The Summer Remains (3 page)

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.”