The Fall of January Cooper

by Audrey Bell

  I nodded. “You think I’m going to tell you about my ex-boyfriends?”

  “Just tell me their names.”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m tired and could use a laugh.”

  “I don’t need anyone else to make fun of me,” I said.

  “Tell me. Come on.” He grabbed another piece of pizza. “I won’t make fun of you.”

  "Wesley, Brooks, Clayton, and Rhett.” I lifted one shoulder. “That’s it.”

  He laughed, anyways. And it was definitely at me, even though he’d promised not to make fun. “Well, it sounds like a good law firm,” he said.

  "Oh, and you married your prom date?"

  He shook his head. “No, but I don’t have as many ex-girlfriends as you do boyfriends.”

  "Bullshit."

  "Scout's honor."

  "Bullshit,” I repeated. I looked at him.

  "No," he tossed his soda in the trash.

  "Oh, come on. I told you.”

  "You want a ride home, sweetheart?"

  "How many?"

  He smiled. "You want a ride or no?"

  "You don't get to be a prude about this," I said, following him outside. He tossed the pizza box in the dumpster.

  "Yes, I do. I paid for your pizza." He laughed as he unlocked his Jeep.

  "You charged it to the bar.”

  “Well, I ordered it. And I’m driving you. And I got you a job.”

  “I'm going to find out," I said, climbing into the passenger's seat. "I'm amazing at Google."

  "Oh, come on. Don't do that," he said.

  "I will."

  "I don't even remember the question," he said.

  "How many ex-girlfriends?"

  He met my eyes. "How many do you think?"

  "At least four," I said. "But eleven if you include the slutty ones that barely count."

  He smiled. "You're off."

  "More?"

  "One," he said.

  "One?!"

  He nodded. “High school.”

  "How is that—”

  "No more questions," he said, with a smile.

  "How is that even possible?"

  "I had just had my tonsils out," he said, pulling up in front of the dorm. "I couldn't say a word and she couldn't keep her hands off of me. I'm irresistible when I'm silent. As you know.”

  I rolled my eyes. “What happened to her?”

  “I’ll never tell,” he said.

  I opened the car door. "What did you do with the body?"

  He just grinned.

  “I’m going to find out.”

  He shook his head at me. "Text me when you get to your room, okay?”

  “My cell phone plan was cancelled and I have a go-phone.” I shrugged. I actually didn’t feel completely humiliated telling him that. “I haven’t exactly figured out how to text.”

  He nodded. “I’ll wait then.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “If you get kidnapped by a paparazzo, Kevin will be pissed.”

  I shrugged, closing the car door behind me. When I reached the entrance to my dorm, I turned and looked over my shoulder, and saw his car still parked on the curb. I gave him a small wave and he honked twice before he drove away.

  Christian

  I shouldn’t have liked her. I hated girls who acted like they were entitled to everything, and January seemed like one of them.

  Except January could make me laugh. She seemed real.

  I told Darrin what I hated about the clueless sorority girls he’d tried to set me up with was the fact that they were so fake.

  January might have been a brat, but she wasn’t fake. If anything, she might have been a little bit too honest. That may have been the problem. I mean, she was a walking disaster, four girls’ worth of trouble packed into one lithe, perfect body.

  But I didn’t hate her. I found her infuriating, but I didn’t hate her. Which was annoying. Because Darrin had noticed almost right away.

  “You have a huge crush on that daughter of that Ponzi-scheming psycho,” Darrin said archly as I drove to campus.

  “I’ve been thinking about charging you gas money,” I said.

  “I’m on your way to campus.”

  “But you really fuck with the atmosphere,” I said. “Plus, you waste heat.”

  He grinned. “Have you asked her out yet?”

  “Who?”“Who? Bullshit who. January Cooper.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said sarcastically.

