C: Effing ocean has slimy seaweed and jelly-effing-stingy-fish. Your point?
J: Feel me holding your hand?
J: Just jump.
Oh God.
It always killed me the way that he could make everything better. He always made everything better for me. Easier. Simpler.Worth doing. He never questioned my worth.
Just jump.
God, I wished I could just jump. Just jump and land right in front of him again, like nothing bad had ever happened.
∞
At fourteen, I didn’t understand what the big deal was about high school. To Joey, Jase, and me, high school sucked big, hairy moose ass. Maybe it was because of where we lived or the high school we attended, but it wasn’t anything like the great time you read about in books.
It was like, well,Dante’seighth ring of Hell—a complete fraud and rip-off of everything I had read that high schoolshould have been.
We went to John Adams High School in New York City. We took the public bus to get there, and then literally squashed ourselves into an overcrowded school with NO air conditioners.Do you understand how horribly that could possibly smell?No, I don’t think you do.
Our textbooks were over thirty years old and so was the food in the cafeteria. The entire population of the student body, which was somewhere in the vicinity of 3,200 hormonal, sweaty teens, had to daily walk through metal detectors to get inside the front lobby of the school. Every ten minutes or so, students would randomly get patted down while they waited in line. Fun. Good times, I tell you.
Maybe it was the oppressiveness of the high school, or maybe it was what was going on with me at home, but I was a complete and utter disaster my freshman year. Okay, shut up, my whole high school career. We all can’t be perky little cheerleaders, can we?
Honestly, I don’t think my school even had cheerleaders. It didn’t have much of anything, but science, math, and history. Even its art program lacked. Art was just an elective you had to take once in the four years you were there, and it consisted of drawing with broken bits of crayons and gossiping in class.
That summer before our ninth grade year started, Jase had to spend it in some sort of I’m-Gonna-Make-My-Kid-A-Lawyer camp that his father shoved down his throat. Joey and I hadn’t seen him for four straight weeks, and we had seriously gone through Jase withdrawals. And that summer, Jase’s father gave me the creeps. Every time I sunbathed on the roof of the tree house, I’d catch him watching me. Hell, once Joey and I even caught him with a pair of binoculars. We never told Jase; I didn’t want him to hate his father even more. Joey and I hated him enough, anyway. When Jase wasn’t around, we made up gruesome stories about horrifying ways his dad died. Of course, we never told those kinds of stories around Jase. It was his father. No matter how much Jase loathed him; it just wasn’t right for us to agree with him. Even though we did. We so did.
Joey and I mostly hid in the tree house that summer and waited for Jase to come home. Everything was always fun with just Joey and me, but when Jase was around, things always seemed richer and fuller.
When the end of that summer came, he brought me home a pot-bellied pig. Who in the world got a pot-bellied pig from one of her best friends?Me. That’s who! Jase supposedly saved it from a farm somewhere. At the time, all I thought was how veryCharlotte’s Webhe was.
Joey?Hegot a dirty magazine. I, um, shared in the gawking and drooling of that too. I mostly giggled myself into a red-faced frenzy. Then later those nights, after the boys were long gone, I touched myself like a horn dog in that little special spot on my body thatJudy Blumetaught me about inDeenie. Again, need I remind you not to judge me? Because seriously, the hand reaches there for a reason and it’s a good reason, too.
Anyway, I named my pig Bacon N. Eggs, and my mother cursed like a drunken trunk driver when I brought him into the house. I had Bacon N. Eggs for two weeks before my mother’s newest paycheck, I meanboyfriend, was pissed off at me for something, and wanted me to be punished for speaking to him harshly.
I’m sorry, but when you ask a fourteen-year-old to, “Go get me a beer, baby, ’cuz I wanna watch those titties of yours bounce all the way back to me,” when her mother isn’t home, you should be prepared to be snapped at—teenage gangster style and all. The very next morning, after a huge fight between my mother and me aboutmy mouthanddisrespecting my elders, my pig was gone andThe Boyfriendwas cooking bacon and eggs in my kitchen, smiling like a damned, evil bastard. No, I don’t think he was really frying up my damn pig, but the message was clear to me. Don’t mess with him. I was devastated, but that was my life at home. Thank God, the majority of the time my mother just spent her time alone, asleep on the couch, with her eyes half-open, mostly comatose. I did my best to make sure that her cigarettes were put out while she slept, which allowed me to always have those little cancer sticks on hand to share with my best friends.
But when her boyfriends came around, in order for me to stay sane, I stayed in the tree house all the time and I read more books than I ever did.
Standing on the corner before first period on a hot, sunny, September day right after the pig-napping, I told my two best friends about Bacon N. Eggs, and the anger in both their expressions unsettled me. I knew they would never blame me, or be angry with me for anything my mother or her tribe of cavemen did, but I hated that I had upset them. I don’t think that there was even a second of any day in our trio of friendship that any of us were everreallyangry at each other. There wasn’t anything ever bad between us, then. Yeah, all the darkness between our threesome comes later.
I was tense as hell as we walked into school, waiting in the line to get through the metal detectors. Jase and Joey both eyed me like they were afraid I would explode.
Then, one of the school safety officers pulled me out to pat me down. He was young and greasy looking, and I froze when he put his hands on me. His big hands slid down my sides, making sure his thumbs moved over my chest as he licked his lips. His eyes roamed hungrily over the front of my shirt, just like tons of other guys had since puberty smacked me in the chest. I cringed at the realization that my first feel up was with this loser, and I didn’t even get a meal out of it.
“Hey, there, Officer Snapperhead, think that I got a gun or something hidden in my bra, or do you just want to lose both your arms?” I asked him, pushing myself away from him.
Jase grabbed my waist and walked me right back out the front door as he angrily eyed the jerk. Joey picked my book bag up off the floor and followed us.
Running his hand up my back and hanging his arm heavily around my shoulders, Jase pulled me close. “Looks like a good day to cut classes, don’t you think?”
Next to us, Joey matched our steps, looking up into the clear blue sky. “Yep. I see your logic in this situation, and I believe this calls for a vacation day.”
Dorks.
I was sure glad they didn’t mention what just happened. They always knew when I needed to talk about things and when I just wanted to pretend they didn’t happen. No one knew me like those two did.
