“Everything’s changing.”
“What things?”
“All the things.” She takes a deep breath. “First with my family. And now, it seems, with us. The other day on our drive home from Whittier, it was the first time it occurred to me I might not have you forever.”
I’m speechless. Because I thought those were things that only I ever considered. Jillian always seems so supremely confident in herself, in her feelings, it’s hard to imagine her struggling with any insecurities. But here she is, reminding me of how human she is, how human we all are.
“It’s stupid,” she says, “I know. I mean, you’re my best friend. Always will be. But I guess I had all these expectations about what our last couple of months of high school would be like. That we’d be even more inseparable, that we’d do all the senior stuff together, like prom and senior luncheon and all those other cheesy things we’re supposed to do but have always made fun of. And then we’d graduate and celebrate and leave all this crap behind, and we’d ride off into our college future together. We’d turn the page. Finally, you know, turn it for good. And then you—something about the way you were so excited about Kate, about spending time with her. You passed up burgers with your best friend for her.” She tries to laugh, but it’s strained. “I mean, you were going crazy at even just the possibility of talking to her. I can’t remember ever seeing you like that. Like ever.”
And I nearly say, If only you’d noticed the way I acted around you, how excited and happy I always am even to be in the same room with you. But I don’t interrupt.
“I guess it made me feel . . . less. Like I was less to you. And that sucked so bad because you’re so . . . more to me.”
I scoot across the couch, closing the sofa distance between us, nearly spilling the cookie tray in the process. “J, you’re my best friend because you’re the best person I know. Nothing will change that.”
Her eyes are moist, soft. This is a side to Jillian I’m not sure I’ve seen—it’s as if she’s nervous around me, uncertain.
“Really?” she says. “You promise?”
“Hope to die.”
We hold each other’s gaze and it’s easy to remember why I fell for Jillian in the first place (as if I could ever truly forget).
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re the best person I know, too.”
We unpause the movie and we sit there, sharing a single sofa cushion, her head against my chest. I can feel the soft, warm tremor of her breathing. And I don’t pay attention to a single scene. I think about that day nearly four years ago, the day I bumped into Jillian in the hall, the day she offered me, a goofy, nerdy kid from Elytown, a chance for her heart—
Sorry I didn’t come tumbling after, I’d said.
She’d smiled. We can always try again.
But then there’s a knock at the front door. We don’t move until the knock happens again, and then Jillian unravels herself from me to answer it. When she comes back, she’s not alone.
“Not this movie again,” Franny groans. “I didn’t catch two transfers over here to watch some cheesy movie.” He flops onto the sofa, in the exact spot formerly occupied by half of Jillian and half of me. Jillian sits beside him, and he pulls her in for a big hug. He laughs. “Hey, do I smell triple chocolate cookies?”
And at the precise moment Franny manages to wedge two entire cookies between his jaws, my jeans vibrate. I fish out my phone.
Hey, sorry I took so long. By the way, it’s me, Kate.
For half a second I consider waiting to reply. I don’t want to seem too eager, too attached. Except I can’t wait a second longer to talk to her.
Don’t be sorry, I assure her. Your timing is perfect.
“Who’s texting you?” Franny says. He pries the phone from my hands with his oversize fingers. “Whoever it is has got you seriously cheesing.”
I reach for it in vain. “Give it back, man.”
It’s too late. He jumps up from the couch, nearly spilling my milk. He grins, studying the screen. “I told you she’d come around.”
Jillian’s eyebrows rise. “That’s Kate.”
“It is indeed,” Franny confirms.
“Nice,” she says. She turns to me, forces a smile. “Now everyone’s happy.”
Franny tosses my phone back. “Well,” he says. “What are you waiting for? Shoot your shot.”
The Thing About Shooting One’s Shot
The thing is I suck at all things move-making. I’m more of the wait to be moved type.
YOU: And how is that working out for you, Jack?
ME: Admittedly, not well.
Which is why I decide to try something different with Kate.
Take action.