  “Did you forget how to do it? Because I can help. You start by not yelling at her when she’s taking an order. And then you like, maybe drive her home. And when you’re driving her home—don’t talk to her about depressing-ass shit like how you paint your mother’s shutters and think fun should be illegal. Talk to her about how you’re a big Red Sox fan and maybe does she want to watch the game sometime, and then—”

  “Maybe five dollars a day.”

  “A day? It’s five miles. It doesn’t even cost you five dollars a day.”

  “Yeah, five dollars a day or you can shut up about January Cooper.”

  Darrin chuckled.

  “And if I needed advice about how to ask out a girl, I would not ask you.”

  “Why not?” he asked mildly.

  “You are single as fuck.”

  He scoffed. “If you came out with me, you could see me in action. I was just trying to get together a party you’d go to.”

  I rolled into the student parking lot and got out of the car.

  “I’m going to ask January to come to a party. And then I’m going to ask you.”

  “Can I have five dollars?”

  “You’re like my cousin, Blake. Whenever you tell him what he’s supposed to do, he starts asking for money.”

  “I have class.”

  “Blake is five, by the way,” Darrin said,

  “That’s how many dollars you owe me.”

  I was glad we didn’t have class in the same building, because I really didn’t want to hear anything else about January Cooper.

  January Cooper.

  And me.

  He had to be out of his mind.

  I walked over to my economics lecture, building a case for why I didn’t like January Cooper.

  I was thinking about it so hard, I didn’t realize I was late until I opened the door and saw the clock on the lecture hall’s wall.

  After class, I stopped by the cheap burrito joint on campus and met up with Darrin for Spanish I.

  I’d somehow thought that if I waited it out long enough, BU would drop its ridiculous one-semester requirement in any language.

  What was anybody going to learn in one semester of language?

  Nothing. That’s what. But it was still required. And so four days a week, I sat through an hour and a half of basic Spanish that I knew I wouldn’t retain for more than a week after graduation.

  Darrin had spent his sociology lecture plotting a campaign to get me drunk or get me a girlfriend or whatever the fuck it was.

  “So, I’m going to invite you to a costume party.”

  “Okay,” I said sarcastically.

  “And then I’m going to invite January.”

  I nodded. “Great plan.”

  “I thought so. What are you going to dress up as?”

  “An invisibility cloak.”

  “That’s…I’m serious. You need to come. I’m going to tell your dad that I think you’re depressed if you don’t come.”

  “You’re not going to do shit if I don’t come,” I scoffed.

  “You need to get laid.”

  “I need to get an A in Spanish so it doesn’t fuck up my GPA,” I said.

  “And one party is going to screw that up for you?” he asked. “There’s like four things you need to know. Hola, Senora, Si, and Adios. You can wear a sombrero and converse in Spanish only. January can be your sexy senorita.”

  “Sounds like you’re the one preoccupied
with January,” I said, shrugging.

  He grinned. “Maybe I am.”

  “See,” I said triumphantly.

  ”She’s hot.”

  “Exactly. This is not my thing. This is your thing.”

  He nodded. “Great, so you’re cool if I fuck her?”

  What the fuck?

  He laughed at the expression on my face.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. So, tell her to be a Spanish dancer. And you can be a Matador. That way you won’t have to worry irrationally about how going to a party might make you fail Spanish.”

  I rolled my eyes, and let Senora Weiss take over. I wrote down notes about the weather. How to tell someone it’s snowing if you ever get caught in Spain. That kind of thing. And in between I pretended to believe that I didn’t really like January and I didn’t really care if Darrin wanted to fuck her. I’d halfway convinced myself by the time we’d gotten to ‘hail’ and ‘partly cloudy.’

  It doesn’t bother you, I said. January bothers you, so any mention of her is annoying.

  Christian

  Ness called drunk and crying as I was about to leave the house for work.

  “You’re making no sense. Slow down.”

  “Forget it,” she mumbled.

  “Where are you?”

  She hung up and I couldn’t get her back on the phone. Swearing, I texted Darrin to tell him I’d be late. When Ness didn’t pick up her phone, not on the fifth or sixth or seventh try, I knew I had to go to her.

