Free The Summer Remains by Seth King

against my shingled roof, and because everything else in my life was going to shit, I cuddled up in bed and opened up my Kindle app. My life could be kinda sucky sometimes, and there was nothing that comforted me more than sinking into a good book and immersing myself in a world I knew nothing of and feeling things I would never otherwise feel. If eyes were windows into the soul, books were rabbit holes into the imagination. But my brain was on overdrive and I couldn’t concentrate on my book for the life of me, as it was one of the sixteen thousand other books where a petrolifically-named bad boy called Slade Stonewood or Rock Rockford steps away from his greasy motorcycle and/or cage fighting arena long enough to be redeemed by the love of a bookish brunette. Seriously, all the books were the same, and I was so ready for something new. Anyway, because I would rather stick rusty pins under my fingernails than let myself be alone with my thoughts for too long, I went into the Florida room and put on last week’s episode of some Real Housewives type show I was trying to get into. During this episode this one woman I couldn’t stand, Gina, was supposed to get drunk and have a meltdown and punch a bunch of people at a fundraising gala for an anti-bullying charity or something, and so I grabbed a bottle of white wine from the fridge and laid myself out on the couch. I injected not one, not two, but three syringes full of wine into my feeding tube, and soon I was doing that thing where you accidentally get drunk alone at home.
    To make myself feel less pathetic I grabbed my mom’s black-and-white cat, Socks, and tried to get her to snuggle with me so I could at least say I was accompanied by one other soul during my pathetic drinking exploits, but she sniffled – she’d been sick lately – and then marched away with her tail in the air. She’d been having nonstop allergies and her doctors were starting to think she was allergic to feline hair, which would literally mean she was allergic to herself. She had no idea how much we had in common.
    As the situation onscreen devolved into chaos and Gina started stumbling through a mansion yelling at people and overturning furniture, my thoughts wandered to Cooper once again. I tried to ignore it, I really did, but soon he was everywhere.
    I thought I could do this, fool someone into dating a dying girl. I really did. But I hadn’t anticipated feeling like such a lying sack of shit in his presence, and I wasn’t sure if I was strong enough to overcome my guilt about my fate and reach for his love. And it wasn’t just the surgery thing. It was also a Me Thing. I thought I’d come to terms with myself in middle school, but now that I’d been subjected to Cooper and his almost inhuman perfection, antique feelings were starting to rise within me, floating up to the surface like bad indigestion. I’d always longed to be one of those people who had that weird spark about them, that verve that shifted the gravitational field around them and just attracted good things, made them pop and crack and whiz like lights in the July sky, but I wasn’t. And Cooper was. He glowed on the edges like a cloud that blocked the midday sun. And maybe we were too different. The other night had proved that. He was headed for forever and I was headed for an operating room, and we would never be able to close that gap. No matter what my phone had told me, the first few Spark boys who’d called me ugly had been right: I was unlovable, and Cooper and I were not a match. I could press my emotions into my keyboard and send them off into the fiber-optic cables of the world for the sake of dilution and distraction all I wanted, but at the end of the day the too-ancient truth in my too-modern world was that I was all alone and somehow Less Than everyone else and that nobody in the world knew just how cold that felt.
    Gina ended up getting arrested for throwing a random Buddha statue at someone’s face, and I