THE FIRST TIME
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - DEEPLY DIPPY
"Deeply dippy 'bout the way you walk
A contact sport
Let the neighbors talk
Deeply dippy, I'm your Superman
I'll explain
You're my Lois Lane
Oh, my love
I can't make head nor tail of passion
Oh, my love
Let's set sail for seas of passion now"
RIGHT SAID FRED (From the album "Up" (1992))
"What´s with the smug grin?" Pacey asked Dawson, who´d had it plastered onto his face constantly, since hours before Pacey had come by to pick him up, so they could head down to the "Miss Windjammer" contest together. Pacey hadn´t been the only one to notice it either and a few times, Dawson had to come up with a lie to his mom, so as not to give away what himself and Mary-Beth had planned for that evening. Not that he didn´t love his mom or knew that she would be happy for him, but telling her about how he was planning to "Kiss-Wise De-Flower" his semi-girlfriend that evening, was a heartfelt Mother/Son moment that he felt zero need to try out for himself. However, when he´d asked Mary-Beth out for this evening, he´d also forgotten that this was the day of the beauty contest, which had meant a small change of plans. Although, not in the part that mattered the most to him.
"I´m ... just happy for Joey, that she´s doing this. You know, I think it could be good for her self-confidence, even if she doesn´t win".
"Could this be the day, where you and Mary-Beth plan on, after what can only be called "A Massively Extended Build-Up Period", sealing the deal with a kiss?" Pacey asked, with that cheeky smile, that also told Dawson that there was no reason to try to hide it.
"You aren´t wrong, Pace. This one time!" he joked and his friend since childhood looked thrilled for him.
"Welcome to the club of kept men, Dawson! Or, in our case, kept boys! It´s about time, you joined our ranks" Pacey quipped back and Dawson couldn´t help being a little proud inside, that he´d even managed to get this far with a girl like Mary-Beth, whom you could almost tell yourself that it would take a lot of leg-work with.
"I still have to get that one thing out of the way first, before I can say that it´s official, don´t I?"
"I´d call it the number one access requirement! Is that the way you see it, as something to get out of the way?" Pacey inquired.
"Both yes and no. I mean, on one hand, I´m looking forward to it not being such a big deal to her, that we have to stick to holding hands, as the furthest we´ll get to".
"I´d call that understandable!"
"Then again, I´m also excited for it, like I don´t remember having looked forward to anything in my life before. Even more than I did, when it was with Jen. It´s like, this feels like it´s the real thing, where that whole thing with Jen was more like ... a teenage fantasy come true. As great as it felt and as beautiful as she looked that day, I didn´t know her like I do Mary-Beth now".
"It just wasn´t the same, as when it´s the real thing. Trust me, Dawson. I get what you mean and when you try for yourself, what´s it like to kiss a girl you have real, deep feelings for, you´ll learn more about love in that moment, than you could sitting through every second of the entire Spielberg filmography" Pacey practically finished Dawson´s thought with, and they nodded understandingly at one another.
"If any couple around these parts have it made right now, it´s you and Joey. I have to admit that I wasn´t entirely sure, if you´d make it this long with all of those years of bickering, you had behind you. I could have easily seen your first fight leading to a break-up and you two not being on speaking terms for months afterwards".
"That makes two of us and believe me, being the boyfriend of one Josephine Potter isn´t a dance on roses all of the time! Which is a very dumb saying, especially if you´re planning on dancing on them in socks or your bare feet, by the way. Right now, though, I can´t say that it doesn´t a little bit sum up my feelings on the subject" Pacey stated and immediately, Dawson couldn´t help worrying over what was going on with his two oldest friends.
"If there´s anything, you want to talk about, you know that you can with me, right?"
"You´ll find out about all of it before long. Well, maybe not all of it! I´m sure that you don´t want to hear about the most intimate things, we´ve done".
"Not until I can say that I´ve gotten further with a girl, than you have" Dawson joked, but Pacey didn´t look like he felt like smiling, or answering any more questions about himself and Joey, for that matter.
