Chapter Twelve
Twelve
ALL OF COOPER’S predictions came true, by the way.
Our whole childhood street did tease me. A lot. So much.
I’d been hoping for a Miss Congeniality moment as I made my entrance—the wind blowing my hair as I strutted in slo-mo and turned every head on the deck.
Instead, nobody really noticed me one way or the other.
Finn wasn’t even there yet, and the other guests were just happily gathered, enjoying each other’s company, eating nibbles off a snack table. Lots of them were work friends I didn’t recognize—or maybe Brody’s relatives. My childhood neighbors were nowhere in sight.
Safe to say, none of these random strangers cared at all if I’d had a glow-up.
I stood there, disappointed. All that slo-mo for nothing.
Was I even at the right wedding?
Then I noticed Ashley, standing next to Brody and letting some cousins get a gander at her engagement ring. Next, I spotted Grandma Dodie, in a straw hat and drinking an enormous fruity cocktail with a dashing older gentleman I didn’t recognize.
I found Pete and nodded toward the two of them. “Who’s the player with Grandma Dodie?”
Pete looked over. “I just asked Mom. He’s a passenger.”
“Not part of the wedding.”
“Nope. She picked him up at the burger bar.”
“Go, Grandma Dodie.” She did not come to play.
I spied my mom and dad, who were busy fighting the wind to tie up a custom-printed welcome banner that featured an engagement photo of Ashley and Brody hugging and an Audrey Hepburn quote in modern calligraphy that read The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.
At last, I found our neighbors—who, parents and kids alike, had gathered on the mini-golf course.
Mr. and Mrs. Dunn were there, and the Vargases, and Finn’s parents, the Turners.
Cooper’s mom was the only parent from our childhood street who had RSVPed no—but only because she was prone to seasickness.
She’d made Ashley and Brody promise to come over for a nice dinner once we were all back.
This felt like an audience I could prove something to. I tried again for that slo-mo entrance, but there was too much Astroturf in that section to do it right.
Everybody—and I mean everybody—in that group had heard about my failed attempt at getting married and was curious to get a glimpse of the wreckage of my life. And every single person who greeted me said some jovial variation of There’s the runaway bride! before giving me a hug.
It was fine. We all needed something to talk about. It was the only thing I’d done lately to make front-page neighborhood news. And I’d been bracing for this for a while.
They also had a few thoughts on my outfit.
I got teased for my too-formal attire, my too-fancy heels, my “new hairdo,” the color of my lipstick, the length of my hem, and my hot-pink heart-shaped earrings—which were generally assessed to be too hot, too pink, and too heart-shaped.
But Cooper had a point: At least I wasn’t invisible.
The teasing was no surprise.
What was surprising … was Cooper.
He stayed right by my side the whole time, like a professional hype man.
If anybody lingered too long on what on earth happened at my tragic non-wedding, Cooper said, “She came to her senses, that’s what happened.”
Over and over: When they questioned my judgment, or dismissed my choices, or not-too-subtly implied that I looked like a hooker … Cooper just jumped in to point out—or even exaggerate—some quality of mine that made me sound far less pathetic.
Convincingly. Enthusiastically. Like he really believed it.
Improvising lines like, “A girl like this doesn’t have to settle for a guy like that.”
Like he was the VP of PR for my rebranding project.
How much was I paying this guy? He needed a raise!
He boasted about me in ways that I could never boast about myself. “Did you know that JoJo graduated from college Phi Beta Kappa?” he’d demand. “In mathematics?”
Of course they didn’t know that.
I didn’t even know that Cooper knew that.
It didn’t matter. To almost everybody who lived on our street, I was just the smallest, scrappiest kid in the neighborhood gang.
But Cooper didn’t let that stop him.
“You wouldn’t think a person who looks this good could be smart, too, would you?” he demanded of everyone.
Did I look good? I was too self-conscious to have a read on that.
“Brains and beauty,” Cooper kept saying. “Amirite?”
Was he Jedi-mind-tricking us all?
Who cared? It was working.
“This girl,” Cooper told our next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Dunn, pointing at me to drive the point home, “is the Einstein of the street.” Then he turned to me and said, “Tell them your IQ.”
What a question. “I have no idea,” I said.
Cooper nodded at the Dunns, like See? Then he said, “How smart do you have to be for your own mom to hide your IQ like a state secret?”
When the Vargases said they’d heard I was left at the altar, Cooper set the record straight by telling the whole story—adding a totally fictional grand finale of Pearce bursting into tears and “crying like a donkey.”