  I had to be sure she didn’t do something stupid. I had to be sure that the stupid things she had already done didn’t finally catch up with her.

  I drove over to her apartment. I parked on the tree-lined street. Standing before the peeling white door, I pressed the buzzer over and over.

  Nothing. The tip of my finger ached. I grabbed the doorknob and rattled it hard, wondering if I’d get arrested for breaking down the doorway.

  The cracked door frame shed peeling paint as I pressed harder, longer on the buzzer. I called Vanessa. I pressed my phone to my ear and listened to it ringing endlessly, trying to imagine where she was.

  I saw her passed out drunk.

  I saw her alone with people she shouldn’t ever trust.

  I saw the worst things that could happen to her.

  I started hitting the other numbers at random, hoping some stranger might just assume the best and buzz me up.

  I stepped back from the doorway and shouted her name, praying she’d hear me through the cracked third-floor window of her apartment.

  Someone in 2R, fed up with the noise I was making, finally buzzed me up and I pushed through the door and sprinted up the stairs to Ness’s apartment and pushed open the door.

  For once, it was a relief that she hadn’t bothered to lock up.

  I found her in the bathroom and she was a mess. “Jesus fuck, Vanessa,” I said, as I reached her crumpled body, collapsed close to the toilet. I pulled her knotted hair back, checked her shallow breathing, and touched her, blue-tinged skin.

  “Vanessa, can you hear me?” I asked softly, lifting her up.

  “Sammy,” she murmured.

  “No, it’s Christian,” I said.

  “Sammy,” she murmured again.

  Sammy.

  Well, Sammy would have absolutely killed me if he saw Vanessa like this. He would kill me for ignoring so many calls. He would kill me for knowing how much she drank and not doing anything. He would kill me—kill us both, maybe—if he knew how she begged me to fuck her when she was drunk, begged me so that she could pretend she was with Sam one last time.

  I couldn’t fix her. I couldn’t fix myself. I couldn’t fix anything. I shook my head. It was too sad that she’d ended up like this.

  “What the fuck did you take?” I asked her.

  She didn’t say anything and her head lolled back in my arm, like her neck was no more than a limp piece of string.

  I shook her. “Vanessa, tell me what you took.”

  Nothing. Her breath was shallow and faint. My heart pounded. If she died…no, I wouldn’t let myself think like that.

  I carried her in my arms to my car, wincing as my bad leg bore her weight down the rickety stairwell. I loaded her in the front seat, deciding it would be faster to drive her to the hospital than wait for an ambulance.

  I drove towards the hospital, keeping an eye on Vanessa’s chest as it rose and fell, trying not to panic at each pause between her breaths, and racing through the yellow lights to Mass General.

  “Ness,” I said, when we got there. “Ness. What are you doing to yourself?” I shook her shoulder. “Come on, breathe. Breathe.”

  She was turning blue, and I threw open the door of my car. I wished I believed in something to pray to as I carried her to the emergency room.

  Don’t die. For fuck’s sake, Vanessa, you can’t die. Sam would never forgive me for this.

  Several people in the waiting room of the hospital’s emergency wing stood up and stared at her, as a nurse wheeled out a stretcher.

  “She’s not breathing,” I said frantically. “I think she had a lot to drink.”

  “What did she take?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, running a hand through my hair, shaking my head, following them down the hallway, wondering how the hell she’d spiraled down so fast.

  I had known she was in trouble, but not like this.

  They shouted more questions at me—mostly about what she had taken. Over and over they asked me that, and I realized they just didn’t believe me when I said I had no clue.

  “If she fucking dies because you didn’t tell us she was doing heroin, or something, man, that’s on you.”

  I held up my hands. “I wasn’t with her. She’s my brother’s ex. I don’t…”

  They pushed me out of the room while they started to cut off her clothes.

  I stared at the door for a second.

