The Shippers(61)

The ones who had ogled me on the wharf.

“Look,” I said to Cooper. “It’s the ship-faced guys.”

“It can’t be,” Cooper said.

But then we read their T-shirts. One of them read BEER MODE ACTIVATED, another read POWERED BY BEER, and the third one kept it simple and just said BEER LIFE.

“Those guys really love beer,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Cooper agreed as we openly stared at them.

And then, I guess in that way that you can sometimes just sense when people are looking at you, the guys noticed us—and started elbowing each other. And just as Cooper and I were about to wave hello like we were friendly acquaintances from across the Gulf, all three men turned around at once, pulled down their pants, and pressed their butts up against the glass of their balcony railing.



* * *



I TEXTED ASHLEY—WITH a selfie for proof—about my sunburn, and she gave me a pass for the day to recover, but she also replied that she fully expected me to be in attendance at tonight’s variety-show-slash-dance-contest, looking, and I quote, “gorgeous.”

She even sent Pete down with a baby-blue sundress she wanted me to wear to offset the “broiled neon” color of my skin.

“Bruh,” Pete said when he saw me. “You really messed yourself up.”

“I’m better now,” I said. And I was. Mostly.

But that evening, as I did my hair, and put on mascara, and stepped gingerly into the dress, Cooper paced around, refusing to get dressed.

“I’m not sure this is a great idea,” Cooper said, while I was putting on my lipstick.

“What?”

“I kind of think maybe you need to take one more night to recover.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “Ashley would never stand for that.”

“You still look pretty pink,” Cooper said.

“It’s fine,” I said. “The lights’ll be dimmed.”

“I’m not worried about what other people will see. I’m worried about how you’ll feel.”

I stepped out of the bathroom to frown at myself in the mirror.

“I’m serious,” Cooper said then.

“About what?” I asked, rotating to get a look at my profile.

“About how you should stay in tonight.”

I looked over. “I’m not staying in, Cooper. I wasted too much time today already.”

But I guess he was a little touchy. “You think today was a waste of time?”

“No,” I said. “But you have to admit I didn’t make any progress.”

Cooper was studying me. “I don’t know if you know this about yourself, but sometimes you get so focused on a goal that you kind of lose perspective on everything else.”

I did know that—but I hadn’t known that Cooper knew that.

“Like the time,” Cooper went on, “that you decided to paint your high school car hot pink—but you had the wrong kind of paint, and it wasn’t sticking, and it kept peeling off as it dried, but you just kept painting and painting and stayed up all night and then slept through your geometry test the next day?”

“Yeah, that … wasn’t great.”

“It was a disaster. And it was a disaster from five minutes in, by the way. But you just kept painting. It was like you’d decided you were painting that car that night with that paint, and so you were locked in.”

He wasn’t wrong. This was kind of a thing with me.

“You have to be able to shift direction sometimes. It’s okay to change your mind.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to work in one of my earrings. “Great life advice. Thank you.”

“Are you listening?” Cooper asked.

“Of course,” I answered. I wasn’t, really.

“Then what am I saying?” Cooper asked.

“You’re saying,” I repeated back, “that if I’m too sunburned, I don’t have to go to this thing tonight.”

“Okay,” Cooper said.

“And also that it’s okay to change direction in life. And I don’t disagree.”

“Exactly,” Cooper said.

“But I’m fine,” I said.

“You don’t look fine,” Cooper said.

But I held out my pink arm and touched my fingers to it several times. “See? I’m fine. It looks way worse than it is. I’m ninety-five percent normal.”

“I think you should stay here.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I’m talking about this whole plan.”

I shook my head. “What whole plan?”

“Operation Conquest.”

But I still refused to take his meaning. “What about it?”

“You’re trying so hard to get Finn interested in you,” Cooper said. “But what’ll you do if it works?”

“Um, I’ll live happily ever after, thanks.”

“You can’t possibly think that.”

“I absolutely think that,” I said.

“JoJo,” Cooper said then. “Finn is absolutely one hundred percent wrong for you.”

What a hell of a thing to say.