“Look,” Cooper says. He moves closer to me so that people can get by. Which means he’s very, very close. Closer than he’s been since our breakup. I take a deep breath and try to stop myself from freaking out. “I want to help you.”
“You want to help me? Have you completely and totally lost it?”
“Eliza, I know you’re mad, but you don’t get it. I didn’t want to ever hurt you; I’m going to help you. They don’t—”
“Oh, I get it all right,” I say.
I push past him and into the Spotted Frog, then march over to a little table in the corner and sit down. The Frog’s one of those places that’s frequented by hipsters, mostly college kids who have turned their backs on the bar scene in favor of sipping organic teas and planting vegetable gardens and working on reducing their carbon footprints. The drinks are completely overpriced, and the people who work there can be a little annoying, with their whole “I’m so over you and everything else” attitudes, but somehow the vibe in there is warm and inviting.
Well. At least it is when you’re there of your own accord and not because some psycho, dumb, secret, macho club at your school has basically blackmailed you into going there.
Cooper walks in behind me, and so I quickly take the extra chair at my table and shove it under the table next to me, where a girl with braids is sipping a chai tea and talking to her friend about her yoga class.
Cooper walks over and calmly removes the chair, puts it back at my table, and then sits down. Ugh. How annoying.
I pull out my phone and text Marissa. “WHERE. ARE. YOU??”
Cooper gets up and disappears for a second, then returns with two coffees.
“I got yours with cinnamon hazelnut syrup,” he says.
I shoot him a glare, but take a sip of the warm liquid. It’s so hot I almost burn my tongue, but it’s good going down, comforting and sweet. “I’m not sure what I should thank you for first,” I say. “Remembering how I take my coffee or turning me in to the dean because of what I wrote about you on Lanesboro Losers.” I think that’s a super-biting and witty remark that should totally put him in his place, but Cooper seems unfazed.
“I didn’t turn you in,” Cooper says. “That was the 318s.” As he takes a sip of his coffee, one shirtsleeve slips down and I can see he’s wearing the watch I bought him. Seriously! That is so screwed up. He should have to give me back all the presents I gave him while we were together.
“Give that back to me,” I say, holding my hand out.
“Give what back to you?” Cooper asks. He sets his coffee cup down on the table.
“The watch I gave you.”
“This?” Cooper holds up his wrist.
“Is that the watch I gave you?”
“Yes.”
“Then yes.”
“No,” he says. “I love this watch.”
“When people break up,” I say, “they give back each other’s stuff.”
“This isn’t each other’s stuff,” he says. “This was a gift.”
“A gift given under false pretenses.” I hold my hand out. “Give it back.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t want to. The person who gets dumped gets to keep the gifts that were given to him.”
“I didn’t dump you,” I say.
“Yes, you did,” he says. “You left me that night.”
“After I found a list that basically showed you were dating me as a joke? Yes, of course I left.”
“That wasn’t my list,” he says. “It was the 318s’ list.”
“Isn’t that kind of one and the same?” I ask. “Like, aren’t you guys all supposed to be together, you know, brotherhood and one for all and all of that?” I roll my eyes so he can see just how stupid and ridiculous I think the whole thing is.
“I guess,” he says. He pushes his cup back and forth between his fingers, sliding it on the table. Then he looks up at me, and he’s looking right at me, and it’s too intense and so I look away.
“Whatever,” I say. “You can keep the dumb watch.” I look down at the table and hope he couldn’t hear the catch in my voice because, suddenly, I feel like I want to cry.
“Thanks,” he says quietly. And then he doesn’t say anything else.
“So what now?” I ask, blinking back the tears and forcing myself to look at him. “Am I supposed to strip down and flash everyone here or something?” I rack my brain for what I would have written in my notebook about the Spotted Frog, but I’m coming up blank. I haven’t been here enough for it to really deserve a place in my notebook.
“What did that guy say?” Cooper asks suddenly, ignoring my comment about the flashing. And about what I’m supposed to do next.
