THE FIRST TIME

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - LOVE THE ONE YOU´RE WITH

"There's a rose in a fisted glove

And the eagle flies with the dove

And if you can't be with the one you love, honey

Love the one you're with"

STEPHEN STILLS (From the album "Stephen Stills" (1970))

Sent: January 26th, 1999

From: SpielbergsDisciple

To: AGirlNamedJoey

Subject: Just catching up.

Hi, Joey.

How´s it going? Over here it´s been a quiet week, since the drama of Pacey´s birthday party, without much in the way of interesting things, to tell you about. The closest I can come is that the student body president has been given the sack and although it seems like no one cares why, it also means that there´ll be a election for the vacant spot coming up soon. Pacey jokingly suggested that I should throw my hat into the mix and just to rub it in, he also offered to be my campaign manager. I gave him a hard pass. For the most part, I like going to Capeside High, but the idea of being the one, who everyone else vents their frustrations at, when they don´t like something, isn´t a thought that appeals to me.

I wish that I had more exciting news to share, but you know how it is here. In a small town like ours, it isn´t like something worth writing about happens every week.

Take care

Dawson

Sent: January 27th, 1999

From: AGirlNamedJoey

To: SpielbergsDisciple

Subject: Re: Just catching up

Hi, Dawson. Call me crazy, but I sometimes miss those weeks in Capeside, where nothing happens and without thinking about it, you just go about your business with one day taking over for the next. Over here, it´s like I´m expected to make the most of my time, which doesn´t leave much time for laying around and watching movies, like we used to for hours on end. When I came over here, I didn´t know entirely what to expect, but so far it´s helped me with becoming more open to new people and I´m so busy most of the time with schoolwork or after school activities, that I don´t have the time to get bored. Which I know sounds like a blast, but it gets kind of exhausting sometimes too.

It´s just like Pacey to suggest something as ridiculous, as you running for student body president! Let´s face it, Dawson! People like us, Jen and Pacey just aren´t the overcompensating-for-something go-getter types, who´ll sign up for that kind of stuff.

Say hi to your folks from me and take good care of yourself!

Joey

Dawson had, in the roughly four weeks since Joey had flown to France, compiled an array of go-to thoughts, whenever he started thinking about her and the thoughts of her wouldn´t leave his brain again. His most commonly used one in those situations, was contemplating what his next movie would be about. With a budget of five thousand big ones (the prize-money from the film festival, his dad had (without his knowledge) entered his first movie into), he had a new-found freedom to do what he wanted with this magnum opus, without constantly having to worry if a shot was affordable or not. Something, that his first movie had all too obviously suffered from.

There in laid part of the problem too. If he wound up wasting that prize money on a movie, that didn´t live up to his own expectations, he knew that it would bug him endlessly for months, if not years, on end. He´d gone through dozens of ideas in his head and tried to put a handful of them down on paper, with him rejecting all of them, for not having the potential of being up to the standard, he wanted to set for his future movie ouvré. He wasn´t kidding himself into thinking that it would become a modern day masterpiece, the kind of movie that opened doors for himself in Hollywood and beyond, yet he still wanted it to be a movie, that he could at least show to the people that he knew, with a sense of pride and achievement.

"So, Dawson. When do you start shooting that masterpiece, you´ve been working so hard on?" his dad asked him, while they were trying to get some heat back into their bodies with a cup of hot chocolate, after they´d been out in the cold, to put snow chains on the wheels of both his dad´s and his mom´s respective cars. With the harsh North-Eastern winter having arrived in what felt like it had been one week to the next, it had been about time as well, albeit a frozen-to-the-bone experience.

"I keep getting five to ten pages into writing the screenplay, before I realize that I can´t see it speaking to me, when I get it on film" he told his dad with an easily-detectable hint of frustration.

"What kind of movie would you guess, would speak to you?" his dad asked, in an obvious attempt to help him get started. It was hard for him to exactly say. His favorite movies were spread throughout vastly different genres and it was hard to come up with a common thread, that bound them together.

"I guess that what I´m leaning towards, is making it a coming-of-age love-story. I just don´t want it to be the kind of trope-filled, conventional love-story, that you see in most teen movies. It has to be a movie with heart and I want it to have a strong and heart-felt message to it. The one thing I´m not sure of yet, is what that message should be".

"If it´s a love-story, wouldn´t it make sense for that message to be about your own feelings regarding love and what it does to people?"

