I’ll be your princess and we’ll do our thing.
Or just be yourself, yes, that’s better.
Just you and me, together.
Forever.
CHAPTER EIGHT
~ Jealousy ~
-1-
Things were looking better with my dad. He was getting some counseling. I didn’t go and see him on weekends because, well, I just wasn’t ready for that. And, besides, what the hell was I gonna do alone in the city when all my friends were in Long Island?
He had come over himself a few times though. We hugged and said hello and then had lunch. When the weather was still warm we even had a “family” barbecue. He spoke about work and mom told him about what needed to be done in the house and it was all very...civil.
He was trying, I could see. And I gave him that much.
The weird thing about it was that he and I never really used to hang out much before anyway. He was just always...there. And if I needed a “dad thing” then I could go to him. Now, with him appearing so “officially,” I sort of felt awkward trying to find something to talk about. So mostly I just hung out in my room and went downstairs whenever my parents called me.
But he and mom talked, and I think that was the first step for him before he could really open up to me.
They seemed happier. They looked like they were getting along better. They were getting along because they were now talking as friends and not as a married couple. But that’s the first step to any relationship, I guess.
I was under no illusions. They never kissed when they saw each other. And they always kept a minimum of a few feet distance between them.
One day, deep into the fall with dry leaves rustling over the ground, dad and I sat on the porch drinking a root beer. The air was peaceful and cool.
And then dad broached the subject. He nodded up at Johnny’s place. “You and him...” he said. “Are you still...?” He took a loud sip of his drink.
Lead settled over my head. I looked at my Skechers and said, “Yeah.” I said it so softly that I wasn’t sure if he’d heard it. “What don’t you like about him, dad?”
He took another sip. His eyes closed into slits. “Just keep your options open, sweetie. You’re young. He’s your first real boyfriend.” He put his hand on my knee. “OK?”
I said nothing.
His hand stayed there for a little while longer, to the point where it was awkward because neither of us was sure if it should stay or not stay or if the question should be answered...
He patted my knee. “Well, I better be off.” He started to get up.
“Dad?” He stopped, sat back down. “Why did you do it? I mean, the drinking—what drove you to it? Weren’t you happy?”
His face tensed up. “Honestly, Cathy, I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.” That he said the F word in my presence let me know that this was a Big Person Talk and he was being totally honest. “Work got to me. There were bills to pay. Sometimes I’d have a beer, sometimes two. Then one day I lost an account, multi-million. Allen got upset.” Allen was the big boss at dad’s work. “He gave me a warning. I’d just bought a new car. So that night I had a few whiskeys. They made me feel good, you know? They made me feel...” He hit his chest like King Kong “...like The Man. And, well, I wanted to feel that every night. So some nights I’d drink even when only the small things got to me. I wanted to feel like The Man all the time, you know?” He sighed. “And then there were other things as well, things that, if you weren’t my daughter, I’d tell you more comfortably.”
“Did you cheat on mom?” I asked, not believing until after I asked it that I’d actually done it.
His eyes flicked over to me. He took a sip of the root beer and made a face like it wasn’t quite satisfying. “They just never hit the spot, these things.” He smacked his lips. “You’re all grown up now, aren’t you?” I looked away. I wanted an answer to my question, but I wasn’t going to push it. After a moment of silence, dad said, “I did. I did.”
It felt like a dagger had been pushed through my heart.
“Did she cheat on you?”
“Why don’t you ask her that, honey? It’s not my place to answer for her.”
“So she did.”
He sighed. “Don’t tell her you got that from me. Things are...fragile...with us right now.”
“I won’t. Is that what you wouldn’t have told me because I’m your daughter?”
He laughed nervously. “You should become an interrogator! Uhm, that, yes...and other things. The point is, I drank because it made me feel good. And soon I started to think that was the only way I could feel good. And then I went past a boundary of some sort and I...well...I couldn’t stop. And then I just...drank. I drank because...that’s what I did. It screwed me up, Cathy. I almost lost my job. I almost lost you. I haven’t lost you, have I?”
