The Summer Remains (5 page)

“Friends walk alone on the beach in the dark.”

A playful, electric silence followed. “Sure they do,” I said finally. “Just let me put my bag in my car.”

The sky was almost black when we hit the beach, or maybe more of a deep purple, but the moon was bright and the bars along the beach were spilling light out onto the sand. Our journey was kept slow by the dog, who was barely waddling along, but I didn’t mind.

A passing man smiled at us and fanned at his face, joking about how humid it still was.

“Summer and January,” Cooper smiled, referring to the local joke about how our only two seasons were Stiflingly Hot, and Too Cold For The Beach. The man laughed and passed.

“So how come I’ve never seen photos of you around or anything?” I asked Cooper as a way to get him to talk about himself, praying I didn’t sound too awkward.

“I don’t know. I’m not really on social media.”

“Really? Why not?”

“I just think our generation is way too into all that, and it’s embarrassing,” he shrugged. “Some things should just be kept private, you know? At the end of the day, who really gives a shit about your boyfriend or your lunch or any of that?”

“Whoa.”

“What?” he asked, and I realized I was staring at him like a crazy person.

“Oh, nothing,” I said as I looked away, “I just agree, trust me. That’s an impressive amount of self-control – I should be more like you. Not that I’m loading selfies every hour or anything, but still, the pressure to be
out there
kind of gets to me sometimes, I guess.”

“Wow,” he breathed as we drifted into some light from a hotel.

“What?”

“You’re just beautiful.”

I smiled despite myself. Honestly, this was all a little much – it was like he was reading from a script or something. “Why do you say stuff like that?” I asked, clawing at my left elbow with my hand.

“Because it’s true. You’re beautiful, and beautiful things don’t demand attention. It just gravitates to them.” He smirked. “
And
I also have a pathological inability to keep my thoughts in my head, so I guess that factors in there somewhere, too.”

“Ah, well, that’s understandable.” And for at least the second time in one night, I wondered if there was a sudden oxygen shortage on Planet Earth. Was the Amazonian deforestation happening more quickly than expected?

But I still couldn’t help it – out of instinct, I turned away and hid my scar with my hand. “You only think that because it’s dark,” I said under my breath.

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” I said as I turned back to him, urging myself not to let my insecurity sabotage this perfect night. “You’re not bad, either.”

He didn’t say anything. We passed a large group of people walking along the edge of the ocean, some swigging from bottles of beer in brown paper bags, some looking up at the stars, others talking quietly. Cooper sighed. “God, I love walking along this beach and seeing all these different people. Isn’t it weird to think that every random person you see, every stranger you pass on the street or whatever every single day, is their own person with their own life and problems and hopes and dreams and heartbreaks and defeats and triumphs, none of which have anything to do with you?”

I was silent for a minute.

“I mean, yeah,” I said finally. “I haven’t really thought about it like that. But yeah.”

He pointed at a sixty-ish woman in pink capris walking up on the boardwalk. “See, what kind of lady walks alone along the ocean at night at that age? Did her husband recently die? Or was there ever a husband at all? Was she a circus performer who lost her husband in a freak joint trapeze accident? Like, don’t you just walk down the street and
wonder
about people sometimes?”

I bit my lip. To be honest, I really didn’t. Not very often, at least. Over the years my condition had forced me to deal with what was right in front of me every day, nothing more, nothing less. I didn’t have enough wiggle room for peripheral vision.

But like the terrible person I am, I lied. “Yeah, actually. People watching is, like, my thing. It’s especially good in Florida.”

“I know!” Cooper said, his childlike enthusiasm intoxicating. “I have, like, a master’s degree in people watching. You can learn anything you need to know about the world just by sitting on a pier at sunset, opening up a beer, and paying attention.” He paused and then pointed a finger at me. “True or false, Summer: ignorance is bliss.”

I shivered in the pre-summer heat once again. “What’s with all the questions?”

“Just tell me.”

“
Well
, setting aside the fact that I cannot stand annoying, oversimplified clichés like that, I would say that it is absolutely, one hundred percent true, unfortunately.”

“Explain.”

Trying not to let him read my face, I looked at the sea again and thought back to the person I was when I was young and thought the world was mostly good.

“Okay, well, I was kind of a sickly kid,” I began. “And I’ve seen a lot of fucked up stuff in my life. Like, I’d seen things that would’ve traumatized an adult by the time I blew out five candles, as sucky as that is. And sometimes I wonder what I’d be like if my life had been…normal, for lack of a better word. Would I be, like,
lighter
? Less cynical? And is wisdom a burden? If I could choose to un-see the things I’ve seen and un-know the things I know, would I?” I took a breath. “And at the end of the day, I do think I’d go back and change it all, because sometimes it gets hard being…like this.” I glanced at him. “But in some cases, I think ignorance is a
good
thing, so…who knows.”

I stopped myself, knowing I was getting too deep for first date material, or whatever this was. Around guys I had to constantly check myself to make sure I wasn’t, like, revealing too much, letting the Floodgates of Emotion open up too early, but Cooper didn’t seem to mind.

“Wow,” he said again after a while. “You seem very intelligent, Summer Martin. I like that.”

“Hey, how’d you know my middle name?” I asked, which was my mom’s maiden name, since she’d had no brothers. Cooper shrugged again.

“I don’t know, I guess I noticed it when you flashed your ID to the bartender earlier.”

