in the corner of his lips. He stares up at Peg, chewing with his mouth wide open.
“Hey, why Florida, by the way?” Peg asks. “Of all the places for Ted to go.”
I have no answer. Ted among tourists? Ted among all those “senile shuffleboard addicts,” those “hip-replacement hippies”? Ted has no shortage of epithets for people who move to Florida.
“I don’t know,” I tell Peg. “Mara told him she wanted to find a new studio space, and I guess he took the opportunity to make a change.”
“But it’s still weird, right?” she asks. “Florida?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s really weird.”
“Hmm.” She stares into the distance, then shakes her head. Taps the table twice. “Corned beef sandwich coming right up.”
As she walks away, I fidget with my fingers in my lap.
“So,” I begin, but Cooper cuts me off.
“You’re probably wondering why I asked you here,” he says.
I meet his eyes. They’re stony and serious. “Huh?” I mutter. Then he breaks into a smile. Shoves a fry into his mouth.
“I’m kidding,” he says. “What’s up, Brierley? Why’d you wanna meet? You sick of Ted already?”
“No, I…”
To be sick of him, I’d have to spend time with him.
“My name’s Douglas now,” I remind him.
“Yeah, I know,” he says. He closes his hand into a fist, nudges my chin with it. “But you’ll always be Brierley to me.”
I lean back until my shoulder blades touch the booth. Something flickers in his eyes and he laughs through his nose.
“Out with it,” he insists.
There’s a wad of potato bobbing on his tongue. I keep my gaze focused on his eyes. “Do you remember that summer I went with you guys to Edgewood Lake?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“And you drove Kyla and me to a hair salon? But then she wanted us to get her some candy from the gas station?”
“Okay…”
“What happened after that?” I ask. “When we went to get the candy. I can’t remember.”
He stops chewing. His jaw freezes at a strange angle. I hold my breath.
“You wanted to meet up so you could ask me about a trip to the gas station… from twenty years ago?”
I nod. How quickly he recalled that it was exactly twenty years.
He picks up a fry, stabs at the ketchup on his plate. “Brierley, I have no idea. But I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that… we got candy?”
I shake my head. Fast and hard. “Kyla said no. She said we were gone a really long time. Way longer than it would take to pick up cigarettes and Nerds Ropes. So something must have gone wrong somehow. You must’ve…” I trail off.
“Are you talking about what happened when we were kids?” he asks.
My jaw clenches. It’s a moment before I can respond. “What do you mean?”
He snips a fry in half with his teeth. “How I used to, you know, mess with you and stuff.”
Mess with me? When we were kids? He was eighteen the first time he shoved his arm into my mouth. I look at his tattoo and I swear I can feel that honeycomb on my tongue.
“Because I’ve grown up a lot since then,” he continues. “I mean, obviously.” He flexes his arm muscles. The bees convulse. “So if this is about confronting me or something—for maybe freaking you out that day, or whatever—there’s no need. I’m a completely different person now. It wouldn’t even make sense for me to apologize, you know? Because I’d be apologizing for something that someone else did.”
I stare at him. Gape, really. I’m still struggling for a response when Peg slaps a sandwich and milkshake in front of me. I jump a little.
“That was fast,” I say.
She winks at me. “I poached it from table seven. Shirley Schmidt can wait a minute.”
She spins around, heads to another table, and I rip the paper off a straw. Plunk it into my shake. I’m about to suck some of it up when I feel a ripple of nausea. I look at the corned beef fringing the bread on my plate. Usually just the sight of it makes my mouth water. Now, I can’t help but see it as the pile of flesh I know it is.
“Listen,” I say, “I’m not talking about what you did to me when I was a kid. I’m talking about that day in particular, when we went to the gas station. Can you think of any reason why it would have taken us so long to get back?”