The Summer Remains (2 page)

Because I, Summer Johnson, Purveyor of Pragmatism, Lover of Logic, Ultimate Believer in the Rational, and Person Who Was Maybe Going To Die Soon, wanted to drown in someone.

2

So, before you decide I am a delusional maniac, let me just get this out of the way: the story of my life is not entitled
Broken
Girl Feels Incomplete; Seeks Boy to Make Her Feel Whole
. I am not some adorably helpless 1940s movie heroine lying on a couch waiting for a man to plug into me and turn me on like a light bulb. I’m perfectly fine with being me. I mean, yeah, it kinda blows sometimes, and occasionally I wish I was Beyoncé, but I’ve pretty much accepted my fate of being Summer Martin Johnson, you know? Awkward exchanges with gas station cash register attendants and the whitest of white girl dance moves: this is the situation of Summer. And let’s get another thing out in the clear: I know I might not sound like the most realistic person in the world, wishing for this. Because let’s face it: quietly attractive twenty-four-year-old girls with stomach tubes and moderately-large facial scars aren’t exactly the most desired creatures walking the Earth, especially for shallow guys in their post-collegiate glory days who just want the hall-of-fame blondes with the sparkly lip gloss and the cutoff denim booty shorts. I get that. But something like this had been brewing for quite some time, all thanks to social media, or as I call it, the Public Bathroom Stall of the World.

If you haven’t heard of the thoroughly-modern condition known as Relationship FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), let me explain for you in big bold painful letters. There I was a few days before The Big Surgery Bomb, innocently trolling Facebook on one of those late spring Florida mornings when the wind smells like humidity and salt and you know summer is on its way and it thrills you and terrifies you in equal measure, when I was bombarded by not one, not two, but THREE engagement stories on my News Feed. What was wrong with these girls? Didn’t they know that it was early, and that my self-esteem was still fragile, and that spacing out their wedding bombshells was the right thing to do, if only until I’d injected my coffee?

But like the masochist I am, I clicked on one of the stories anyway and scrolled through the pictures of the engagement. This one belonged to Misty, this girl who’d sat behind me in high school science class and had always borrowed my pens without giving them back. For months she’d been posting about how Crazy In Love she was and about how this new guy was The One and about how Hashtag Blessed she was and generally just assaulting twelve hundred of her closest frenemies with other completely unsolicited details about her delirious happiness. And now I guess she’d finally gotten her ring in a cheesy outdoor engagement by a lake.

Okay, first of all: I want my pens back, Misty. All of them. Including that one with the dark purple ink that I really liked. And secondly: STFU. You have a guy who loves you. We get it. At the risk of sounding like a bitter old spinster clutching her pearls in jealousy,
you can stop now
. But even my cynicism couldn’t overcome my basic humanity, and ironically enough, at the end of the day there was nothing that could make you feel alone like the silvery, artificial glow of your laptop screen. So as I glared at the photos of Misty’s boyfriend bending down on one knee underneath their Oak Tree of Love while professing his Undying Devotion to this stupid pen thief, I couldn’t help but think to myself:
why can’t someone love me like that?

And then I slapped myself in the face and tossed my phone aside, but not before screen-shotting one particularly heinous photo and reminding myself to send it to my friend Autumn to bitch about it later that day. But seriously, my qualms with the Pen Thief aside, girls were getting married by the boatload, and I couldn’t deal with it anymore. At least the Mistys of my mom’s generation surpassed her in silence – in this constantly connected age I had to deal with them vomiting their lives onto Facebook all day, every day, reminding me that I was me. I deserved love, too, no matter my present circumstances, and I didn’t know how much longer I could watch my frenemies pull ahead on the Highway of Life and live so loudly while I sat in the dark.

On a rational level I knew I was being ridiculous, of course, but still, in some deep and ancient place within me, I felt like a failure, a forgotten loss, a flash in the pan. And unfortunately for my mother, Dr. Steinberg, that random counselor lady, and the boys in my town in general, failure was not something I was accustomed to accepting. Not at all.

~

The days after the surgery news were what the word “blur” had been invented for. The operation was tentatively scheduled for the Monday after Labor Day weekend, so it was official: I was granted one final summer on the beach. Or
not
final summer, depending on the outcome of my surgery, or whatever. There were scores of documents to sign, tons of words to learn, a dozen therapists to pretend to listen to while they spoke to me in quietly apologetic tones, etcetera.

