Getting Over Max Cooper Read online

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2022

  Copyright © 2022 by Marcelle Karp

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  G. P. Putnam’s Sons is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Ebook ISBN 9780593325056

  Cover art © 2022 by Mallory Heyer

  Cover design by Theresa Evangelista

  Design by Nicole Rheingans, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. The Beginning of Summer

  2. Wednesday in June

  3. The Next Day (Thursday, Still June)

  4. The First Friday in July

  5. Saturday (Two Days Before the Fourth of July)

  6. The Day After the Fourth of July

  7. The Next Day

  Epilogue: The Day Before Leo Leaves

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Ruby

  The Beginning of Summer

  Chapter One

  “Can you get off your phone, Jazz? We got customers here,” Sue barks at me, her high-pitched voice in surround sound as she nudges me off the stool with her hip, here in the way, way back of Crabby’s.

  “Yeah, okay,” I mutter. I was literally sitting for one minute; I’d been watching Ariana Grande’s video “Thank U, Next,” the historical Mean Girls version, an epic mash-up of my favorite singer becoming a character from one of my favorite movies.

  “Also, Jazz, I need you to use the disinfectant every single time you wipe the counter down,” she says, invading my personal space with her breath, which is a combination of coffee and cigarettes and weed. “Everything needs to be sanitized, got me?”

  As if I don’t already know that. Still, I don’t answer her with what I’d like to say (“Shut up, shut up, shut up”) because she’s the boss. I put my iPhone in the back pocket of my denim skirt, adjust my sweaty purple tank top, then grab the spray, squirting the air like I’m perfuming it as I walk toward the counter of this shoe box of a snack shack that is my summer job.

  “Move it, move it,” orders Nate Beckerman, sounding like a drill sergeant, his intonation clipped. He doesn’t speak that way naturally; he is a high school student like me, but Nate wants to be an actor, so he’s always doing what he calls “character work.” I guess he’s in military mode right now.

  “At your command!” I laugh, saluting him.

  Nate acknowledges my salute with a nod of his chin as he leans over the counter and grabs a peppermint patty from the plastic bin that’s next to my cash register. It costs twenty-five cents, but he just takes it like he owns Crabby’s. A blatant consequence of his privilege. Sue is going to be pissed if she catches him—I am under orders to charge everyone for everything. Even my mom pays.

  I squirt Nate with disinfectant, as if he’s a mosquito I’m spritzing with repellent. “Can you stop? I’m going to get in trouble,” I whine, then quickly modulate my voice, trying to sound normal, as I realize Nate’s cousin McDimple (his actual name is Leo) is standing off to the side of my counter. The top half of McDimple’s wet suit is dangling off his hip bones, his body is damp from the ocean, and he’s on his phone, a ’droid—who has a ’droid other than moms? “What, um, what do you want, Nate?”

  “Ice cream, B!” I know what the B stands for, and I am not here for it.

  “You’re going to have to try that again,” I tell him rather sternly.

  McDimple looks up from his phone and catches me staring, then smiles, flashing his dimples, and they momentarily blind me before I return to earth.

  “Can I get a Rocky Road, please?” McDimple asks as he glides to Nate’s side, phone in hand, elbows on my counter, dimples winking. Does McDimple wake up in the morning and bask in his exquisiteness? I would if I had those thick black eyelashes, those green eyes that twinkle, and those lips—ah, those lips. “This dork will have the same.”

  “Yo, earth to Jazz?” Nate pushes my shoulder gently, laughing as he busts me zoning out at McDimple. He has the biggest mop of curly black hair of the century, and it bounces with every step, every movement of his arms; it’s so comical it makes it hard to stay mad at him for very long.

  “Sugar cone or wafer?” I ask. There are no customers behind Nate and McDimple, we are slow, slow, slow. Soon, like once we hit the Fourth of July, I’ll be busy all the time here in this sweatbox, serving people ice cream and their basic iced coffees, having to explain over and over again that we don’t make lattes.

  “You decide for me,” McDimple says, and what he really means is: Okay, Jasmine, you can kiss me now. McDimple is the unicorn of boys: new here, attractive. I want him to be my Valentine. Chill, with wavy dark hair. Fit, with skin that glistens like Edward Cullen’s. Wears T-shirts of indie bands from the ’90s, with names like Pavement and Lush and Hole that I’ve had to google, music I don’t listen to at all. Doesn’t walk around with AirPods in his ears. All things I’ve picked up from simply observing him for the last five days that I’ve been back in Fair Harbor.

  Quite possibly cuffed. I only have this impression because I did see him with an impossibly beautiful redheaded girl at Max Cooper’s free Friday night. Still. Even if he’s taken, I can allow myself the luxury of appreciating his beauty.

  “Sprinkles?” I don’t have empirical data on this, but I do know that people like sprinkles. Especially kids—they like everything that is a possibly messy situation.

  “Seriously, Jazz, any more questions?” Nate says impatiently, back in his Nate voice.