“Wow,” the Vargases said.
“She’s a heartbreaker,” Cooper said. Then he added, like it was good advice for everyone: “Watch yourselves.”
Even when people like the elderly Bishops were, in fact, just making pleasant chitchat and asking what I was up to—Cooper couldn’t help but be aggressive.
“Tell them about your thesis paper for your math major,” he said, elbowing me.
“They don’t want to hear about that,” I said.
Didn’t Cooper realize that nobody wanted to talk about math? Most people on earth had either (worst-case scenario) active PTSD from terrible math teachers growing up or (best-case) a pleasant, glazed-over disinterest. Math was the last subject on earth anybody should use for small talk.
“I want to hear about it,” Cooper said.
I glanced at the Bishops. Then I said, “Well, it was based on the mathematics of knot theory.”
I checked for any sign of recognition.
Seeing none, I explained. “Knot theory, like knots.” Then I spelled it: “K-n-o-t-s. Which is a mathematical exploration of how knots are shaped.”
Had I lost them yet?
“So…” I went on. “I used knot theory to explore the loops you make with yarn in knitting”—here, I mimed knitting something—“you know, like sweaters and scarves…”
Their eyes still seemed focused.
“To extrapolate mathematical models,” I went on, for my big finish, “that could help physicists understand how strands of DNA fold themselves.”
And … now I’d lost them.
Their smiles had stiffened. Their eyes had glazed. As if to prove me right, they both caught sight of some other neighbors—and hurried to go greet them.
But guess who I hadn’t lost?
Cooper.
He was still right there with me, wearing an expression you might call astonished admiration. “Holy shit,” Cooper said. “That was your math thesis?”
Now I felt shy. “It was pretty esoteric.”
“It’s incredible,” Cooper said, staring at me with new eyes. “It’s the most bad-to-the-bone thing ever.”
I’d never heard a regular person say bad-to-the-bone to describe math. But he wasn’t wrong.
A smile took over my face, and I looked at Cooper with some new eyes myself.
“What?” Cooper asked as I kept smiling.
“Nothing.”
“What?” he prodded.
“I’ve just never seen a non–math person get excited about knot theory.”
“And knitting,” Cooper pointed out. “And DNA. Is that why you became an art teacher? So you could teach your kids to knit strands of DNA?”
“Not exactly, but kind of,” I said. I mostly became an art teacher because I felt like the world vastly underappreciated the awe-inspiring beauty of mathematics. And I wanted to get that fixed. One middle schooler at a time.
Then Cooper added, “Guess you didn’t knit me that beanie in high school for nothing.”
I shrugged. “Must’ve been destiny.”
“I still wear it, by the way.”
“You do?” I thought he might have thrown it away.
He nodded to confirm. “Prized possession.”
The idea that he’d kept it felt important somehow.
That’s when Cooper said, “Anyway. I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
He put both his hands out for a furtive—and considerate—low five and leaned closer. “That you were smarter than all the rest of us put together.”
COOPER AND I continued chatting for a while because Finn took forever to show up, and Ashley wasn’t starting the Putt-Putt tournament without him.
This was part of the plan.
With great precision, Ashley had sorted all the young people into mini-golf teams that had the potential for love connections—and the old people were not included. They self-sorted off toward the snack table while the rest of us gathered in our teams.
I went along while wondering about Finn. Did he have a last-minute work thing? Did his plane from Chicago get delayed? Did he get back with his ex-wife?
He wouldn’t mess up my plans for radical self-transformation, would he?
But just as I was thinking of checking the passenger list, Finn arrived at last. And, for better or for worse, he looked exactly like his picture on the web. Except for the golf shirt. And matching golf shorts. And … matching golf shoes.
A full golf ensemble is what I’m describing—minus the 1920s jodhpurs and argyle socks.
Like Finn was possibly taking Putt-Putt a little too seriously.
As he walked toward us, stealing my slo-mo entrance for himself, I compared this in real life version of Finn to my well-worn mental picture.
Yep. Still the confidence of the best-looking guy in the room.
And still just oozing alpha energy.
And—could he be taller now? Bigger, anyway. He’d definitely been working out. Professional success agreed with him. He had a new swagger: not a high-school-kid swagger, but the refined, seasoned swagger of a grown-up.
He was still—and always would be—Finn Turner. The legend himself.
Here’s a random truth about crushes: They can, and do, burn out.