Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - Token of Darkness

His father still looked skeptical, but just said, “If you’re sick, stay in the employee area and away from the food. If you start feeling better, you can come out front and give me a hand at the register.”

Cooper was grateful that his father wasn’t the type to probe further—yet. He would expect answers later, but would give Cooper some time to calm down first.

Cooper’s mother had tried to convince him to see a shrink about a month ago when it became obvious that he wasn’t sleeping, and had no interest in getting back in touch with his friends. They had ended up shouting, all of them. Cooper had never raised his voice to his parents before, and he couldn’t remember the last time they had yelled.

They hadn’t discussed the subject again since, but he remembered his father’s view of the situation: Sometimes we need time to heal in our own way, without doctors telling us what we should be feeling.

“Are you okay?” Samantha finally asked as Cooper collapsed against a wall in the employees’ lounge and slid down to sit on the floor.

“Just fine.” Sarcasm wasn’t his natural tone, but sometimes Samantha brought it out of him. “What did I do back there? It was like—”

It was if a part of him over which he had no control had shoved Brent away—except that Brent’s body had never moved, only collapsed in on itself. Afterward, Cooper felt like he was looking at a corpse.

Cooper squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out the memory of the first time that had happened, in the hospital. He had woken up in the hospital only a few minutes before, and there had been so many doctors and nurses and people asking questions and poking and prodding him. He had just wanted them all to go away—

He bowed his head and drew a deep breath.

“Look, Brent was okay,” Samantha said awkwardly. “I stayed until he stood up and walked out. He’s all right. It’s no big deal.”

“No big deal,” Cooper repeated. “Samantha, I see ghosts—”

“Just one.”

“Fine, one ghost,” he said, continuing more firmly, “and now I have another freakish thing going on.”

“Technically, you’ve had that as long as I’ve known you,” Samantha joked. “You’ve just kind of avoided people so you haven’t—I’m not helping, am I?”

“Not so much,” he said, and yet her awkward attempt almost brought a smile to his face.

“If you’re so worried, talk to him,” Samantha said. “You could look for him at the library again, or ask the librarian if she knows his last name so you can look up his phone number. Or just ask around at Q-tech on Monday.”

Cooper shook his head. “I doubt he wants to talk to me. He probably doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

“You’re such a coward, Cooper Blake,” Samantha snapped. “You wouldn’t talk to that girl earlier when it was perfectly obvious she was trying to leave you an opportunity, no questions asked. And now you meet someone who might be able to help you, might even want to help you, and you’re running away as fast as you can. What about your friends? You don’t call anyone, and barely talk to people in the hall, even when I hear them call your name. I know you don’t talk to your parents, even when you all sit around the table together. I’m your only friend at the moment and I swear the only reason I talk to you is because no one else can hear me.”

Cooper blinked, startled by the tirade.

“I wouldn’t even know where to start with Delilah and the others,” he said.

“It’s not like they don’t know … what happened,” she said, sounding as unwilling as he was to remember the details out loud. “They’re probably just giving you space. I’m sure they’re worried—”

“They’re worried, sure,” Cooper interrupted. “They would be even more worried if they knew what was actually going on, and then instead of dealing with my issues, I would be dealing with their issues with my issues. I don’t want to have to take care of other people, not until I’m okay taking care of myself.”

“Coward,” Samantha said again with a flounce of her currently neon orange, yellow and pink hair.

“I’m not a coward!” Cooper protested, before realizing he was speaking loudly, and clamping his mouth shut.

He stood up. The shaking had mostly subsided.

“Come on, just talk to Brent,” Samantha said. “If not to help you, then for me. Unless you want to be stuck with me the rest of your natural life?”

“You’re charming, but I could live without you.”

“So go talk to him. He saw me for a moment, and he talked back to me. He’ll believe you. It doesn’t just have to be you and me trying to figure this out. Because, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not very good at the whole magic and mythology stuff.”

“I’m a football player,” he grumbled.

“No, you’re an ex-football player, the same way you’re probably an ex-friend to at least a few people.”

“The doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to play, anyway,” Cooper said—before opening the door to face his father up front.

“Yeah, they told you that you couldn’t play football. But not that you couldn’t have a life.” She shook her head and sighed. “You work, then. I’ll look for him. Do reconnaissance. I’ll try to get him to hear me.”

Cooper could only stare as she walked off. Maybe she was right. Samantha’s support was all that had gotten him through the first weeks of physical therapy, when everything hurt all the time. It had been early August before he had been able to walk across a room on his own. Samantha had been the one who kept him going and convinced him to keep trying, back when he was sure he would be a painful wreck the rest of his life.

He owed it to her to do whatever he could to help her, too.

First, though, he waited for his father to finish the order he was working on and gesture to Cooper to follow him a few paces from the register.

“Cooper …” He had a sinking feeling in his stomach as his father took a deep, thoughtful breath, and finally just asked, “What happened?”

Cooper hated lying to his parents, but contrary to what Brent thought, he had gotten pretty good at it. The trick was to keep it as close to the truth as possible, and to include something the other person wanted to hear.

“I was at the library, and ran into a friend,” he said, meaning Brent, a slight exaggeration but one that would make his father happy. “We got to talking about what happened this summer, and it brought a lot of stuff back. I couldn’t handle going back to school right away.”

He knew his father assumed Cooper meant the accident, though he was actually referring to Samantha. But all in all, his words were pretty much honest.

His father nodded. “Okay, then. Thanks for telling me.” He turned back to the coffee machine, as one of their regulars came in. By the time his father had prepared her order, he had come to a decision. “Cooper, get an apron on and watch the register for me. I’ll let the school know I forgot to call them before taking you out for a doctor’s appointment this afternoon.”

Cooper breathed a sigh of relief as he did as instructed.

Before leaving the front room, however, his father added, “I’m covering for you this once, by the way, because you’re seventeen, you’ve always been a responsible young man, and I believe you’re doing what you need to do. But if I start hearing from the school that you’re skipping classes or not getting your work done on a regular basis, we’re going to have a longer talk. Understand?”

Cooper nodded. “I understand.”

If today was any indication of how the school year was going to go, then he suspected the next “talk” was going to come sooner rather than later—and it was going to be the least of his problems.