On day three after the big bang, a little Xanax had finally helped my mother’s anxiety levels descend to a somewhat manageable rate, and the imminent death of the day flashed a sullen yellow above the ocean to the east as she drove me home after our final consultation for a few weeks. (And I use the word “home” loosely, as I had not felt like I’d had a true home in years. Sure, I may have laid my head at my mom’s every night, but it was no longer the dwelling I’d grown up in. Things had changed and evolved and she was always off on dates trying to get remarried while my father had his wife and his other children in Orlando to deal with, which was shitty but understandable, I guess. Even my friends were starting to drift and shift and move forward in ways I seemed to not be. No matter where I went, I never really felt welcome or wanted. I was like a piece of a puzzle that had become so wet and swollen from the condensation of a glass left on a coffee table, I no longer fit anywhere – a new but permanent outlier.)

“Summer, I’m sorry about that request or whatever, with the Last Great Hope lady,” my mother finally said as she drove, mentioning the Elephant of Awkwardness we’d both avoided for days. “I didn’t mean to shut you down like that, you know. I’m just trying to protect you. That’s all I want – what’s best for you. But who knows – maybe you’ll find love someday.”

“Yeah, who knows,” I said, pursing my lips together with a secret only I knew. I was going to try.

So, it turns out there was this app called Spark. People my age were plagued by three main questions:
am I ever going to grow up, am I ever going to get my shit together,
and
will I ever find someone, or will I die alone in a pile of cats
?, and since most of my generation had already given up on the first two concepts, they were using Spark to focus on the third. After hearing two nurses gossiping about it the day after the diagnosis, I’d done some digging on Google, and it seemed I’d found my golden parachute. To make a long story short, the app let you “like” photos of nearby guys that you thought were acceptably attractive and/or not murderers, and if they “liked” you back, you could message them. This was perfect for me, and not only because I had the social skills of a rock garden and therefore found the prospect of hiding behind a screen for the unavoidably awkward first few conversations with a prospective love interest incredibly appealing. If the guys declined me, I’d never be notified, which was perfect. (I wasn’t
that
fragile, I just liked to avoid bad news – God knows I had enough to deal with already.) Spark was taking the world by storm and making twenty-somethings everywhere have bad dates over overpriced hors d’oeuvres at stupid hipster bars, and you’d better believe I wanted in on that awkward action before fate took me out of it. Not dying in a pile of cats was the most easily-solvable Big Life Question I could confront in the tiny window of time I’d suddenly been allotted, and Operation Find A Boy Before the Operation had officially begun.

Once we got home, Shelly whispered one final apology after a day full of them and then excused herself to her room to “call her sister.” I knew she’d really be crying silently into her pillow all alone, and the thought pounded around in my guilty chest like a dresser tumbling down a staircase during a hasty move. As she disappeared down the hallway, I went out onto the porch we’d screened into a sort of indoor/outdoor living room, slammed a comfortable spot into the supremely uncomfortable couch I’d inherited from my great grandmother, and felt my stomach rumble with something that had nothing to do with my health issues. And though the irony of curing that most human of maladies – loneliness – with a soulless app housed in a four-inch piece of glass and metal was not lost on me, my sense of humor was nothing if not morbid, especially now that my condition was now
literally
morbid, and so I smiled and took out my phone.

My bones shivered with a manic, reckless, thrilling energy. This was wrong. I knew that. By joining this dating app I was basically selling someone a ticket to sail on the Titanic. Even if I were to survive the surgery, the next six months of my life would still be rough – there was no doubt about that. But it was also, perhaps, my last chance at love. Life was going to destroy me anyway, be it in three months or sixty years – why not let love help finish the job, too?

And as I sat there, another thought sprung out at me like the old Jack in the Box someone had given me during an extended hospital stay that would jump out at odd hours of the night and scare me senseless: in this age of TMI, I could share
anything
about myself. Should I share the news about my possibly (okay, probably) impending death? Of course they deserved to know, these guys I would prospectively be matching with. But as a human, I also deserved to have someone to look at me and see
me
, Summer Johnson, not the Permanent Death Cloud that now hung over my shoulders like shame during a hangover meal at Arby’s. And I knew that would be impossible if someone knew the truth. Besides, I knew I couldn’t go one more day as Summer, That Girl You Treat Differently Because of The Throat Thing, and so, like the heinous bitch I am, I decided to do the most sensible thing I could imagine and download the app, take my chances, and hold the information close in the beginning. If I met anyone special I’d share that I was obviously unwell and edit out the death thing, and if things sank down deep with anyone, I’d figure out how to drop the big news then. But would I even be able to
find
love in such a short time?

And then I realized that in all of the madness I was overlooking the simple fact that none of this mattered unless I
actually got a date
, which honestly was still a major question mark for me. (Stomach tube, facial scar, shallow boys, etc.) As usual I was being a cynical, over-analytical, self-doubting mess, and so on that ratty old couch on my ratty old porch in my ratty old life, I took the deepest of breaths and then downloaded the app that would hopefully make me officially un-single for however long my personal forever would last.

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?