Just like every year, they blocked off all the streets in Hanover and people walked around without much clothing, getting sunburned, drinking out of bottles of water or bottles of beer. It was a good day for me, brain-wise and body-wise and otherwise-wise, so while Mom and Dad and the kids went to ride on the rides, I met up with Stuart.
“My little American,” he said, rubbing my shoulders when I found him on the main road. I kissed him. He tasted bitter and sweet. “Having some beers?”
“Yeah, I just…” He rubbed his face with his hand. “Sometimes I just need a break.”
“Good! Yes! You should relax.” He had come over almost every day this week, helping to do the dishes, taking Puppy for long walks, driving Bette and Davy to camp.
“How’s the writing?” I asked.
“Blah,” he said. “America!” he shouted instead, and put his arm around my shoulders.
I told him about the biographies. He told me about a regular who had come into the Canoe Club that reminded him of a short story. When we arrived at his house, I could hear people’s voices, but couldn’t see them. I tried to look up, but my eyeballs don’t really do that these days, so I just listened.
“Stu-ey’s back!” I heard Ross Nervig shout.
“Are they on the roof?” I asked Stuart.
“Yep!”
Inside the garage I squeezed my hands in and out of fists, and craned my neck to look upward so my eyeballs didn’t have to.
“Oh!” Stuart said. “We don’t have to go up there. I’ll tell them to come down here.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“No, baby,” he said, putting his hands on my cheeks. “They should come down here. I’m so stupid. I will not let you strain yourself.”
“It’s fine,” I told him, and added I don’t like the language, “I will not let you…” to a long list of things that I had not said to Stuart. The list included the following:
Please don’t call me “baby.”
Please don’t remind me to take my medication. If I forget, I would rather my family did that.
Please don’t stroke my hair and become sad, because that makes me sad.
I didn’t like this part of myself, this part that censored, and Stuart did everything out of love, and he did so much. He would never hold it above my head, but I would. Every time I repeated myself, every time I forgot where I had put my phone, every time I couldn’t take Puppy for a walk, it hung above my head.
But I could still do most things. Most everything. Just not all the time. See, Stu?
I swallowed. I thought of myself just a couple of months ago, flitting around like no big deal, thinking I was going to live on my own in New York.
But it’s not that you don’t fall, it’s that you get back up, right? Right. Stuart waited while I psyched myself up, a little encouraging smile on his face.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“I want to do this.”
I gripped the rungs like I was hanging off a cliff. Stuart asked if I wanted help, his hands floating around my calves. I said no, and though I had to wait a moment after each step, I pushed off strong. I made it up both ladders, and by the time I sat down on the flat, warm tar, I was breathing and happy like I had won a marathon. I realized I would do it all over again just for that feeling, like I was back in the world and the world was good. Even if it made me tired.
Stuart went to a cooler that sat in the center and cracked opened a beer.
“My friend Sammie!” Coop was lounging next to a girl in an American flag bikini. He was wearing his favorite THAT GOOD GOOD tank top. I looked around a circle of people I was probably supposed to know, their heads in red, white, and blue bandannas and plumes of cigarette smoke, and goddamn, it was great to see Coop. It’s hard to describe the feeling of relief I had, Future Sam, really knowing someone else up there on the roof. He was just so, I don’t know, nonblurry. Then I realized the last time I had felt that out-in-the-world feeling was at the Potholes, with Coop. So it made sense.
“Hey, Coop,” I said, still taking deep breaths. I pointed to the opening in the roof. “I made it up both ladders.”
“Well, cheers to you!” he said, tilting his head, holding up a beer. He swigged it and set down the empty bottle.
“Yes, cheers to you!” Stuart called from the cooler, and turned back to Ross Nervig, who had pulled him into a discussion about poetry.
“Anyone want a water?” Coop asked, getting up. “I’m going to switch to water.”
“I’ll have a water,” I said.
Coop brought me a sweating bottle and sat back down next to Hot Katie. Hot Katie who he was supposedly not dating.
After a minute, I noticed a dark shape land on her leg. She screamed and stood. Coop turned from the girl he was talking to on his other side.
“Get away from him!” I screamed at Katie.
“What?” she shouted, taken aback, still whacking the air.
“Please move!” I motioned her away from Coop.
Coop realized what was happening and scrambled to the other side of the roof.
“He’s allergic to bees,” I said, quieter.
“Is it gone?” Coop asked me.
“It’s gone,” I told him.
Thanks, he mouthed.
For the next hour or so I tried out my newfound small-talking on a few people, trying to remember things about them.
