Jeremy Stone

by Lesley Choyce

  The floodgates opened

  and I held her

  and then she sobbed

  and blew her nose on my sleeve

  and said she was

  sorry.

  I knew it was my job to stay strong right now.

  That was all I knew.

  I silently told the fuckin’ black dogs to fuck off

  and they did.

  And suddenly,

  Old Man was in the little closet with us.

  He looked a little older, a little more tired. Bent over.

  I heard him speak in my head in the usual way.

  Oh boy, he said, you sure got your hands full

  and he nodded at Caitlan.

  I shrugged. You look tired, I said silently to him.

  Yeah, he said. I’ve been staying up late.

  So much to think about on this side.

  She’s pretty, he said.

  But it looks like a bit of trouble.

  I must have looked puzzled because he added,

  It’s okay, though. It’s always okay.

  Caitlan was pulling herself together

  We’ve been in here a long time. Fred

  will probably show up. But that’s okay.

  It’s only Fred and he’s cool. But we

  should get

  to our next class. I’m sorry.

  Nothing to be sorry about, I said.

  Probably best if we don’t

  leave here together

  in case somebody sees.

  Right. Old Man nodded.

  And then she was gone

  and I was alone again

  with my grandfather. You like her? he asked.

  What’s not to like? I answered.

  She’s got Indian hair,

  Indian eyes.

  I noticed. That’s good.

  It’s all good, he said.

  When you get to where

  I am, you get to see things

  on a lot of levels.

  And your eyes work in different ways.

  I get to see the sunset

  from the other side of the sun

  and the sunrise too.

  And people—

  you can see people inside out,

  if you know what I mean.

  What can I do to help her?

  You’ll need to be careful.

  She could drag you down.

  But she said she was trying to help me.

  She’s kind. But a bit intense.

  You noticed.

  I don’t miss much.

  She needs you. So there’s that.

  Can’t ignore that.

  Just don’t fall in love.

  Oops.

  Right.

  Sounds like she’s still in love with Jenson Hayes.

  There’s that.

  That can’t be good.

  She didn’t have closure.

  Everyone needs that.

  What can I do about that?

  Old Man straightened his back. That’s what he

  does when he’s about to leave me.

  I’ll ask around. Everyone shows up

  on my side

  of the sunset eventually.

  I’ll just Google him

  and see.

  And then of course he was gone. And leave it to Old Man to try to blow my mind by suggesting you could find someone on the other side just by Googling a name. But then that’s Old Man for ya.

  Just then

  the door opened

  and I guess it was Fred

  ’cause he had a bucket and a mop. I was just sitting there

  in a chair with my hands on my knees.

  Fred looked surprised

  but not too surprised. I guess he’d come to his janitor’s closet before

  and seen lots of unusual things.

  It’s okay, kid, he said. Finish up with whatever you’re doing and I’ll come back in a few minutes.

  And he left.

  So I don’t know if he thought I was doing drugs or whatever.

  But it didn’t matter

  much, I guess.

  Not to

  Fred.

  The End of the Day

  No one said, Why did you miss class?

  I went to English then history

  and then it was time to go home.

  I looked around outside for Caitlan

  but she was gone. I wondered what she did after school.

  I had

  nowhere

  to go but home.

  So I went home.

  When I went in the door there was my mom

  lying on the living room floor face up eyes closed

  arms at her side.

  Mom! I screamed.

  She didn’t move but she spoke:

  What?

  She didn’t open her eyes.

  Are you okay? Yes.

  She sounded annoyed.

  What are you doing? I’m meditating.

  Just shut up so I can

  meditate.

  She was mad.

  So I didn’t say another word.

  Went into the kitchen

  for peanut butter

  and celery.

  Peanut butter is smooth on the tongue and celery,

  well, you gotta love celery: the way it crunches.

  So after a few minutes

  my mom

  comes into the kitchen and lights a cigarette.

  First one of the day, she says.

  I promised myself I wouldn’t

  smoke

  until I meditated

  for twenty minutes.

  My mom could take the longest drag

  on a cigarette,

  like half the cigarette

  and then hold

  the smoke

  in her lungs.

  I chose not to say a word

  about secondhand smoke

  or any

  of that shit

  that would make her mad.

