He pushed me away and stepped around me. “No thanks, Mikey. You either admit that something has changed with you or I don’t want to be around you anymore.”
“Jesus, Coop,” I hissed. “Maybe it’s you that’s changed.”
He was almost out the door but suddenly stopped, spinning around quickly. “Maybe I have,” he stated dismissively. “Maybe Iactuallywant to be what you said I was to you. How about that? But you aren’t gay and you know it. What you are though, is mean, Mikey. That joke you pulled was mean.”
And with that, he left me standing there with my mouth hanging wide open. Cooper had also changed, but this was his world, not mine.
I walked directly out of school after my interaction with Coop. It was Friday and the last day for senior’s, but I didn’t give a fuck by that point.
My cell phone began blowing up about five minutes after I didn’t show up for my class with Jen. I was halfway home by then. After reading a ton of her questions about where I was, why I’d ditched school, and how I could miss her final cheerleading assembly performance, I switched my phone off.
I walked through my front door, tossed my backpack on the floor, and shuffled to the kitchen for a Coke. I was surprised to see Mom had company. A woman I’d never seen before in either universe sat at the kitchen table with Mom. Trust me, I’d have remembered this woman if we had met.
“Hi, honey,” Mom said, twisting her wrist and checking her watch before raising an eyebrow. “Early dismissal on your last day?”
“For me it was,” I said, being careful to tone down the smart-assed comment I had dialed up. “Hello,” I said, to the woman that resembledmy mother in the style department but had kicked it up fifty notches.
Mom’s guest wore a ton more jewelry than I thought was appropriate for a human with any sense of style. She had one or more rings per finger and at least thirty bangle-type bracelets per wrist. But it was her headdress or whatever the fuck she had wrapped around her skull, that made me look away before I stared too long and said something outrageous.
I restrained a need to laugh out loud before returning my attention to her. A brightly colored scarf with images of neon moons, stars, and galaxies was covering her head and was tied into a knot directly above her forehead. Pinned below the knot was a ceramic brooch of an eye that was about the size of a saucer. The eye itself had the illusion of rays of sunshine or bursts of cosmic light coming out of the iris.
Her eyes were outlined in black eyeliner with exaggerated curved lines drawn up and away from the corners of each eye, while her lips were a vibrant orange in hue. I’d never laid eyes on a more unusual looking person in my life. She reminded me of an actress that was on a Nick at Night rerun of a nineteen-sixties comedy who played the mother of a witch. Mom often watched the show because she absolutely loved the mother’s character.
“Michael, meet Druzella.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: Cooper
“Don’t know. Don’t care,” I stated, answering Jen’s question and shoving another tater tot into my mouth. I was definitely not going to miss cafeteria food. Even the cafeteria pizza was getting boring and that was everyone’s favorite.
“He hasn’t returned a single one of my texts. Not one,” Jennifer bitched. She bothered me. How Mikey put up with a complainer like her was beyond me. Maybe that’s what drove him to say he was gay? I sat staring at Jennifer and wanted to poke her eyes out with my last tater tot. God, I’d tried to like her, but as I sat listening to her go on and on and on about Mikey being a disappointment, I resented sitting with her. Now I was pissed that I wasted the past four years of high school praying she liked me enough.Well, fuck that.
“You look angry, Cooper,” she said, moving her mirror and presenting the phoniest face I’ve ever witnessed. That was a lie. I’ve witnessed this face a million times.Where’s my tot?
My internal dialogue was still cussing, something I never did out loud, but she was on my very last nerve. My very last and tiny, tiny, tiny,darnnerve.Calm down.
“Nervous I guess,” I said. “You know, about prom, graduation, stuff like that.”
“It’ll all be great after we graduate, you’ll see,” she declared, checking her makeup for the tenth time. “All of us in Seattle at UW. Just imagine the freedom.”
I added another item to myMad at Mikeylist. He hadn’t told her he wasgoing to Washington State in Pullman yet, not UW. What was wrong with him? But then again, maybe I wasn’t going to college with him anymore either.
“That’s not it,” I said, locating the tot and holstering it up in my hand.
“Oohhh,” she giggled. “Is Hastings pressuring you to give it up?”
My eyes doubled their normal size.
She leaned closer. “I bet you’re gonna do it on prom night.”
“Uh, I doubt that.”
She quickly looked around at who might be in ear shot. Hastings hadn’t come to lunch and Meg was fighting with Greg at another table. “Hastings told me his folks will be gone this weekend and he wants us to come to his house after the dance,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows and making the letter O with her mouth like something naughty might happen. “I think he’s planning his move, Coopie,” she squealed.
“Are you and Mikey going?” I asked. “Does he know about Hastings’ folks being gone?”
“Hmmm, probably,” she murmured. “Don’t know actually, but I’m not putting out even if we do.”
I knew her and Mikey weren’t doing it. He’d have told me if they were. I had wondered why they hadn’t yet but he always blamed her.“She won’t even rub my dick,”he’d said, while we were showering. I certainly would’ve if he’d asked me back then.