His dad wasn´t barking entirely up the wrong tree, there was only one problem with his idea. For as much as Dawson loved to be with, adored and deeply cared to his bones about his very sweet and in every way wonderful girlfriend Mary-Beth, he still hadn´t experienced that life-changing "Moment of Clarity" with her. That infamous moment that he´d read about or seen characters in books and movies have, when they realize that they´re up to their ears in love with someone and have to be with that person for the rest of their lives, no matter what the cost to themselves is.

He was emotionally mature enough too, to know that this Joey obsession, he´d had lately, wasn´t a case of him actually being in love with her. It was simply a deep longing that came out of missing a girl, who´d been arguably the most stable force in his life, for almost as far back, as he could remember. His love for the sometimes-charming young miss Potter went back to their early childhood, there was no denying that. Still, even if she had been close by and not been crazy in love with Pacey (and Pacey also vice-versa with her), he still wasn´t sure that them dating would be the best of ideas. Aside from it possibly costing him, what he knew would be one of the best friends, he´d ever have in his life, it would also involve having to break the fragile heart of an innocent sweetheart like Mary-Beth.

Having to do that was the absolute last thing, Dawson wanted to have on his conscience.

Abby had always seen anyone, who voluntarily did more school work, than they absolutely had to, as either having no life, or being in some small way out of their tiny, little minds. How was it then, that she somehow wound up signing up to be a candidate for student body president?

It all began on what had begun as as your standard run-of-the-mill Wednesday morning, if your name was Abby Morgan and you were living in the Potter house as a fifteen-year-old in Capeside in 1999. Her teething "Step Little Brother" Alexander had woken her up three times during the night with his crying and she´d been feeling cranky from the moment, when her alarm clock sounded at far too early of an hour, as far as she was concerned. By the time she´d arrived for school, she was still in the kind of foul mood, where no one should dare to say the wrong thing to her, or they would face her un-adulterated wrath.

The first of her friends, that she ran into, was Jen, who was shaking her head at the sight of a campaign poster, hanging on a nearby wall.

"Do you fancy a glimpse into what the opposite of utopia looks like?" Jen dryly asked her, as Abby came up to her friend and shot a glander at the poster, Jen was checking out.

"You have to be kidding me!" was the only response, that seemed fitting at that moment.

"There´s our dark future, staring us right in the face! Belinda and Chris Wolfe, running for student body president and vice president together! You just know that they´ll turn this school into one long waking nightmare, for the ninety-nine percent of us, who can´t stand them and their clique pals!"

"What about their campaign slogan? "Bringing true American, Christian values back to Capeside High". I´ll give you three guesses, who that´s subtly directed at!" Abby complained and if that wasn´t enough, it wouldn´t be many minutes after this, until they were unlucky enough to come face to face with the most loathsome girl, she´d met in her life. Belinda was catching students on their way to class and trying to score some easily bought votes, by handing out what were clearly cheap, store-bought cupcakes. When Abby and Jen came up towards Capeside´s own miniature version of Alexis from "Dynasty" however, all they got was an icy glare.

"I´d offer you two a cupcake, but I don´t need the freak vote to win that election in a landslide!" Belinda taunted them, as they tried to pass by her un-noticed and on a usual day, Abby wouldn't have dignified a lame insult like that with as much as the slightest turn of her head. Unfortunately, the combination of who it was and the mood Abby was in, suddenly brought out the old fighter in her and (as it often had happened before), led to her speaking her mind, before thinking about the potential consequences.

"Tell me, Belinda, because I´m curious. Does being a sad, D-Rate parody of every mean girl I´ve seen in teen movies come naturally to you, or did you have to take some kind of special lessons on how to improve your level of bitchiness?" she snarled back at her latest nemesis, who didn´t have the common sense to back off, when Abby got right up in her scrunched-up face.

"At least, I´m not an abomination in the eyes of God and everyone in Capeside! That you would dare to go around flaunting that you´re a disgusting lesbo, only tells me ..."

That was as far as Belinda got in the latest of the hundreds (if it wasn´t thousands) of little taunts, that she´d sent Abby´s way over the years, before Abby, in a moment that she had been building up to for practically her entire life, had enough and threw a punch straight at her enemy´s face. It came so out of nowhere, that Belinda had no time to react, before Abby´s small, but hard-hitting fist, hit her rival square on the jaw and sent her tumbling butt-first, down to the floor. Most of the bystanders didn´t know how to react, but she could hear how a good few of them laughed at seeing Belinda being put in her place by the kind of underdog, that girls like Belinda saw as being so far beneath them in the school pecking order, that to them, they may as well not have existed at all. As for Abby, even if she was in principle against using violence as a problem-solving mechanism, she couldn´t deny that landing that punch had felt damn good!

