Bridesmaid Two looked up at Pete all smitten and nodded.
And then the weirdest thing happened: I suddenly liked her.
“Mia Macall,” I said, considering it. “I love that name.”
She smiled. “You do?”
“I really do,” I said, riding a surge of affection. “It’s like a movie star name.”
“Too bad I’m an accountant, then,” she said.
A math person, too! Her stock was going up by the minute.
“You make it glamorous,” I said, and I meant it.
I FELT BETTERfor a little while after that. But of course, if Mia wasn’t Sock Girl, then who was? Some other bridesmaid? Some random stranger? Good god—please don’t let it be Harmony.
I guess I’d never know.
Didn’t matter anyway.
Cooper had given up on me. And so I had no choice but to give up on him back.
Which I would totally be doing. Very soon.
Just as soon as I stopped longing for him to miraculously show up on the ship.
Here’s what I was up against: Nothing was fun without Cooper.
The ship seemed grayer, the people seemed duller. Even the ocean seemed… wetter. I didn’t want to be alone in the cabin, but I didn’t want to be out with the passengers, either. Every conversation I had to endure was interminable. Cooper had ruined me for everything—and everyone—else.
Two days at sea. Two days where I pretended to laugh, and pretended to be interested, and pretended to taste my food.
On the second night, we adjourned after dinner to the little theater where the slow-dance contest had been—this time to watch slideshows about the bride and groom. Brody’s slideshow, put together by his mother, consisted mostly of school, team, and mall portraits of the same kid with the exact same smile and the exact same haircut.
Yawn. No wonder I’d dumped him.
But Pete had been tasked with putting Ashley’s slideshow together, and he’d taken the project next-level seriously. He’d gone through every photo my mom had in every shoebox in the attic and pulled out all the sweetest, goofiest ones—of angelic Ashley, but also of our neighborhood gang: climbing the Vargases’ magnolia tree, hand-washing the Hamels’ cars, forming a human pyramid. The show had plenty of other photos, too, of course—but at least a third of them were the neighborhood kids.
And Cooper was in every single one of those.
Usually right next to me.
That’s what I saw as the photos flashed by—in every picture, Cooper and I were together. He had me in a headlock, or I was sitting on his shoulders, or we were upside down together on the jungle gym while everyone else was right side up. In picture after picture, Cooper was sitting on me, or holding my ankles for a handstand, or giving me rabbit ears.
And guess what else? In half the pictures Cooper was in, he was wearing—wait for it:a vest.
That’s right.
Now that I saw the photos, I remembered. Cooper’s mom used to dress him in vests for anything even halfway fancy. And there it was: I liked guys in vests because they reminded me of Cooper. And now Cooper wore vests because I liked them. So we were basically a puppy chasing its own tail.
Of course we were.
Everybody agreed. The whole ship was shipping us, after all.
The whole ship—except for Cooper… who had finally had enough of me, in the end, to do the opposite.
It was fun to see the old photos at first—I laughed and squealed with everybody else—but the more images that flashed by, the more bittersweet it all started to feel. I missed those kids. I missedbeinga kid. I missed the momentum of childhood—that feeling like you were working toward something that mattered. Growing up, if nothing else. The comforting notion I used to carry that one day not far off, I’d have it all figured out.
