The Summer Remains (9 page)

I stared at him. “You’re seriously trying to get me undressed on our second date, or whatever this is?”

“Of course it’s a date,” he said. “And…wait, why are you looking at me like that?”

The wind whipped between the pilings below us. “Well, it’s just that…um…nobody has ever taken me out on a date before, that’s all.”

His head turned. He wasn’t expecting that, I guess. “Really? At twenty-four?”

I stared at him for what felt like forever, feeling stark naked. Finally he turned, shook his head, and approached the railing. “And fine, don’t take off your clothes. Have fun sinking to the bottom when you are overwhelmed by the weight of soaking wet cotton! Just come on, trust me. I won’t even touch you or look that hard, I swear.”

I hesitated. The thing was, in my haste to get ready, I’d put on a two-piece instead of my usual one-piece, meaning I’d have to show my stomach. But oh well: he was asking for it.

I reached down and lifted up my dress to just below the white tube sticking out of my lower left abdomen and the surgery stars crisscrossing my trunk and lower neck area. The truth was, I was technically disabled, although I had accepted this fact to varying degrees throughout my life. Because being disabled makes you Other, and that erases you, because nobody in the world wanted to be Other. Your genes told you to find a suitable mate, and that meant someone who was strong and capable, someone who carried good genes – not someone defected like me, because I would produce less-than-perfect offspring. So I literally repulsed people on a genetic level – I was logical enough to acknowledge that, and human enough to admit that it broke my heart. But I hadn’t always been like this. By a certain age I’d started trying to hide and deny my disability by doing anything I could to be seen as One Of The Normal Kids. During one particularly pathetic period of denial, I tried to join the track team in high school and then saw my two-week career as a runner go up in flames when I fell on my face during a track meet with the Florida School for the Blind, single-handedly making my school lose the entire meet. Now, losing a running contest to a bunch of kids who could not see was a very specific kind of humiliation that I would not wish on even the most distant of frenemies, but it did lend me a certain humility that I carry with me to this day.

But I was done hiding, if only because I no longer had the energy. So I closed my eyes, took the dress off completely, and waited for his response as I stood there in all of my scarred glory.

“And…?” he finally asked. “What are you waiting for?”

I finally opened my eyes. “This is a feeding tube. I get milk through a tube. I can’t eat, Cooper. Like, at all. Anything. It makes me barf. Just so you know.”

He just stared at me and then grabbed my hand, pulling me to the edge of the pier. “Summer, if you wanna scare me, you’re gonna have to pull some hidden tentacles out of your bra or something. My mom’s in a wheelchair, so a little health issue or two is nothing for me. Anyway, you ready?”

A smile rose from somewhere deep within me and parted my lips. And I couldn’t explain why, but suddenly I felt like the lightest person alive. “Tentacles? Ew. And I guess. I mean, yeah. Let’s do it.”

We climbed the railing. I held my breath. And together, we jumped.

Now that my life had a possible expiration date, why did it feel like I’d only just started living?

10

We freefell for a few moments, and just as my stomach got that gross falling feeling, we hit the water with dual thuddy-splashy sounds. Immediately we started rising and falling with the waves, out in the middle of the sea. It was weird, and fun, and I had never done anything like it before. There was this greenish glow on Cooper’s face from the stars, and he was just beautiful.

“Look down,” he whispered, and so I looked down and gasped again. “It’s phosphorescent plankton,” he said as I stared at my glow-in-the-dark skin. You know how little bubbles form on the inside of a champagne glass and then rise to the surface? That’s what was happening, except they were forming on my skin in a beautiful neon green color, and then they’d, like, zigzag away from me whenever I moved. My skin was sparkling, and for all the world it looked like I was emitting little green champagne bubbles. “My friends and I learned about this the first time we broke into the pier after dark and drunkenly jumped off,” Cooper explained. “We looked down and noticed that we’d lit up like fireworks. It was crazy, and we’ve been doing pier jumps every year since then.” He paused and licked his lip. “But anyway, now you can see what I see. You were wrong, Summer: you
do
glow.”

The subject of my scar left my brain, along with all the hatred I regularly pointed at myself, and suddenly it was just me and Cooper. Us. All at once the cruel words of supermarket strangers and gawking passersby faded away, and for the first time in my life, I truly believed I was beautiful.

Cooper reached up and touched my face.

“You said you wouldn’t touch me,” I whispered.

“I lied. Sue me.”

He ran his finger along my lip and then started going up my cheek, and I took a breath as he brushed over my scar. For the first time ever, I didn’t flinch.

And neither did he.

“You’re beautiful,” he said quietly as we treaded water like puppies under the night sky. “Really. You have this…I don’t know, this grace. You carry the light, my friend.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Come on,” he said. “Haven’t you noticed how people act around you?”

