THE FIRST TIME

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - MISS YOU

"I've been holding out so long

I've been sleeping all alone

Lord, I miss you"

ROLLING STONES (From the album "Some Girls" (1978))

Sent: February 17th, 1999

From: AGirlNamedJoey

To: ThatAbbyGirl

Subject: Bessie´s B-Day present.

Hi, Abby. I just wanted to let you know that I´ll be sending Bessie´s birthday present to you guys in a few days, when I´ll have it picked out. Can you and Bodie make sure that she doesn´t know I sent her one, until it´s time for her to receive it?

Don´t tell anyone (least of all Bessie!), but some days I just miss being home with you, Bessie, Bodie and Alexander so much, that it´s hard to get through. Maybe it´s because you feel so far away from where I am, I´m not sure. Anyways, say hi to everyone in the house for me and make sure to help out, whenever you can. I know that you´re probably busy with your new girlfriend and the campaign for student body president, but I´m sure that Bessie can still use your help a lot.

Have fun back there in Capeside!

Joey.

Sent: February 18th, 1999

From: ThatAbbyGirl

To: AGirlNamedJoey

Subject: re: Bessie´s B-Day Present.

Hi, Joey. Can you believe that this is the first time, I´m trying my luck at this e-mail thing? I have to admit that it´s a lot smarter and faster than sending a letter, so who knows? Maybe in ten or twenty years or so, we won´t have any postal delivery service left! Isn´t that a weird thought, if there ever was one?

Sure thing, I´ll help you with hiding Bessie´s present from her, until it´s time for her actual birthday. She says that she doesn´t want us to make a big deal over it, but I can tell that she doesn´t really mean it, when she says that. Now that I´ve lived here for a few months, I´ve also begun to be able to read her a lot easier than I could at first and it feels like I´m really connecting with both her and Bodie much better, than I´ve ever done with my own parents. Kind of funny how things turn out that way sometimes, huh?

And if you think that you ´re the only one, who desperately misses having her sister around, I can tell you that you couldn´t possibly be more wrong! She doesn´t say it out loud (you know how Bessie is with grand showings of emotion), but it´s pretty easy to tell that she misses the heck out of you! I do too sometimes, but it looks like she´s having a harder time with it than any of us, even Pacey, who looked more like a hung cat, than his usual self, for those first few weeks after you´d left!

Have fun yourself and eat some croissants on my behalf!

Abby.

Loneliness. It was a feeling that Joey had never been familiar with back in Capeside, where she´d always have someone around to talk to and even if she didn´t, then she could quickly find someone to spend some time with. With all of the new friends (both of them) that she´d made since her sophomore year began, she´d never considered that it could happen to her. This was also why she´d lied in most of her e-mails with her friends and family (if you count the one e-mail that Bodie had replied to), because she didn´t want them to worry about her and thinking that she wished that she´d stayed put, where she was. Something, that it was becoming harder by the day for her to deny.

One thing was that she missed her friends and family. That part, she´d been more or less prepared for beforehand and compared to how bad it had been in her worst imagination, it hadn´t been entirely as bad, as she´d imagined that it would be. Knowing that it wouldn´t be long until she saw them again helped a lot to know, and that old saying that distance only made the heart grow fonder, definitely rang true when it came to herself and Pacey. What she´d come to find out though, was that what she missed almost as much was being there in the thick of things, where she could influence the actions of her friends and hopefully, help to steer them in the direction, that she felt like it was right for them to take. It wasn´t a part of her that she´d ever had to address before, but now that she was being forced to, it was also as undeniable as death, taxes and that she hadn´t had much luck in making friends in Toulouse. So far, she´d only managed to make one true one, that being the British girl, Emma. However, Emma had found herself a boyfriend in Phillipe, a boy who clearly shared Emma´s slightly out there style in fashion and music, leaving herself to be alone much of the time.

"Hi, Zizou. Did you come in here to keep me company?" she asked the resident cat at their house and the one, she guessed would be missing her the most, after she´d gone home to the US again. She got along fine with her host parents, it wasn´t like that and they were nice people for sure, there was just the matter of a small cultural barrier between them, that it wasn´t so easy to make go away. A few days before this, they´d had Escargots for dinner and let´s just say that eating those snails (that basically just tasted like garlic and nothing else) hadn´t exactly been to the taste of her very American tastebuds. She´d had to fight hard not to start gagging, whenever she´d swallowed one of those slimy little things and it wasn´t an experience, she ever wanted to try again.

