So I was in the corner of the ceramics studio, skipping lunch, scraping and kneading the hell out of wet clay, sweating with the effort. My chemistry homework was open on a stool next to me. I was pausing every few seconds to write the answers, then going back to molding this godforsaken bowl, which at this point looks more like the alcoholic cousin of a bowl, loopy and friendly and just not functional at all, like my dad’s cousin Tim, who at family gatherings always asks me when I’m going to put my brain to good use and go on Jeopardy! and win him some money; reason #5,666 why I need to keep said brain intact and get the hell out of here.
Anyway, in walked Coop, shutting the door behind him. He pulled out a Baggie and a pack of Zig Zag rolling papers from his back pocket.
“Sammie?”
I turned off the wheel. “Yeah, what are you doing?”
“Hey,” he said, not answering, and he giggled and walked over. In addition to the pocket for weed paraphernalia, Coop’s Carhartts had another back pocket for a folded-up notebook, and in the side pocket, a row of mechanical pencils.
“Nice storage facility,” I said, pointing at his pants with a muddy finger.
He sat across from me, pulling a stool between his legs, and began to work, hunched over like a craftsman, delicately pinching and sprinkling little green stubs. A strand of his hair fell in his eyes and he blew it back, brow furrowed. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Backpacks get too hot this time of year.”
“Were you really just coming in here to roll a J?”
“It’s my lunch routine,” he said, licking the edge of the paper with a shrug. “Then I saw you. So. What are you doing?”
“Catching up.”
“Oh, from Nationals, huh.”
“How did you know?”
“You told me that night at church. Plus, everyone was talking about it. I mean, not that you lost, but everyone was like, whoa, we went to Nationals in debate? People get excited about that stuff. I was bragging, like, ‘I know that girl.’”
I laughed. Coop rolled the impeccable little cylinder between his fingertips.
“But now I’m screwed.” I pointed to my chem homework, also muddy. “Not screwed, but. You remember…” I paused, wondering if we should get into this again. But Coop hadn’t told anyone after I had asked him to keep it quiet at the party. Which was nice. “You know how part of the disease is memory loss?”
“Yeah,” Coop said. “How is that going? Are you okay?”
“I forgot all these assignments. I never forget assignments. Never. And now I’m scared I will forget stuff during a test, or forget my speech at graduation, or…”
Coop smiled a lazy smile, and put the joint behind his ear. “So you’re worried you’re going to be normal.”
I gave him a little punch. “No…”
“Those are all the things I worry about, all the time.”
I considered that for a minute, and glanced at the joint. “Yeah, but you could just, I don’t know, stop smoking so much?”
He looked up at the ceiling, pretending to think, and back at me, shrugging. “But if the valedictorian is worrying about the same shit, then what’s the point?”
Then I had an idea. “Can I ask you something?”
Coop leaned on the stool with his forearms and looked at me like there was nothing else in the world he’d rather do than answer my question. “Shoot, Samantha.”
“How do you get by in school without flunking?”
“Hmm,” he said, drumming his fingertips on his biceps.
“I mean, how do you make sure you pass even when you’re, like…” I glanced at the joint again. “Mentally altered?”
“Well, first of all, I don’t just ‘get by.’ I get okay grades.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?” he asked, and it had been a while since I saw Coop’s surprised face. Probably since we were kids.
“I always look for the names of people I know on the honor roll.”
“Oh.” Coop started in again. Granted, he probably was high, but he was also going deep. “Well, I don’t ‘do’ a lot of ‘work.’” He held up quotation symbols. “I learn what needs to be learned, which is mostly how to effectively communicate that I have learned something, without actually learning it. Do you follow?”
“I do.” I watched this side of Coop with fascination—it was far from the stoner, “I don’t give a crap” person I had assumed he had turned into since we stopped being friends.
“For example,” he continued. “With your memory thing. I don’t memorize things. That takes too much time. Instead, I set up opportunities for… alternative resources. Like phones, or makeup tests, or other kind souls who happen to be near me.”
As he spoke, I thought of the colors on my calendar bleeding together, all the dates, all the assignments, all the moments that I might look away from my paper and look back to see nothing but numbers or words that meant nothing to me, having no one to reach out to and call “time-out,” flubbing test after test until they let me graduate out of pity.
Coop was still leaning forward, watching me formulate. “What is that look on your face?” he asked.
“Can you show me this stuff?”
“What stuff?”
“All these alternative resources you have.”
He tilted his head. “Are you asking me how to cheat?”
I sighed. I didn’t want to say yes, but as Mom always says, “Call a spade a spade.” I have tried doing it the old way, Future Sam, the honest way, where I work hard, and study, and memorize, and look where that got me. Plus, it’s just two weeks out of four years. The morality scale is still tipped in my favor, right?
Coop smiled and winked, and sure, at that moment, I could see why girls wanted him to be the foundation to their human pyramid.
“Okay,” he said, sliding each tool back into its rightful pocket. “Come over whenever.”