  Instead, I said I was sorry

  for messing up her meditation on the living room floor.

  It’s hard, you know.

  Everything is hard

  for a single mother

  who’s given up all

  her addictions

  except smokes

  and alcohol.

  I know, Mom, I said.

  It can’t be easy.

  My Mother Knows

  She knows that I love her

  and would do just about anything for her

  except buy her drugs. She used to do that sometimes.

  Give me money to buy her drugs from this guy named

  Chevy. I liked Chevy.

  Everybody did

  even though he’d sell weed or coke or maybe even crack

  to a kid like me

  to take home to my mother. Chevy bought groceries

  for families

  that didn’t have any money, usually because the father

  or mother

  had spent it all on drugs.

  When we moved away—off reserve

  Chevy gave my mom a whole

  carton of smokes

  as a going-away present.

  This was after my father was gone.

  I think my mom liked Chevy

  but didn’t want her kid

  having a drug dealer

  for a secondhand father.

  I have to draw the line somewhere, she said.

  And when we moved, she got real moody

  ’cause she gav
e up everything

  but eventually went back to

  nicotine and alcohol

  in what she called “limited quantities.”

  She worried about me

  and took me to counselors

  and healers

  and psychics. I told them all about

  Old Man and they all told me

  that was great. The psychics said

  they could see him. But I don’t know.

  The psychics said I was an Old Soul and that part of me was damaged because of some kind of shit that happened in a previous life. The not-talking routine that I did sometimes was a good thing because the silence, they said, helped cleanse me of negative energy from my past lives. I asked one of them, Jack—Jack the side-burned psychic—if he could see Old Man and he said he could, that Old Man was standing over my left shoulder. And I turned and sure enough, Old Man was smiling. But that was nothing new.

  So Jack said Old Man would always be there for me. He also said my father was somewhere Out West and kind of messed up but would come back one day. He said he saw the two of us as adults drinking beer in a gloomy bar. And there were no other people in the bar. Just black dogs.

  And I said,

  Yeah,

  that’s probably

  me

  and him.

  But the psychic said it was okay, that when I was an adult and we had that beer together, we’d both be pretty messed up but not totally fucked. And that, he assured me, was the way life worked for most people, even Old Souls like me.

  You just got to work with

  what the spirit world hands you,

  and grow from there, he said.

  Isn’t that true, Old Man? he asked.

  And Old Man nodded, straightened his back and disappeared.

  Then the psychic told my mother

  That will be a hundred bucks.

  Cooking

  My mother stopped cooking when

  my dad left.

  She said I had to cook from then on.

  I said I was okay with that.

  So I shopped for food.

  And cooked.

  When my mom finished her cigarette

  she took out another

  and just looked at it for a long while

  and then spoke to it:

  You bastard, she said. Let go.

  And then she put it back in the pack

  and I asked her if she wanted me

  to make

  spaghetti. I love you, kid, she said. Someday.

  Someday.

  But she didn’t finish the someday sentence.

  She never

  does.

  So I boiled water

  and it got real steamy in the kitchen

  and I kept thinking

  I should expand our list

  of stuff we would eat for meals.

  Maybe start reading some of

  those women’s magazines

  I saw in the supermarket line

  with recipes

  for artichoke salads

  and sautéed eggplant

  and thirty ways to lose weight

  and fifty ways

  to have great sex.

  As I dropped in the spaghetti—

  the really thin stuff

  called capelli d’Angelo angel hair

  hair of the angels—

  I told my mom about Caitlan.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have done that

  ’cause she pulled that second smoke

  out from her pack

  and lit it,

  took the signature long drag,

  tilted her head back

  and said

  Holy fuck.

  Maybe

  sending you to school

  was a total

  absolute

  mistake.

  The First Time He Walked Up to Me

  I didn’t know who he was at first.

  Just another guy at school.

  I didn’t know what he wanted.

  You’re Jeremy, right? I’d been walking down the hall

  my eyes looking at the dusty floor

  thinking about Geronimo

  preventing the sun from coming up.

  I looked up, nodded.

  Saw this skinny white kid

  pale, like a lot of white people when

  they don’t get out in the sun

  with messy, kinda long hair hanging

  down over his eyes.

