The Summer Remains (6 page)

“Um, sure,” I said. “But only if you, like, want to, or whatever?”

“You’re delusional, Summer. Come here.” He walked over and pulled me into a hug. With a shiver I tried to ignore how good my name sounded on his lips, and how badly I wanted to hear it again, despite tonight. “You’re pretty and funny and you’re so empathetic you feel bad for catfish. A dude would have to be far stupider than me not to want to see you again.”

I just stared up at him for a minute, getting the acute sensation that I was being pulled into something.

“You’re
someone
, aren’t you, Summer?” he said next, his brown eyes searching me as they flashed against the stars.

“What?” I asked, shifting my shoulders a little. “We just met tonight. What do you mean?”

His bottom lip disappeared into his mouth. “Well, I’m a writer, and I’m big on characterizing people. I get the sense that you’re not a supporting player in this world, but a main character – am I correct?”

I smiled at the inexplicable admiration on his face.

Flirt back with him. Just try this.

“I guess we’ll just have to see, won’t we?” I asked.

“I guess we will.”

“Oh, and Cooper?”

“Yes?” he asked, almost breathlessly, as another firework popped in the low clouds.

“Happy birthday.”

I never did find that bracelet. So it goes.

6

On my first real Monday back in the real world since the diagnosis, I tried to go about my routine as normally as possible, just as I’d told Steinberg and Shelly I’d wanted to spend my time. I came into work at 1 PM for a half-day, but for some reason I felt totally irritable all afternoon. I spilled coffee from my syringe all over my pants and was accidentally super bitchy to my boss, but since she was so wrapped up in talking about her latest drama with her boyfriend or something, she barely noticed.

I worked at this tiny marketing firm called
Social
that utilized stuff kids used – e.g., social media – to market them stuff they
didn’t
use anymore, like day planners and address books and music players and calculators, basically everything the smartphone had made obsolete. Sometimes I felt a little gross, like I was selling corpses to babies, but the pay was okay and it was really easy as far as jobs went. When I was little everyone had always told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, but they’d forgotten to tell me two very important things: 1. how to grow up, and 2. how to figure out what the hell I wanted once I’d done that. So after college had dumped me into a scary and changing world, I’d decided to find something to do
while
I grew up, and that had led me to this job.

Actually, the phrase “growing up” should’ve been stricken from the English language in my opinion, because nobody ever grew up. I used to think “growing up” was that one moment when everyone looked around and suddenly realized they’d become Miranda from
Sex and the City
, but these days I was pretty sure it meant accepting that the concept of adulthood didn’t even really exist at all, and that everyone you’d looked up to as a child had just been elegantly faking it, like a toddler putting on their mom’s heels and jewelry and parading around the house with a candy cigarette in hand. Sure, our modes of dress-up changed as we progressed in age, and cheesy pearl necklaces stolen from our grandmothers’ dressers gave way to business suits and blowouts and battered old briefcases, but every time I saw my mom send my little brother off to bed and then take off her Adult Mask for the night, slump against the counter with a bottle of wine in our darkened kitchen, and quietly panic about the state of her life, my childhood faith in the authority of the world eroded just a little bit more.

Anyway, my boss’s name was Dakota J. Fanning, I am not kidding, and sometimes I suspected she had hired me solely to make me listen to her rant about her personal issues and be a shoulder for her to cry on whenever her love life went south, which was always. After she talked my ear off about her latest problems I went to my desk to work on some ads for a local author (God knows kids weren’t reading books, either) and put in my headphones to give myself some time to think about the Cooper situation. Two days had passed and still he dominated my every thought, and I knew that if I didn’t get a handle on this soon, I was going to go even crazier than I had that night of the fireworks.

