So am I a bad person or a good person?
13. Jackson (Yes, okay, he was my boyfriend. Don’t ask me any more about it.)
By now, you know everything about Jackson Clarke, probably way more than anyone on earth wants to hear. This is all I have to add:
I still think about him every day.
When I see him, my heart jumps up in my chest.
I long for him to talk to me, and whenever he even says hello, I feel a thousand times worse than I did before.
I wish he was dead.
I wish he still liked me.
When I got home from talking to Shiv, Hutch was on my deck. Again. Wednesday and Sunday afternoons, he helps my dad greenhouse the southern deck. Especially now that the weather’s good, the two of them are always huddled together over a peony bush or a broken window-pane, the boom box blasting cassette tapes of Hutch’s retro metal.
The sunlight was starting to fade; it was maybe six o’clock. “Hey, Hutch. Hey, Dad,” I called, waving as I came down the dock. The two of them were staring up at the greenhouse, which I had to admit was coming together. “You guys taking a break?”
My dad had taken to hiding Popsicles in the way-back of the freezer, so that he and I could get enough calories in the macrobiotic nightmare of our life. I popped inside and got one for me, one for my dad and one for Hutch, too (my mother was out, needless to say). Then the three of us sat on the edge of the deck, leaning forward so the Popsicles didn’t melt on our clothes, watching the boats sail across the lake.
I actually felt happy for the first time since Jackson broke up with me.
Now don’t go getting excited that I’ll suddenly notice Hutch in the soft pink light of the sunset and fall in love. He’s not the love of my life, and no, we haven’t been destined to get together ever since those gummy bears back in fourth grade, just because that’s what happens in movies.1 And don’t go thinking he and I become best friends in a Breakfast Club sort of way, either,2 with me realizing he’s got a heart of gold under the Iron Maiden motorcycle jacket, and him realizing that I’m not the slut everyone thinks I am. Yes, that happens onscreen. But forget it. This is real life. He creeps me out. We have nothing in common besides leprosy.
“Roo, good to see you looking cheerful,” said my dad. “Isn’t it nice to see her cheerful, John? It’s been taking her a while to process her feelings about the breakup with Jackson. He was her first serious boyfriend, you know.”
“You’re better off without that guy,” said Hutch, his mouth full of Popsicle.
“You think so?” I said. “I don’t.”
“He’s a jerk.”
“Huh?”
“Not a nice guy, Roo. He’s mean inside.”
“Why do you say that?”
Then Hutch told this story. I’m not sure why he told it, except that he and my dad had been doing some heavy manly rocker bonding. Or maybe he felt sorry for me, even though I was such a bitch to him most of the time. Hutch said that he and Jackson had been friends in sixth grade—the year when, at Tate, you start moving from room to room for each class instead of staying all day in one place with one teacher. Jackson was a year ahead, but they had gym together, and French, and the same free periods—so they started hanging out. As a sixth grader, Hutch was friends with all the cool seventh-grade boys: Kyle, Matt, Jackson and a few others. They played kick-ball after school. They had their own table in the refectory. They made a lot of noise in the hallways. Jackson and Hutch were friends in particular: Hutch used to ride his bike over to Jackson’s house on weekends, and Jackson stayed at Hutch’s when his parents had to go to Tokyo on business one week. When the two of them were bored in class, they’d write funny rhymes about the teachers and stick them in each other’s mail cubbies.Mean Madame Long,
I know I got the answers wrong.
You can sit me on the bench,
You can call me “stupid wench,”
You can raise a giant stench,
But I can’t remember French.
That kind of thing. That’s the one he recited for us. Anyway, summer came, and Hutch went off traveling for most of it with his family, and when he got back in seventh (when Jackson was in eighth), he found himself frozen out. “I got zits over the summer,” he said to me and my dad, staring down at his Popsicle stick. “I looked like hell, and I was still completely short. And they’d all been to sports camp together while I’d been away.
“First week of school, I trailed after them, sitting on one end of our table, not much part of the talk. Still showing up for kickball. Something seemed off, but I couldn’t tell what. These guys were my friends, you know?
“Then one day, I wrote a rhyme about Mr. Krell—remember, the middle-school gym teacher? And I stuck it in Jackson’s cubby like we did the year before.”3
“Oh man,” said my dad. “I can see it coming. Children can be so cruel.”
“I got my same note back with something scrawled across the top in Jackson’s writing,” Hutch went on. “‘Joke’s long over. Loser.’” He stood up and tossed his Popsicle stick in the trash can.
“That’s all it said?” I asked.
“‘Joke’s long over. Loser.’”
“Wow.”
“He never talked to me again. Like we’d never been friends. Like we’d never even met. And when Kyle and those guys filled my locker with ball bearings in eighth,4 and they poured out all over the floor-Jackson didn’t say a word. Just stood there, changing his shirt like nothing was even happening.”
“Jackson would never do that,” I said.
“Well, he did. Who knows?” Hutch shrugged. “He might have put the bearings in himself.”
“No way.”
“I’m just telling you what happened.”
“He’s not like that anymore,” I said. “If he ever was.”
“Dream on,” said Hutch. And then, like he was singing: “Dream on!”
“Dream on!”5 squeaked my dad, in a stupid rock ‘n’ roll falsetto.
Hutch joined him, and they kept squealing “dream on” like stuck pigs until, simultaneously, they yelled, “Dream-a make-a dream come true!”6 They both sang, and stopped for a little air-guitar duet.
With this additional evidence of (1) Hutch’s creepy tendency to make references to antique heavy metal songs that no one else knows about and (2) my dad actually knowing them and liking it and (3) a complete lack of dignity on both their parts, the moment was over. No more sharing was going to happen. My dad hit Play on the old cassette deck, and the entire dock of houseboats was bombarded with retro metal.
Was Jackson truly the kind of guy who would fill someone’s locker with ball bearings? Or even just stand there, saying nothing, when his friends were humiliating someone? Had he really written “Joke’s long over. Loser” on that poem? It didn’t seem like the kind of thing Hutch could invent.
But it didn’t seem like the guy I knew, either.
Maybe Jackson had done those things but wasn’t that way anymore. We all grow up and regret the mean things we did in middle school.
Or maybe I never knew him that well in the first place.
I grabbed my bike, rode to the nearest store (ten blocks) and bought two large bunches of basil, a box of pasta, walnuts and a wedge of Parmesan cheese. Then I boiled noodles and made pesto sauce in our blender, before my mom got back to tell me it wasn’t macrobiotic.