Zizou (named after the nickname for the French soccer star Zinedine Zidane, like she guessed that many pets around all of France had been, after he´d helped Les Bleus (as they call their national team) to winning the world cup the year before. Plus, you had to admit that it was a pretty cute name for a cat!), jumped up on her bed and like the naughty kitty that he was, proceeded to step all over her schoolbooks like he couldn´t care less that it had to be annoying for her, before getting cozy pressed as tightly up against her leg, as he could. As it always was when it came to the two of them, she couldn´t help herself from nuzzling his neck and the loud purring she heard from him, told her that at least someone was ecstatic to have her there, even if no one of the human variety seemed to be.

One thing that she did have going for her though, was that it would officially become Friday in a few hours from then and she had what should become a fun weekend ahead of her. With Phillipe being just as perpetually broke as her own boyfriend back home always seemed to be, he couldn´t afford to come with herself and Emma to Paris on what Joey hoped would become one of the highlights of her stay in the nation, that had almost taken on mythical proportions to her, prior to her coming there and finding out for herself what life and the people there were like.

Now that she had, she couldn´t pretend that either of them had been a huge hit with her.

Meanwhile, back in Joey´s hometown, Dawson was growing ever more frustrated at his lack of ability to come up with a screenplay, that was worth throwing the five thousand after, he´d won in that junior filmmaker´s contest. By this point, he figured that he had to have gone through at least a hundred different ideas for its plot in his head and although, a few of them had seemed like they would have been both filmable and could end up being decent, what he wanted to make was a movie that spoke to an entire generation and if that was his goal, then decent just wasn´t going to cut it.

The main problem, it seemed to him, was that every good to great idea for a small budget movie had already been done, with there also being plenty of not-so-great copycat movies of those good movies to boot. If all he was going to make was a copy of a better movie, then what would be the point of it?

He´d gone to pretty much every available source to him for inspiration, most of them more than once, and was getting the feeling that his friends were getting tired of him sounding like a broken record, who either turned the conversation to talking about his girlfriend or his unmade movie, as if by natural reflex. Pacey had already made it clear that he couldn´t take listening to more than five minutes of it per day, which made Jen the most obvious victim, he had to pick the brains of. He got that chance on a rather dead dayshift at Screen Time, that he knew Jen had only said yes to, so that she could go to the movies with Abby and Melissa that evening.

"You have a whole store full of sources of inspiration here, Dawson! It can´t be that hard to come up with an idea, that´ll work for you!" Jen stated to him, hinting in no small way that she was also starting to reach her limit, as far as how much talk about his movie, she could handle!

"All of these were made on a budget; I could only dream of having! Give me a check for a million dollars and I´m sure that I could come up with something usable, but only having five grand severely limits what I can do" he explained to her. Just the new equipment that he´d have to buy would alone take up at least a quarter of his budget, leaving him without much leeway when it came to who he could hire and which locations he could afford to film at.

"You know, you could see if you could find an investor?" Jen suggested and it wasn´t as if he hadn´t given it some thought.

"The flipside of that is that any investor will want a say in how the movie turns out. If I could find one, who´ll just hand me a check or a wad of cash and tell me that I could do with it what I wanted, that would be ideal, they just don´t hang on trees around here. Not that I´m kidding myself into thinking that they exist anywhere, but if they do, it sure isn´t here in Capeside!"

"It isn´t like this town is short on those, who have more money, than they know what to do with! It can´t hurt to test the waters a little, can it?"

"I guess not, but how would you suggest that I go about it? I´ve never actually tried anything like this before, remember?" he reminded Jen, who took a few moments to think it over.

"You could try something as simple as taking an ad out in the school paper. Considering that their last cover story was the librarian´s ten-year anniversary working there, I bet they´ll let you do it for free, if you ask them nicely and you perhaps give them an interview about your plans for the movie. Don´t forget that there are plenty of kids of those with deep pockets, who go to the same school as us" Jen threw out there and he figured to himself, why not?

It wasn´t as if he had anything to lose by trying it.

