Stuart was silhouetted by the colors, all eyes on him. His arms flailed wildly as he read, and Ross stood beside him nodding, clapping his hands at parts he liked. I wondered what he was working on, if he would read his own work like this someday, as if he felt every word. Stuart was majestic. Stuart was drunk.
I thought about five summers ago, the first and only time I got drunk like that. Coop at that party in April, telling me that he had wanted to “get drunk with me his whole life,” but actually we had, once.
The summer before freshman year, before the whole “date” incident, he and some of his baseball player buddies had stolen someone’s parents’ whiskey, and Coop convinced me to try it if he mixed it with Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper. This was, of course, before I knew I wanted to get out of the Upper Valley, before I discovered debate, before I wanted NYU, before I wanted Stuart.
It had been fun at first, and I gulped it down like I was drinking a soda.
Coop and I kept pushing each other and giggling. He had taken my glasses and ran around with them, and I chased him and hopped on his back. Then he had given me a piggyback ride into the trees, where I slid off him, and after I swayed for a second, I began to vomit.
Coop had held my hair as I puked and kept saying, “Oh no, oh no.”
I had started laughing, even as I was wiping puke from my mouth, and said, “I’m never doing this again!”
“You’re never going to puke again?” Coop had asked, and by then we were both laughing. It was such stupid, happy laughing.
I remembered him bending beside me, not afraid to be next to me when something so gross was happening. I remembered the feeling of his hand on my back, holding my curls in a bunch.
I watched the girl in the American flag bikini pass Coop a joint, but he waved it off.
He looked back at me, almost like he was remembering the same thing, but he couldn’t have been. Anyway, we looked at each other. I don’t really know what either of us was thinking, but we looked at each other for a long time.
Today, Stuart was closer to the way he was on the day he read at the library, when I realized I loved, or was starting to love, him. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him like that, actually. He’s happier when he’s doing what he wants to do, not just what he feels he needs to do. We all would be better doing that, I think.
I asked Coop for a ride home. Ever since he brought me home from Maddie’s graduation party, Mom and Dad had started to let Coop hang out and give me rides and stuff, which is nice. Takes the pressure off them to have him just across the mountain, I guess, and he’s home more often than his mother. Plus, the nurse gets expensive.
Mom invited him in to have pie, and we ended up eating it in my room because Bette was having kind of a tantrum about pie, and anyway, Coop saw the NPC Task Force pictures on my wall and asked me about them.
After I died from embarrassment and then rose again, I was like, “Oh god, that was kinda dumb. Back when I thought I could, like, make NPC disappear. When I thought I could still do all the things I had set out for myself.”
“Well, why forget about them?” Coop asked. “No time like now. They’re not going to matter less just because they aren’t part of some grand scheme. You just have to… adjust the plan.”
“Adjust the plan to what?”
“I guess I mean get rid of ‘the plan’ altogether. Do them because they’re good things to do. Do them just for the sake of doing them.”
SO I DID
Today, as a tribute to Beyoncé and independent women everywhere, I called Maddie and congratulated her again.
“Can I say something cheesy?” I asked her.
“I’m never opposed to cheese,” Maddie said solemnly, and we laughed.
“Seriously, though.”
“Seriously,” she said. “Cheese.”
“Ahem, ahem. All strong women are allies, and if I can’t run the world, you should, and you should know I’m behind you.”
Maddie was quiet for a bit. “That means a lot, Sammie. Really.”
“Well, you mean a lot to me.”
“You, too. Your opinion always means a lot to me.”
“Will I see you before you go?” I asked.
“I’m already down the coast with my aunts. But I’ll be back before school starts. We’ll see each other again soon.”
“I hope so,” I said, and when we hung up, I remembered how I had compared our debate tactics to blowing up a balloon. And maybe this is the NPC talking but something inside me had swelled up, but thankfully didn’t pop.
THE MCCOY SIBLINGS: AN UNOFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER 2: BETTE