The Shippers(58)

It was right there—just sitting in my mouth like a butterscotch candy: Why did you disappear?

But at the very last second, I shifted.

I reached up instead and touched the scar on his upper lip. “How did you get this?” I asked.

The gel stopped. But then it started again.

I breathed in and out.

“It’s kind of a long story,” Cooper said, coating a thick layer of aloe down into an area that in any nonmedical situation we would call cleavage.

“I’ve got time,” I said.

“Shouldn’t you be going back to sleep?”

“Shouldn’t you?”

Cooper sighed. Then he said, “You remember when my mom and I moved to our street, yes?”

“Of course,” I said.

I fully remembered. Our gang of kids were all out riding bikes in the street … and I suddenly noticed this new kid in a red T-shirt with a cut on his lip and a cast on his arm, standing in the Hickses’ old driveway, watching us.

I rode over to him. “What happened to your face?”

“A fencing accident,” Cooper had said.

Looking back, it was such an odd thing to say. But I never questioned it. I just assumed that this brand-new child in my life had been brandishing a sword a little too roughly.

“Do you want to ride bikes with us?” I asked him next.

“I don’t have a bike,” Cooper had said. “We had to leave it at my old house.”

At that, I climbed off my bike and pushed the handlebars toward him. “Take mine,” I said.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I’ll go get my brother’s skateboard.”

Inside, as I hunted in Pete’s messy room for the skateboard, I saw a pack of markers, and I grabbed it and brought it outside with me. Back in the street, I called all the kids over, and then I pointed at Cooper. “What’s your name, new kid?”

“Cooper Watts,” Cooper announced, quite formally.

“Can we sign your cast, Cooper Watts?” I asked.

At that, all the kids noticed the pristine white cast on his forearm and dropped their bikes right there in the street to run over and grab markers. I’m still not sure what was so enrapturing about signing a cast, but by the time we were done with him, there was no expanse of white left. I myself signed it, in my prettiest cursive: Welcome to the neighborhood! Your friend, JoJo. And I dotted the i in friend with a flower.

Cooper had thanked me many times for that welcome, as if my declaring him to be our friend had made it happen. I’d tried to explain that it would’ve happened no matter what—but he persisted with the idea that I had somehow done something vital and life-changing for him that day.

Now, all these years later, as he applied aloe along my collarbones, he thanked me again. “When we moved onto our street,” Cooper said, “I was recovering from—a thing that had happened.”

He was? “What was the thing?”

“That’s why I had the cast, and the cut lip. It was the reason my mom and I moved, actually,” Cooper said.

I waited.

“Wow,” Cooper said then. “I guess I don’t talk about this much.”

“What happened?” I prompted.

“So…” Cooper said. “In our old town, while my parents were in the middle of getting divorced … there was an incident where my dad came by after school one day before my mom was home from work … and he took me to his apartment for a sleepover—without actually telling her.”

“Wait—what?”

“Yeah. So that was rough. She got home, and I wasn’t there, and she couldn’t find me anywhere … and then she called the police.”

“Why didn’t your dad tell her he’d picked you up?” I asked, hoping maybe he’d just forgotten.

“Apparently,” Cooper said, “he was trying to scare her.”

“Hold on,” I said, sitting up straighter—sunburn forgotten. “Are you saying your dad kidnapped you?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘kidnapped.’ He just … took me. Without asking. And didn’t tell my mom.”

“Cooper,” I said. “That’s kidnapping.”

“Not if it’s your dad.”

But I couldn’t let that stand. “Even if it’s your dad.”

Cooper shrugged. “I guess, technically—fine. You could call it kidnapping.”

“Technically?”

“I didn’t feel kidnapped, if that makes it better.”

“Not sure it does.”

“Yeah. So. My dad wasn’t the nicest guy. Or—sometimes he was okay, I guess. But he was very controlling. Like, he never let my mom do anything by herself or make any decisions. She told me not long ago that he wouldn’t let her have a credit card. She had to do everything with cash that he gave her. And he told her what to do all the time—like what to have for dinner, and where she could and couldn’t go, and what to wear. Crazy stuff. Stuff that didn’t matter—like which earrings she could buy. And I guess, after a while, she really didn’t like that. Finally, she decided to leave him … and he didn’t take too kindly to that news.”

“Like—how?”