Jeremy Stone

by Lesley Choyce

  Just looked stunned.

  I smiled and gave him two thumbs up.

  Jimmy just said, Watch what happens next.

  What Happened Next

  Was we

  got caught.

  Two hours later,

  Mr. McLeod had us called to the vice principal’s office.

  Our teacher sat there with his arms folded.

  Ms. Goldworthy, the VP,

  looked like she had eaten some bad yogurt.

  McLeod kind of went into a rant. He was enraged at both of us.

  Paper Clip looked meanly at me.

  He thought I did this on purpose to nail

  his ass to the wall.

  Ms. G wanted to “get to the bottom of this.”

  McLeod did too.

  Jimmy was nowhere around.

  The big question is, Ms. G said,

  who copied from whom?

  (You don’t usually hear anyone actually use the word “whom” much anymore, I was thinking.)

  Paper Clip sat sullen.

  He was used to getting blamed for

  things.

  You could tell he had a strategy for

  times like this:

  don’t own up to anything

  and blame someone else

  and say you are the victim.

  Me, I confessed,

  said it was me who cheated.

  (Well, I did. I didn’t know the answers. Jimmy had given them to me.)

  Is that true? McLeod asked.

  Yes. Absolutely.

  I’m sorry.

  Thomas looked baffled.

  Ms. G nodded a kind of approval. Have you

  cheated before? she asked.

  No. never. (The truth.)

  Why now? she wanted to know.

  Well, I began, it was this whole European history thing. I kept wondering why we weren’t studying

  something more important.

  (And I wasn’t sure where I was going.)

  Mr. McLeod suddenly looked up.

  Oh, he said sympathetically, you mean like …

  I sat silently.

  Um, he continued, like the history of

  your people.

  I nodded.

  Then there was just this big load of silence

  sitting on us all.

  Thomas now nodded as well. He too acted like

  we’d been cheated out of learning about the

  true history of Aboriginal North Americans.

  He’d become a Native rights advocate

  in twelve seconds.

  Well, Ms. Goldworthy finally said,

  I think that if Jeremy promises

  not to

  ever cheat again

  we should

  put this behind us

  and

  we should all

  move on.

  Which we did.

  I still got the F.

  But I had turned the corner

  with Paper Clip.

  Pretty soon,

  it would be time

  to introduce him

  to Jenson.

  Caitlan in the Hall

  She had heard I’d been called to the office,

  grabbed me as I walked out.

  Thomas turned and looked at her,

  at me.

  He looked baffled, befuddled, bewildered.

  Jeremy, what’s going on? Why were you in there with

  Thomas?

  What did he do now? Are you okay? Are you in trouble?

  Did you try to kick his ass? I need to know.

  I had lost my speech again, just then. She was tugging at my arm. All I knew was that Caitlan cared.

  She was worried about me.

  This girl cared. When I could muster enough oxygen in my lungs

  I tried to explain.

  That doesn’t make sense, she said. You let him copy?

  You took the blame? You covered for him?

  Yes, yes, and yes. It was Jimmy’s idea.

  Jimmy. Who’s Jimmy?

  Well … sure, I opened up and told her about Jimmy.

  It’s all part of the plan, I said.

  Truth is, I wasn’t the type of person who made plans. Things happened or didn’t happen. I just usually went along for the ride.

  Jimmy begins with a J, Caitlan said to me.

  So?

  Jimmy, Jeremy, Jenson. Three names

  beginning with J.

  So?

  It just seems curious, she said. Very curious.

  Can you introduce me to Jimmy?

  No, no, and no,

  Jimmy insisted.

  I guess not, I told Caitlan.

  Why not?

  I don’t know. Jimmy says no.

  He’s only eleven

  and shy around girls.

  I noticed that Caitlan was wearing a long-sleeved blouse buttoned at the wrists.

  How are you doing? I asked.

  I’m hanging in there. But it’s very dark inside.

  Inside me, I mean.

  What about Jenson?

  Soon, I said.

  I promise.

  Soon. (Then we stopped walking.)

  Did you hear about the earthquake in South

  America? she asked suddenly.

  No.

  I saw the pictures on TV. It was awful.

  Probably not a good idea to watch that stuff. There’s a lot of trouble in the world. Hard enough to …

  (She cut me off.) I can’t help but watch.

  I take in other people’s pain.

  It’s what I do.

