The Summer Remains (12 page)

He rolled his eyes. “Same as your thoughts on getting out of bed on Monday morning: it’s terrible and awful and torturous, but for some reason, people still seem to do it anyway. I said I believed in
love
, not the government-sanctioned version of it. And don’t look at me like that – you’d be this cynical on the issue, too, if you’d grown up watching my parents’ pathetic excuse for a marriage. I want love, sure, but that doesn’t mean I want a piece of paper to
tell
me I’m in love.”

“Let me read something of yours,” I said suddenly, probably to mask the disappointment sinking into my chest.

“Huh?”

“You said you’re a writer, and I wanna read something you wrote. Anything.”

His jaw clenched. “No.”

“Why?”

“It’s just embarrassing.”

“Then how do think you could ever become an author if you never let anybody read your stuff?”

“Because those people are…strangers,” he said. “And I don’t really care what they think. But you’re…you, already. You don’t understand how personal it is. Writing is like throwing your soul onto a page and then going, ‘Here, everyone, hope you love it!’ I don’t really care about that faceless audience out there, but it would crush me to not have
your
approval. I already think you’re the smartest person I know.”

He looked away, and my insides caved in for him. He was twenty-five and unemployed; letting his life slip by because he was too afraid to chase his dreams. And as I noticed how warm his last comment had made me feel, I realized how much I wanted to make him feel warm, too, in return, and I started thinking of ways I could do that. By looking at me the way he did every day and making me feel the way I was feeling, he was giving me a gift. But how could I give
him
a gift?

“You
should
show people,” I said. “You’re obviously very smart, and you should take advantage of that. Put your brain to work.”

“How do you know I’m not the worst writer to ever put fingers to a keyboard?” he asked, trying not to smile.

“Trust me, if you write half as well as you speak, you’ll be fine. So stop being cat shit and let me read something, you overgrown toddler.”

“And you wonder why,” he said.

“What?”

“And you wonder why I like you. You just used the phrases ‘cat shit’ and ‘overgrown toddler’ in the same sentence. You speak my language, Summer.”

He slept over. Or more accurately, I
let
him sleep over, which was stupid and reckless of me, because every one of these Big Relationship Steps we passed just made me fall deeper into like with him. When my work alarm jolted me awake at seven the next morning, I found him gone. And even despite it all, I felt empty and disappointed, I can’t lie. And also super embarrassed, because I always slept with my mouth hanging open and looked totally fugly, and that meant he’d seen me at my worst. Oh well.

There was a note on my desk, and when I reached over and grabbed it I laughed: Cooper’s handwriting was beyond awful. Hopefully he wrote his newspaper stories on a laptop, I noted to myself as I read, because this was damn near illegible:

It’s 2 AM and you’re too cute to mess with. I’ll let myself out. Check your mailbox when you wake up, though – I changed my mind. Just left you a little something I happened to have in my car. Nothing big. -Cooper

My whole body went numb as I finished reading. I tried to turn off my feelings, but it just wouldn’t work. Then I said a silent prayer that my mom hadn’t seen him leaving last night – as she was devoutly and irrevocably Methodist, I’d probably never hear the end of it. And because I am an impatient fool, I immediately walked out to the mailbox and found a blue folder with a story inside printed out from Microsoft Word, along with another note from Cooper:

Okay, don’t judge this too harshly – it’s a first draft. You’ll get used to my typos eventually. Hope you love it. Float on, my friend.

I put the folder under my arm and went back inside, the word “eventually” ringing in my head like the bells that sometimes chimed from my mom’s church down the street. The way he spoke about us hanging out in the future like it was a
given
or something was astonishing to me for some reason. No one had ever done that before. Not even close.

I tried to be cool and tell myself I’d get around to reading the story once I was free, but in reality I was free right then, and was super excited to devour it. I was kinda scared, too, that it would be terrible, and that my view of Cooper as some dark, twisted genius would be ruined forever. So as I sat down to read, I prepared to lie to him if it was bad, and keep the secret to myself.

To soothe my nerves I put on my favorite song,
The Road
by Saviour.
And so it goes,
she sang as I started reading.
Just because you’re lost on life’s road / doesn’t mean you can’t find someone else to wander beside you and help lighten the load.

And from the first sentence alone, Cooper’s story blew my mind.

“We don’t get to choose how much time we get in this life, but we do get to choose how we spend it,” the story began. “And I am here today to tell you I have made all the wrong choices.”

Called
Eighty Eight
, the book was about a boy our age who sat around all day worrying about the future while doing nothing to help his current situation – you know, obsessing over his career and family and all that while his bills piled up on the counter, etcetera. Then one day he woke up as an eighty-eight year old man and realized he was stuck in that body for good and was going to die soon, and so he frantically ran around trying to do everything he’d planned on doing as a young man, except he was too old and frail to carry out anything on his bucket list. In the end he died with no experiences under his belt, no stamps in his passport, and nothing to show for his life, all because he’d wasted his youth stumbling through the tense fog of anxiety. The book wasn’t totally perfect, and there were some typos and clunky paragraphs he could’ve smoothed out, but the bones of greatness were absolutely there. It was only about sixty pages, but by the last sentence I was in tears. It was flat-out devastating, and it made me realize just how much I hid behind hoping for a better future instead of improving my present, telling myself I would fix it all one day and never actually fixing anything at all. In only sixty pages I had become completely attached to the old man, feeling every ounce of his heartbreak and every inch of his joy. And as I turned the last page, I just looked outside and felt empty and full and exhausted and pumped up all at the same time, but mostly I just felt hopefully heartbroken.

In the mid-morning light I saw a mom walking with her little son and their dog, and I wanted to lean out of the window and shout,
What’s wrong with you freaks?! Why isn’t your world stopping? Why aren’t you heartbroken? Why aren’t you lying on the floor, broken and sobbing, because a totally fictional character in a totally made-up story is dead?
I was furious that the world wasn’t broken by a story it had never read, and I wanted to gouge out my eyeballs so I could read it all over again with brand new eyes –
that
was the mark of a good fucking book.

After all this I found myself totally in awe of Cooper, and even
more
confused. Cooper was a writer to the floor of him, that was obvious. But why didn’t he know that? And how could I convince him of his talent while I still had time?

And also: why was he even
thinking
about these things? I’d thought
I
was the most morbid twenty-something to ever exist, but this book had out-doomed me in spades. Just what, exactly, had happened in his past to make him this dark? Things were starting to add up about him, and they weren’t making sense. I’d thought he could look past my scar and all that because of his mother, but now I was suspecting there could be more. Why did he act so weird in public sometimes? Why had a gorgeous boy been alone on his birthday, turning to a dating app for companionship, warning me about his internal scars?

As I closed the folder and reluctantly headed for the shower to get ready for work, I couldn’t help but ask myself: was I
really
the only one in this relationship who was being haunted by something?

13

Three weeks later, I fainted.

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

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

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

I hoped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A friend,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This rang a bell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“
Anti
-support?”

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

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

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