Chapter 25
Madeline
Sunday afternoon, the vet called me and said that Mascot was doing well enough to be picked up.
When I got to the office, a woman in scrubs carried him out.
He wore a plastic cone around his neck that made him look like a feline satellite dish.
His flank was shaved where they’d given him stitches and he had a blue cast wrapped around his back leg. He stared around the room glumly.
She handed him to me with a perky smile. “The cone is to keep him from licking his stitches. We don’t want those to become infected. He’ll need to wear it until his follow-up appointment in ten days.”
Mascot looked at me and meowed unhappily, but he didn’t try to escape from my clutches. Maybe between the vets and me, he considered me the lesser of two evils.
She scheduled the follow-up appointment, gave me feline pain pills for Mascot, and told me I should limit his activities for the next four to six weeks until the cast came off.
I wondered what activities cats had that I ought to be limiting, since as far as I could tell, Selena’s cat just lay around on various pieces of furniture. I didn’t want to appear ignorant, though, so I nodded, planned to google it later, and left.
I realized almost immediately that I should’ve bought some sort of box or cage to transport Mascot in, but I hadn’t thought about that when I’d been at the pet store picking up food, a litter box, litter, a bed, treats, and toys for him.
I put the roof on my convertible, set him on the bed, and attempted to win his friendship with treats.
He showed no interest in them. I had to take some pictures of him for my This cat needs a home social media posts, but he looked distinctly hostile and more than a little wretched as he huddled on his bed, glaring at me from his cone collar.
I petted him for a few minutes and took a couple of pictures.
The petting hadn’t helped him look friendlier. He was sullen and suspicious, a cat meme waiting to happen. I’d have to ask Cooper to take some more pictures after Mascot started trusting humanity again.
“You’ll love Cooper,” I said. “He’s really nice. So is Claire.”
I would’ve called Claire and prepped her about the cat situation but figured she was probably spending time with her father. I didn’t want to intrude.
I’d texted Cooper last night and asked how things were going.
His message back to me had been upbeat.
So far, so good. My dad is sticking around. Hope your father isn’t taking it too hard.
I wrote, My dad will be fine.
My father had moped around the kitchen for the first hour I’d been home, eating all of the junk food that he’d given up once he started dating Ms. Nash, but then he’d gotten philosophical. “Every relationship teaches you something,” he said, “even if it doesn’t end the way you want.”
“What did dating Ms. Nash teach you?” I asked.
He grinned and bit into a nacho. “Well, for one thing, I learned that hot younger women are willing to date me.”
So there was that.
Mostly, I was happy that things had worked out the way Cooper wanted. Part of me was jealous that his father really had come back. Last I’d heard, my mother had taken up with Sven, a sauna aficionado. There was no way she and my father would ever make amends.
Another part of me worried that Cooper would ghost me now that he no longer needed a fake girlfriend.
I stayed in the vet’s parking lot for a couple more minutes, petting Mascot in the hope that he would understand I was trying to help him. He gave me squinty-eyed looks of suspicion.
As soon as I started the car, Mascot jumped onto the floor and tried to hide under the seat, which was probably one of the activities I was supposed to be limiting. He dragged his leg behind him and meowed accusingly.
In an effort not to panic him more, I drove super slow on my way to Cooper’s house.
This might have worked if a car behind me hadn’t honked angrily for my lack of speed and zoomed past me, honking again.
After that, Mascot crawled out from his hiding place, jumped back on the seat, and scaled the headrest.
How had the vet thought I was going to limit any of this?
Best just to get him to Cooper’s house quickly. I sped the rest of the way. This did little to calm Mascot’s nerves.
I finally parked in front of Cooper’s house, peeled Mascot off the passenger-side upholstery, and extricated him from my car.
As I walked to Cooper’s house, the cat clung to my shirt, then tried to escape over my shoulder. I held onto him and rang the doorbell. Mascot meowed loudly, cone swinging while he searched Cooper’s yard for hiding places.
The door opened. I expected to see Cooper since he knew I was coming.
Instead, Mr. Nash answered. In some ways, he looked like an older version of Cooper.
He had the same square jaw and handsome features.
He was almost as tall and broad-shouldered as Cooper, but his hair was light blond and had none of Cooper’s curl.
The manual labor he did on the oil rigs may not have paid much, but the muscles in his arms left no doubt of his strength.
My poor father. Instead of taking Ms. Nash’s spin class, he should’ve been lifting weights.
Mr. Nash took note of Mascot and looked at me in question, like I might be a door-to-door fundraiser collecting money for injured animals. “Yes?” he prompted.
“Is Cooper here?” I asked.
“Yes.” The word still held a question. He had no idea who I was. Mascot shrank in my arms, his ears flat against his head. I hoped he wasn’t about to start hissing.
“I’m Madeline,” I said.
Mr. Nash’s eyes widened, taking me in fully. Judging me. I wasn’t sure if he liked what he saw.
I gulped nervously. Had Cooper said something that made him dislike me, or did he just dislike me on principle since I was his ex-wife’s last boyfriend’s daughter?
Cooper appeared at the door. “Madeline.” He opened the door wider to let me in.
“I forgot you were coming today. With my dad returning home last night . . .” His sentence drifted off.
I didn’t know if he really had forgotten about Mascot or whether he was just making an excuse for his parents as to why he hadn’t mentioned the cat.
I stepped in and Mascot made another valiant attempt to crawl over my shoulder and flee. Mostly, he just succeeded in clawing me.
“He’s so affectionate,” I said as though that was why he was clinging to my shirt. “Such a sweet cat. I’m sure it won’t be long until we find a home for him.”
Cooper’s father only looked at me in confusion. His mother joined us in the family room, equally confused about why I had come to their house carrying a disgruntled, injured cone-cat.
“I forgot to tell you,” Cooper said to them, “on the way to the dance, this cat ran in front of the car, and I accidentally hit it.” He told the rest of the story, adding that since I couldn’t keep the cat at my house, he’d volunteered to keep it at his.
“Just until he’s healed and we can find a home for him. ”
“I’ve got food and supplies in my car,” I added.
Cooper’s parents looked less than thrilled with this turn of events, although Claire, who came into the living room during the explanation, immediately took to Mascot. She plucked him from my arms, carried him to the couch, and removed his cone.
“He’s supposed to wear that until his wound heals,” I said. “It’s so he doesn’t lick his stitches.”
She softly stroked his fur. “He won’t lick his stitches while I’m petting him. I’ll put it back on afterward.” She began scratching his chin and murmuring things to him.
I wouldn’t say that Mascot relaxed, exactly, but he did look at Claire like she was the one sane person he’d met in the last twenty-four hours.
Ms. Nash’s gaze bounced between Cooper and Claire with reluctant defeat. “I guess we can keep the cat until we find a home for him. But we will find a home for him.”
“Right,” Claire said and went back to cooing at Mascot.
Cooper helped me carry the cat supplies inside. When we’d finished piling them into the kitchen, Ms. Nash told me that Cooper couldn’t hang out today because he had plans with his father.
Cooper gave me an apologetic look and walked me to the door.
Claire and Mr. Nash were only a few feet away on the couch while we said goodbye, so it wasn’t exactly private.
Claire wasn’t paying attention to us, but I was pretty sure Mr. Nash was.
Cooper glanced at them and turned back to me with another apologetic look. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
As I headed to my car, I told myself that my trip here had been successful. They’d taken the cat.
But being hustled out of Cooper’s house, well, it didn’t feel quite like success. It felt like another reminder that I was no longer needed as the fake girlfriend.
c c c
The next day, I hoped I’d see Cooper before school. Nope. He was nowhere around. Right before class started, Dahlia posted the picture of us kissing on her social media and claimed he’d been cheating on her all along.
Harper and Kinsley both took screenshots of her post and sent it to me during first period. I forwarded it to Cooper on Snapchat and—using way too many panicked question marks—asked what he was telling people about it.
Cooper: I tell them that I couldn’t have cheated on her because I was never her boyfriend. We just had a date to homecoming that she bailed on when I had to drive you to the vet.
Dahlia was going to hate that response. It told people that he’d never been that into her.
Me: So does that mean we’re still going with the we-kissed-for-a-drama-rehearsal story?
Cooper: I never went with a different one.
I wrote, erased, and finally sent, It seems more suspicious now that we ditched our dates before the homecoming dance.
He didn’t respond to that, and I couldn’t bring myself to say more to him over Snapchat. I was afraid if I did, he’d know what I was really asking: What are we now?
Did he regret holding hands with me at the vet?
Here, sitting in class among the social strata of our day-to-day school life, things seemed different.
A girl like me who only ranked somewhere in the vast wasteland of a middling popularity level shouldn’t expect one of the most popular guys in the school to fall for her. Was he planning on ghosting me?
I would wait until I talked to Cooper in person and could see how he acted, see his expression and hear the tone of his voice to figure out how I should act toward him.
Except for one brief time when I spotted Cooper way ahead of me in the hallway, I didn’t see him at school, something that made me more frustrated as the day went on.
Plenty of other people went out of their way to talk to me. Even some of the cheerleaders. It was widely known that Dahlia broke up with Cooper on the way to the homecoming dance and that he’d gone off with me, although the circumstances around his abandonment were less clear.
Several people asked me if Cooper and I were a couple now.
Good question.
I said we were friends and explained how TC had accidentally hit a cat. I showed them the picture of Mascot I’d taken at the vet. “Do you know anyone who wants a cat?” I always asked. “We need to find a good home for him.”
That usually ended the conversation quickly.
And okay, Mascot looked less than cuddly in the picture.
He was crouched and glowering in his cone collar, caught mid-meow so that he appeared to be baring his fangs.
But he didn’t look, as one person put it, like he was plotting to overthrow the free world.
Cooper didn’t message me after our exchange in first period. I hadn’t been surprised when he didn’t communicate with me yesterday. He was spending time with his father. But today?
A few flirty texts would have been encouraging. Any texts would’ve been reassuring. I was left wondering if his silence was just part of his personality—not being chatty over text—or whether he expected us to go back to the way we were before but without the pranks.
Only, if he ghosted me after making me fall for him, I was totally going to start up the pranks again.
I hate to say that it took me until I was walking to drama class to realize I had something I could text him about that wouldn’t make me look needy.
Me: How did Mascot settle in yesterday?
Cooper: Good. His paws barely touched the ground all day. Claire insisted that if she was watching him, he wouldn’t have to wear the cone of shame.
Me: That’s good.
I knew I should say more. Something with subtext. I flipped through emojis. Turns out there isn’t one that means I need to know what you think about the two of us.
I put in a cat emoji anyway.
I watched the circles in his message bubble going around. Then stop. Then go around again. Then stop. He didn’t know what to say next. That made two of us.
He finally wrote, We should talk.
He wanted to talk about us. It was either going to be good news or news that would require all of my acting skills in order not to cry through.
A second message came through. I’m not working today. I’ll go to your house after practice.
Me: I can drive you home from practice.
Cooper: I’ve got my mom’s car. I’m driving Claire home.
Me: Your mom isn’t at work today?
Cooper: My dad is picking her up.
I knew I shouldn’t compare his fake texts to his real ones, but I couldn’t help but notice how sparse his words were when he was writing about our define the relationship talk.
Me: Okay, see you then.
I resisted the urge to attach myself to Claire after rehearsal and walk with her to the parking lot so I could see Cooper. He and I wouldn’t be able to talk privately with her around, and he’d know I’d walked with her just because I wanted a few extra moments with him.
My new mantra was: Must not look needy. Even if you feel it.
And to think—some people thought learning how to act was a waste of time.
Turned out, I was using that talent all the time.