The Shippers(39)

“I can’t imagine a version of you like that, either, honestly,” Cooper said.

“Well, that’s how it is.”

“Can’t you just seriously explain it all to her—like you just did for me?”

“I can. I should. But the thing is, a few weeks ago, she told my mom that the number-one thing she’s most excited for on this cruise—besides the getting married part, I guess—is that serenade. She’s been looking forward to it for weeks. Or decades, depending on how you count.”

Cooper rolled back on his pillow to contemplate all this.

Cooper knew about music. He was a composition major in college. He could play the piano, the drums, and the mini banjo. Oh, and he had perfect pitch, too.

I’m sure this was hard for him to relate to.

“The thing I can’t get past,” Cooper said then, “is that you’re great at singing. It’s not like you’re tone-deaf. Or you don’t have rhythm. Or you lack tonal memory. You have—really—a good voice.”

“Thank you,” I said, like you do when a compliment doesn’t penetrate.

“You don’t believe me?”

I thought for a second. “I guess it doesn’t really change anything. I’ve just always been … afraid to sing in public.”

“But why?”

“Does everything have to have a reason?”

“Probably.”

We were doing therapy now? Fine. “I had a mean music teacher.”

“Define mean.”

“She used to single me out and tell me I sounded like a yowling cat—in first grade!—and make me stand at the head of the class, repeating sections of songs in front of everybody until I got them right. But I never could get them right. It got so bad, I started faking stomachaches before class. Then she decided I was a troublemaker—and started doing it more.”

“Wow,” Cooper said.

“It kind of snowballed.”

“It sure did.”

“I’ll state for the record that I had many wonderful teachers in my life—most of them math teachers, by the way—which was lucky. But she was the only music teacher at our elementary school for years. So I had her three years, first grade through third, before she quit.”

“The year I moved to our street,” Cooper said, putting it together.

“By fourth grade, we had Mrs. Cantorna—who was, as I’m sure you remember, the epitome of loveliness.”

“But by then it was too late for you.”

I nodded. “By then it was too late for me.”

Cooper was quiet for a minute after that. Then he asked, “Are duets allowed?”

“Where?” I asked.

“At Ashley’s reception.”

I pulled in a breath. Was he asking what it sounded like he was asking?

Cooper went on. “What if I serenaded Ashley with you? What if we did it together?”

At those words, a rolling wave of relief cascaded over my body. I turned onto my side, ripping the pillow barrier away so I could check his face in the moonlight. “Really?”

He met my eyes. “That could work, maybe—right?”

I nodded. That could work, maybe.

“But do you think she’d mind an extra person?” Cooper asked.

“Not if it’s you.”

“We’re going to have to practice, okay?” he said. “And it has to be a song that’s easy for you. One you know really well.”

“Like what?” I asked.

Cooper shrugged, like What else? “‘Tonight, You Belong to Me.’”

What else, indeed.

That was our song.

Or, at least—if we’d had a song, it would’ve been that one.

Of all those songs—from “I’ll Be Seeing You” to “All of Me”—that one was our favorite. We spent the whole summer after junior year up on the roof of my house, singing it over and over. I took the melody, and Cooper took the harmony, the accompaniment, and the whistle solo. It was just one of those songs that never got old.

“You could sing that song in your sleep,” Cooper said.

“You’re not wrong about that,” I said. I probably had.

“We’ll just pretend we’re in your bedroom,” Cooper said. “Easy.”

I was nodding now, liking this idea more and more. “If you’re going to do something terrifying, it should be something you already know by heart.”

“You should get that as a tattoo,” Cooper said.

“Maybe I will.”

Could it be that simple? Had we just solved it?

I rolled back to study the ceiling again.

It was like that glorious feeling—my favorite feeling in the world—with a problem set in math where you’d spent days, and weeks, and study sessions, trying to fit the pieces together … and then they clicked into place.

And then Cooper started singing, like we’d done so many times: the sweetest, saddest song, written to a love who now belonged to somebody else, leading up to his favorite line:

But tonight,

You belong to me.



He hadn’t even hit the word tonight before I jumped in, too, and by you belong to me, we were fully harmonizing like we’d never stopped.