"A worrying sign, if there ever was one" Dawson thought to himself.
When Joey had gotten to Capeside´s town hall (that on this day served as the site of the "Miss Windjammer" contest), she´d still had her head filled with lots of worries over things like telling Pacey about France and how do deal with her best friend having a crush on him in the right way, that wouldn´t lead to their friendship coming to an end. As she looked out over her competition however, there was only one thought that spread like a fast-moving Cancer throughout her mind.
"How were you ever stupid enough to fool yourself into thinking, that you could have actually won this thing?" was that thought and the way she was feeling so far below them, had her thinking that if she avoided the humiliation of finishing dead last, then she could call it a success.
For one thing, these girls that she was up against were the exact opposite of herself, at least in the way they carried themselves. They looked like confident young women, who were ready to take on the world and in comparison to them, she felt like a kid who´d wandered in there by mistake. She certainly didn´t feel like someone, who would be competing against them in a contest of personality, talent and beauty, before the day was over.
"Joey! I wasn´t expecting to see you entering this thing!" Dawson´s mom Gail, who she knew was among the judges and for that reason, had forbidden him from telling his parents that she was entering the contest, came over to her and said with a welcoming smile.
"I´m also scouring the fire exits, in case I make a total fool of myself, the shame becomes too much and I have to make a run for it!" she joked dryly, which got a small laugh out of Gail.
"You´ll do fine! Are you here by yourself?"
"No, Jen is here with me, but she´s in the girl´s room right now. Pacey and Dawson should be here soon".
"My son, actually taking an interest in something that goes on in his hometown? I´ll have to check if he´s ill, when he gets here!" Gail quipped and it made Joey have to smile to herself. "Joey, I know that I shouldn´t pry, but you know that he wouldn´t tell me anything, if his life depended on it".
"You want to know what´s going on between him and Mary-Beth, don´t you?"
"It´s just that she´s over at our house practically every day and it makes a mom ask herself some questions, about what her little boy has been up to".
"Gail, it´s Mary-Beth and Dawson, we´re talking about here! If I had to guess, seeing as he doesn´t tell me all that much more these days, than he tells you, I´d say that they´re still keeping it very PG".
"And, that´s "Teen-Speak" for?"
"Nothing, you need to worry your head with, for a long time to come" Joey told Gail, whom she could tell look a little relieved to hear so.
"By the way, I saw your old sidekick Mellissa here today. She´s grown up to become a stunner! Not that you haven´t too, dear. I just wouldn´t have expected it as much with her, as I would have with you" Gail said, bringing up the number one topic, that Joey never, ever felt like talking about!
"If you say so" was all she replied, trying to close the subject as fast as she could.
"Whatever happened between you two? You used to be so thick as thieves, that I remember it making my son a little jealous sometimes, that him and Pacey weren´t allowed to be a part of it" Gail asked, without knowing that it brought up memories within Joey, she´d buried deeply in the back of her mind over the past two years.
"I found out what she´s really like, when she stuck a knife in my back. If you don´t mind, I prefer to pretend like she doesn´t exist" Joey replied, while wondering to herself what on earth was keeping Jen this long.
Jen would be the first to admit, that she had a severe case of aversion towards cheerleaders. I was most likely brought on by her mother´s biggest glory days being her time as a Knicks cheerleader in the early 80´s, itself a culmination of years of hard work going back to gymnastics classes in her mom´s early childhood. Since her mom had little else to hang her hat on, as far as any major achievements in her life went, she´d also tried her hardest to pass it on to Jen, whether her daughter wanted to or not. While Jen was quite aware, that it wasn´t right of her to judge all of the cheerleaders in the world based on the actions of a sad and pathetic woman, who´d unfortunately also had close to absolute power over herself for by far the majority of her life so far, it wasn´t like the ones she´d taken the time to talk with had done much to endear themselves to her. When Pacey had told her the "Mellissa and Joey" story, it hadn´t surprised her too much then, to find out that the opposing party to her close friend was one of them.
Since that day though, she´d begun secretly studying Melissa from afar and from what she could tell, Melissa seemed like an almost too sugary-sweet nice girl, one of those girls who would no doubt be every mother´s dream hook-up for their teenage son. She was always among the first to volunteer whenever there was a community project to help the needy in town (of which there were far more in Capeside than you´d think, when you looked at the pretty painting, they so successfully presented to the rest of the world), and top of being a cheerleader, was on the debate team and their rather successful quiz team (the only one of Capeside High´s teams, who could brag that they´d regularly won anything over the past many years).
As she studied her, an idea also began to pop up in her head. What if she could soften the blow of herself liking Pacey, by mending the long-lost Joey and Melissa friendship? It had just been a fleeting thought, that would make an appearance now and again in her mind, before she found herself in this situation (being alone with Melissa in the girl´s room) and it was Melissa, who started talking to her.
"I see that you and Joey have become friends" Melissa said shyly, while they washed their hands next to each other. "I know don´t know if she´s told you anything, but we used to be really close. Until I completely messed it all up".
"I haven´t heard anything from Joey, but Pacey told me" Jen answered her and could see a small smile creep across Joey´s supposed enemy´s face.
"I always had a feeling about those two, probably longer ago than any of them did. Anyway, I´m just glad to see that she´s doing so great, after all of those terrible things she went through with her parents. Don´t think that it hasn´t been on my guilty conscience ever since, how our friendship came to an end, but with her having sworn never to talk to me again, in those exact words, I can´t even tell her and try to make things right with her" Melissa sadly explained.
"Why did you do those things? Melissa, I´ve done some rotten stuff in my life already. Stuff that would it send shivers down your spine just to be told about, but I would still never sink so low as to kick a friend in the head like that, while they were already on the ground and pleading for my help, to get them up on their feet again".
"You don´t know what it was like! It wasn´t just Joey that the other kids started avoiding. I got the cold shoulder from them, almost as badly as she did. Jen, I was a very insecure thirteen-year-old already and unlike for Joey, whose sister allowed her to stay home and have her assignments brought to her until things began to cool down, my parents showed no mercy like that and they made me go to school. Do you have any idea what it´s like to be that age, being in school and feeling like no one wants you to be there?"
"I kind of do. My first days at Capeside High, it felt as if I was some kind of alien lifeform, sent there to spy on the human race, from the way most of them looked at me" Jen truthfully replied, as bad memories of her first days at Capeside High flooded back to her.
"I couldn´t tell Joey, that it was thanks to her that I came home crying every day, because no one had talked to me all day, or how I´d had to sit alone at lunch and sometimes have food thrown at me".
"What about Dawson and Pacey? Weren´t you friends with them too?"
"Only through Joey. Whenever she wasn´t there, we hardly said a word to one another".
"Still, loneliness is one thing, but what you did ..."
"You´ve only felt a fraction of the hate, this hypocritical town is capable of throwing at someone. To make it even more unfair, I hadn´t done the first thing to deserve it! All I´d done was make friends with a girl, that all of the other girls saw as being weird and called things like "Beanstalk" and "A Boy Named Joseph" behind her back. I did a really nice thing for her and you have to admit, quite brave thing too by, as the only one of them, reaching out to her and being her friend and this was the thanks, I got for it? Being hated by everyone, who weren´t my immediate family members? I shouldn´t have done what I did, we don´t need to argue about that. I´d still at least like it if she knew, that they were the actions of a kid, who´d been pushed to the end of their rope, saw no other way out of their misery and was acting out of pure desperation. I happened to spill some lies to the worst girl, I could have told them to. By the time Joey came back, the whole thing had skyrocketed far out of my control and those few rumors, all of which I´d completely made up, had multiplied greatly in number since I told the first one, and they were all over the school. After we had a huge fight in front of an entire classroom of shocked faces, that was it for the friendship between us" Melissa sadly recounted to her.
Now that she had learned the truth, the idea of herself getting those two girls talking again also began to seem much more feasible to Jen, than it had just a minute earlier.
Pacey had come up with what he thought was a brilliant plan for how to get the truth out of Joey and now that he´d come up with such a great idea, he figured that he might as well get some fun out of this whole situation too. It relied on a technique, he´s perfected on her throughout their childhood, whenever he could tell that there was something she wasn´t telling him. To bug the living daylights out of her, until she gave up and told him whatever it was, that she was trying to hide from him. Since he didn´t want her to get angry with him however, he had to tweak the plan a little.
"So, how do I look?" Joey asked him, while she was wearing that gorgeous black dress, that only made her look even more beautiful, than she already was.
"Like you could be one of DiCaprio´s French girls from Titanic" he praised her and it made her blush a little.
"You have to say that, because you´re my boyfriend!" she joked through a sweet smile, and if there hadn´t been people getting ready for the contest around them everywhere they looked, he would have given her a kiss to remember, right then and there.
"Do you know what I´ve been wondering?" he asked her.
"If ... you´re getting that raise at "Screen Time"; you´ve been thinking about asking for?"
"Nope, although I´ve asked the owner and he´s promised to get back to me on it".
"In that case ... I´m drawing a blank here, so just tell me".
"I was just wondering how you feel about travelling" he threw out there, making her look a little puzzled.
"I guess, it´s something that I want to do".
"Because, I can´t ever see myself leaving the good old US of A. I mean, why would I, when everything I could ever want is right here?" he lied and her reaction to it, told him that he had her hooked now.
"You don´t think that it could be a good learning experience for us, to experience what it´s like in Europe, perhaps?"
"What could I possibly learn there, that I couldn´t here? No, you´ll never get me to set foot in England or France, for example. Why anyone ever would, I have no clue! What, with all of those snobby French people, who´ll probably turn up their noses at an American like me!" he said, while trying to keep a smile back at Joey getting flustered over what she was hearing.
"That´s very bigoted of you to say, Pacey! You don´t know any French people, so you shouldn´t judge them!"
"Ah, they´re all the same! I bet that your mom hated it, back when she studied there!"
"As a matter of fact ..." Joey started, before it was like a lightbulb went off over her head.
"Do you know?" she asked him, now looking a little suspicious.
"Know what? I don´t know anything, Joey! You should know that better than anyone!" he joked, as her suspicion started turning into a smile instead.
"Let me guess. It was Bessie, who told you, wasn´t it?"
"It wasn´t, but how I found out doesn´t matter. Why didn´t you tell me anything?" he asked her, while wishing that he´d chosen a more private spot, for a conversation of this nature.
"I was scared, okay? The more time that passed without me telling you, the surer I became that once you found out, you´d get mad and break up with me. I´m so crazy about you, Pacey, that you don´t even know half of it and if we broke up now, it would feel like it was the end of the world to me" she whispered to him so sweetly, that there was no way, he could possibly get mad at her.
"Joey, if you think that´s all it´s going to take to make me give up on us, then I hate to tell you, but you really don´t know me yet".
"We´re talking half a year here and we still haven´t reached out three-month anniversary yet. If you want to date other girls, while I´m gone, it´s okay with me" she told him, in what was the most blatant lie, he´d perhaps ever seen.
"You´re so full of it, Potter! Anyway, who would I go on a date with, in this "One Girl Worth Dating" kind of town?"
"There´s Jen. She likes you, I´m pretty sure".
"I like Jen too, but not in that way and either way, you should know that I would never dream of doing anything, that could come between you and her. And don´t tell me it won´t, because thanks to yourself and Dawson, I´ve watched enough chick flicks at our movie nights together, to know that it will! Joey, you´re everything to me and when you come back home to me again, I want us to pick up right where we left off" he told her and it was enough, that she couldn´t help herself from kissing him, the strangers surrounding them be damned.
It was a conversation that he´d been dreading, since Abby had first told him about Joey and the scholarship in France. Now, that they´d finally had it, he had no idea what he´d been so worried over in the first place.
END OF CHAPTER SEVENTEEN