The Shippers(34)

Finn frowned and left his fist there. “What was that?”

I sighed. “A narwhal.”

“It doesn’t look like a narwhal,” Finn said, like maybe I had my animal wrong.

And then Cooper, bless him, leaned in and hit Finn’s fist with a proper version.

“A narwhal,” Cooper said, pointing his finger straight, like there could be no mistake about it. Then he added, I guess for posterity: “JoJo studies the mathematics of knitting.”



* * *



LOOKING BACK, THIS was the point of no return.

In some other universe, there’s a version of my life where I read the tea leaves of the future in that moment, left the sports deck immediately, went back to Cooper’s cabin by myself, and drank his complimentary champagne straight from the bottle on his balcony until the ship left the harbor.

This is not that version.

Instead, I stayed for the Putt-Putt tournament—doggedly hoping to turn a very weak start into a strong finish.

Ashley had put me on Finn’s team, after all. And I had compressed all my organs to squeeze into this outfit. Might as well make the most of it.

Cooper wasn’t originally on my team. I know because Ashley had typed out all four lists and printed them on different-colored card stock for reference—adding Cooper at the last minute to the smallest team. But when my team gathered by the lighthouse to get started, Cooper was there.

“Aren’t you supposed to be over by the octopus?” I asked.

“I switched with Evan.”

“You didn’t have to,” I said. “I’m pretty good at Putt-Putt golf.”

“How long has it been since you’ve played?”

I thought back. “Middle school?”

Cooper shrugged and said, “You might be a little rusty.”

Was he being overprotective? How good could all these people possibly be at mini golf?

But that was before I noticed that Brody had also just switched cards and joined our team—risking Ashley’s wrath, because he was definitely upsetting the gender balance to form a bro team. All bros, in fact, except for me.

And Brody, like Finn, turned out to be surprisingly into mini golf.

I don’t need to name names, but let’s just say one of them—coughBrody—was wearing a single leather golf glove on his nondominant hand.

To play mini golf.

There are people who like to compete because it’s fun—and then there are other people who like to compete so they can crush the competition.

Brody was 100 percent crush the competition.

Except he seemed to think that I was the competition—even though we were on the same team.

Anyway—did I just say I was “pretty good” at mini golf?

Today, I was the opposite.

Did the heels have me off-balance? Was my child-sized dress cutting off circulation to the motor cortex of my brain? Or—possibly—when the biggest crush of your life publicly does not remember you at all … is that a little destabilizing?

Whatever it was, I just couldn’t get those tiny little balls into any of those tiny little holes.

I just kept smacking at them with my club. To no avail.

I’ll shock no one by saying that Finn most often got holes in one—or two. Three, max.

Brody, too.

But I was solidly, repeatedly, in the double digits.

Without ever voting, we’d all elected Finn our team captain by telepathy. And then Brody had appointed himself the scorekeeper, and—I guess in an effort to foreground that he had snagged the best of the two Burton sisters—he kept calling out loudly to ask for my score … and then pretending not to hear my answer.

“JoJo! What’s your total?” Brody would shout, waving his putter at me.

“Twenty-three!” I’d shout back.

“Three?” he’d respond, deliberately getting it wrong.

“Twenty-three!” I’d have to shout again.

And then Finn would look up from his practice putt like Twenty-three? Who could possibly get twenty-three?

Brody did this on every round.

Twenty-three is a lot. I agree.

Even so, isn’t it poor teamsmanship to leave a player behind?

But leave me behind they did. Finn, Sean, and Brody would take their shots, high-five each other, and then move on to the next anchor, or pirate ship, or mermaid.

Like I didn’t even exist.

I tried to catch up, but shot after shot went too far, stopped too short, got stuck in valleys, bounced off walls, skittered off the course altogether, or got lost in the octopus’s tentacles. Once, at the sandcastle, I made a shot that went into the hole, circled around, and then popped out again to roll back to the beginning.

And Cooper, bless him, stayed with me the whole time, offering useless advice like “Keep your wrists loose,” “Find your center of gravity,” and “Be the golf ball.”

“What does that even mean?” I said, swinging my putter and missing the ball entirely.

Somewhere around shot twelve or thirteen, Cooper would start putting his hands over mine on the golf club handle, willing them to absorb his know-how. Or, perhaps, just taking my shots for me.

This helped a little.

But of course, Cooper himself was taking shots in the teens, so I’m not sure how much know-how he really had to offer.