Screw passivity.
Screw inertia.
To hell with the path of least resistance.
So shoot your shot already, Jack, you say.
Consider it shotted, my friends.
I pick up my phone and hover over Kate’s empty photo circle, my thumb just above the generic, gender-neutral silhouette.
I hover.
And I hover some more.
Because the question that has dogged me ever since my first kindergarten crush still torments me a decade-plus later: What in the world am I supposed to say?
I think, Just be yourself, Jack. At least you can be you somewhat believably.
I type: Hey, I’m sorta in your neck of the woods. Wanna grab some cereal?
Silly Rabbits, Tricks Are for (Big) Kids
I have to borrow Mom’s car because my car is doing this billowing smoke thing, which probably isn’t good.
“And where are you and my car going?” Mom inquires.
“Out,” I say. I can’t control my face, and apparently it wants to grin ear to ear. “For cereal.”
Mom gives me a what’s wrong with my kid look but tosses me her keys and says, “We’re out of milk, too.”
I probably should’ve mentioned that this particular cereal is ninety minutes east. But this way, when Dad asks how much she knew, she’ll have what our government likes to call plausible deniability.
Anyway, to the metal I put the pedal, and I speed past a state highway patrol car idling in the center median, but either he’s on break or he understands that I am a man on an important mission, because he doesn’t even blink.
Then I blink and the next thing I know I’m pulling into a long driveway. I text Kate, Hey, I’m here.
My heart is shoving itself into a missile-shaped carton, lighting its wick, and exploding in my chest, a million and one fireworks erupting within my rib cage.
And I haven’t even seen Kate yet.
Just the thought of her fires up my sweat glands, makes me sink into the front seat, and I wonder if it’s too late to turn around. To go home. Yes, I want to see her. Badly. But also I don’t want to screw this up.
Only there are signs everywhere prohibiting U-turns.
Plus, there’s a tap at my window—
And it’s her—beautiful, brown, super-tight-curls Kate. She leans into my window frame, making that roll your window down motion. And I try, except I have to turn the car back on since Mom’s ride has power everything. I attempt to turn the ignition just enough to engage battery power without actually restarting the car, but it’s not working, so I turn on the car, only to fumble with the window buttons because Mom keeps the child lock on—apparently she doesn’t trust me or Dad to exercise good window-lowering judgment—and Kate is rolling in laughter.
Finally, I just open the door.
Kate shakes her head. “Uh, are you okay, man?” she asks.
The answer is no.
And the answer is absolutely.
We fill our arms with bowls and spoons, milk and cereal. She takes me to her favorite place. A quiet spot down in the gorges, where she goes to read and draw. “I do my best thinking here,” she confides. “Or at least that’s what I tell myself to justify the exorbitant amount of time I spend he
re.”
We navigate the narrow trail, a wall of crimson rock on either side of us. We watch the water curl around smooth stones, flowing to wherever, taking its time.
And it’s like she could lecture on pizza crusts for ten hours and I’d never stop listening, I’d never be bored. But we don’t discuss crusts, except to agree that neither of us is a big fan of cheese-stuffed crust, that we’re pizza crust purists, why mess with a great thing. We talk about where we grew up (she’s originally from a suburb near Pittsburgh), and our favorite movies (I confess Adventures in Babysitting, which was introduced to me, ironically, by my sixty-year-old former babysitter, also known as my maw-maw; Kate loves a flick she stumbled onto called Raising Victor Vargas, which I’ve never seen).
“I challenge you to watch it and not craugh,” she says.
“Craugh?”
She smiles. “Craughing is a simultaneous mix of crying and laughing that is triggered by only the absolute best things in life.”
“So, what else has made you craugh?”
“That’s for me to know, and for you . . .” She slurps up the leftover milk in her bowl and emerges with the most awesome fruity-loops-milk mustache ever, and she’s not at all embarrassed or self-conscious and she doesn’t flinch when I wipe it away.
And cereal is my new favorite food.