I dug my nails into my shins, my chin on my knee. I shook my head.
Dad put his arm around me and pulled me closer. Then he knuckled my head. “Ouch, damnit! I’m not five, dad!”
“I know you’re not. Sometimes I wish you were, but you’re not.” He stood up, flicked his head in Johnny’s house’s direction. Johnny was at the docks today. “How serious is it?”
I dug my hands into my jeans, looked away.
“Tell me, just so I know.”
With all possible intensity of feeling, I looked my dad dead in the eyes, and I said, “I love him.”
Dad’s face didn’t change. He looked over at Johnny’s place, stared at it for a beat too long, then looked over at me. “OK.” No smile, no frown, just deadpan.
He kissed me on the forehead.
“Dad, why don’t you like him?”
I stood, and he held me by the shoulders at arm’s length, sighed. “Maybe you should ask him, honey.” That sent an anvil down my stomach. “I just want what’s best for you.”
I wanted to tell him that Johnny was best for me, that he was a good guy, that he loved me and cared for me. But I figured that would stress him out, and I didn’t want him stressed out. I didn’t want him drinking again.
He walked up the steps and hollered into the doorway. “Alice, I’m outta here!”
Mom came out, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. There was no mirth in her gaze, no smile, no warmth. “OK, Jack. Thanks for coming by.”
Dad stood there for a beat, then said, “OK, then, do it again some time.”
“Sure, you’re always welcome here.”
It was there—that statement: You’re always welcome here, and the way it was said—which nailed it home for me. That, and the fact that straight after the statement...they shook hands.
It was over between my parents. Honestly and truly over.
And that made me sad. That made me really sad.
-2-
If a girl “blossoms,” what does a guy do? Well, whatever it is, Johnny did that in Junior year. And then some. I think even the teachers took notice.
His body firmed up, filled out. He grew even taller and almost hit six foot! His muscles became bigger, more swollen.
He became a man.
Sometimes he’d skip shaving for a few days and his stubble would scratch me when I kissed him.
It’s interesting, though, when you’ve been with someone for so long, and when you’ve known him before he’s hit his male version of a “blossom”—you don’t really notice that stuff. But I couldn’t help notice that everyone else had noticed!
“Does this mean I’m the cool chick because I’m dating the coolest guy?” I asked him once.
“I’m not the coolest guy. Mark Ryleigh is the coolest guy.”
Mark Ryleigh. High school quarterback, and Nicole Ferman’s main squeeze since she and Johnny had, well, “split up.” (I put that in quotes because, noting how deeply in love Johnny and I were, how much we shared together, how we were always there for each other, made me realize that she and he had never had anything even close to that!)
Johnny and Mark Ryleigh wer
e as different as day and black death. Johnny was dark and tall, lean and muscular. Mark was beefy, stocky, laughed very loudly, and made sure everyone knew when he was in the room. Johnny was silent, aware of his surroundings but preferring to sit in the shadows watching. When Johnny entered a party, heads turned, whispers began, people greeted him. There was a calmness and serenity about him, a serenity he got from Pat, I’m sure.
When Mark entered a room, boys grunted and hoot-hoot-hooted and just went ape-shit. In all fairness, a fair amount of girls also went ape-shit, usually those with an IQ of about seven.
Mark Ryleigh was your typical All-American Jock.
Johnny was Zorro.
Mark didn’t like Johnny. Popularity was important to Mark. And it was meaningless to Johnny.
Which is probably why Johnny got something better than mere popularity. By Junior year, Johnny had earned the irrevocable title of just—plain—cool.
Mark hated him for it. Because Johnny never tried. And Mark tried too hard.
There’d never been any threats made, and Johnny was usually civil to the guy but there was an unbearable electricity as the two passed each other in the hallways each day. It made me uncomfortable.
I also suspected Nicole was part of the reason for it, that she was feeding things to Mark to keep the feud going.
