The Shippers(42)

“Long story short: I woke up at his place late for work, had to do a sprint of shame back to the office, and I didn’t even notice until I got home after work that I’d had a massive bruise on my neck the whole time.”

“At work?” Mrs. Dunn asked, in a tone like Oh, dear.

Harmony nodded. “But guess what? I’m not always good at what they call ‘playing well with others.’ It’s never been easy for me to make friends…”

“What about your Brazilian?” Grandma Dodie countered.

Harmony winked. “I don’t have trouble making those kinds of friends. But real friends? That’s harder for me. Lots of days, I just go into the office, do my thing, and accidentally never talk to anybody. But on that day? Everybody talked to me. In the halls. At the water cooler. Stopping by my doorway. I was the belle of the office park. And I thought: Maybe it was the signaling. Maybe everybody had a certain idea about me, and who I was, and then this unexpected sign broke that idea—and let them see me differently.”

“Very differently,” Mr. Dunn agreed.

“Sometimes,” Harmony said, “anything different is good.”

The table couldn’t argue with that.

“The thing is,” Harmony went on, “it worked. I got invited to happy hours after that. Someone asked me to join the softball team, and then a cooking class, and then an axe-throwing night. It absolutely changed my life.”

The adults were baffled. “It really worked?” Mrs. Dunn asked.

“Like a charm,” Harmony said with a wink. “It’s working right now.”

At that, Harmony’s pancakes arrived. She poured syrup all over them in a spiral while the adults just stared at her. Finally, just before stabbing a pie-slice-sized bite with her fork, Harmony looked around the table, smiled, shrugged, and said, “Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.”



* * *



I WASN’T HAPPY. Things were going off the rails. We were losing focus. This breakfast was supposed to be about Finn Turner—and Finn Turner only.

Next, in a bad-to-worse move that felt almost like deliberate sabotage, Brody announced broadly to the table, “I hear JoJo was a real rascal as a kid.”

And then the grown-ups were off to the races.

Wasn’t Brody supposed to be helping? Not sure why Ashley assumed he would do that.

And was I a rascal?

No!

Not on purpose, anyway.

But the adults all had stories. And they told every damn one.

Breakfast turned into a litany of testimonials. The time I fell off Old Man Pipkin’s roof. The time I built a fire in the Pesikoffs’ driveway. The time I ran my bike into a parked car in front of the Turners’ house.

Not to mention all the math-based businesses I’d tried to start in the summers: Algebra Tutoring for Dummies, Master Your Times Tables at Last, and (Fun) Math Camp. No takers for that one. We also reminisced at length about the time I set up a lemonade stand, but instead of selling lemonade, I tried to sell financial advice. I was like Lucy from Peanuts, but my hand-lettered sign read BECOME A MILLIONAIRE!

I’d garnered one client, and it was Grandma Dodie.

But everybody’s favorite story, of course, was the time I was selling Girl Scout cookies, and Mr. Dunn answered his front door while brushing his teeth, and I saw the foam at his mouth, thought he had rabies—and ran away screaming. That really cracked the table up. My fear of rabies. Hilarious.

I endured all these stories with the scowl of a wet cat.

“Why does everybody only remember my shenanigans?” I asked, after far too long. “Cooper was involved in ninety percent of these incidents. Masterminded most of them!” Then I pointed at Cooper like J’accuse! and said, “I only built that fire because Cooper wanted to make s’mores! And Cooper was the Director of Putting Up Flyers for the math camp! And Cooper was the one who shouted ‘Rabies!’ at Mr. Dunn before we both ran away screaming.”

“Cooper just had such a sweet face,” Mrs. Vargas said, like he could never be a troublemaker.

We all turned to regard Cooper’s face.

And that’s when Bridesmaid Two, ever the interrupter, decided to ask, “What do you do for a living, Cooper?”

“He’s in a band,” I said.

Just as Cooper answered, “I work for the BBC in London. I’m a Foley sound artist.”

I turned to him. “You’re a what?”

He wasn’t in a band? How did I not know this? I mean, yes—he’d been gone for four years, so he’d had plenty of time for a secret career change. But I’d seen him a lot lately.

Hell, we’d just slept together!

But, now that I thought about it, had I asked Cooper even one question about himself since he got here? I felt a punch of guilt for having been so very all about me for the past twenty-four hours.

“What’s a Foley artist, Cooper?” Mrs. Dunn asked.

“We make the sounds for movies.”

“Like the soundtrack?” Bridesmaid Two asked.

But Cooper shook his head. “The sounds, not the music.”

Brody liked this. “Like explosions and stuff?”

“Yes, that. But—everything. Movies mostly just record the actors’ dialogue, and everything else gets added in later. Glasses clinking. Grocery bags rustling. Footsteps.”