Chapter Fourteen #2
“What about your Brazilian?” Grandma Dodie countered.
Harmony winked. “I don’t have trouble making those kinds of friends.
But real friends? That’s harder for me. Lots of days, I just go into the office, do my thing, and accidentally never talk to anybody.
But on that day? Everybody talked to me.
In the halls. At the water cooler. Stopping by my doorway.
I was the belle of the office park. And I thought: Maybe it was the signaling.
Maybe everybody had a certain idea about me, and who I was, and then this unexpected sign broke that idea—and let them see me differently. ”
“Very differently,” Mr. Dunn agreed.
“Sometimes,” Harmony said, “anything different is good.”
The table couldn’t argue with that.
“The thing is,” Harmony went on, “it worked. I got invited to happy hours after that. Someone asked me to join the softball team, and then a cooking class, and then an axe-throwing night. It absolutely changed my life.”
The adults were baffled. “It really worked?” Mrs. Dunn asked.
“Like a charm,” Harmony said with a wink. “It’s working right now.”
At that, Harmony’s pancakes arrived. She poured syrup all over them in a spiral while the adults just stared at her. Finally, just before stabbing a pie-slice-sized bite with her fork, Harmony looked around the table, smiled, shrugged, and said, “Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.”
I WASN’T HAPPY. Things were going off the rails. We were losing focus. This breakfast was supposed to be about Finn Turner—and Finn Turner only.
Next, in a bad-to-worse move that felt almost like deliberate sabotage, Brody announced broadly to the table, “I hear JoJo was a real rascal as a kid.”
And then the grown-ups were off to the races.
Wasn’t Brody supposed to be helping? Not sure why Ashley assumed he would do that.
And was I a rascal?
No!
Not on purpose, anyway.
But the adults all had stories. And they told every damn one.
Breakfast turned into a litany of testimonials. The time I fell off Old Man Pipkin’s roof. The time I built a fire in the Pesikoffs’ driveway. The time I ran my bike into a parked car in front of the Turners’ house.
Not to mention all the math-based businesses I’d tried to start in the summers: Algebra Tutoring for Dummies, Master Your Times Tables at Last, and (Fun) Math Camp.
No takers for that one. We also reminisced at length about the time I set up a lemonade stand, but instead of selling lemonade, I tried to sell financial advice.
I was like Lucy from Peanuts, but my hand-lettered sign read BECOME A MILLIONAIRE!
I’d garnered one client, and it was Grandma Dodie.
But everybody’s favorite story, of course, was the time I was selling Girl Scout cookies, and Mr. Dunn answered his front door while brushing his teeth, and I saw the foam at his mouth, thought he had rabies—and ran away screaming. That really cracked the table up. My fear of rabies. Hilarious.
I endured all these stories with the scowl of a wet cat.
“Why does everybody only remember my shenanigans?” I asked, after far too long.
“Cooper was involved in ninety percent of these incidents. Masterminded most of them!” Then I pointed at Cooper like J’accuse!
and said, “I only built that fire because Cooper wanted to make s’mores!
And Cooper was the Director of Putting Up Flyers for the math camp!
And Cooper was the one who shouted ‘Rabies!’ at Mr. Dunn before we both ran away screaming. ”
“Cooper just had such a sweet face,” Mrs. Vargas said, like he could never be a troublemaker.
We all turned to regard Cooper’s face.
And that’s when Bridesmaid Two, ever the interrupter, decided to ask, “What do you do for a living, Cooper?”
“He’s in a band,” I said.
Just as Cooper answered, “I work for the BBC in London. I’m a Foley sound artist.”
I turned to him. “You’re a what?”
He wasn’t in a band? How did I not know this? I mean, yes—he’d been gone for four years, so he’d had plenty of time for a secret career change. But I’d seen him a lot lately.
Hell, we’d just slept together!
But, now that I thought about it, had I asked Cooper even one question about himself since he got here? I felt a punch of guilt for having been so very all about me for the past twenty-four hours.
“What’s a Foley artist, Cooper?” Mrs. Dunn asked.
“We make the sounds for movies.”
“Like the soundtrack?” Bridesmaid Two asked.
But Cooper shook his head. “The sounds, not the music.”
Brody liked this. “Like explosions and stuff?”
“Yes, that. But—everything. Movies mostly just record the actors’ dialogue, and everything else gets added in later. Glasses clinking. Grocery bags rustling. Footsteps.”
“Footsteps?” Mr. Vargas asked.
Cooper nodded. “You can create every possible human emotion with footsteps. We have a whole closet of prop shoes.”
Now this was a good topic. Why hadn’t we spent all of breakfast talking about this?
“So if you need to make the sound of thunder, would you go out and record some thunder?” Mr. Dunn asked.
“For thunder,” Cooper said, “I like to use a piece of aluminum sheet metal. You punch it and then ripple it.”
“Is that better than the real thing?” Mrs. Dunn wanted to know.
Cooper nodded. “The sound has to fit the visuals just right—plus, the pacing of the scene. So you watch the screen as you record the sound.”
We all nodded.
“That’s such a cool job,” Bridesmaid Two said, looking decidedly starry-eyed.
Okay, Bridesmaid Two. Settle down.
Though … it was a cool job. I couldn’t resist one-upping her. “That,” I corrected, “is the coolest job in the world.”
Cooper nodded at me. “It really is.”
“And you’re in London?” Mrs. Dunn asked.
Cooper looked at me. “I just got an offer to move back, actually.”
“To Los Angeles?” Mrs. Dunn inquired, like Cooper was still talking to her.
But he kept his eyes on me. “To Austin,” he answered. “They make a lot of movies there.”
Mrs. Vargas again: “But you couldn’t possibly leave London?”
Cooper’s gaze stayed fixed on mine. “I could be talked into coming home.”
It was really bothering me that I hadn’t known about Cooper’s job all this time. But that’s what his mom had told my mom after he left: that he’d gone to London to play in a band.
That’s what he’d been doing in my head for four years.
“Your mom said you were in a band,” I said accusingly.
“I was—at first,” Cooper said. “We still play sometimes.”
“In clubs?” Bridesmaid Two interrupted.
Cooper shook his head. “Mostly busking for money on the Tube.”
“There’s no Tube in Austin,” Mrs. Vargas cautioned.
“No,” Cooper agreed. “But there are lots of tacos.”
I processed it all.
Maybe I really hadn’t wanted to ask him about what he’d been up to all this time. Maybe I’d wanted to just act like those four years had never happened.
But I guess they had happened, after all.
Days after we graduated college, after we’d returned home and formulated a plan to get summer jobs at the same bookstore together, Cooper ghosted me.
Left without a word. One minute, I was showing him my new engagement ring, and telling him Pearce had an internship in DC, and making Cooper promise that we’d make the most of my last summer as an unmarried woman …
and the next minute, Cooper was just—gone.
Hardcore gone. Like not answering calls or texts gone.
His mom was always so apologetic when she saw me. “Maybe his phone doesn’t work over there,” she’d say. Like that might make me feel better.
It didn’t.
I’d been so absolutely wrecked by the way he left—and the question of how my oldest friend could do that to me—that the fact of it stayed centered in my mind like a wound that refused to heal.
But I guess Cooper had been doing fine.
Doing fine, and living his life. His cool life. Working for the BBC and busking in Tube stations. Without me.
At some point, I’d have to ask what the hell, exactly, had happened.
But the problem was, I wanted to know precisely as badly as I never wanted to know.
And, at least for now, that would have to be that.
I WAS RESENTING Bridesmaid Two for churning up all my emotions when my parents came up to our table to check on how everyone was doing.
“Is everyone settled in?” my dad asked the group, in full host mode.
Oh, yes, everyone confirmed.
“Today’s an ‘at-sea’ day,” my dad said, making air quotes like he might be starting a vocab lesson, “but there are activities planned from morning till midnight.” Then, and I’m not even kidding, he started handing out printed schedule pages to everyone at the table.
I squinted at him, like Where’s my real dad?
My real dad never knew anything about any family schedule.
My real dad wouldn’t even be here. He’d be stuck in a work meeting somewhere.
But this must have been part of trying to win my mom back. He must be trying to prove that he had at least the potential to participate. I looked him over as he worked the table with that big trying-too-hard smile—giving thumbs-ups to Mr. Dunn and slapping Brody on the back.
It had a real whiff of desperation about it.
And then it hit me.
My dad wanted us all to see him differently. He was attempting to rebrand, too.
And I got that. I so got that.
Too bad he missed Harmony’s TED Talk on the semiotics of love bites.
For maybe the first time in my life, I felt sympathy for my dad.
It’s not easy, is it, buddy? my heart wanted to say.
But that heart of mine was about to have bigger concerns.
Because, next … the guy I’d been waiting for all this time showed up at last.
“Finn!” Mr. Dunn said warmly, spotting him first. “There you are!” Then he gestured toward me. “JoJo’s been pining for you all morning.”
How could Mr. Dunn have intuited that? Just how obvious was I being?
I felt an urge to say, “No, I wasn’t!” But of course that would’ve been worse.
“We’ve been reminiscing about the old neighborhood,” Mr. Dunn continued. “And that time JoJo got diarrhea on the Fourth of July.”
Seriously, Mr. Dunn?
“That’s not—” I started. I was going to say “fair,” but I decided, instead, to finish with “appetizing.” As if the only person Mr. Dunn had just harmed was Finn.
Then I gave Finn an apologetic look.
But Finn just shook his head, and shrugged, and frowned—all at once.
Like none of it mattered, and he was completely unbothered by everything.
And definitely like he didn’t need me to stand up for him.
And, frankly, like he had no idea—again—who this “JoJo” person with digestive issues might even be.