Christ. “A simple hello would suffice,” I muttered.
I thought of when we were younger, when he used to freak out every time one of our moms made hot dogs. Every hot dog lunch, without fail, Coop would stand on the top of his chair, pumping his fists, and yell, “Hot dogs! Hot dogs! Hot dogs!” as if he had won the lottery. He was an excitable kid.
He wrapped me in a sour hug. His words were slurring. “Never in my life would I think I would see Samantha Agatha McCoy at a party. Never in my life.”
“Well, here I am!” I extracted myself. “And you remember my middle name,” I added, but he didn’t hear.
“Do you know,” he started saying to me, then directing it to the crowd. “Do you know, that I have wanted to get drunk with this girl my whole life?”
“What a coincidence,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“My whole life,” he said, almost solemnly. “This girl is my childhood friend. We’re from the same mountain,” he told a disinterested junior with a nose piercing nearby. “My childhood friend!” he repeated, and took me by the shoulders, his navy eyes wide.
“It’s good to see you, too, Coop.” I smiled.
I noticed Stuart and Ross coming through the front door, and I took a step backward.
Coop kept going. “And the first time we talk in fucking years you tell me you’re sick!”
“Whoa,” I said, and put a finger to my lips.
“Oh,” Coop said, imitating me, finger to his lips. “Okay.” I wasn’t sure I was imagining it, but his eyes looked almost watery, as if he was about to cry.
“I don’t want to tell people quite yet,” I said low to him. I was not looking at Stuart, but I knew he was still there, because I was finding out that when someone who you like touches you, you become connected to their body in an echolocation sort of way, and when they get closer, as Stuart was, my body also began to get warmer.
“But you told me,” Coop said, way too loudly, a weird pride behind it.
“Yeah, and now I’m wondering why,” I said off to the side.
“Don’t be like that,” he said.
“Coop!” someone yelled. A girl I can only assume was Hot Katie made a beeline toward us. Her long, tan legs fell from tight, acid-washed shorts, and her flat stomach sparkled with drops of sweat or beer or some other liquid under a crop top. I watched Coop’s eyes, and everyone else’s eyes for that matter, travel her body. I knew she didn’t do it on purpose, but girls like her made me feel like garbage. Like, what’s even the point with girls like her around.
“Coop.” Hot Katie propped herself on his shoulder, and whispered into his ear, giggling. “Come with me,” she said, and they went. It was that easy? It was that easy. Oak trees belong with other oak trees.
I could see Stacia and Maddie sharing a chair in the room next to ours, their legs entangled.
I picked up a book called Anagrams and started to read. I felt someone’s eyes on me and looked up. Stuart. I held up the book like someone would hold up a glass. Cheers. Parties, right? Ha-ha. It’s not that I don’t know what to do or say it’s just that I’ve been to so many parties that I’m tired of them and would rather read this book ha-ha so don’t worry about me I’ll just be here.
Then he walked toward me. I stared back down at the book, my eyes unmoving, but somehow I knew that he had just sidestepped a chair, had said excuse me to a girl who was dancing, and now he was here, next to me. He picked out a book of his own, a hardcover called The Writing Life.
“Hey,” he said, thumbing through the pages.
“Hey,” I said, reading the same sentence over and over again, my skin burning through my clothes.
“Ross’s parents have a good book collection.”
“Thankfully,” I said, and we both laughed a little.
“Giving up this early, huh?”
Instead of answering, I chugged my drink. And that was when I realized why the art of small talk eluded me. When I had a purpose, I could ask and answer questions to break someone down. When I had no purpose, I hit a wall. I was tired of the wall. An idea, or maybe an impetus, or maybe I was just mimicking the Hot Katies of the world; anyway, something grew.
His beautiful eyebrows began to furrow, wondering.
When I want something, I want it. And I wanted Stuart Shah.
I looked at him straight in his deep, black, beautiful eyes and said, “I want you to know that I have always had an enormous crush on you.”
And I put the book back on the shelf and left.
WHICH KIND OF TREE AM I—AM I EVEN IN THE FOREST?