After they´d graciously been allowed by both of their host families to leave school at lunch, Joey and Emma had made their way down to the Toulouse-Matabiau station by bus, where the TGV train that would to take them to Paris, was scheduled to arrive shortly after one o´clock. Usually, a train ride wouldn´t be enough to get Joey excited, but knowing that they´d be travelling at over three hundred miles an hour, through a scenery that she would probably once get to see twice, if you included the ride home that following Sunday, made it a many times more interesting prospect than travelling by train back home, where she´d already seen everything there was to see dozens of times before.

Having an almost overly giddy Emma with her didn´t hurt either. For as different as they were and how differently they´d been brought up in two widely different countries in many ways, she wasn´t afraid to admit that her time in France wouldn´t have been anywhere close to the same, if she hadn´t made friends with that quirky English girl on one of her first days there.

"Did you do much travelling with your family growing up?" Emma asked her, while they were looking over a rack of magazines for some entertainment on the two-hour plus train ride to one of the most famous cities in the world.

"Not as much, as I would have liked. When the entire existence of your family is built around a restaurant, going away on holiday in the summer is a luxury, you can´t afford. I used to dread the first day of school after the summer vacation ended, because it felt to me like everyone else would have all of these amazing stories of places, they´d visited, and strangers they´d met and become friends with, and I´d never have any interesting stories to tell them".

"You still had fun with your friends, didn´t you?" Emma asked, while her eyes settled on some music magazine with a bunch of very tattooed and long-haired guys on the cover, that looked interesting to her hard-rock loving self.

"Not as much as you´d think. These past years, Dawson has spent most of his summer visiting his aunt in Philadelphia, leaving me with no one else except for Pacey".

"That still sounds like it could be a lot worse!" Emma smilingly said, before giving Joey a wink that made Joey roll her eyes.

"I´m talking about me and Pacey before we became couple, when we were getting on one another´s nerves most of the time! Maybe that´s why I´m so close with my family, because they were the only ones, who were always there for me, no matter what. Until my dad went to jail, at least. What about you? Did you and your family do much travelling?"

"My dad would drag all three of us around the country in a rented RV for two weeks every summer. Even if my mom tried to air it out and spray dozens of cans of air freshener in there, it would still end up stinking so badly at the end of those two weeks, that none of us missed getting back into it for months afterwards! My older brother and I would quickly begin to get on one another´s nerves, as you like to put it, and after a few days of him and me being forced to be together almost all of the time, our parents would constantly have to scold us and explain to us why we had to learn to get along. I couldn´t in my wildest dreams have imagined back then, that I´d ever miss them all as much as I do now!" Emma told her truthfully, making her nod along in agreement.

"You too, huh?"

"Joey, we´re a pair of fifteen-ýear-old´s, who are both away from home for an extended period, for the first time in our lives. In other words, I´m pretty sure, it´s only natural!" Emma reassured her and it felt nice to know that she was with someone, who was going through at least a little of the same, as she was.

Eventually, she made the choice to buy a copy of Time Magazine, seeing as it was the only magazine from home, that they had for sale there, while Emma settled on buying a copy of "Kerrang". Shortly after they´d finished reading their magazines, the two girls arrived at the Gare du Lyon train station and their weekend in Paris had officially begun.

Dawson had set to work practically from the moment he´d arrived at school, with setting Jen´s loose plan to find an investor in motion. He had sort of an in with the school paper, since he had media class with a few of those students, who worked on the paper that most of the students only gave a slight glance, before throwing it into the recycling bins that they had for that specific purpose. On the rare occasion, they´d have an interesting story to report on, but since everything had to be filtered through a principal, who didn´t want anything the slightest bit controversial to be printed in the paper, it would nine out of ten times end up being a boring read either way. As it turned out, all he´d had to do was hand in what he wanted to be written and they promised that they´d print it in the next issue.

He hadn´t imagined that he wouldn´t have to wait longer than until study hall a few periods later, before a possible investor presented themselves. He couldn´t ever have imagined who it would be, either.

"I hear that you´re looking for someone to invest in a movie, you´re making. Tell me about it" Hannah whispered to him, moments after having taken a seat across from him.

"Rumors travel fast around here!" he told her back, without wanting to seem too interested in what she had to say. Especially not after Pacey had told him about the unwanted experiences, he´d recently had with her. Not that it seemed to deter her much.