“Um, by staring?”

“No, not at all. It’s the craziest thing, but they, like, act
better
. They pull up their shoulders and speak softly and mess with their clothes. I noticed it both nights we’ve hung out, with waitresses and bartenders and just random people and stuff. It’s like you make them feel inferior just by being yourself.”

“Is this your ‘
thing
?’” I laughed after a minute. “Like, do you just go around doing crazy things like this for shy, vulnerable girls? Is this what you
do
?”

“You’re not vulnerable, not really,” he said. “The way you look at people, the shine in your eyes…there’s a strength under there, whether you know it or not.”

I tried to push down the golden feeling I was drowning in.
Come on, Summer, you’re acting like the annoying Facebook girls
.

He laughed a little and then pulled away and started swimming ashore. I was dreading getting out of the water again, because that meant he’d be able to see my stomach in all its splendor, but I followed him anyway, trying not to think about all the sharks and stingrays and eels and feelings and all the other deadly, terrifying things that were circling us at that very second, maliciously plotting our bloody deaths.

“Doesn’t this scare you?” I asked Cooper as we swam.

“What?”

“Oh, I don’t know, this whole ‘
swimming in the pitch-black ocean in the middle of the night’
thing?”

He turned around. “I fear the unknown. And I know what’s in this ocean. Therefore, it does not scare me.”

“Oh. What
is
the unknown to you, then?”

“Everything else. The future, mainly.”

“Okay then,” I said, and kept doggie paddling. As we swam I thought of the stars, and whether anyone up there knew or cared that I was floating in a sea of surging liquid on a doomed planet with a boy I liked and enjoyed and wanted desperately to like me back.

“Are you okay?” Cooper asked after we’d sloshed our way through the surf and collapsed on the sand. In truth, I didn’t know if I was. I had a vague pain near my feeding tube and I was incredibly out of breath, but I lied.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I panted as I hid my chest with my arms, angling my face away so he couldn’t see my makeup-free face. “I think. Ugh, that was cute and all, but you’re lucky my ankle wasn’t bitten off by a shark or something. Then this would’ve definitely been un-cute. Like, the opposite of cute.”

“You know it was more than a little cute,” he said, his face a little too smug to be adorable. “Admit it.”

“Nope.” I shook my head. “I refuse to participate in your ego-building exercises when it already seems big enough to begin with as it is.”

He laughed and then just sort of stared at me.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I don’t know, I just like you,” he said. “Do you know what a turn-on it was when you turned me down the other night? Seriously,
so
sexy, Summer.”

Ughstopsayingmynameyouaredrivingmecrazy
. My emotions were becoming too much to deal with, so I turned away again.

He looked up at the stars. “Looking at this, I almost believe in God again,” he said, and then he smirked. “True or false, Summer: God exists.”

“Why are you asking me all this?”

“Because the Jesus people back there got me thinking, and because you seem smart, and I want to hear your opinion.”

“Okay, but you first.”

“Where would I begin?” he exhaled through his teeth, puffing out his cheeks. “Okay. Well. I was raised in the church, and I built my whole identity around God, and my relationship with Him, and all that crap. But then life happened, and I had that same identity crisis when I was like nineteen that everybody has, and it just leveled me, pretty much. I felt like I had been sold a lie. If God wasn’t real, then what
was
real? If there was no order to anything, then why was I even trying? If we were all just monkeys on a rock spinning in space, then why did anything matter at all? Why not just crawl into a hole and die?” He met my eyes. “So that’s where I am. I want to believe. I really do. But I just need something to believe in.”

“Yes, I agree with all that,” I said. “There is no destiny or order or ledger in the sky deciding what your life is going to be – which is exactly the reason you should start living your life, exactly how you want to live it, right now.”

He stared at me. Because I just wanted him to know things about me for some reason, I continued. “Like, I guess I’d call myself an optimistic nihilist when it comes to all that. Nothing matters, so everything matters. You can find joy in the nothingness, and silence in the chaos. I’ve been thinking about this stuff since I was a kid, and I think this world was just one big accident, and that we create our heaven and our hell by the way we live our lives.”

“Um, explain that last bit?”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. So, like, in every neighborhood there was a miserable old cat lady who closed her curtains and hated the world and threw stuff at the kids who crossed her driveway, right? You didn’t have to wonder whether she was going to hell, because she was already in hell. Her life was miserable, whether she’d admit it or not. She’d created her own hell for herself, and she lived in it every day. But, like, that other lady two streets over who volunteered her time and checked on local sick children and, like, de-wormed African orphans on her work vacations and stuff? She was happy and free. She’d created heaven already. Who was to say that wouldn’t last forever? Who could say that disappeared as soon as she was done borrowing the set of bones she’d been leased?” I paused. “So anyway, I just try to create a good life for myself and the ones I love and forget about the rest. That’s what I try to do.”

“Well,” he said after a moment. “You’re deep. That’s kinda hot. Scratch that: really hot. I like smart girls.”

“Yeah right,” I laughed. “When’s the last time you checked out a girl’s cranium?”

“Point taken, I guess,” he said, shrugging. “But you know, right now I’m reading this book by this singer you probably don’t know, it’s essays and poetry and song lyrics called
Strange Fiction
, and-”

“Wait,” I said. “Wait just a minute. You fuck with Saviour?”

“I do, indeed, fuck with Saviour,” he laughed. “Float on, my friend.”

“You know ‘float on?!’” I cried, which was sort of Saviour’s catchphrase and the slogan of her fans, since it was from a poem of hers saying ‘even dead fish like us still go with the flow, so let your heart die and fly like a crow.’ She signed all her blog posts with the phrase, too. It was also a dark inside joke about how we were all “floating” toward an inevitable death anyway and therefore none of this crap even mattered, but that was obviously too dark to bring up now.

“Yeah, I love her music,” he nodded. “Now
there
is a smart girl. Her songs are like X-rays of the human psyche or something. She simultaneously describes all the things I loved about being a teenager, while reminding me that I’d never,
ever
want to be that person again. What’s the latest on her, anyway?”

I paused and scratched at my elbow. Since I was a total Saviour fangirl and followed her on all the embarrassing celebrity blogs I read, I practically knew what she ate for breakfast every morning – but obviously I didn’t want him to know that. Caring about celebrities was, like, weird and lame. And actually, I had to make sure not to get
too
immersed in Saviour’s world of albums and blog posts and opinion pieces and
Strange Fiction
, because in my boring life, the prospect of sinking into her beautiful dark fantasy land and losing interest in my
actual
situation, all darkness sans beauty, was all too tempting.

“I think she got arrested at an airport for heroin again,” I said nonchalantly. “Or so I heard.”

“‘
Again
?’ Isn’t she, like, sixteen?”

“Yeah, but she’s also a genius, and as she says in that song
Bones
, intelligence and happiness are-”

“Infrequent companions,” he said, finishing the quote for me. “I know that all too well. That sucks though, she’s so talented. Anyway, yeah, I’ve been reading the book over and over, and I think I’ve internalized pretty much every word in it – so
clearly
I like smart girls,” he joked.

“Strange,” I said, shivering a little. “I’ve memorized the book, too. I wouldn’t have expected that from you. She’s so…dark.”

“She is, but she describes everything so perfectly. Sometimes I just wonder, like,
how could anyone else possibly be this lost, too
?! Sometimes the words are so beautiful and true and unsettling I just want to hug my book and make sure nobody else in the world ever reads those words, because they are
mine
, Goddamnit, and they apply to
me
, and damn it if anyone else is going to steal
my
words and plug them into
their
lives!”

I laughed harder than I had in months. It was so rare to meet anyone who made me laugh like this, or anyone who made me laugh at all, actually, and didn’t make me shiver with disgust and decide that they were Not Like Me, But One Of Those Others; those people who chewed with their mouths open and didn’t care for animals and thought white sunglasses were an acceptable life decision. You know, muggles. But Cooper was just…acceptable, in the best way.

Something else came to me. “In the water you said the future scared you. What did you mean?”

“Well maybe not the future,” he said, “but, like, how I’m even going to
get
to the future at all.
That
scares me.”

“Ahh,” I said. “The age-old plight of the twenty something.
What the fuck am I doing with my life
?”

“Yes!” he cried.

“Mhmm. I feel like your teens are all about those big, cheesy questions: you know, ‘who am I,’ ‘why am I here,’ etcetera. But then your twenties are when you have to actually put those answers to
work
. Like, in a larger context. Like, I’m here, and I sort of know who I am, but who am I in the
world
? What do I do now? And am I doing it right, this whole
life
thing?”

“Yeah,” he said, “your twenties are definitely a weird age. Children in adult bodies being forced to make adult decisions with their child brains. It’s all a big mess if you ask me.”

“Exactly!” I said, and then he laughed.

“What is it?”

“I’m just like everyone else,” he said. “I have no idea where I’m going, but something tells me I’d be fine ending up wherever, as long as you were with me.”

I hesitated audibly. Something told me he was sincere, but I still didn’t want to believe him. I’d already seen too many rides around the block end when we’d gotten back home; watched enough flirtatious little texting relationships fizzle into radio silence. This was all too perfect. I felt like I was in a movie. Something needed to wrong. And so, like the idiot I was, I
made
it go wrong again.