“Oh. And thanks, but don’t confuse intelligence with, like, world-weariness. I missed a lot of school as a kid and therefore I can’t do geometry or tell you about, like, the fall of the French monarchy or whatever to save my life. But, yeah, if you want to know about Life With a Capital L and The Ways of The World and all that, I guess I’m not a
total
idiot.”

He flashed that smile again, luminous even in the dark. “Is that so?”

“I guess,” I said, my face warming.

“Good, because naïve people annoy me. What annoys
you
, Summer?”

“Hmmm.”

I considered bringing up the Facebook wedding thing but then remembered that the word “marriage” was the single worst thing a girl could ever say on a first date besides, like, “I was born a male” or something.

“Lately?” I asked. “Underwear and responsibilities.”

“I get you on that one,” he laughed. “And what are your, like, hobbies?”

“Are you really asking me about my hobbies right now?”

“Indeed I am. The way in which a human being chooses to spend their down time can be surprisingly revealing. How do you fill your empty time?”

“Hmm. I don’t know,” I said as I looked out at the sea. Nobody outside a hospital had ever wanted to know this much information about me, and it kind of felt like diving into the warmest ocean around after the longest, coldest winter in the world. “I don’t have many hobbies, I guess. I like to read and watch TV? Oh, and I love Scrabble, even though I’m not great at it.”

“Blech. Why?”

“I don’t know, I’m just sort of obsessed with odds. They remind me that life is a game of chance, and that you can’t control anything even if you wanted to. It saves me a lot of stress.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“What about you? What do you like to do?”

“Fish, for one,” he said. “The verb, not the noun.”

I gagged a little.

“What? Don’t like seafood?”

“No, I just…this is embarrassing, but I sort of feel bad for the fish. Getting hooked in the mouth and then pulled out of the water to drown in oxygen just all seems so cruel and weird.”

“Actually,” Cooper said, “you would be pleased to know that fish don’t even have advanced enough nervous systems to feel pain.”

“
I
feel pain, though,” I whispered before I could stop myself. “Too much of it.”

“What was that?

“Nothing. I just said that
I’m
still being pained, watching their murders. And it seems unnecessarily difficult way to get dinner, too. Why not just go to the fish market and buy it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Life’s supposed to be hard. If your life is too easy, that means you’re doing it wrong.”

I thought about that for a minute.

“Anyway, I also write,” he said. “Opinion pieces. Short stories. A little poetry. Anything.”

“Is this, like, your profession?”

“Ummm…”

“What?” I asked.

“Well, I used to do stuff for the newspaper, or, like, the online version of it, but I sort of stopped.”

“Why?”

“Well, the thing is, I, um…well, you know, the newspaper, it sort of….they let me go, as they say.”

He slumped and stared down at the sand, the human equivalent of a collapsed building.

“Oh, I didn’t…um, sorry for asking.”

“It’s okay,” he said, looking like it was definitely
not
okay. “They were downsizing, and since I was only a part-time columnist, well…yeah. That was two years ago, and I haven’t worked since.”

“At all?”

“At all.”

“Well, they’re idiots,” I finally said. “I’d never let you go.”

He bit his lip a little, enticed. “Is that so?”

Oh my God. Did I really say that?

“I guess we’ll see,” I said, trying to save myself.

“Here, let’s pause.”

He laid his jacket down on the sand for me and then lowered down beside me. We just stared out at the ocean for a minute, watching the reflection of the moon bounce up and down on the surging black waves.

“Well, looking back on tonight, I’m certainly glad I downloaded that app and then weirdly poured my heart out to you,” Cooper said as Hadley rolled around in the sand beside us. “This definitely beats Netflix on my couch.”

“I’m glad, too,” I said. “And don’t worry, you didn’t rant. If anyone did, it was me. You’re just, like, I don’t know…disarming.”

“Is that so?”

“Perhaps…”

Our eyes met, and, like gravity, our faces started to pull together.

“You know, if I were brave,” he whispered, his cool breath dancing across my lips, “I’d stop myself right now, since you said we’re just friends and all. But I’m not.”

He leaned in to kiss me just as the world lit up. We both turned to see a dazzling firework pop above the sand dunes, casting a golden glow on the sand and sea. People celebrated the Fourth of July in Florida all summer long, and it wasn’t uncommon to see fireworks from spring to August here.

I turned back and saw my reflection in Cooper’s eyes, but mostly I just saw my scar.

Scar scar scar. I’m scarred. I’m scarred and doomed and insecure and Cooper’s not and I shouldn’t even be here.

He leaned closer again as everything faded back to black, and I pushed him away with my hand.

“Oh,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Ugh
. This wasn’t right. Everything was messed up, most of all me. I was broken and I was dying and I was a heinous bitch for going on a date with someone the same week I’d learned I had a terminal illness. No matter how hard I was trying to act like one of the flirty Facebook girls with the whole world in front of her, I was a broken adult-child who’d spent most of my life in a hospital, and I just wasn’t built for this.

“Um, I should go,” I said as I got up.

“What? Why?”

I reached down to my left wrist to fumble with the silver bracelet my dad had gotten me on a work trip to the Bahamas, which I did every time I was nervous, but it wasn’t there. I’d lost it.
Shit
.

I bent over and started darting around in the sand looking for it. “Because it’s getting chilly and I can’t find my bracelet and you’re cute and I’m not and everything is all wrong and I just want to go home and take a bath and forget the world exists.”

Cooper opened his mouth to respond.

“Just don’t ask,” I said as I stopped and held up a hand. “I can’t explain. I’m sorry.”

“Well…I mean, I can see you again, right?”

I stared at him. Had this meltdown not done
enough
to push him away?