"Look, I´ll be blunt, Dawson. I need some way of getting back on my parent´s good graces and me doing something like taking advantage of a promising investment opportunity is something, they can wrap their rich, thick-skulled heads around. Even if your movie doesn´t make a dime and no offense, Spielberg Junior, but I´m guessing that this one won´t make close to its budget back, it´ll still show them that I´m not as much of a lost cause, as they think I am right now. What´s you budget as of this moment?" she asked and while he didn´t want to trust her, what she´d just said made perfect sense to him and her cover story (if that was what it was) seemed perfectly plausible enough.

"Five thousand, but I have to spend at least fifteen hundred of that on film and new equipment".

"Come to my house tonight and we´ll talk about doubling that figure. See you later, Dawson" she told him, before leaving him there with his thoughts and a Geography book, the contents of which kept going in one ear and out of the other for him.

After they´d settled into the hostel, they would be staying at for the next few days, they spent a few hours just walking around the area that they were temporarily housed in, both to take in the scenery and familiarize themselves a little with it. Afterwards, they started looking for a place to eat dinner, so they took a metro train downtown, where they also figured that most of the best of the affordable restaurants would be located. Since both of them were on a rather tight budget, this eliminated all of the fancier ones, but it still left them with hundreds of times more eating options, than she would have had back in Capeside. Based entirely on Emma´s gut feeling, they eventually agreed to try out one of the smaller French ones, that while it was small, also scored very highly on the cozy scale.

"I see that they have your favorite dish!" Emma quipped, while pointing to the Escargots on the menu.

"Don´t remind me! I´m still trying to supress the memory of eating something, that I´d before then never imagined putting in my mouth to begin with!"

"Or as we call it back in "Old Blighty": Scottish cooking!" Emma had just joked, when one of the waiters came over to them with a wide smile on his face.

"Emma, is that you? I haven´t seen you in ..." the waiter began to say, before Emma interrupted him.

"Almost a year. Hi, Trevor. I heard a rumor from my brother, that you were working here. Joey, this is Trevor, my older brother´s best friend and the guy, who was my first boyfriend. Trevor, this is Joey, the sister I never knew that I had from America" Emma introduced them and Joey could see right away, what would have attracted Emma to him. She´d seen some hot guys over there, but he still had to be in her top ten, if not in her top five.

"Do you live here now?" Trevor asked and for a few moments, Joey felt like the fifth wheel among them.

"I´m an exchange student in Toulouse. That´s how I met Joey here" Emma explained and Trevor smiled shyly at Joey, who responded in kind.

"Is she still a pain in the arse most of the time?" Trevor asked her jokingly and she had to let out a small giggle.

"Only ninety-nine percent of the time! Then again, I can´t help myself from loving her for some reason!" Joey quipped, getting an agreeing smile out of Trevor.

"She has that effect on you, doesn´t she? I´ll get you two a pair of menus" he told them, before getting back to his work.

"So, this was why you were so Gung Ho on us going in here! You could have just said that it was because your ex-boyfriend works here" Joey asked Emma with a smile, just from how nice she could see that it had been for Emma to have seen him again.

"I didn´t know for sure, so I didn´t want you feel like I´d dragged you in here for no reason. Anyway, we´ll need a guide with some local knowledge to show us the other side of the city, don´t you agree?"

"What other side?" she asked, immediately dreading a little what the answer would be.

"The really fun side! Joey, you and I are going to have a weekend together, that none of us will ever forget!" Emma told her with a wide smile, that was equivalent to the knot growing constantly in size, inside of Joey´s stomach.

"You do know that you´ll be making a deal with the devil, don´t you?" Pacey half-jokingly told him, just before he was on his way out of the door, to make his way to the Von Wenning mansion, that he´d previously only seen from the outside.

"All I´m heading over there to do is to hear her out. Nothing else!"

"I´m just saying that the girl has a tendency to get what she wants! If I hadn´t had Joey on my conscience, I´d most likely be caught in her web by now, with no pleasant way out of it again! Be wary of her feminine charms and tricks, is all that I´m saying".

"You don´t have anything to worry about and neither does Mary-Beth. I already have everything I could want it a girlfriend, so why would I go out on the lookout for another one?"

"Do you know what that unmistakably sounds like?"

"Humor me, Pacey! What did it sound like?"