It took a lot to set Johnny off, but when he did get set off, he was a blizzard of pinpointed rage.
When my dad got set off there were bodies everywhere, and his anger flayed out like vomit landing where it shouldn’t, leaving traces everywhere. (It hurts me to say things like this about my father, but I was facing the facts now finally; the magic was gone.)
News of my “home situation” had not hit the school yet. Not the kids, at least. But the teachers knew. And they knew it because my grades had slipped. The only class I was doing well in was English Lit, and that’s because Fiction was keeping me alive, both creating it with my poetry, or burying myself in it when reading.
I tried to concentrate, I did, but my thoughts kept going onto “more important things” in life, things that seemed to matter so much more to me now than the coefficient of seven or whatever the heck you learn in Junior year—I can’t even remember any of it. My mind was on things like: “How can I be happy?” and “How can I avoid the mistakes my parents made?”
Somehow, I was pretty sure learning calculus wasn’t going to help me with any of that.
Because I’d known Johnny my whole life, and because my initial attraction to him had nothing to do with his looks, I completely missed noticing Nicole Ferman’s seething, hateful, vengeful jealousy of me and him.
I missed it like a bullet to the head.
I also missed it because in all my school years I never really got in “deep” with any of the other girls. So I missed plenty of school gossip. Johnny had always been my companion. When he and Nicole had first “dated,” I got in tighter with a few friends (Nancy, Lee-Anne, Vivian; yeah, that’s it) but that was mostly chit-chat at lunches, and even then I didn’t talk much.
I was a bookworm. And most of my time at school during lunches was spent reading Twilight or Cassandra Clare novels or, in later years, stuff that appealed to...that mushroomed part of me.
In Junior year, I was just trying to get by. Life was rough-going, and I thought I was doing OK, all things considered.
And then Nicole and Mark Ryleigh upped it a notch.
-3-
No one would have dreamed of throwing a Winter Recess party except Jess van der Haven.
Whatever Nicole had in the looks department, Jess had in the Wild Girl department. She threw about seven parties a year up in her mansion in Nassau.
Although Johnny and I lived in pretty generous homes, Jess’s place was a palace.
Her parents were rarely there. And she had more money than she knew what to do with.
Whereas I was trying to hide my problems at home, Jess made her problems the very thing that made her cool.
It was December twentieth, Saturday.
And it was cold.
Johnny and I pulled up to the gargantuan entrance in his red Mustang GT. He and his dad had spent months fixing it up after Pat had bought it for a steal for five hundred bucks! The car’s engine had been a wreck, but six months later they’d completely souped it up and now it purred like a roadhog on steroids.
I saw the looks Johnny got as we arrived. He was in a warm gray sweater and jeans. I was in jeans and a faux fur coat.
It might have been the middle of winter, and the last weekend before Christmas, but Jess had the place packed.
Music screamed from the three floor mansion. Guys were out throwing snowballs or sliding on snow.
Inside, the temperature instantly went up by about thirty degrees. The place was full, body heat and gas heaters warming it up. I was amazed at how many girls showed up in mini-skirts. I got cold just looking at them.
I saw Jess out the corner of my eye, sitting back on a couch with a beer in her hand and a guy climbing over her. “Hey, Johnny! Have a good time, baby!” she hollered.
Johnny smiled at her, then squeezed my hand.
More girls greeted him as we made our way to the punch bowl. A drinking game was going on in the corner; a guy was making out with a girl by the wall, his hand sliding up the inside of her leg. She smiled at Johnny when he walked past.
“Drink?” Johnny asked me.
I shrugged. “Why not?”
He sniffed it. “It’s spiked.”
“Of course it is.” Mom had told me it’s OK if I drank, so long as I didn’t overdo it and stayed with Johnny all night. (As if I would do anything else.) The irony is that Johnny was allowed to drink as much as he wanted to, yet never did. He often had wine on weekends with his dinner at home, half a glass. It’s a Portuguese thing. But never at parties. And like his dad, he never touched the stuff before driving. Not a drop.
