5. Spring Break
SPRING brEAK
THE YEAR BEFORE
I’D GONE ON spring break with the Coopers every year since Sadie and I started high school, and junior year was no different.
It had been a particularly good year for Steven Cooper, or so he kept saying, which meant that rather than the usual Hilton Head beach house, we were heading down to Key West. Sadie and I had spent months picking out our bathing suits, and Ben was noticeably put out by the fact that even though the Coopers had made it clear that Sadie had the option of inviting him on the trip instead of me, she’d still chosen me.
“Are you sure you want to bring me and not him?” I’d asked her.
“Of course, you know how Ben can be,” she’d said, and she didn’t have to say anything else.
Ben was the jealous type—he didn’t trust Sadie, and it showed. She deserved better. I told her more than once that she should dump him. The funny thing is that it should have been the other way around… It’s Sadie who shouldn’t have trusted Ben.
Leading up to the break, though, things were exactly the same between them. Ben was being jealous and possessive, but he was also love-bombing the hell out of her anytime they got in a fight.
“Love-bombing?” Detective Norris interrupts me.
“Yeah,” I say, trying and failing to hide my annoyance at the interruption with such a basic question. “You know, like when a person lays it on really thick to make someone feel really dependent on them. It can come across as romantic at first, but it’s actually crazy manipulative.”
“I know what the term means,” he replies, once again looking at me in the way that I hate—like he’s smarter than I am. “I was just curious about your use of it here. Do you think their relationship was emotionally abusive? That Ben was a narcissist?”
“Ben? What? No.” I feel my cheeks turn red. “I mean, he could be a jealous jerk, but Sadie could be a lot too…”
Is this guy not as clueless and out of touch as I thought? I have to choose my next words very carefully.
“It’s an expression they use all the time on a show I watch,” I say finally with a little shrug. “Can I just finish my story?”
The house they rented was beyond gorgeous. It looked like something straight out of one of those real-estate reality TV shows. Even Jayne, who normally does her best to be perpetually unimpressed by everything, had her mouth hanging wide open.
“Damn, Steven,” she said finally. “I gotta say, you knocked this one out of the park.”
Steven was beaming.
I’d been around long enough to understand Steven Cooper’s relationship with his daughters.
Sadie adored him with abandon, but I could see that in his eyes, that made her love worth less than Jayne’s.
Steven Cooper liked things he had to work for, and I think it was probably because he’d been born the golden boy.
When everyone hands you what you want on a silver platter for your entire life, it has to get to you sooner or later.
I’m not saying it was healthy or whatever, but since I have my own special brand of dysfunctional family, it became a sort of game to me to figure out what was dysfunctional about the Coopers.
Steven didn’t—doesn’t—respect people who love him too easily.
I often found myself wondering how he’d ended up with Carly, who was every inch the doting wife, which I could tell was an opinion that Sadie and Jayne both shared (although probably for different reasons).
Given that it was a rare point on which the three of us all agreed, we would sometimes talk about it if we were sharing a room on a trip and Jayne was in one of her particularly bitchy moods.
Carly was always a good mom, as far as I could tell, and she was a good surrogate mom to me too.
But her world was so small. And she always had way more in common with Sadie than she did with Jayne.
Jayne was Steven’s girl. Sadie was Carly’s.
The two of them would spend hours planning for whatever major events were coming up at school, like making signs for Sadie’s homecoming queen campaign or track meets.
It was all the kind of stuff you’d want a mom to do, and sometimes I didn’t know what to say when Sadie and Jayne started laying into her.
They didn’t know what it was like not to have a mom at all.
To wish so desperately that there was someone you could bitch about.
Carly was an easy target, and when I joined in, I could almost pretend that the three of us were sisters, and she was my mom too.
But pretending something doesn’t make it true, no matter how good you are at the game.
It was the fourth night of our trip, and I was having the time of my life.
We were spending our mornings on the beach and our afternoons in town shopping, with Steven cooking up dinner every night, featuring whatever he caught on his deep-sea fishing excursion that day.
I think it was swordfish that night, and it was kind of a big deal because they let all us kids have wine with dinner.