  I had a couple of my own psychology textbooks of advice for her about that. Not the professional type of books, just the Jeremy Stone authored versions with advice like: don’t go there, don’t take on others’ suffering unless you can do something about it, don’t watch the news ever, don’t increase your own darkness with the world’s catastrophes, etc., etc.

  I gotta go to physics, she said.

  We’re doing Einstein today. I love Einstein.

  (At least that was positive.)

  I wondered why she was taking physics. It didn’t seem like a Caitlan thing to do.

  I love Einstein, too, I said. I really like his hair

  and his ideas.

  She was walking away and I tried to keep up. For this brief instant, her darkness was gone.

  Like someone

  had switched on

  a light in a very

  dark room.

  But

  there

  was

  something

  not quite

  right about

  mixing earthquakes

  and Einstein.

  Waiting for Paper Clip

  I thought it would be better

  if he came to me

  rather than me trying to approach him.

  It didn’t take long.

  He found me by the creek. I had just hauled out

  an old truck tire

  and was splattered with black, stinky muck.

  He was alone. (No Tyler, no Robert)

  You are one crazy, totally insane

  piece of work, PC said.

  I was rubbing black oily mud from my hands onto my pants. (Something about the feel of wet sticky mud on my hands though felt good, not bad. Something from a previous life maybe. )

  I did what I had to do, I said.

  Who made you do it?

  So, for the second time

  I explained about Jimmy.

  He talks to you?

  (Thomas seemed g
enuinely curious.

  There was no hostility in him now—

  a completely changed Clip.)

  He was an old chum. From when I was little. And then he got sick and died.

  And now he comes back to haunt you?

  Not haunt.

  What then?

  Advise.

  Oh. (Thomas didn’t know

  what to say next, I guess.)

  I took the leap.

  So does Jenson.

  Who?

  Jenson Hayes, you know?

  A puzzled look again. Not a clue.

  I was thinking of Jimmy’s plan.

  This was the next step right?

  What should I do?

  I put my muddied hand to my cheek and rubbed the

  mud in.

  But maybe it was too soon.

  But it had to be soon. Caitlan would lose interest in

  Einstein

  and go back to watching earthquake victims and

  thinking about Jenson.

  I know what happened, I said.

  I know why Jenson killed himself.

  Who the fuck is Jenson?

  (Some loss of cool on PC’s part.)

  Jenson Hayes, I repeated.

  A kid in your class,

  hung out with Caitlan.

  I stay far away from that crazy bitch.

  (He was rattled again.)

  And I never knew anyone named Jenson.

  Okay, I told myself. I pushed things this far. He doesn’t want to own up. I could understand he was covering up what happened. Didn’t want to get involved.

  Thomas Heaney took a deep breath.

  Jeremy, he said, go home and get cleaned up.

  You look like you’ve seen a ghost.

  Mud and Mom

  My mom took one look at me. You got into a fight, didn’t you?

  No, I was at the creek.

  Look at your face, your pants. Jeremy, sometimes I think you’ll never grow up.

  My mom found a towel, wet it, and started to clean

  my face.

  I didn’t smell any cigarettes or booze on her breath.

  When you were born, she told me, you arrived way too early.

  I knew this story but did not want to stop her.

  The doctors didn’t think you’d live

  and they kept telling me to prepare myself

  in case you didn’t.

  But I wanted you to live so badly.

  You were so tiny and in an incubator

  and your father and I would stand there leaning over

  and listen to your breathing—a faint gurgling sound—

  and sometimes you would stop—I don’t know what it was—

  it was like you’d stop, you were giving up,

  and I’d say, Please God, let him take

  another breath.

  And you did.

  And then you were home with us,

  not healthy, but home

  and I promised God

  I would

  clean up

  my act.

  But I

  didn’t exactly

  do that.

  And

  God

  was

  kind

  anyway.

  Now, go take a bath.

  God in the Bathtub

  I hadn’t thought much about God for a while. But in the bathtub, with the hot water running in, I thanked God for allowing me to live as a baby. And I wondered where I would be now if I had not lived through those early premature days of being alive. Maybe I’d be a tree in a forest or a rock in a clean running stream. Or another person in another time and place. An Old Soul on his next adventure.

  Maybe I had been close to death or actually died and come back all those times I stopped breathing. I held my breath now and slipped down into the warm bath water. I held my eyes tightly shut and waited for all the oxygen to burn up in my lungs and waited for answers to come.

  But they didn’t.

  Only pictures:

  the sun,

  the light filtering green through spring leaves,

  and then black space with a bunch of patterns of many colors.