I took the punch and nursed it. Samantha Jaspin came up to Johnny and asked him if he wanted to dance, then looked at me and said, “If it’s cool with you, honey!”
Johnny declined. “Not tonight, Sammy. We’re not staying long.” Johnny had a reputation for giving any girl the time of day, at least one dance. He especially had a reputation for giving homely girls a dance or two, just to up their confidence—although he denied it whenever I called him on it!
“Oh, baby, please!” She grabbed his arm, started tugging it, ever looking at me and wondering if I would make a scene.
“Sorry, Sam, some other night.”
“Oh, Johnny, you never say no!” She pouted her lips.
Johnny closed his eyes. “I know. Tonight is different. It’s not you. I promise.”
“Oh, Johnny, you’re such a flirt.”
By now I just wanted to kick her.
He extracted his hand from hers and we stood there awkwardly for a second. “OK, fine!” She strutted off, wiggling her ass voluptuously, completely unaware that Johnny wasn’t even looking at her.
“You OK?” I asked him.
“Sure.”
I saw his eyes staring fixedly at one point.
I turned my head.
And there was Mark Ryleigh.
Nicole leaned against a wall next to him, sucking an olive from a Martini, pushing it in and out of her mouth, putting her tongue out lusciously over it. She had a smug grin on her face. She also wore a mini-skirt, black, a short mini skirt, no tights. I bet she also doesn’t have any panties on for easy access. Her already generous boobs were pushed up, and she was staring straight at me and Johnny.
Sucking on her olive.
And smiling.
Mark scowled. Three of his football cronies were behind him, each in football jackets—Dustin (“Dust” as everyone called him), Roderick (“Hotrod”), and Just Vick.
Nicole slithered her arm around Mark’s shoulder and pulled him into her. Her tongue looked like a lizard as it devoured his. I was instantly disgusted. Mark put his hand on her butt and pulled her mini-skirt
a little up so that her perfect bun was clearly visible (and she was either wearing a thong or...like I said...nothing).
Then Mark sent his gaze back to Johnny, and the staredown continued.
Butterflies slammed inside my stomach. I looked away and sipped my drink.
“Why are they looking at you like that?” I asked.
“Probably because I told Nicole where to stick it after she spread those rumors about you.” Picking on anything to ruin my reputation, Nicole had started spreading rumors about how often I was “spreading my legs” for Johnny, and that’s why my grades were so low. According to her, not only was I not a virgin, but Johnny and I were doing it three times a day—twice of which was during school hours!
So far I’d ignored her.
“You did what?” I spouted.
“I pulled her aside and told her she should go fuck herself. That she had no right to spread false rumors about you.”
I shook my head. “Johnny...damnit.”
He said nothing.
I put my drink down beside him, wrapped my hands around his neck and said, “Baby, that was very gallant, but also very...freaking...stupid! Mark has the entire football team on his side. You know that’s what she wanted you to do, don’t you? With girls it’s normally best to simply...let it slide. These things usually go away.”
His eyes went hot with anger. “I’ll decide what’s stupid and what’s not, Cat.” Even when he was angry, the way he said “Cat” still made my legs wobbly. “You fight your battles your way, and I’ll fight mine my way. Nicole is my battle as much as it is yours.”
“Are they still looking at us.” My back was turned to them.
Johnny looked up. “Yeah.”
“Damn it,” I whispered.
“Come, let’s dance.”
We danced for a half hour. Some girls came by and danced with us, the closest they could get to dancing “with Johnny” tonight. But the slow-dances were all mine. Johnny had stopped granting those to anyone (except girls who needed a confidence boost) since he and I had started dating.
Quite a few guys came by and said hi to him as well. A lot of the dudes at school called him Ronaldo as a joke. He pulled a few guys over as they said hello and whispered something in their ears. Many of them looked up at Mark and his crew after Johnny spoke to them. Then Johnny would gesture for them to calm down (or something, not sure what the gesture meant exactly).
Johnny Page 7