Some kind of light, summery white that Carly had been gushing about.
Apparently, it was a rare Italian import, as if any of us would know or care.
But they had bought three bottles and decided to share with us.
I’ll admit, I’m pretty bad at knowing my limits, which is one of the reasons why I quit drinking. But that night the wine just hit me like a ton of bricks. I got so drunk.
Most of the night is really fuzzy, but I do remember how much fun it was before I got wasted.
How even Jayne was relaxed, probably because she was busy texting her best friend, Evan, most of the night.
Carly had given up a long time ago on asking the girls to put their devices away during mealtimes.
Sadie wasn’t too bad about it—I was usually with her, and I think she thought Ben could just wait—but with Jayne, it was like she had to get back to Evan the second he texted her.
Any conversation with him always put her in a good mood.
She even got up a few times to refill my glass for me in the kitchen, where the wine was left cooling in the fridge.
I really hadn’t meant to get so drunk. Not tipsy, cute drunk either.
I’m not sure why anyone decided to keep pouring me drinks or why Steven and Carly let it go.
I can’t remember too much, like I said. But by the time we finished eating, I was somehow sloppy drunk, while everyone else was just pleasantly, lightly buzzed.
It was Carly who not-so-gently suggested that I go upstairs to bed.
“I’m fine,” I remember saying, stumbling slightly as I got up from the table.
“Clearly, you’re not,” Jayne said coldly, looking up from her phone with a glare that was something between embarrassment and utter disgust. I remember thinking how obnoxious it was for her to be so judgmental after she’d poured me drinks. But that was Jayne for you: judgmental.
“Mom’s right, Patch,” Sadie said. “Probably time to call it a night, yeah?”
“You too?” I asked, wondering why my voice sounded so loud, even to my own ears. “You’re no fun!”
I knocked over my wineglass as I left the table. It was an accident, and the perfect golden tone of the wine soaked in quickly into the upholstery of my chair.
“Okay,” Steven said, getting up from the table himself. “Come on, kid. Upstairs with you.”
Steven was like that. Is like that. When everyone else sits around making suggestions about what to do in a situation, he’s the one who stands up and does something about it.
For better or worse. Before I knew it, he was next to me, offering an arm in a way that would have been gallant if I weren’t a drunk sixteen-year-old and he weren’t the fiftysomething father of my best friend, trying to save me from the embarrassment I inevitably seem to cause for myself everywhere I go.
At least I used to be able to blame the embarrassment on alcohol.
Now I have no excuse—it’s just me being fucking me.
Once he helped me to the doorway of my room, Steven gave me a fatherly pat on the shoulder. “Don’t be too embarrassed,” he said, reading my mind. “Happens to the best of us. Get some rest.”
He disappeared back to the family below while I muttered a barely coherent “Thanks.”
Just my luck, Jayne happened to show up at my door about two minutes after Steven was back downstairs.
“Really, Lizzie?” she asked, leaning against the frame and shaking her head at me like I was a puppy who’d had an accident.
“Your pathetic obsession with my sister is bad enough. What, are you dragging Steven into it now too? Making him help you to bed? Do you have any shame? Is there a man alive you won’t throw yourself at? ”
“That’s not—I didn’t—” I felt my face turning bright red, and the room was already spinning. “I need to lie down,” I said finally.
It wasn’t even an excuse. I never even told Jayne she was wrong. Maybe she wasn’t. I do have a history of throwing myself at guys. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s true.
I must have been trashed, because about two minutes after Jayne left the room, I collapsed into my bed and passed out.
At the house back in Hilton Head, all us girls shared a room, but the place in Key West had four bedrooms, which meant we all got our own.
I had been reveling in the privacy ever since we’d arrived.
Levi isn’t big on privacy, and he’s gone as far as taking my door off its hinges just to make sure I’m not getting up to any “funny business” with whatever guy I’m seeing.
I’m not sure if he realizes how easy it is to just go someplace else, but he seems to think that robbing me of every shred of dignity in the house is the same thing as protecting my honor, so he clearly doesn’t have a very good grasp on reality.