  “Um, excuse me, Nate, but if I don’t ask the questions now, you’ll ask me for sprinkles later.”

  “Ohhh, the sprinkle police are here, everybody—”

  “Hey, Nate, chill,” McDimple interrupts Nate and the noise stops.

  A gasp slips from my throat. It’s very possible this is the moment when I fall in love with McDimple. Normally I don’t condone the actions of a King T’Challa protecting me, a woman, but I’ll let him have this one. It’s a rush, actually, and I’m so overwhelmed that my whole face becomes a furnace.

  I hurl my upper body into the freezer, sugar cones in my left hand, while I scoop, or rather dig, at the frozen tundra of ice cream. I am supposed to warm up the scooper and scoop the ice cream in an S pattern, but I can’t focus; I have McDimple rolling under my skin, and I stab at the thick, milky ice, unable to concentrate on formations.


  Sue puts her hand on my back, startling me out from the cool air of the freezer’s innards. I stand up, ice cream cones filled now with Rocky Road. They’re not the smoothest scoops I’ve ever captured, and have triple the amount of ice cream Sue allows for a double scoop, but I’m not going to stress about it.

  “Just checking to see whether you’ve fallen in,” she says, her eyebrow clocking the scoop mountains in my hands, her blue bandana holding her frizzy hair away from her overtanned face. She could be twenty-five or fifty-five—I have no idea; she just reads old to me.

  As I head back to the counter, McDimple has a camera out, a pocket Hasselblad—a very important brand of camera for photographers of all levels—and he’s pointing it at me. The camera is a goal of mine. To own one, that is. I have so many questions for him: Is he a photographer? Is this a camera he owns? What is happening right now?

  Because: if he is a photographer, I absolutely should know him. Taking photos is what I want to do for a living when I escape high school. Lots of my friends take photos of themselves and lots of my friends post cool shots on their Instagrams, but for me, photography is a way to tell stories.

  Backup plan: master feminism and then teach it.

  “What . . .” I say instead. Words: not my forte, ever. However, I’d get an A+ in awkward any day of the week.

  “We’re going to surf by Birch. Adera and them are out there now,” Nate tells me as he pays for the cones and hands one to McDimple. Adera MacIntosh is another girl in our friend group, and the universal use of “them” means probably Kim Chang and Gus Stuto, other mainstays of our group, who don’t have day jobs like me. “You gonna come after work?”

  Birch is the beach we all hang out on. We refer to it as Birch because the pathway to that part of the beach is via Birch Walk, which is the walk Macy Whelan, my best friend, lives on. A long time ago, when our moms and babysitters and dads dictated where and how we spent our days, Birch was where they met so the kids could have playdates while the adults on duty drank in the sun. And even though the parents don’t hover around us anymore, Birch is still our spot.

  “Maybe. Macy is coming back today, so it’ll depend on what she wants to do.” For me, there is no summer without Macy; this is where we’ve spent our childhood riding our boogie boards in the surf and climbing up the stairs of the lighthouse and lying in the sun on the floating raft in the bay. Macy hasn’t been here in two weeks; she and her bouncy-castle nine-year-old brother, Dylan, were doing required time with their dad, Dr. Anthony Whelan, who, because he hates Macy’s mom, Olive, refuses to come to Fire Island, even though Macy and Dylan love being here.

  “Which ferry?” McDimple asks, still behind the camera. I am trying to avoid further descent into awkward by not posing, and instead, focus on how McDimple and I are connecting about ferries.

  “No clue—she’s been annoyingly vague about her arrival.” I turn to see where Sue is, nervous that she’ll yell at me for having the tiniest amount of fun. But she’s not in sight; maybe she’s in the bathroom or in outer space, anywhere that’s not here.

  “Come on, bro, stop taking pictures of her,” Nate says to McDimple, smacking him on the arm. “Don’t take it personally, Jazz, he shoots everyone. All you photographers are the same. Okay, we out.”

  McDimple lowers the camera from his face and raises his thick eyebrows at me, essentially asking me to marry him, but maybe not, and then he says, “Later.”

  I lean forward on the counter, almost stretching, watching them chatter as they move away from my daydream with a deliberate pace. Ahead of them is tranquility: the glassine Great South Bay of Long Island, dotted with docked boats and puttering ferries.

  “Hey, lady, if you lean on my counter like that, you’re going to crack it,” Sue says, now having reappeared from whatever upside-down world she’d been lurking in.

  I turn, wishing I could talk to her about what just happened. But. She’s not my friend, she’s my boss. And also:

  I just had an almost-conversation with the cutest boy in the whole world, our very first since I arrived. Oh, sure, he’s come to Crabby’s to order things, but this was the first time where we had actually exchanged words instead of just looking at each other.

  And that is enough to make my day.

