The Shippers(83)

We clearly were. Without Cooper.

I searched the dock in vain, willing Cooper to appear, running after us on the wharf and waving his arms.

But nothing. Just dockworkers. People milling about. Seagulls.

“Looks like he really did quit,” my dad said.

We watched Bishop’s Cay drift away from us for a few minutes—nobody talking—and I had that time-lag feeling where I just couldn’t seem to grasp that what was happening was really happening.

Had we truly just left Cooper behind? Had I really never set him straight about anything that mattered? Had I genuinely called him for life-and-death help—and then he actually didn’t show up?

Most important: Was there nothing at all I could do to rewind time, do this day over, and get it right?

I kept flashing back to that moment just before Cooper had stepped onto the elevator—and rewriting it in my mind. What if, propriety be damned, I’d shouted all the way down the hall, “I didn’t sleep with Finn!” Could I have bought enough time to explain?

I guess we’d never know.

When we were fully, undeniably, irreversibly at sea, my dad announced to the group, “I’m going to walk JoJo to her room now.”

More befuddlement from my mom: “You are?”

My dad assessed me. “She needs to rest before dinner.”

I nodded, glad to be rescued. Then I nodded at Ashley. “I’m okay. You should go try on the dress.”

“Let’s hope it fits,” my mother said, shifting back to the original crisis of the day.

And so we went our separate ways—my mom in charge of Ashley, and my dad in charge of me.

But here was the problem: I really didn’t want to go back to the room.

The room was the last place I wanted to go, in fact. Even the thought of it, all empty, with every trace of Cooper gone, felt bleak beyond words.

Had he really just … left?

Even when he’d declared out loud that he was done—I didn’t really think he was done. I didn’t think he could possibly give up on me so easily. Sure, I was frustrating—but that wasn’t news! I’d been frustrating my whole life!

It had never bothered him before.

As my dad walked me back, I decided it was the last place on this ship I was willing to go. “Dad?” I asked then.

“Yeah, sweetheart?”

“Let’s stop for a drink.”



* * *



MY DAD WASN’T drinking, so he got a water “on the rocks,” but I went ahead and ordered the hardest liquor I could think of: a tequila shot.

But then I didn’t drink it—because when I started to lift the shot glass, I realized my hands were still shaking. And I didn’t want my dad to see. So I sat on them instead.

All he knew, really, was that I’d gotten trapped in an abandoned lighthouse.

Maybe that was all he ever needed to know.

We sat in the shade beside the deck railing for the sake of my lingering sunburn, and I watched Bishop’s Cay float away behind us.

What happened next was the longest conversation I’d ever had with my father in my entire life. Possibly longer than all our other conversations put together.

And it happened mostly because I was stalling.

Because I couldn’t face Cooper’s empty room.

So I opened with a real headline-grabber. “I always worry,” I said, “that I’m too much like you.”

“Too much like me?” my dad asked.

“You know,” I explained. “Not good with people.”

“I’m good with people,” my dad protested.

I gave him a look.

“You’re good with people, anyway,” my dad corrected. “You’re joined at the hip with Ashley and Pete. And your mom, too, by the way. Not to mention that kid Christopher.”

“Christopher?” I asked.

“The kid with the scar.”

“Dad, that’s Cooper. How are you so bad with names?”

My dad shrugged, but now he was thinking about Cooper and me. “In my whole life,” my dad said then, “I’ve never had a friend like that.”

He hadn’t?

My dad went on. “I remember that first summer he moved to our block. You were both so scrawny. And completely inseparable, by the way. The two of you fell asleep playing board games in your room almost every night. He wasn’t even supposed to be there! He must’ve climbed in through the window. And I’d be going through the house, turning off lights and checking on everybody, and I’d find the two of you curled up like lambs. So I’d scoop him up and carry him home to his mom.”

“You did?” I asked. “I don’t remember any of that.”

“Well,” my dad said. “You were asleep.”

“What were you doing checking on me?”

“What do you mean?” my dad asked. “I checked on everybody every night. And I made sure the doors were locked—and the cars, too.”

“But why?”

“Why?” my dad asked, looking at me like I was crazy. “Because I’m the dad.”

Wow. “Does Mom know about this?”

My dad thought about it. “I don’t know. I guess she was usually asleep by then.”