“He told you that?”
“He didn’t have to. When she’s speaking, he rolls his eyes. Not that I blame him; she’s dumb as a post.”
“It isn’t her brain he cares about.” I fought back the mental picture of the two of them kissing in Nina’s bed, her mouth on his skin, and the way he’d looked at me, reveling in the pain he was inflicting. But it was like building a wall of sand to keep the tide from rushing in: worse than useless.
“She’s nothing compared to you,” Ruben said kindly. “And he knows it.”
I shrugged, feigning indifference. I had thought about making Ruben my messenger, having him tell Hence that he’d misunderstood what he’d heard, that I needed to speak to him and clear things up. But when I opened my mouth to ask, there was Hence’s face again, cruel with his hatred of me. Was I really going to stoop that low, begging him to hear my side of things?
“I don’t care what he does,” I told Ruben instead. “I’m out of here. As soon as I finish my classes I’m on a train to Boston. Tell him I’m thrilled to be starting my new life as a Harvard snob.”
And I meant it—well, the part about being on my way out of New York City, anyway. Like Dad’s favorite Janis Joplin song said, freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose. Now I was so free I could drift like a balloon over the rooftops and out to sea, and hardly anyone would care enough to wave good-bye.
After I’d taken my last exam and exchanged tearful hugs with Jackie and her mom, there was one thing left to do. From the front window of the café across the street from The Underground, I kept watch until I was sure Quentin had gone out for the night, and then, journal in the deep front pocket of my sweatshirt, I climbed the creaky fire escape up to my window. Up in my room for what looked like the last time, I slipped the journal into its hiding place, grieving for it as I said good-bye. I couldn’t bear to take it with me. A reminder of Hence, of Dad’s death, of Quentin turning into a stranger, it was a part of the life I had to force myself to forget. If I ever saw it again—and the odds were good that I wouldn’t—it would be because a miracle had happened and I’d come home.
Chelsea
Cooper’s whisper woke me. “Rise and shine, Chelsea. Let’s get rolling.” My eyes popped open, everything coming back to me all at once: the concert, my conversation with Hence, and—most vividly of all—the impulse I’d had to kiss Cooper. “Shhh. Hence came in a couple of hours ago. We don’t want to wake him.” Cooper was bending over me, so close I could smell the shampoo he’d used. Dizzy, I shut my eyes. When I opened them, he was gone.
I sat up, buried my face in my hands, and exhaled with relief. The night before, I hadn’t done the first thing that popped into my head, for once. I hadn’t kissed Coop, and he would never need to know I’d had such a crazy impulse. “Hence is here?” I asked when he returned.
“You were sacked out when he came in.” Damp-haired and barefoot, Coop swept through the room, straightening it up. “You can shower in the apartment. I’ll meet you in front of the club.”
By the time I’d dressed and taken the elevator downstairs, Coop was waiting beside a double-parked silver Jaguar Coupe with a box of doughnuts and two coffees. Much to my surprise, when he pressed the button on his key chain, the car’s lights flashed.
“That’s your car?”
“Ha. Don’t I wish? It’s Hence’s.” Coop looked cheery and energized, as if he’d had a full night’s sleep in a comfy bed instead of four hours on a couch. He dug in the pocket of his jeans and dumped sugar packets and creamers in my hand. “I don’t know how you take yours.”
“Hence is letting us use it?”
“I told him I needed to drive you back to Brooklyn and run some errands. He wasn’t upset to see you on the couch, by the way.”
“Amazing.” In the Jag, I fixed my coffee and laid claim to a powdered-sugar doughnut while Coop programmed my uncle’s address into the GPS system. A line of cars gathered behind us, drivers swearing at us out their windows.
“I’m going, I’m going,” Coop muttered.
As we pulled away from the curb, I put my feet up on the dashboard. Even if we were on a serious mission, this was a road trip, wasn’t it? I might as well enjoy it. And so what if I’d started having bizarre feelings about Coop? They would pass. In the meantime, I’d act like my usual self around him, and maybe he wouldn’t notice.