  * * *

  • • •

  This is my summer life so far in Fair Harbor, at my day job as the best ice cream scooper in all of Fire Island (with the exception of my dual Rocky Road disaster cones just now) and my friends stopping by to give me updates about where they’ll be and when, which I appreciate, because it helps to know where to go after work. Mom and I have been coming to this specific town for fourteen of my sixteen summers, trading city life for beach life. Fire Island is only an hour and ten minutes away from Manhattan by the Long Island Rail Road, with a bonus half-hour ride on the ferry that glides across the Great South Bay, delivering you to the town of your choice; there are seventeen distinct communities along these thirty-three miles of barrier island. There’s the Pines and Cherry Grove, which are the safest of havens for the LGBTQ community, and there’s Ocean Beach, which is filled with the yearlong locals plus a whole bunch of restaurants and shops and a school, and there’s even a town called Point O’ Woods that you need a key to enter. And my town? My town is where housewives wade around in ginormous sun hats, and overtanned dad bods stand at the dock with fishing rods, and kids ride their bikes without helmets. You get on the ferry on the mainland and you leave Americuh behind you; all that’s here is everything that is summer.

  Crabby’s, where I work, is part of the grocery store, Woodson’s. It’s like Woodson’s is the main house, and Crabby’s is its tiny garage. To enter or exit Crabby’s, you have to walk through Woodson’s, and even the bathroom is in Woodson’s, which is where Sue disappeared to. And so I use these twelve seconds of Sue-free time to text with Adera—she wants me to take some shots of her with my camera for her Insta today.

  Meet me at my house at 5:30

  She responds with a thumbs-up. She’s hit me up almost every day since I’ve been back to take glam shots for her Insta, and I don’t mind, as long as she gives me credit; she’s got like twelve hundred Instagram followers, so that’s free promotion for me, budding photographer.

  “Jasmine Jacobsooooooon!” That voice, it comes from around that corner where McDimple and Nate turned right and disappeared. Which means:

  OH MY GOD, IT’S MACY! SHE’S HERE.

  “Macyyyyyy!” It’s the best surprise, and I’m not even mad that she didn’t text me that she was on the ferry.

  Summer can begin now.

  We both scream at the same time—not words, just sounds of joy. Sue is throwing me shade because she does not get the experience of joy, and we’re hugging each other over this dumb counter, me barely reaching Macy—I’m just so short—and she smells like vanilla ice cream. I don’t take hugs for granted anymore. I give them and accept them readily.

  “I love the way this color is looking, Jazz,” Macy says, touching the pink stripes cutting through my brown hair.

  “I’m going to need you to do touch-ups,” I tell her. The thing about coloring my dark brown hair is that I need to constantly replenish it. Every wash, every time I go out into the sun, it fades just a little bit, enough for it not to look the way I want it to, which is vibrant and pink.

  “You know I love playing colorist.” She laughs as she runs a hand through her long blond hair; she’s been helping me keep my pink highlights ever since I started doing them when I was twelve.

  “I’m so happy to see you, Moo,” I say, using our pet name for each other.

  “Me too!” She leans back over the counter and pulls my forehead to hers. “I’ve missed you.”

  We haven’t had many sleepovers this year—the last time we did was for my birthday in March when Macy came to New York City for two days and Mom gave me
her credit card and let us go to a fancy restaurant without her. We haven’t texted much; we FaceTime mostly, but even that has been sporadic.

  I am so happy to have my person back.

  “Allo, Jazzy!” Standing right behind Macy is Gayle, their nanny since forever—first she was Macy’s, and now she watches Dylan, who needs full-time supervision. Plus, Olive can’t do the parenting part during the week because she has a job in Philadelphia, where they live. And the dad only sees them once a month, for a weekend, which isn’t even partial parenting; that’s visiting with some kids that happen to be yours.

  “Hi, Gayle!” I say, releasing Macy, who is resplendent in her denim strapless romper and flip-flops, her arms sculpted, unlike the baby bat wings I flap about. Macy’s on the lacrosse team at her school, which I suppose is the benefit of going to school in the suburbs of Philadelphia—they have land and space to do actual sports, unlike my high school, where we just have an indoor gym.

  “You think I could order an ice cream cone, love? Mint chocolate chip?” Gayle says. She’s British, with the kind of eyes that give her the air of a woman with a permanent smile on her big moon-shaped face, and I can never tell if that’s just her face or if it’s in fact how she is: a happy person. “Dylan, would you like a cone?”

  Dylan is doing cartwheels in front of Crabby’s, and it’s possible he hasn’t heard Gayle. She asks him one more time if he wants a cone of something, anything, and he shrugs, so we take it as a no. He is so annoying, this kid. “Macy? Interested?”

  “I’m good, G,” Macy says, taking a selfie, with me in the far background bent over the ice cream freezer. If my arms don’t turn into world championship bodybuilder arms by the end of the summer, I will be surprised, because ice cream scooping is a grind.

  “Dude, why didn’t you text me you were on the ferry?!” I yell to Macy as I emerge from the ice vortex. I promptly get woozy, hold the freezer for balance, and then, when I’m settled, approach the counter, taking a swig of water, because hydration.