While I thought, I listened to a TED Talk given by this singer called Saviour, creator of my favorite album,
Pop Killer
. Saviour was actually the stage name of an androgynous, auburn-haired seventeen-year-old from Tasmania or something, but age had nothing to do with talent sometimes – I knew that – and she was a lyrical genius nonetheless. She took the most haunting lyrics that simultaneously mocked the state of youth culture and confronted Big Life Questions, and then spit them over these massive, menacing hip-hop beats that rattled your eardrums and shook your bones. Her music was seriously soul-crushingly sad and was mostly about death and disillusionment and the fear of growing old and stuff, but that’s why I liked it. Actually, it was so good it made me look at the speakers when I heard it, made me crave some deeper connection to it than I was actually experiencing, like when you finish a good book and hug it to your chest to somehow soak the words into your soul through osmosis. Sometimes it was comforting to know another human was thinking the same messed-up thoughts as me – it made me feel less alone in my awful-ness. And I guess I liked when something made me feel deeply, while having no real-life consequences. I enjoyed reading words that attacked my soul and made me question everything I thought I knew about the world, and I liked that I could get my heart broken by Saviour’s music and then get up and walk to the sea and feel nothing at all. I found it healthy to seek temporary heartbreak in art, especially since real life gave you such a hell of a hangover. After all, wasn’t that what constituted humanity in the first place? Seeking out some pretty bullshit to insert the knife and remind us of why we’re different from the beasts?

I opened up Photoshop to start
obsessing over Cooper
doing my job. “This age has turned us into a billion little superstars,” Saviour began in her odd, high, crystalline voice. “If you eat it, post it. If you’re feeling it, rant about it. If you love it, shout it from the heavens. If you hate it about yourself, hide it with a filter and move on. The truth means nothing if the lie is pretty enough. We run to our glowing screens and throw our edited lives under the lights and bam – it’s seen, it’s heard, so it matters and it’s true. Nothing that happens in the dark actually happens – a tree falling in the forest has to be observed, shared, dissected, backlashed against, and then accepted again, or else it was never a tree, not at all. So hide your broken hearts and smile for the camera phones – we are the new monsters, and the whole world is our stage now.”

I turned off the speech as quickly as I could. That was enough Saviour for today.

After Dakota Fanning let me off work I stopped by Publix to get some stuff for dinner. I wanted to make lasagna from scratch and didn’t exactly know what you were supposed to put in it, which sounds dumb but oh well, and so I grabbed a cart and got out this cooking app I used for recipes and stuff. On the way into the bowels of the store I passed a rack full of magazines about famous people, and these people had a
lot
of problems. Even more than my boss, actually.

“JEN FIRED FROM NEW MOVIE: PARTYING TO BLAME FOR PREMATURE AGING?” one read. “JULIA GOES UNDER THE KNIFE AGAIN: ‘I’VE NEVER LOOKED BETTER!’” another proclaimed. “KATE’S FAMILY WORRIED: TOO THIN, TOO FAST?” a third screamed. “INSIDE EMMA’S NEW DIET: GET THIN FAST!” another read, confusingly. How wrong had I been in my assumption that people were either fat or skinny, ugly or pretty? In the “before” picture of the girl losing all the weight, she looked like a beauty queen and weighed probably 115 pounds. In the “after,” she was borderline anorexic. Figures. Our culture forced perfection on you and then told you you weren’t perfect enough once you attained it.
Nice fad diet and plastic surgery, but still fugly! Try harder next time, fatty!

Out of instinct I reached into my bag for my mirror to make sure my scar was still nicely concealed under the ever-present layer of makeup I’d caked over it that morning.

Ten minutes later I was looking for cheap tomato sauce while thinking about what outfit to wear next time I saw Cooper, if I’d even see him again at all. I had this purple dress I looked kind of good in, but then again it showed a rather large surgery scar, and I knew I’d feel self-conscious in it. Or maybe I could just play it cool and wear jeans and a cardigan. Or maybe I could stop being such a callous fucking bitch and stop trying to date someone while I was dying. Whatever. As I browsed, a mother and daughter passed by, and the little girl, who looked about three, pointed over at me from her cart.

“Mama, what’s wrong with that girl’s face?” she asked as her mom pushed her. “It’s broken.”

I turned as red as the sauce in my hand as I tried to look away, but I made eye contact with the mom just as her eyes popped out of her head.

“Ana Elizabeth Flores, how
dare
you say-”

Once the mom realized I had noticed, she paused, arranged her pretty features into a desperately apologetic and embarrassed smile, said a quick “sorry,” and then pulled her daughter away, muttering under her breath at her until they were out of sight.

“Wow, sorry,” someone else said, and I jumped and saw a lanky guy standing behind me. The Publix clerk loading boxes of off-brand seasoning onto the shelves had seen the whole thing. “Babies,” he said, shaking his head. “They just don’t know any better.”

“Yeah, um...yeah.”

I tossed the sauce back onto the shelf and darted away, mortified that he had heard.

Mortified that my makeup hadn’t worked.

Mortified that I lived in my scarred broken skin.

Mortified that I was me.

Mortified that I was mortified.

Just mortified in general, basically.

I had the house to myself that night since Chase had gone to a sleepover after dinner and my mom was at a “coffee meeting with a friend,” which I’d quietly suspected was actually a date from this Christian singles website she was obsessed with, although I didn’t say anything. It was gross outside, a light, windy rain falling in sheets against my shingled roof, and because everything else in my life was going to shit, I cuddled up in bed and opened up my Kindle app. My life could be kinda sucky sometimes, and there was nothing that comforted me more than sinking into a good book and immersing myself in a world I knew nothing of and feeling things I would never otherwise feel. If eyes were windows into the soul, books were rabbit holes into the imagination. But my brain was on overdrive and I couldn’t concentrate on my book for the life of me, as it was one of the sixteen thousand other books where a petrolifically-named bad boy called Slade Stonewood or Rock Rockford steps away from his greasy motorcycle and/or cage fighting arena long enough to be redeemed by the love of a bookish brunette. Seriously, all the books were the same, and I was
so
ready for something new. Anyway, because I would rather stick rusty pins under my fingernails than let myself be alone with my thoughts for too long, I went into the Florida room and put on last week’s episode of some
Real Housewives
type show I was trying to get into. During this episode this one woman I couldn’t stand, Gina, was supposed to get drunk and have a meltdown and punch a bunch of people at a fundraising gala for an anti-bullying charity or something, and so I grabbed a bottle of white wine from the fridge and laid myself out on the couch. I injected not one, not two, but three syringes full of wine into my feeding tube, and soon I was doing that thing where you accidentally get drunk alone at home.

To make myself feel less pathetic I grabbed my mom’s black-and-white cat, Socks, and tried to get her to snuggle with me so I could at least say I was accompanied by one other soul during my pathetic drinking exploits, but she sniffled – she’d been sick lately – and then marched away with her tail in the air. She’d been having nonstop allergies and her doctors were starting to think she was allergic to feline hair, which would literally mean she was allergic to herself. She had no idea how much we had in common.

As the situation onscreen devolved into chaos and Gina started stumbling through a mansion yelling at people and overturning furniture, my thoughts wandered to Cooper once again. I tried to ignore it, I really did, but soon he was everywhere.

I thought I could do this, fool someone into dating a dying girl. I really did. But I hadn’t anticipated feeling like such a lying sack of shit in his presence, and I wasn’t sure if I was strong enough to overcome my guilt about my fate and reach for his love. And it wasn’t just the surgery thing. It was also a Me Thing. I thought I’d come to terms with myself in middle school, but now that I’d been subjected to Cooper and his almost inhuman perfection, antique feelings were starting to rise within me, floating up to the surface like bad indigestion. I’d always longed to be one of those people who had that weird spark about them, that verve that shifted the gravitational field around them and just attracted good things, made them
pop
and
crack
and
whiz
like lights in the July sky, but I wasn’t. And Cooper was. He glowed on the edges like a cloud that blocked the midday sun. And maybe we were too different. The other night had proved that. He was headed for forever and I was headed for an operating room, and we would never be able to close that gap. No matter what my phone had told me, the first few Spark boys who’d called me ugly had been right: I was unlovable, and Cooper and I were not a match. I could press my emotions into my keyboard and send them off into the fiber-optic cables of the world for the sake of dilution and distraction all I wanted, but at the end of the day the too-ancient truth in my too-modern world was that I was all alone and somehow Less Than everyone else and that nobody in the world knew just how cold that felt.

Gina ended up getting arrested for throwing a random Buddha statue at someone’s face, and I started to drift off to sleep as the eerie purplish police lights from the television danced across my walls, the opulent violets pulling me into the dark. You know, being strong during the day is easy. Everyone is strong in the light. But when the silence arrives, with no phones or tablets or headphones around to drown out the Human Noise reminding us that we are not enough, bravado falls away and the truth comes. And as the warm fuzziness of sleep started to wrap around me, the rain whispering and tapping at my windows, I was left with one final and ruinous thought: if humans were colors, Cooper was the most dazzling gold in the world and I was a million different shades of the same boring grey.