At every quiet moment, I quizzed myself: Becca is in Washington, DC, Lynn decided against taking that internship after all, Jeff is working at Ross Nervig’s dad’s contracting business. Becca: DC, Lynn: no internship, Jeff: Nervig’s dad.
Soon I was feeling bleary. I had taken my pain meds after I came up the ladder, and the sleepiness crept in.
When Stuart swooped down to kiss me, I whispered, “Hey.”
“Hey,” he said. His eyes were sleepy, too, but for a different reason.
“I think I gotta go,” I said.
“No,” he said, frowning.
“My—what’s the thing, with the gas—my tank is low,” I said.
“Okay, well, just wait one second and we’ll go home.”
“You are home!”
Stuart talked warm and soft in my ear. “You can stay here. I’ll bring you some water.”
I lifted my hand to his shirt and pulled him closer. “No. You stay with your friends. You relax. I mean it.”
“How about I just kiss you?” he said, and planted his lips on mine, sloppy and salty until I had to laugh.
“Stu-ey, now!” Ross was yelling, pointing at the sky, a book in his hands like a Viking conqueror with his ax.
The fireworks had started.
“One second, baby, I promised Ross I would read this Ginsberg,” he said, slurring a bit, and scrambled over to his friend. I laughed again to myself. Coop was looking at me. I shrugged and smiled.
“Everyone! I wanna read this,” Stuart yelled as the golden strips of light popped behind him. He looked at the book. He looked at the book, and lines from “America” rumbled out of his gut with great intensity. Verses about hopelessness, about giving it one’s all but still having nothing.
Stuart was silhouetted by the colors, all eyes on him. His arms flailed wildly as he read, and Ross stood beside him nodding, clapping his hands at parts he liked. I wondered what he was working on, if he would read his own work like this someday, as if he felt every word. Stuart was majestic. Stuart was drunk.
I thought about five summers ago, the first and only time I got drunk like that. Coop at that party in April, telling me that he had wanted to “get drunk with me his whole life,” but actually we had, once.
The summer before freshman year, before the whole “date” incident, he and some of his baseball player buddies had stolen someone’s parents’ whiskey, and Coop convinced me to try it if he mixed it with Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper. This was, of course, before I knew I wanted to get out of the Upper Valley, before I discovered debate, before I wanted NYU, before I wanted Stuart.
It had been fun at first, and I gulped it down like I was drinking a soda.
Coop and I kept pushing each other and giggling. He had taken my glasses and ran around with them, and I chased him and hopped on his back. Then he had given me a piggyback ride into the trees, where I slid off him, and after I swayed for a second, I began to vomit.
Coop had held my hair as I puked and kept saying, “Oh no, oh no.”
I had started laughing, even as I was wiping puke from my mouth, and said, “I’m never doing this again!”
“You’re never going to puke again?” Coop had asked, and by then we were both laughing. It was such stupid, happy laughing.
I remembered him bending beside me, not afraid to be next to me when something so gross was happening. I remembered the feeling of his hand on my back, holding my curls in a bunch.
I watched the girl in the American flag bikini pass Coop a joint, but he waved it off.
He looked back at me, almost like he was remembering the same thing, but he couldn’t have been. Anyway, we looked at each other. I don’t really know what either of us was thinking, but we looked at each other for a long time.
Today, Stuart was closer to the way he was on the day he read at the library, when I realized I loved, or was starting to love, him. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him like that, actually. He’s happier when he’s doing what he wants to do, not just what he feels he needs to do. We all would be better doing that, I think.
I asked Coop for a ride home. Ever since he brought me home from Maddie’s graduation party, Mom and Dad had started to let Coop hang out and give me rides and stuff, which is nice. Takes the pressure off them to have him just across the mountain, I guess, and he’s home more often than his mother. Plus, the nurse gets expensive.
Mom invited him in to have pie, and we ended up eating it in my room because Bette was having kind of a tantrum about pie, and anyway, Coop saw the NPC Task Force pictures on my wall and asked me about them.
After I died from embarrassment and then rose again, I was like, “Oh god, that was kinda dumb. Back when I thought I could, like, make NPC disappear. When I thought I could still do all the things I had set out for myself.”
“Well, why forget about them?” Coop asked. “No time like now. They’re not going to matter less just because they aren’t part of some grand scheme. You just have to… adjust the plan.”
“Adjust the plan to what?”
“I guess I mean get rid of ‘the plan’ altogether. Do them because they’re good things to do. Do them just for the sake of doing them.”