"Famous last words! Please, feel free to correct me if I´m way off here, but Mary-Beth and you still haven´t done the deed, have you? Or for that matter, come anywhere close to it?" Pacey asked him, unknowingly hitting a soft spot with him. He loved Mary-Beth for sure, but he was also as curious about sex as any other fifteen-year-old virgin is, and he had to admit that after all of those months of first courting her and then dating her, still only to have gotten halfway to second base one time felt like very little reward for all of the work, he´d been putting in with her.

"I´m not the kind of guy, who cheats on my girlfriend and that´s the end of it, Pacey! Have a nice shift!" he told Pacey off on his way out of the door and in the process, nearly bumped into a pair of customers, who were coming in, just as he was coming out.

His dad was working that evening and he knew that asking his mom for a ride would have led to a whole bunch of questions, that he didn´t feel much like answering, so he took a cab over there, getting dropped off right outside the enormous mansion, that had to be at least five times larger than the house, he´d lived for his entire life in. It was well lit up out front, but it struck him why there wouldn´t be any fancy cars parked outside or any sign of life going on inside. Before ringing the doorbell, he took a deep breath and had to wait for almost half a minute, until someone opened the door. It turned out to be Hannah, who had clearly dolled herself up a whole lot more, than her rather innocent invitation had suggested. It also made him feel a little foolish for turning up there in a pair of well-worn jeans, sneakers that were probably ripe to be thrown out and one of his work-shirts hiding underneath his two-year-old winter coat, that was beginning to show signs of it´s age.

"I´m glad that you decided to take me up on my invitation. Come in" she flirtingly told him, as she held the door open for him.

"My parents making an appearance at some big anniversary for something, that I can´t remember what is, probably because I didn´t care all that much and it´s our butler´s night off. Between you and me, I´m pretty sure that he´s out on a date with the housekeeper from one of the houses down the street!" she continued playfully and for as little as he wanted to, he couldn´t deny that she had a very pretty smile, when it wasn´t hidden beneath several layers of sarcasm, over how little she thought of Capeside as a whole.

"How nice for him! And her, of course!" he stumblingly got out, drawing a small giggle from her.

"Am I making you nervous, Dawson?" she asked him, before sending him what he had to imagine was her best version of bedroom eyes.

"Kind of. I mean, I wasn´t expecting this!"

"What were you expecting?"

"I don´t know, but it wasn´t this! I thought, you´d only invited me here to talk about you investing in my movie and here, you are and ..."

"I´ve thought it over since our little talk in study hall and here is my proposal for you: I'll buy fifty percent of the rights to whatever profit there might be on your movie for five thousand dollars. I have far more than that in my bank account, so I can get it for you by Monday. I´m not going to ask for any kind of involvement in what the movie will be about, but I will retain a right to veto any decision of yours, if I really don´t agree with you. I also want a role in the movie. It doesn´t have to be one of the major roles, but it still has to be one with a nice handful of good lines to it. Do we have a deal?"

On one hand, he didn´t want to make a deal with anyone, who would take any decisive power away from himself, but on the other, how many movies were in reality made without someone fronting at least part of the funding for it? It wasn´t like this made him different from nearly all of the other independent filmmakers out there.

"I accept, with one exception: You don´t get to veto anything, but I will agree to take any criticism you have very seriously, every time. Deal?" he asked, hoping that she would say yes with every fiber of his body.

"No deal! You can´t just take one thing out the deal, without replacing it with something else! This is a business discussion and if you´re not ready to bend a little here, I don´t see how we can start off a partnership this way".

"A partnership?" he had to ask, since he up to this point hadn´t thought of it as anything more, than her offering him a nice, fat check.

"If this is successful, who´s to say that we can´t try to replicate the success with your next movie or the next one after that?" she smilingly asked him and just the thought of what having a financial backer like the Von Wenning family would do for him, was enough to send fleeting thoughts of himself thanking the academy racing through his head.

"I don´t know what else, I can offer you. I can give you any job that you want on the movie, but apart from that ..."

"I´m guessing that Pacey has already told you in great detail about what happened between us, so I won´t try to BS you into thinking that you´re my first choice, but I want you, Dawson. Not for all that long, it goes without saying, just for the duration that we´re working together. Mary-Beth will never have to know, unless you decide to tell her" Hannah, in a way that reminded him (more than he wanted it to) of the snake in the garden of Eden, told him, just as she began wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her soft and warm bosom tightly up against his chest.

Part of him wanted to run. Another, almost as big part of him, wanted to do the complete opposite.

END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO