“Curtis! You’re so smart! How did you fail two classes? They’ll put you on academic probation.”
“Whatever, I saw it coming. I’ll be fine. I don’t know what the hell I want to do with my life, anyway, I was already thinking I might go back home for a few months and try to get my head together.”
“You’re unbelievable,” I said, taking out my phone and navigating to the page. Heart pounding, I added, “I guess this is it. Let’s see. A, great. B, OK, sure. A, amazing… Oh my God, Curtis, I passed everything! I just got one C! I can’t believe it!”
I jumped up so high that I sent my phone flying, but I didn’t care—I could get a new one if I had to. Curtis was excited, too. We fell on the ground and hugged and rolled back and forth, while the other students stared at us, perplexed. I didn’t care. I’d set a goal for myself, and I’d accomplished it. I was still overjoyed when I got home that afternoon, so much that I could hardly remember being angry the night before.
Mike and Sue were sitting in the living room when I arrived. I skipped in, and she observed, “I guess you’re not fighting after all.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
Mike explained: “We were arguing about what the hell had happened between you guys that would make my brother go into the kitchen to try and cook dinner. We figured he had to be making up for something he’d done wrong.”
I turned and saw Jack wearing a pair of red oven mitts and pulling a casserole dish out of the oven. He hadn’t heard us—he had on his noise-canceling headphones. I grabbed his phone off the counter and saw he was listening to a cooking tutorial on YouTube. It was so sweet. I walked in there without thinking and tapped him on the shoulder, hoping to see what he was cooking.
“AAAH!” he screamed, twitching and dropping the dish, sending whatever it contained—it was some unidentifiable black-and-red mush, and in all honesty, it looked atrocious—flying across the kitchen.
We both stood there staring briefly at the disaster. “Oops,” I said.
Jack took off the oven mitts with a defeated gesture. “There goes my first and last attempt at cooking lasagna.”
So that charred, runny mass was supposed to be lasagna? I had the feeling I had saved our household from certain death. I to conceal my disgust as I told him, “I’m sorry, Jack. It looked…great.”
“You don’t have to lie,” he said, removing his headphones.
“Did you decide to cook to tell me you’re sorry, or are we celebrating because the school year’s officially over?”
“I was more thinking the second, but if you’ll accept this as an apology, I’m cool with that, too.”
“It’s just two words,” I told him.
“Fine,” he said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have hidden something like that, and especially not for so long. But I meant what I said. There are no feelings there whatsoever. She’s my friend, that’s all. And she doesn’t have feelings for me, either. I know she was mean to you. It’s because she’s got this…idea about you, because of the things I told her a year ago. I’ve been trying to get her to understand that it was complicated, and that isn’t who you are or were, but she’s struggling with it.”
“Look, Jack, there’s something I need to admit to myself, too: I did it. I did leave. I made up that story about Monty because I thought I knew better than you what you were supposed to do with your life. I can’t keep pretending otherwise. So let’s make a deal: you focus on your things, and I’ll see if I can soften Vivian up. And if not, it doesn’t matter. But I don’t want you to have to worry about it anymore. You’ve already got too much on your mind.”
“Does that mean you forgive me?”
“How about we do this: I’ll clean up your lasagna disaster, you make me your famous chili, and we’ll agree to forgive each other.”
“NO!” Mike and Sue shrieked in unison.
“Don’t listen to them, they’re just a couple of haters,” I said.
“Deal!” Jack shouted. He got to work, and I turned to Mike and Sue, who were groaning with disgust. I stuck my tongue out at them.
17
Shrill Sergeant
My theory is that nobody actually likes September. Kids have to go back to school, summer’s over, the leaves start falling off the trees, it’s back to the grind…and Jack and I had to come back from vacation.
It wasn’t all bad: I had a killer tan, and I’d enjoyed myself in Greece. We’d been there nearly two months, but for me, the trip had been too short. Jack being Jack, he said we could just stay there. Even on the plane, he kept telling me that as soon we got to the airport, we could go to the counter, buy a return ticket, go back, and never return home.
But we had things to do. My semester was starting, he needed to promote his film… Marvelous as just giving it all up sounded, we couldn’t ignore our responsibilities.
Jack had made me a promise when we were in Greece, and when we got back, I planned on making him stick to it. I wanted him to teach me to drive. I didn’t like being so dependent. It was time to learn how to take care of myself.
He was surprised, but not enthusiastic, and whatever goodwill he might have felt about the whole thing vanished when Mike told us he wanted to tag along. And so one day, there we were, Jack in the driver’s seat and me to his right, with Will in the back seat trying to relax while Mikestuck his head between us and announced: “That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, you are now present for the first-ever driving class of the young and alluring Jennifer Brown! Will she make it? Will young Jackie still have a car when it’s all over? Soon, all shall be revealed!”