“Are you going to give me one of those?” Coop interrupted my interior monologue. I handed him a jelly doughnut and he made a face. “Not that. One of the glazed chocolate ones.”
“What did you get jelly for if you don’t like it?”
“I thought you might.” Which was exactly the kind of nice thing Coop was always doing, come to think of it. I thanked him.
He stole a quick look at me before focusing back on traffic. “You’ve got powdered sugar on your nose.”
Cooper changed lanes, passed a slow-moving Buick, and fiddled with the satellite radio, settling on an alternative station. Grungy guitars blasted through the speakers.
“Is this the kind of music you play?” I asked him. “Alternative? I’ve never understood what it’s supposed to be an alternative to.”
He didn’t answer. Maybe he thought I was criticizing his taste in music? I began again. “How did you start playing?”
That worked better. “I picked up my best friend’s guitar in ninth grade. I’d tried other instruments before that. In fourth grade, I played the trumpet. Then there was the year my mother wanted me to play the clarinet. It just wasn’t me.”
Had Cooper ever mentioned his family before? If he had, I couldn’t remember it.
“But the guitar was you?” I prompted him.
“It felt right in my hands,” he said. “I taught myself a couple of chords and never looked back.”
“Where did you grow up?” I asked him.
“Beavercreek, Ohio.”
I laughed. “Is that a real place?”
“As real as Marblehead, Massachusetts.” And he drew the name out so I could hear how ridiculous it sounded.
“Does it have creeks? And beavers?”
“It’s a suburb of Dayton,” he told me. “Maybe beavers lived there once. Is your head made out of marble?”
“Why did you leave it?”
“So I could be your chauffeur.”
“Seriously,” I said. “What made you run away from home?”
Coop laughed. “I left after I graduated high school. I wouldn’t call that running away from home.” He fiddled with the radio presets. “I wanted to see New York City,” he said. “Find out if I could make it in the music scene. That old cliché. ‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.’ ” He sang that last part. “My mom’s a Frank Sinatra fan.”
“So you weren’t trying to get away from your family?” I thought of Hence and his unspeakable past.
“My family’s okay,” Cooper said. “They wanted me to go to college. Dad was gutted when I didn’t. He’s still worried I’ll never find my place in corporate America. He calls me every other day to nudge me about it, but he isn’t an ogre. He wants what he thinks is best for me, even if it doesn’t match what I want for myself.”
I thought of my own father, probably worried to death about where I’d gone and whether I was okay, and felt a twinge of guilt for leaving him without a word. “Don’t you want to go to college someday?”
“Sure,” he said. “I took a class at CUNY this spring. And I’ll be taking intro to psych in the fall.”
“Hence gives you time off from the club?”
“Of course. Anyway, school’s got to take a backseat to my job, at least for now. And my music. I’ve got an audition lined up next week.”
“You do? I mean… that’s great. I hope you get it.”
Coop resumed playing with the radio, then gave up and connected his iPod. We’d completely left the city behind. The countryside around us sparkled in the sunshine, and the Jag was practically the only car on the road. I leaned b
ack and listened to the music. It was nobody I’d ever heard before, but kind of fun—bouncier and more playful than the stuff we’d had on earlier. I relaxed in my seat and rolled the window up so I could hear better. Halfway through the second song I asked who we were listening to.
“What do you think of it?”
“He’s got a nice voice,” I said. “And this song is quirky, but catchy. Who is it?”
Coop didn’t respond, but the look on his face—and the red splotches on his cheeks—gave the answer away.
“It’s you? No way! You’re actually good.” I meant it as a compliment, but realized too late that it might not have sounded that way.
“ ‘Actually’?” But Cooper was smiling to himself, not seeming to mind.
“I didn’t realize,” I said. “Is that you on the guitar?”
He nodded. “I play lead.”
“Who’s that you’re playing with?”