  “You allowed back here?” a serious-looking African-American man in scrubs demanded.

  “My…I…”

  “The waiting room is that way,” he said firmly, directing me towards the end of the hallway. “They’ll get you when they have news. You can’t be back here.”

  I nodded, licking my lips, and trying to catch my breath.

  “Yeah, yeah. Sorry, man,” I told him.

  I waited in the plastic chairs, watching the clock, and the kid a few chairs down, with asthma.

  I started remembering Sam.

  He’d met Vanessa when she was waitressing part-time. A pretty girl with a smile that made her look like a kid, and a way of needing Sam that my parents thought was unhealthy.

  At the funeral, she wailed like a witch. Out of proportion, I had thought in the first pew of St. Thomas’s, she was acting entirely out of proportion. She cried harder than my mother.

  Later, at the wake, she had hung onto my neck until I growled at her to let go. I’d been on crutches and painkillers and in shock. I had no comfort to give her.

  She had stepped back, her face damp, her eyes swollen half shut. She’d never looked so terrible, but still you could see the traces of her beauty. “God, why did it have to be Sam?” she asked. And I knew what she meant. I knew what she was really saying. It should’ve been you.

  I hated her for a second. I could imagine her, at the wake, forgetting Sam—if not completely, then enough to move on. I’ll be carrying Sam around for the rest of my life, and he’ll just be the college boyfriend who died.

  But, here we were. I carried her around as much as I carried him. And the accident that killed Sam, two years before, had just about taken Vanessa, too.

  On the local news, they were rolling footage of flooded roads. A sobbing woman—looked like a mother—a death toll of two in some storm in the Midwest. Two people. I used to see that number and think well, it could be worse.

  But look at how much fucking damage just one person dying does.

  The doctors didn’t come for me for hours. At first, I thought that meant t
hat at least nothing terrible that happened, but then I grew paranoid, watching the bad news on the local channel—there’s never anything but bad news on the local channel.

  Past midnight, a weary-looking doctor, still in scrubs, trudged towards me. “You’re with Vanessa?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you related to her?”

  “No,” I said, and my heart twisted in my throat, like a fish without water, flopping stupidly against the wall of my chest. Would they tell me if she had died or would I have to call her father—the man whose very name made Sam clench his fists?

  My father asked what he had done, once, and Sam had spat back, ‘nothing, he did nothing. Ever. She never had a father.’

  And her mother had her own problems—some kind of unshakeable depression—Vanessa could hardly tell Sam about it, and Sam never shared it with us.

  “Yeah.”

  “You it?”

  “No,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Is she okay?”

  “We need to speak with her family.”

  “For fuck’s sake, tell me she’s not dead.”

  “She’s not dead,” the doctor said. There were flecks of blood on his shoulder and I wondered where they’d come from. Not Vanessa, I didn’t think. Alcohol poisoning couldn’t make you bleed, could it? I didn’t want to know.

  “We need to talk to her parents though. About…” He met my eyes meaningful. “Treatment.”

  “Right. Yeah, that’d be good.”

  “You’re her boyfriend?”

  “No, no, she…no,” I said.

  He looked at me suspiciously and nodded. “If you say so. Well, if you could give me the contact information for a family member.”

  She had a half-sister in California, Jane, who had worn a zebra dress to the funeral and wrapped her arms around Vanessa while she cried. She’d given me her phone number. “If you need anything.”

  Like I’d call her if I needed something. But maybe she saw Vanessa coming apart before anyone else.

  I gave the doctor the phone number, and I gave him my father’s number too, just in case, and he told me to get some sleep. He assured me that Vanessa would be fine.

  Instead of going home and going to sleep, I drove to the rink and thought about Sam.

  Our freshman year, we’d come to McSorley’s—with a bunch of teammates—looking to fuck around with some Harvard kids. They called us the Tweedles then—Dee and Dum—because nobody ever gave first-year hockey players good nicknames.