“What guy?” I ask, confused.
“The one you were dancing with at Cure.”
“You mean like what did we talk about when we were dancing?”
“No,” Cooper says. “What did he say when you asked him to dance?”
“Um, he said, ‘Sure.’” Cooper looks taken aback. “You don’t have to look so shocked, Cooper, not everyone judges people on how much skin they’re showing or how good they look in a bikini.”
“I don’t judge people on those things.”
“Is that why you’re hooking up with Isabella Royce?”
“Isabella Royce?” Cooper sits up straight. “Who told you I was hooking up with Isabella Royce?”
But before I can answer him, one of the hipster, “I’m so totally over it” workers, a guy with five earrings in each ear, is up on the stage that covers half of the café in the back.
“Hello,” he says into the microphone that’s set up. He taps on it and then says, “Testing, one two three” and somehow he’s able to make it seem totally ironic.
“We’re going to get started,” he says. “So please pick your song and sign up over there.” He points over to the corner, where a middle-aged woman is setting up what looks like a karaoke folder.
“Great,” I say. “Now not only do I have to sit here and wait for some kind of direction, but now I’m going to have to listen to crazy people sing karaoke.” The weird thing is, I don’t mind listening to karaoke. I mean, what’s not to like? People making total asses of themselves? Fun! It’s just so annoying that I have to do it now, here, with Cooper.
Plus the Spotted Frog does karaoke as part of their “performance” series, where they have a different kind of entertainment every night. Usually they do poetry readings or have little indie bands play music in the corner, but once a month they do karaoke. People pretty much sing only indie music or girl rock, and the Spotted Frog tries to pretend it’s all retro. So not as fun as the normal kind of karaoke.
Then Cooper gets this look on his face, the same look Clarice and Marissa got earlier, one of those “how do I tell her this?” kind of looks.
“What?” I ask. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Um, you know you’re supposed to do karaoke, right?”
My heart sinks as I realize one of the things I wrote about in my purple notebook is how I wish I could get up and sing karaoke. Shit, shit, shit. Why did I write that? Why, why, why? I have no aspirations to be a singer. At all. In fact, I’m a horrible singer. Which I guess is why I always thought it would be cool to sing karaoke. I mean, it takes a lot of self-confidence to get up and do something that you know you’re not good at. And that’s the thing about karaoke—it almost doesn’t really matter how good a singer you are—people care more about how much you get into it. If you get up there and act like you’re really excited and think you’re a rock star, people love it.
“I am?” I croak out.
“Yeah,” Cooper says.
“Here?” I look around at the crowd. This is definitely not the kind of place that loves hearing the latest Britney Spears song belted out at the top of someone’s lungs. This place would scoff at such a thing. This place wants you to sing Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos and bands people have never, ever heard of and never will again once they leave here
.
Right now, for example, two girls are over at the folder, pouring through the songs, and I totally just heard one of them say, “Ooh, Fiona Apple, that is so nineties perfect.”
“So did you get his number?” Cooper’s asking.
“Whose number?” I ask.
“The guy you were dancing with,” he says.
“Rich?”
“Oh, you know his name now?” Cooper narrows his eyes and takes another sip of his coffee.
“Why wouldn’t I know his name?” I ask.
“He just didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would take the time to ask you your name, if you know what I mean.”
“Cooper, we were dancing. Of course he asked me my name.”
Cooper snorts again and takes another sip of his coffee.
“Not everyone,” I say, “is a sex-crazed maniac.” Not that Cooper’s sex-crazed. Although I wouldn’t necessarily say he isn’t sex-crazed either. I’d put his sex-crazedness at a normal level. Of course, that could just be for me. His sex-crazedness level for Isabella Royce could be through the roof.
“I’m not a sex-crazed maniac.” Cooper looks shocked and offended.