  I couldn’t recognize the patterns exactly

  but I think I saw symbols

  like the ones my people

  used to carve into rocks.

  And then I saw

  the sun again.

  And surfaced and took

  a deep breath.

  And it was quiet in my head: I was alone.

  No Jenson.

  No Jimmy.

  No Old Man.

  Alone with my thoughts,

  which told me

  something

  was not

  quite

  right.

  My Mom in the Kitchen Staring at an Unopened Pack of Smokes

  Yes, she’d do this sometimes.

  A test.

  One she almost always failed.

  The patch, she said. I’m going to try the patch again. Look at you, all clean. No more mud. Did you know in the old days, some of the people would coat themselves with mud while fishing to keep the mosquitoes and black flies from biting them.

  Did it work?

  It must have. I never tried it. I used Muskol instead. Or sometimes I could use my mind to keep the bugs away. When I was young and innocent. That is what my grandmother said to do. She claimed she could use her mind and that never once in her entire life was she bitten by a mosquito.

  Do you think it was true?

  No. I think it was just a story. My grandmother told me lots of stories when I was little that I soon learned were bullshit. But it was really good bullshit and made me love her more for it. It’s what we believe that shapes who we are and what we believe is not necessarily true.

  I’d been thinking a lot about Jimmy

  and why he had appeared now in my life so

  this seemed like as good a time

  as any to mention this to her.

  I think you can buy cigarettes made from lettuce. Maybe I could smoke them while on the patch.

  Mom?

  Yes, Jeremy.

  You remember Jimmy?

  Jimmy Talltree who ran the little store back in the community?

  No, Jimmy Falcon.

  I don’t remember Jimmy Falcon.

  (This seemed impossible

  but then maybe my mom had lost some

  memory. There had been a lot of drugs.)

  Jimmy and I were friends. He used to

  hang out at

  our house all the time. Skinny little

  kid. Always had a runny nose.

  Could have been any one of your friends, I guess. But I don’t remember him.

  Remember, he died when we were

  both eleven?

  Eleven?

  He got sick and didn’t get better.

  Holy fuck, my mom said.

  What?

  Jimmy?

  Yeah.

  Jimmy was the name you gave to your imaginary friend. The one you had since you were really little.

  No, Mom. He was a real kid like me.

  She reached for the pack of cigarettes, broke open the cellophane, and took one out.

  She shook her head. We thought you’d never give up on him, she said.

  That can’t be right.

  She lit up the cigarette. Sorry, she said. It’s one of those times.

  Think hard. Jimmy Falcon.

  We used to wrestle in the living room.

  When you were eleven, my mom said, staring at the smoke she exhaled,

  your g
randfather died

  and your father went off

  the deep end.

  And you kept asking me

  What happened to Jimmy?

  And I just had to keep repeating,

  I don’t know, Jeremy,

  I just don’t know.

  Awkward Moments in the Kitchen

  Let’s face it, my mom screws up a lot of things and makes lots of mistakes. She’d be the first to admit it and I always forgive her. Like I say, she did a whack of drugs. I couldn’t name them all but she had memory lapse and sometimes got confused and called me by different names. So this could have been one of those times. Unfortunately, she said this:

  Jeremy, I’m clear as a bell on

  this.

  You made Jimmy up

  and I went along with it ’cause

  it helped to keep you happy.

  Otherwise, you’d get so lonely

  and sad

  after your grampa passed.

  I couldn’t remember my grandfather dying.

  I guess

  when he died

  he came right

  back.

  Old Man

  never

  left.

  Maybe we need to take you

  back for more tests.

  I don’t

  want

  any

  more

  tests.

  Your doctor said you

  were cured

  when you told him to fuck off.

  I had only

  stayed

  silent

  because

  I

  didn’t have

  anything to say.

  I understand that perfectly.

  Whatever can be said has probably

  already been said by someone.

  Mom?

  Yeah, hon?

  You telling me the truth about Jimmy?

  Big exhale of smoke. A whole

  cloud of it.

  My mom opens a window.

  Nods yes.

  But I was glad you had Jimmy,

  she says.

  Every kid needs a best friend.

  Back to the List, the Plan

  Me in my bedroom wondering why Old Man is not nearby to help me with this one.

  Old Man?

  Nothing.

  So (gulp) Jimmy Falcon was from my imagination.

  From my subconscious.

  Told me to help Thomas cheat,

  gave me the answers,

  and disappeared.

  (Just as a test, I called out inside my mind.)

  Jimmy! Help me!

  No Jimmy.