“Beavercreek. Don’t laugh—that was the name of my old band in Ohio. The bassist, Pete, built a recording studio in his basement. You can hear it’s not a very professional recording, right? This was our demo.”
“What happened? Why aren’t you with them anymore?”
“They didn’t want to leave Ohio, and I wasn’t going to stay. No big drama… we’re all still friends.”
“But you need another band,” I said. “Maybe you should start one of your own.”
“Maybe I should,” Coop said, but he didn’t sound serious. “You play an instrument?”
I felt myself get flustered. “I don’t have any talent,” I said. “And I’m not just talking about music. My dad says I never give anything my all.”
“Sounds like something a dad would say.” Coop’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Anyway, I’ve seen you in action. I think he’s wrong.”
I drew myself upright and folded my legs. “That’s nice of you.”
“I’m not being nice,” he said. “You’re spunky.”
Embarrassed, I reached for the GPS. “I wonder what Coxsackie, New York, is like.”
“Is it a real place?” Cooper quipped, cracking me up. “Seriously, though, I looked at a map. Coxsackie is one town over from Climax, New York.”
“It would be.”
After that, we talked about who gets to name towns, and wondered why they didn’t pick names like Alice or Steve. One moment I was thinking how comfortable we were together, and the next I was wondering if we were destined to always be just friends. Stealing a look at him out of the corner of my eye—his hands on the wheel, his profile, his shaggy brown hair all crazy in the crossbreeze—I wondered how it had taken me so long to notice how cute he was. The inside of my head was a jumble of thoughts. I was working so hard to not betray any of them that at one point I must have fallen silent for a while, and when Coop said something to me I had to ask him to repeat it.
“I said, why don’t you read me the rest of your mother’s journal? You brought it, didn’t you?”
Of course I had. I reached into the backpack under my seat and tugged it out. But I hesitated. “There are only a few pages left.”
“You have to read them sometime. Besides, we need every bit of information we can get, don’t we?”
Buoyed by that “we”—he could as easily have said “you”—I turned to where I’d left off. The sections she’d written as a teenager had ended; now she was writing from The Underground, after she’d run away from my father and me. Just as I’d guessed, she’d come home to find the club boarded up—like seeing an old friend in a full-body cast, she’d written—and had climbed up the fire escape and through the fifth-story window. She wasn’t surprised she’d beaten Hence back to New York since that morning’s paper had mentioned a transit strike in the UK. What did surprise her was the state of her old room, which was exactly as she’d left it, down to the bed that hadn’t been stripped since the night she and Hence had run from Quentin’s gun. I pressed my face into the pillowcase and inhaled, hoping to catch Hence’s scent, but it had faded. She wrote about being shocked by the changes her brother had made in the club downstairs: hideous iron chandeliers, a red marble floor, walls covered with stuffed deer heads staring mournfully down at me. It’s horrifying. But who am I to judge the mess my brother made of The Underground when I’ve done the same thing to my own life?
There were a few pages about my dad, about hoping he wouldn’t stay angry with her, because at least she’d never deceived him; he’d known all along she was damaged goods. Riptide’s big hit had been playing everywhere, and the tabloids were full of paparazzi shots of Hence on the town with Nina, and she had been so lonely and miserable. Going on a date with a nice guy like Max had been her way of moving on. And then she had gotten pregnant, and marrying Max had seemed like the only sensible choice.
After that, reading the journal got harder. There was a long part about how my dad couldn’t compare to Hence. He was kind, responsible, a good father to me. But his kisses weren’t Hence’s kisses. His hands on her body weren’t Hence’s hands. I turned from Coop as I read that part, so he wouldn’t be able to see my face, but I kept reading. There was so little of the journal left. I couldn’t skip a word.
She described going to the mailbox and pulling out the postcard with a picture of The Bat Cave and Hence’s familiar crooked handwriting on the back. My heart started pounding, somehow knowing before my brain could that the card was something momentous. I read the message over and over till I had memorized every word. I thought I must be dreaming. I told myself I couldn’t go to Hence. Think of Max, I told myself. Think of Chelsea.