“No one said you were,” I say, wrapping my hands around my cup of coffee and enjoying his obvious discomfort. “I was just saying that Rich isn’t.” Which isn’t exactly true. Okay, it’s not even close to true. Rich was sex-crazed enough to take a girl home from the club with him and then never call her again. Is this enough to make someone a maniac? I’m not sure. Either way, Cooper totally doesn’t need to know about the girl at the club or the fact that Rich was dancing with me only to get away from her.
“You said, ‘Not everyone is a sex-crazed maniac’ which implies that I am,” Cooper says. “Which I’m not.”
“If you say so,” I say, and shrug. “But it sounds to me like maybe you have a guilty conscience.”
“I don’t have a—” Cooper clears his throat and leans across the table. “Is this about that night in the pool?”
Oh. That night in the pool. I’d totally forgotten about that. One night, when Cooper’s parents were out, he invited me over for dinner. We grilled hamburgers on the deck and ate them on paper plates, and then we went swimming and we started making out, and Cooper was totally pushing it, trying to get it past third-base territory, but I wouldn’t let him.
“Why do you care anyway?” I say. “That’s ancient history.”
“I don’t,” he says. His phone starts vibrating, and he picks it up and checks his texts. “They want to know if you’re karaokeing.”
“Can’t you …” I try to act like I don’t care and avert my eyes. “Can’t you just tell them that I am? That I did?”
“Eliza,” he says. “I can’t.” I see pity in his eyes, which really, really pisses me off. Actually, I’m mostly mad at myself, for even suggesting to Cooper that he help me. So before I can stop myself, I’m getting up and walking over to the corner, where the woman is setting up the karaoke machine.
“Do you have any Britney Spears?” I ask.
Chapter Five
9:01 p.m.
This is horrible. This is beyond horrible. I mean, talk about rubbing salt in my wounds. Is it not enough that I’ve been dumped and left brokenhearted? Now I have to be completely humiliated as well? Just because I wrote something totally dumb on a ridiculous website?
The woman behind the karaoke table has a British accent and crazy curly gray hair, and she’s looking at me nervously, like she can’t figure me out. Which makes sense. I mean, everyone else in here is wearing hemp, and I’m wearing platform heels with studs on them. “I think I left all the Britney back at the office, love.” She starts flipping through the binder that lists all the songs, like maybe some rogue Britney might have slipped in there somewhere. “Um, will Christina Aguilera do?” she asks hopefully.
“I guess so,” I say glumly. But then I remember all those people who try out for American Idol and sing a Christina Aguilera song and end up booted, and everyone in the audience shakes their head sadly and thinks, “Oh my God, what a fool. Why would anyone choose Christina? That is such a mistake.”
“Actually, uh, no,” I say. “Do you have anything else?”
“I think I have an old Justin Timberlake song in here somewhere.” She pulls out a disc and holds it up. “It’s a compilation.” She smiles at me proudly.
“Great,” I say. I write my name down on the list and then turn my back on Cooper and sit down at a table in the corner. I never should have asked him if he would lie for me. I mean, yes, he is a liar, but his lying is obviously exclusive to me, and to think otherwise shows a certain level of insanity on my part.
I look around. I guess the good thing about this place is that no one’s really paying attention to the Fiona Apple girls who are singing right now. They’re all, you know, way too cool to be interested in karaoke. Even karaoke that is supposed to be ironic and hip.
Cooper crosses the room in three long strides and sits down next to me.
“Ugh,” I say, turning my seat away from him. I pick up a magazine that someone left on the table and start flipping through the pages. “Stop following me.”
“I have to,” he says. “To make sure you’re doing what you’re supposed to.”
“Just shut up,” I say. “If you have to follow me around, fine, but don’t talk to me.” I don’t want him to talk to me because obviously I hate him, but also because I don’t trust myself around him. His closeness is making my stomach do flip-flops, and I really don’t want to cry in front of him, or bring up our breakup, or … just, yeah. Being close to Cooper is not a good idea.
Cooper reaches into his pocket, pulls out his cell phone, and snaps a picture of me.
