I stepped in and Mascot made another valiant attempt to crawl over my shoulder and flee. Mostly, he just succeeded in clawing me.
“He’s so affectionate,” I said as though that was why he was clinging to my shirt. “Such a sweet cat. I’m sure it won’t be long until we find a home for him.”
Cooper’s father only looked at me in confusion. His mother joined us in the family room, equally confused about why I had come to their house carrying a disgruntled, injured cone-cat.
“I forgot to tell you,” Cooper said to them, “on the way to the dance, this cat ran in front of the car, and I accidentally hit it.” He told the rest of the story, adding that since I couldn’t keep the cat at my house, he’d volunteered to keep it at his. “Just until he’s healed and we can find a home for him.”
“I’ve got food and supplies in my car,” I added.
Cooper’s parents looked less than thrilled with this turn of events, although Claire, who came into the living room during the explanation, immediately took to Mascot. She plucked him from my arms, carried him to the couch, and removed his cone.
“He’s supposed to wear that until his wound heals,” I said. “It’s so he doesn’t lick his stitches.”
She softly stroked his fur. “He won’t lick his stitches while I’m petting him. I’ll put it back on afterward.” She began scratching his chin and murmuring things to him.
I wouldn’t say that Mascot relaxed, exactly, but he did look at Claire like she was the one sane person he’d met in the last twenty-four hours.
Ms. Nash’s gaze bounced between Cooper and Claire with reluctant defeat. “I guess we can keep the cat until we find a home for him. But wewillfind a home for him.”
“Right,” Claire said and went back to cooing at Mascot.
Cooper helped me carry the cat supplies inside. When we’d finished piling them into the kitchen, Ms. Nash told me that Cooper couldn’t hang out today because he had plans with his father.
Cooper gave me an apologetic look and walked me to the door. Claire and Mr. Nash were only a few feet away on the couch while we said goodbye, so it wasn’t exactly private. Claire wasn’t paying attention to us, but I was pretty sure Mr. Nash was. Cooper glanced at them and turned back to me with another apologetic look. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
As I headed to my car, I told myself that my trip here had been successful. They’d taken the cat.
But being hustled out of Cooper’s house, well, it didn’t feel quite like success. It felt like another reminder that I was no longer needed as the fake girlfriend.
c c c
The next day, I hoped I’d see Cooper before school. Nope. He was nowhere around. Right before class started, Dahlia posted the picture of us kissing on her social media and claimed he’d been cheating on her all along.
Harper and Kinsley both took screenshots of her post and sent it to me during first period. I forwarded it to Cooper on Snapchat and—using way too many panicked question marks—asked what he was telling people about it.
Cooper:I tell them that I couldn’t have cheated on herbecause I was never her boyfriend. We just had a date to homecoming that she bailed on when I had to drive you to the vet.
Dahlia was going to hate that response. It told people that he’d never been that into her.
Me:So does that mean we’re still going with the we-kissed-for-a-drama-rehearsal story?
Cooper:I never went with a different one.
I wrote, erased, and finally sent,It seems more suspicious now that we ditched our dates before the homecoming dance.
He didn’t respond to that, and I couldn’t bring myself to say more to him over Snapchat. I was afraid if I did, he’d know what I was really asking: What are we now?
Did he regret holding hands with me at the vet? Here, sitting in class among the social strata of our day-to-day school life, things seemed different. A girl like me who only ranked somewhere in the vast wasteland of a middling popularity level shouldn’t expect one of the most popular guys in the school to fall for her. Was he planning on ghosting me?
I would wait until I talked to Cooper in person and could see how he acted, see his expression and hear the tone of his voice to figure out how I should act toward him.
Except for one brief time when I spotted Cooper way ahead of me in the hallway, I didn’t see him at school, something that made me more frustrated as the day went on.
Plenty of other people went out of their way to talk to me. Even some of the cheerleaders. It was widely known that Dahlia broke up with Cooper on the way to the homecoming dance andthat he’d gone off with me, although the circumstances around his abandonment were less clear.
Several people asked me if Cooper and I were a couple now.
Good question.
