she’d beaten Hence back to New York since that morning’s paper
had mentioned a transit strike in the UK. What
did
surprise her was the state of her old room, which was exactly as she’d left it, down
to the bed that hadn’t been stripped since the night she and Hence had run from Quentin’s
gun.
I pressed my face into the pillowcase and inhaled, hoping to catch Hence’s scent,
but it had faded.
She wrote about being shocked by the changes her brother had made in the club downstairs:
hideous iron chandeliers, a red marble floor, walls covered with stuffed deer heads
staring mournfully down at me. It’s horrifying. But who am I to judge the mess my
brother made of The Underground when I’ve done the same thing to my own life?

There were a few pages about my dad, about hoping he wouldn’t stay angry with her,
because at least she’d never deceived
him; he’d known all along she was damaged goods. Riptide’s big hit had been playing
everywhere, and the tabloids were full of paparazzi shots of Hence on the town with
Nina, and she had been so lonely and miserable. Going on a date with a nice guy like
Max had been her way of moving on. And then she had gotten pregnant, and marrying
Max had seemed like the only sensible choice.

After that, reading the journal got harder. There was a long part about how my dad
couldn’t compare to Hence. He was kind, responsible, a good father to me. But his
kisses weren’t Hence’s kisses. His hands on her body weren’t Hence’s hands. I turned
from Coop as I read that part, so he wouldn’t be able to see my face, but I kept reading.
There was so little of the journal left. I couldn’t skip a word.