Then came the hardest part, a passage about me—my little girl, my only joy these last three years—about how once she’d reunited with Hence, she hoped Max wouldn’t make it hard for her to see me. But even if he does, she wrote, I’ll come up with a plan for getting her back. I’ll hire a lawyer if I have to. I won’t let anything keep me from her.
And though I hadn’t reached the journal’s end, I closed it, unable to go on.
“Chelsea?” Cooper stole a glance at me from the corner of his eye. “Are you okay?”
At the sound of his voice, I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. He pulled over to the side of the road and shut off the ignition. Before I could gain control of my voice, he leaned across to my side of the car and put his arms around me. “Say something,” he urged.
“She was coming for me,” I said between sobs. “It says so. Why didn’t she come back?”
Cooper didn’t answer, but he kept holding on until I had cried it all out.
“I need a Kleenex,” I said finally. That was an understatement. My nose was running something fierce.
“Use my shirt,” Cooper said. I laughed—an out-of-control half sob, half chortle—and he released me to dig between the seats for a stray doughnut-shop napkin. Wiping my nose and pulling myself together, I took my first look out the window in a while. We were in the mountains. A tractor trailer rumbled by, shaking the car.
“Why are you so nice to me?” I asked when I could trust myself to speak. “Lying to Hence, not getting mad when I ran out from the mixing room last night, even though you told me to stay hidden, and I could have gotten you fired…”
“It wasn’t such a big deal.”
“It was,” I said. “It totally was.”
“I like you.” Cooper didn’t look at me when he said the words. “I thought it was brave, what you did last night, telling Hence what he needed to know, even though he might have blown up at you. I like how you always say exactly what’s on your mind, no matter how…”
“Thoughtless?”
He held out another napkin, and I took it. “That wasn’t what I was going to say.” He met my eyes with an expression on his face that stole my breath.
“What?” I asked. “What were you going to say?”
“I forget.” He leaned over again. This time I twisted in my seat to meet him halfway. He brushed back the hair that had fallen into my eyes. Before I could think of what t
o say or how to react, he was kissing me as though everything that had ever happened in our lives had led us to this moment.
I tightened my arms around Coop and kissed him back, his lips on mine more thrilling and gentle than I could have imagined. Who knows how long we stayed like that, his hands in my hair, the air around us scented with powdered sugar. Cars and trucks blew by, sending shudders through our car. A cascade of car honks from a passing van full of college-age guys finally brought us to our senses.
“Wooo-hoooooooo!” one of them shouted, waving his arms out the window at us.
“Get a room!” another one yelled.
Cooper pulled away, frowning up the road after them. “Jerks,” he said.
“No kidding.” I grabbed his shoulders and tugged him close. “Never mind them. Kiss me again.”
And he did, his sweet lips exploring mine for a few more minutes. But then he pulled back. “I’ve been wanting to do that almost from the first moment I met you,” he murmured.
“Really?” Could I have inherited some of my mother’s magnetism after all?
“Really.” He touched my chin, tilting my face up toward him, but this time he kissed the tip of my nose. “But we should get moving. We’ve got a mission to execute, remember?”
“I remember.” And the pleasant thrill that had run completely through me was replaced by foreboding. I buckled my seat belt.
“Is there more?” Coop said as he turned the key in the ignition. “In the journal? If you feel ready to read it…”
There was more. While my mom waited for Hence to arrive she’d had nothing much to do but write about where Hence might be and what the two of them would do once he finally arrived. I can’t sit here waiting anymore, she’d written. I need to do something…. But what? Being in her childhood home made her ache with longing for her mother, for her father, even for Q. I keep remembering the way he used to be, floppy blond bangs and freckles on his nose, always wearing his favorite striped rugby shirt, black and yellow like a big bumblebee. We used to be so close, she wrote. Maybe it’s not too late.