“What was that for?” I ask. I hold my hands up in front of my face like he’s a paparazzi stalker, which really makes no sense, since, you know, he already took the picture.
“So I can show Tyler,” he says. “They need to know you’re here.” He looks apologetic.
“They don’t trust you enough to tell them the truth?” I ask, grinning. “They need photographic evidence?”
“I guess so.” He looks like this just hit him. I grin some more.
“Thank you, Helena and Rose,” the karaoke woman is saying. “And now, we have Eliza, performing “Sexy Back” by Justin Timberlake.” A giggle ripples through the crowd. Hmmph. I guess they’re not too cool to make fun of others. And they’re definitely not too cool to scoff at Justin Timberlake. Damn. I really should have used a fake name.
“Eliza, dear, where are you?” she asks. She looks around and finally, I get up, walk to the front of the stage, and take the microphone from her. My hands are shaking, and she puts the Justin Timberlake DVD into the player, so that the words can flash across the screen for me to sing along with.
It’s at that moment I realize this is a horrible plan. Yes, the whole thing is a horrible plan, doing what the 318s say and letting my notebook fall into the wrong hands, but the more horrible thing is that I HAVE PICKED A JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE SONG. “Sexy Back,” no less!
I thought I was being coy, picking a song that no one would care about but, really, it’s having the opposite effect. People are interested because they think it’s so stupid. And when I think about it, it is a pretty stupid song. “I’m bringing sexy back”? What does that even mean? Not to mention that it’s pretty arrogant. Like, bringing sexy back all by yourself? Justin even got crap for it, I think. Can you imagine what these people are going to think about ME singing that I’m bringing sexy back?
Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod. My mouth starts to get all dry, and I really wish I had some water.
The music starts then, and suddenly it’s like a movie, one of those really bad movies where the person is supposed to be in a talent show or auditioning for something or singing in front of people, and they just FREEZE. That is what is happening right now. I am just freezing.
The words are starting to move across the screen, but I can’t
open my mouth. Everyone in the whole place is staring at me, which is making it even worse, and I’m sure it’s my imagination, but it seems like more people are coming in, like some kind of announcement got posted somewhere saying that some weird girl was singing Justin Timberlake in the hipster café and her name is Eliza and everyone should come watch.
I take a deep breath. Okay. There is nothing to this. It is just singing. In fact, I’ve sung this song tons of times. Of course, I was alone in my room at the time, using my hairbrush as a microphone and making up my own dance moves while pretending to be famous. But still. It’s just karaoke, and I am never going to see any of these people again. I try and picture them all naked. Then I close my eyes and pretend I’m back in my room. But it’s not working. Nothing is coming out of my mouth.
“Come on!” someone yells. I open my eyes. It’s some jerk college guy who looks like maybe he’s the type to put expensive whiskey in one of those silver flasks and then carry it around, thinking it makes him seem super-classy and not just like he’s trying to get drunk in the middle of the day. “Show us how you’re going to get sexy back!”
Then, suddenly, just when I think the crazy, drunk flask guy is going to get up and say something again, or maybe throw his flask at me the way people used to throw tomatoes, Cooper is out of his chair and standing next to me. He takes the microphone out of my hand and starts to sing. What? Why? Cooper is now standing next to me, singing “Sexy Back” by Justin Timberlake!
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“Helping you,” he whispers back. The thing about Cooper is that even though he’s a jerk, he definitely has, you know, that something. That thing I was talking about that allows certain people to be good at karaoke. He’s suddenly gyrating all over the place, totally getting into it, and acting like he really is bringing sexy back.
And to my surprise, people are actually starting to like it. Of course, I guess it isn’t really that surprising. Cooper is very good-looking. And charming. Which is how he charmed me into losing my mind and going out with him. He’s also not that bad of a singer, although his strength definitely lies in his performance. I’m so caught up in what he’s doing, that when he puts the microphone in my face to sing backup, I chime right in and sing, my panicked feeling gone.