However. Like a gentleman, he didn’t leave me hanging forever. At last, he nodded like he was retrieving a nebulous memory from the mists of time, and then he faked it.
“JoJo,” he said, likeOf course.
Then Finn held out his fist at last, and I did my narwhal—but I was feeling so glum by that point that I did it weakly, and its little horn was, shall we say, a bit limp.
Finn frowned and left his fist there. “What was that?”
I sighed. “A narwhal.”
“It doesn’t look like a narwhal,” Finn said, like maybe I had my animal wrong.
And then Cooper, bless him, leaned in and hit Finn’s fist with a proper version.
“Anarwhal,” Cooper said, pointing his finger straight, like there could be no mistake about it. Then he added, I guess for posterity: “JoJo studies the mathematics of knitting.”
LOOKING BACK, THISwas the point of no return.
In some other universe, there’s a version of my life where I read the tea leaves of the future in that moment, left the sports deck immediately, went back to Cooper’s cabin by myself, and drank hiscomplimentary champagne straight from the bottle on his balcony until the ship left the harbor.
This is not that version.
Instead, I stayed for the Putt-Putt tournament—doggedly hoping to turn a very weak start into a strong finish.
Ashley had put me on Finn’s team, after all. And I had compressed all my organs to squeeze into this outfit. Might as well make the most of it.
Cooper wasn’t originally on my team. I know because Ashley had typed out all four lists and printed them on different-colored card stock for reference—adding Cooper at the last minute to the smallest team. But when my team gathered by the lighthouse to get started, Cooper was there.
“Aren’t you supposed to be over by the octopus?” I asked.
“I switched with Evan.”
“You didn’t have to,” I said. “I’m pretty good at Putt-Putt golf.”
“How long has it been since you’ve played?”
I thought back. “Middle school?”
Cooper shrugged and said, “You might be a little rusty.”
Was he being overprotective? How good could all these people possibly be at mini golf?
But that was before I noticed that Brody had also just switched cards and joined our team—risking Ashley’s wrath, because he was definitely upsetting the gender balance to form a bro team. All bros, in fact, except for me.
And Brody, like Finn, turned out to be surprisingly into mini golf.
I don’t need to name names, but let’s just say one of them—coughBrody—was wearing a single leather golf glove on his nondominant hand.
To playmini golf.
There are people who like to compete because it’s fun—and then there are other people who like to compete so they cancrush the competition.
Brody was 100 percentcrush the competition.
Except he seemed to think thatIwas the competition—even though we were on the same team.
Anyway—did I just say I was “pretty good” at mini golf?
Today, I was the opposite.
