Chapter Twelve #2
Even after all those crushed-out years, with no encouragement and no reason for hope, I had—genuinely—moved on.
He went to college, and then I went to college, and there just wasn’t enough fuel to keep that fire burning.
Life shifted, and so did I. Time and distance did their work.
And he became … just a former crush. A former crush with an asterisk and a lengthy footnote—but a former crush, all the same.
On the rare occasions when I’d see him around the street when we both happened to be home for holidays, it hardly rocked my world. I’d just think, Oh, there’s Finn. Who I used to have that insane crush on.
But now, seeing him in person—under the influence of this highly specific new theory that he was the only man I’d ever love …
It shifted things back. As Finn joined the group, all my old full-body Pavlovian high school reactions to him revved up again, and my rib cage felt like it was clamping down on my heart. Not to mention my lungs.
I forced myself to take a breath—terrified that I might audibly gasp.
But nobody would have noticed anyway. We were all watching Finn.
He came straight over to the neighborhood kids, and he fist-bumped everybody—which took a minute, because on our street, everyone had a signature fist bump.
Ashley’s was “snail,” where instead of bumping your fist, she’d put up two fingers like antennae.
Sean’s was “squirrel,” where he scampered his hand up your arm.
Pete’s was “stick shift,” where he moved your forearm like he was shifting gears.
Cooper’s was “shark attack,” where he made his two hands into a shark’s mouth and then ate your fist. And mine was “narwhal” … where I just held up one finger.
Everybody had a particular fist bump.
Everybody—except Finn.
Guess what Finn’s was?
Nothing. Just a fist.
Because Finn was our undisputed alpha. And he didn’t have to go any harder than that.
He was a benevolent alpha, though. He patiently bumped everybody after he arrived, shining his star power on each of us in turn like sunshine—and he said everybody’s nickname as he went.
If the person he was greeting didn’t have a nickname, he just made one up.
“Coop,” he’d said to Cooper, stretching out the ooo. His brothers, Evan and Sean, got “E-van” and “Sean-o”; Pete got “-ster” added to the end of his name to make “Pete-ster,” which made Pete glow with pride; and Ashley got “Bride of the Century” and a gallant kiss on the back of her hand.
Through it all, I hung back shyly—the way you do when you come face-to-face with your future while wearing wobbly stilettos on a carpet of Astroturf—wondering what my nickname would be.
I wound up the very last fist-bumper, after Finn had made eye contact with every other neighborhood kid and made each one feel like a million bucks.
And then he got to me.
At my turn, right there at the end, he looked at me blankly and then frowned around at the crowd for clues before squinting and saying, “And who’s this?”
Are you kind of hoping it was the glow-up? That maybe I just looked so different in that too-tight minidress that he couldn’t recognize me? That I was, in that moment, perhaps too beautiful for my own good?
Yeah, no.
“It’s JoJo,” Sean said.
But Finn just blinked, like that name didn’t ring a bell.
“JoJo,” Evan offered next. “From across the street.”
Still nothing.
“She’s the one,” Evan explained, “who had a crush on you for like eight years.”
Six, actually. But point taken.
“She fell out of the tree in the side yard while trying to spy on you?” Sean said.
“She used to call you all the time and hang up?” Evan offered.
“She got your school photo printed on a pillowcase?” Pete added, right behind me—before I kicked him.
Wow. I guess everybody really knew everything.
But still nothing from Finn. No recognition at all.
So brutal.
However. Like a gentleman, he didn’t leave me hanging forever. At last, he nodded like he was retrieving a nebulous memory from the mists of time, and then he faked it.
“JoJo,” he said, like Of course.
Then Finn held out his fist at last, and I did my narwhal—but I was feeling so glum by that point that I did it weakly, and its little horn was, shall we say, a bit limp.
Finn frowned and left his fist there. “What was that?”
I sighed. “A narwhal.”
“It doesn’t look like a narwhal,” Finn said, like maybe I had my animal wrong.
And then Cooper, bless him, leaned in and hit Finn’s fist with a proper version.
“A narwhal,” Cooper said, pointing his finger straight, like there could be no mistake about it. Then he added, I guess for posterity: “JoJo studies the mathematics of knitting.”
LOOKING BACK, THIS was the point of no return.
In some other universe, there’s a version of my life where I read the tea leaves of the future in that moment, left the sports deck immediately, went back to Cooper’s cabin by myself, and drank his complimentary champagne straight from the bottle on his balcony until the ship left the harbor.