Probably why bowls and spoons were invented.
Truth & Consequences
Naturally, when I make it back from my cereal expedition, my parents are less than thrilled to learn how far I traveled for a bowl of artificially flavored milk.
“You missed dinner, Jackie. What were you even doing all the way out there?” Mom asks.
“Something about the milk out that way, it’s . . .” I shrug. “More organic-y?”
“Jack, come on,” my dad says, in his understanding-yet-stern dad voice.
“I went to see someone,” I blurt. “A friend.”
Mom and Dad exchange looks.
“Okay, do we know this friend?” Dad asks.
“No. We, uh, only just met.”
“Why didn’t you just tell us that?” Mom asks, shaking her head.
I tell them the truth, which is: I have no idea.
And so we discuss what it means to be trustworthy.
Rather, my parents discuss and I listen, nodding my agreement when so called upon.
Because my dad is an English major at heart, his part of the lecture consists of breaking down the semantics—do you understand what trustworthy really means, Jackie? It means that you must be worthy of one’s trust. Hence, TRUST . . . WORTHY—repeatedly, until even Mom seems bored.
“So, what’s her name?” Mom interjects.
“Huh?” I say.
“Don’t play with me,” Mom says in her I’m not messing around voice. If Dad is the Lecturer, Mom is the Interrogator. “This new friend of yours.”
“Kate,” I say.
“And,” Mom says.
“And what?”
“Tell me about Kate. Who is she? How do you know her? What’s her criminal record?”
“No criminal activity that I know of. She’s a freshman at Whittier. I met her during the campus visit.”
“An older woman,” Dad says, cheesing approvingly. “Apple don’t fall far . . .”
Mom freezes Dad with a death stare and he retreats. “Jackie, Dad and I aren’t upset because you took the car to Whittier. Or even because you like this Kate. It’s that you were intentionally misleading. That’s not like you.” Her forehead creases in a way that spells concern.
I understand. Parents live in constant dread, forever worried that their kid’s slightest transgression is an invisible step toward a life of crime, or at the very least, eternal dysfunction. For instance, what if the fact that I borrowed my mom’s car and drove it ninety minutes away gradually morphs into grand theft auto when I’m twenty-three, culminating in a highway police chase whereby I drive into a giant sewer drain, living out my days as a smelly rat king? Or what if missing curfew leads to my inability to be gainfully employed well into my thirties and I live in my parents’ attic with my invisible friend Otis?
I get it.
“So, as punishment, your mom and I have decided to . . .” Dad looks at Mom for crime-to-punishment value assignment.
“Put you on probation,” Mom says.
“Right, probation,” Dad confirms. “Otherwise known as thin ice. You slip up again in the next few weeks, and it’s no cell phone, no parties, no . . .”
“Life,” I finish. “I understand. And thank you. For the suspended sentence.”
“Don’t thank us yet. It comes with community service, too,” Dad says.
I suppress a groan.
Dad and Mom look at each other again, I suppose to reestablish their parental telepathy. “That’s right,” Mom says, still studying Dad’s face. “You’ll be cutting Ms. Nolan’s grass for the next month . . .”
“Which includes picking up after her dogs,” Dad adds.
This time I groan. Ms. Nolan is a pleasant woman, but she doesn’t believe in pooper scoopers. Her yard is more crap than grass. “C’mon, guys. She has like forty-three dogs over there.”
“You made your bed, mister,” Mom says.
I sigh.
“You know you can always invite your friends here, Jack. We want to know the people in your life,” Mom says.
“I know. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I hope you got your money’s worth,” they say, eyebrows raised.
Which to answer would be the equivalent of sprinting in dress socks through a field of black ice that’s also encrusted with land mines. So, I keep my head low and cultivate a look that I hope conveys my sincere remorse.
“I’m sorry, guys,” I say for the dozenth time. “Disappointing you really sucks.”
“Well, as long as you learn from this experience,” Mom says. I wag my head as she wraps me in a hug and Dad pats my head, and I keep wagging as they shuffle out, until Dad pauses in my doorway.
