“What?” Cooper asked as I kept smiling.
“Nothing.”
“What?” he prodded.
“I’ve just never seen a non–math person get excited about knot theory.”
“And knitting,” Cooper pointed out. “And DNA. Is that why you became an art teacher? So you could teach your kids to knit strands of DNA?”
“Not exactly, but kind of,” I said. I mostly became an art teacher because I felt like the world vastly underappreciated the awe-inspiring beauty of mathematics. And I wanted to get that fixed. One middle schooler at a time.
Then Cooper added, “Guess you didn’t knit me that beanie in high school for nothing.”
I shrugged. “Must’ve been destiny.”
“I still wear it, by the way.”
“You do?” I thought he might have thrown it away.
He nodded to confirm. “Prized possession.”
The idea that he’d kept it felt important somehow.
That’s when Cooper said, “Anyway. I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
He put both his hands out for a furtive—and considerate—low five and leaned closer. “That you were smarter than all the rest of us put together.”
COOPER AND Icontinued chatting for a while because Finn took forever to show up, and Ashley wasn’t starting the Putt-Putt tournament without him.
This was part of the plan.
With great precision, Ashley had sorted all the young people into mini-golf teams that had the potential for love connections—and the old people were not included. They self-sorted off toward the snack table while the rest of us gathered in our teams.
I went along while wondering about Finn. Did he have a last-minute work thing? Did his plane from Chicago get delayed? Did he get back with his ex-wife?
He wouldn’t mess up my plans for radical self-transformation, would he?
But just as I was thinking of checking the passenger list, Finn arrived at last. And, for better or for worse, he looked exactly like his picture on the web. Except for the golf shirt. And matching golf shorts. And… matching golf shoes.
A fullgolf ensembleis what I’m describing—minus the 1920s jodhpurs and argyle socks.
Like Finn was possibly taking Putt-Putt a little too seriously.
As he walked toward us, stealing my slo-mo entrance for himself, I compared thisin real lifeversion of Finn to my well-worn mental picture.
Yep. Still the confidence of the best-looking guy in the room.
And still just oozing alpha energy.
And—could he be taller now? Bigger, anyway. He’d definitely been working out. Professional success agreed with him. He had a new swagger: not a high-school-kid swagger, but the refined, seasoned swagger of a grown-up.
He was still—and always would be—Finn Turner. The legend himself.
Here’s a random truth about crushes: They can, and do, burn out.
Even after all those crushed-out years, with no encouragement and no reason for hope, I had—genuinely—moved on. He went to college, and then I went to college, and there just wasn’t enough fuel to keep that fire burning. Life shifted, and so did I. Time and distance did their work. And he became… just a former crush. A former crush with an asterisk and a lengthy footnote—but a former crush, all the same.