This is not that version.
Instead, I stayed for the Putt-Putt tournament—doggedly hoping to turn a very weak start into a strong finish.
Ashley had put me on Finn’s team, after all. And I had compressed all my organs to squeeze into this outfit. Might as well make the most of it.
Cooper wasn’t originally on my team. I know because Ashley had typed out all four lists and printed them on different-colored card stock for reference—adding Cooper at the last minute to the smallest team. But when my team gathered by the lighthouse to get started, Cooper was there.
“Aren’t you supposed to be over by the octopus?” I asked.
“I switched with Evan.”
“You didn’t have to,” I said. “I’m pretty good at Putt-Putt golf.”
“How long has it been since you’ve played?”
I thought back. “Middle school?”
Cooper shrugged and said, “You might be a little rusty.”
Was he being overprotective? How good could all these people possibly be at mini golf?
But that was before I noticed that Brody had also just switched cards and joined our team—risking Ashley’s wrath, because he was definitely upsetting the gender balance to form a bro team. All bros, in fact, except for me.
And Brody, like Finn, turned out to be surprisingly into mini golf.
I don’t need to name names, but let’s just say one of them—coughBrody—was wearing a single leather golf glove on his nondominant hand.
To play mini golf.
There are people who like to compete because it’s fun—and then there are other people who like to compete so they can crush the competition.
Brody was 100 percent crush the competition.
Except he seemed to think that I was the competition—even though we were on the same team.
Anyway—did I just say I was “pretty good” at mini golf?
Today, I was the opposite.
Did the heels have me off-balance? Was my child-sized dress cutting off circulation to the motor cortex of my brain? Or—possibly—when the biggest crush of your life publicly does not remember you at all … is that a little destabilizing?
Whatever it was, I just couldn’t get those tiny little balls into any of those tiny little holes.
I just kept smacking at them with my club. To no avail.
I’ll shock no one by saying that Finn most often got holes in one—or two. Three, max.
Brody, too.
But I was solidly, repeatedly, in the double digits.
Without ever voting, we’d all elected Finn our team captain by telepathy.
And then Brody had appointed himself the scorekeeper, and—I guess in an effort to foreground that he had snagged the best of the two Burton sisters—he kept calling out loudly to ask for my score …
and then pretending not to hear my answer.
“JoJo! What’s your total?” Brody would shout, waving his putter at me.
“Twenty-three!” I’d shout back.
“Three?” he’d respond, deliberately getting it wrong.
“Twenty-three!” I’d have to shout again.
And then Finn would look up from his practice putt like Twenty-three? Who could possibly get twenty-three?
Brody did this on every round.
Twenty-three is a lot. I agree.
Even so, isn’t it poor teamsmanship to leave a player behind?
But leave me behind they did. Finn, Sean, and Brody would take their shots, high-five each other, and then move on to the next anchor, or pirate ship, or mermaid.
Like I didn’t even exist.
I tried to catch up, but shot after shot went too far, stopped too short, got stuck in valleys, bounced off walls, skittered off the course altogether, or got lost in the octopus’s tentacles.
Once, at the sandcastle, I made a shot that went into the hole, circled around, and then popped out again to roll back to the beginning.
And Cooper, bless him, stayed with me the whole time, offering useless advice like “Keep your wrists loose,” “Find your center of gravity,” and “Be the golf ball.”
“What does that even mean?” I said, swinging my putter and missing the ball entirely.
Somewhere around shot twelve or thirteen, Cooper would start putting his hands over mine on the golf club handle, willing them to absorb his know-how. Or, perhaps, just taking my shots for me.
This helped a little.
But of course, Cooper himself was taking shots in the teens, so I’m not sure how much know-how he really had to offer.
“I’m so much worse than I thought I was,” I said, when the rest of our team had rounded the sandcastle and we’d lost visual contact again.
“It’s those heels,” he said. “They’re messing with your depth perception.”
“I can’t believe Finn didn’t remember me,” I said next.
“Big kids never remember little kids.”
“He remembered everybody else.”
“Maybe he was playing it cool.”
“Did you see him squint at me like he’d never seen me before? I totally froze.”
“You did fine,” Cooper said.
“But I didn’t say anything,” I argued. “He’s going to think I have no personality.”
“Guess what?” Cooper said, in an effort to be kind. “In that dress, you don’t need a personality.”