“Jackie, so, did you or did you not purchase milk for the family?”
Crap, I’d forgotten to stop by the store on my way home. “Negatory, Dad. Sorry.”
“Right,” Dad says. “Suddenly, I’d like cereal, too.”
FRANNY: Hey, man, how was your big date?
I fall backward into my bed and I close my eyes and I’m back in the gorges, except the sun, clouds, and river rock are all puffy, pastel marshmallows, the sky twinkling with sugar grains, and silver spoon trees swaying in the frosted sugar breeze and singing about love, about happiness. Kate and I in the middle of it all, drifting lazily down a milk river, our butts flopped in giant Froot Loops. We’re holding hands and partly singing along, partly laughing, because what’s going to happen when our cereal tubes get soggy?
But it doesn’t matter.
When we’re together, how could anything else matter?
ME: Worth every penny.
FRANNY: Knew it would be.
FRANNY: So . . . I have big news.
ME: All the Wentworth players contracted encephalitis so you win the state championship by default?
FRANNY: The Coupon’s coming home.
ME: Are you kidding me?!?
FRANNY: I’d joke about this?
ME: So he got out? Just like that? They let him go??
FRANNY: End of the month.
ME: WTF?!
FRANNY: Right. TF.
The Coupon’s A-Coming
The Coupon is Franny’s nickname for his dad. Coined back in fifth grade, when his dad, yet again, cut out on him, this time on the eve of his first ever game. Which especially sucks, watching your best friend’s heart repeatedly smashed to smithereens, since Franny is the most loyal person I know.
It’s true. No exaggeration.
Franny and I date back to—as so many friendships do—the playground. For most kids, the playground is a magical place of shiny aluminum slides and rusty chain swings. A place to make friends an
d run free.
For me, it was a place to get my ass kicked. Recurrently.
Enter Franny.
Even as a kid, he was intimidating. Hell, he towered over most of the parents, and his voice, at seven years old, was already deeper than most dads’, mine included. On more than one occasion he saved me from imminent doom. Which I couldn’t understand. I mean, what could I do for him, other than split my red Popsicles and single-leggedly lose every three-legged race for us?
Winning games is easy for me, he’d said one day after hitting our baseball so deep we spent all of daylight trying to find it. But that’s why I like you. You don’t care about winning.
Naturally, he was wrong. I did care. I just realized winning wasn’t a particular strength of mine, and so I gradually grew accustomed to its antonym.
But that’s Franny. Give him rain, he’s pointing out the rainbow. Which is useful, because he’s had more rain than anyone I know.
“Guess I thought this day would never come,” Franny says, leaning against my back-porch post. He flings a rock over the fence and into the old cornfield. We used to ride our bikes back there, racing along the furrowed rows, jumping over the mounds of dirt, motocross stars in the making. I listen for the rock, but I don’t hear it hit ground.
“It’s been, what, six years?”
“Eight,” Franny says. He casts another rock. “I barely remember him. And what I do remember, none of it’s good.”
“What’s Abuela saying?”
Franny shrugs. “It’s her son, you know, so she’s all sorts of conflicted. She told me that she won’t let him live with us if I don’t want him to.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know. She’s happy that he’s coming back. But she’s sad, too, because she thinks I haven’t forgiven him. I know what she wants me to do. I mean, you know how she is, always talking, Francisco, be the bigger person. Which is bull. He’s had a lot more time on this earth to figure things out, but because he’s blown every opportunity, has ruined every good thing in his life, I have to be bigger. Where’s the goddamn sense in that?”
He slumps onto the stairs. “But I tell him to stay away and I’m the bad guy. I let him back in and I start the countdown until he messes up again. I’m screwed no matter what. Story of my life, right?” Franny says, smiling. Except I know his real smile. His happy smile. This isn’t that. This is his I have to be tough, I can’t let anything faze me smile. This is the smile that I see most.
Opposite of Always Page 5