  Yeah, Jeremy, I said.

  We need to talk. You okay with that?

  I thought maybe he was selling weed

  and assumed I was a stoner.

  What do we need to talk about?

  (The word “need” was freaking me a bit.)

  Don’t be scared. Shit. I guess I looked scared.

  I look that way a lot

  (even when I’m not scared). So?

  He looked puzzled now. Said, You can’t tell that I’m different?

  I wanted to say all white people kinda looked the same to me

  but I received a knuckle sandwich for that one once.

  Lesson learned.

  Dunno, I said.

  You don’t know who I am?

  Like what kind of bullshit, now?

  How was I supposed to know who he was?

  No, man. You somebody important,

  someone famous?

  No, dude. (Nobody had called me dude in a long while.)

  Who are you, dude?

  Jenson Hayes, he said.

  I guess I stopped breathing and stared.

  You okay, dude? he asked. I let out my breath and

  took a new gulp of air.

  I’m okay, I said. You?

  He smiled a crooked smile, snorted a little.

  Well, he said, you know, dude.

  Yeah, We Needed to Talk

  Can we go outside? he said.

  I know you have a free period now.

  So I followed him outside into some drizzling rain.

  Dogs were barking somewhere.

  There was a lot of litter on the sidewalk.

  Why me? I asked.

  Old Man said you’d help.

  I laughed. Of course. What did he do, Google you?

  Something like that, Jenson Hayes said.

  He’s very cool.

  My grandfather invented cool.

  Does Caitlan know

  that you are around?

  Not yet. But I saw you two

  talking in Fred’s closet.

  You saw us? You were there?

  Not exactly but … you know.

  I guess. Okay, so here you are.

  Here I am and Old Man said

  you’d be the one person

  in the universe who would accept me

  for who I am now

  and not ask too many

  bullshit questions.

  I guess I could be that person.

  But you really are …

  well ... you know?

  Yeah, he said, brushing the long hair

  out of his eyes.

  And in some ways it’s all okay now,

  but in other ways

  it really sucks.

  At least you don’t have

  to go to school, right, dude?

  That’s one of the perks.

  But I miss a lot of things.

  I miss being a vegan,

  I miss trying to change the world,

  and I even miss arguing with

  greedy assholes.

  I miss being who I was.

  B
ut at least you don’t have to go to school

  and you probably don’t even have to

  deal with assholes.

  He nodded. True, but one more thing.

  I miss Caitlan.

  What Love Is

  Love, Jenson said, stays with you even if you move on. Love takes up a whole lot more of who you are than most people realize. You think you are all about arms and legs and your big fat brain with ideas and all those opinions—let me tell you, I was the king of opinions. And you think some things are important: like what to eat and what you look like and what people think of you and how you are going to make it through life and what kind of grade you are going to get on the final exam.

  But none of that is important.

  Guess you’re right on that, I added.

  So when me and Caitlan had this thing going,

  I was stronger than I’d ever been before.

  I mean strong and in a good way.

  Nobody could get to me

  like they had all my life.

  Not my asshole father.

  Not the mean teachers.

  Not the creeps at school.

  But then we had this

  little argument,

  Caitlan and me.

  And we stopped

  talking.

  And I got stubborn.

  Felt isolated.

  All alone

  and

  weak.

  He smelled it.

  He knew I was weak.

  He pretended to

  be my friend.

  Told me things about Caitlan that were not true.

  Who did?

  Thomas Heaney.

  Paper Clip, I said.

  I call him Paper Clip.

  He had some of his buddies

  say all kinds of weird crap about me.

  And Thomas

  told Caitlan some stuff about me

  that wasn’t true.

  I stopped going to school.

  I should have been angry

  and fought it.

  Sometimes it’s not that easy, I said.

  Instead, I got weaker.

  And then I got a text message

  that came from

  Caitlan.

  At least it came from her phone

  and it said

  we were over

  and she was going out with Thomas Heaney.

  Fuckin’ Paper Clip.

  Just Standing Around in the Drizzle Talking to a Dead Dude

  That pretty much sums up the situation

  but I knew Jenson wasn’t just here to shoot the shit.

  So, Jenson, what now?

  I need you to help set things straight with Caitlan.

  She can’t hear you

  or see you