Following a rather unpleasant trip to the principal´s office later, that resulted in Abby getting Saturday detention for the next three months and a warning that she would be suspended, if she got into another fight for the rest of the school year, she´d made up her mind on what the only way was, that she could feasibly do anything to someone with the kind of social standing and popularity that Belinda, being the head cheerleader at Capeside High, had. She would run for student body president, only she wouldn´t run to win the election. Winning it would be arguably the worst thing, that could happen and would result in herself having to spent even more time at school, than she was already forced to! The one and only reason why she´d decided to run, was to prevent Belinda from winning.

Now the only question was who her campaign manager should be.

If Mary-Beth had one part of her personality, that she desperately wanted to change, it was to not be so much of a push-over, yet another side effect of being possibly the shyest of all of the shy girls at her school. It even extended to when she went shopping, and was why she´d twice come home with newly bought shoes, that were so butt-ugly in her own eyes, that she still hadn´t worn them, outside of that first time in the shop, where her lack of ability to say no, had gotten the better of her again. To make it even sadder, she sometimes spent hours just practicing saying no to people in the mirror, to see how it felt to her. While she was all too aware that it was slighty pathetic of her, to have to take it at that much of a snail´s pace, she also knew that working on being braver in that aspect was a long process and not something, she would be able to change right away, just because she wanted it to.

"Why don´t you give it a shot?" Dawson had almost casually asked her during their study date that evening, following a short discussion between them, over how there wouldn´t be any candidates worth voting for in the upcoming student body president election.

"Me?" she replied shyly. "I can´t stand up on a stage in front of everyone at school and give big speeches, Dawson. It just isn´t in me!"

"Mary-Beth, you know how crazy I am about you. I don´t think that anyone knows how much it annoys you, to be as shy as you are, better than I do. For Pete´s sake, it took you visiting me three times here, before my mom got a word out of you! That has to have been a new record for her! You still overcame that hurdle, didn´t you?" he tried to encourage her. To his credit, it also worked quite a bit.

"Your parents couldn´t have been nicer to me, if they tried. I can´t say that about a lot of those, I go to school with".

"That only makes it better! Think about it for a second. If you can do this, there isn´t any further that you can go up, as far as situations, where you have to speak to a large crowd goes. That´s unless, we´re talking about you running for president someday! You know that I´d vote for you in a heartbeat and I´m pretty sure, that my parents would too! They both adore you, in case you hadn´t noticed!" he very sweetly and smilingly joked, bringing a just as sweet smile out of her.

"I´m also pretty sure that you and your parents would be the only ones, who would!" she joked back, in an attempt to avoid addressing his suggestion.

"If I were you, I´d at least consider it. This isn´t about me wanting you to change anything about yourself. In my eyes, you´re a perfect ten, just the way you are. I´m just worried that if you keep hiding what an amazing girl you are from everyone else, except for me and our parents, it will hold you back and lead to others, who aren´t as deserving of it, getting ahead of you someday. Give everyone at school a small glimpse into who you are and it´ll be impossible for them not to like you. I´m proof of that" he told her with a kind smile, that was soon followed up by a small kiss as a reward for his kind words.

Maybe she should try running in that election, even if it was all to see, if she could stand being the center of attention. It wasn´t like she had any social status to speak of, so she didn´t have anything to lose and it could even end up being fun, trying something that unlikely for her to do!

Was is it just an attempt to soothe his guilty conscience for having trouble not thinking about a girl, who wasn´t his girlfriend, that had led to Dawson suggesting that his actual girlfriend ran for student body president? Dawson had to keep asking himself this question, after Mary-Beth had headed home. In some way, it probably was and as he´d come to find out, doing little nice things like that for his high school sweetheart, also had the adverse effect of making him feel less guilty that his fantasies those days rarely involved only himself and Mary-Beth, if she was in them at all. Not that he wasn´t aware that it isn´t a rarity for guys his age to have fantasies about a bit of this and that in the heat of the moment, or that he was sure, that the same thing went for all of the girls, he knew. Unlike how he imagined it was for them, he´d often felt guilty after he was done pleasing himself and putting a smile on Mary-Beth´s, in his own humble opinion, unbelievably cute face, was the perfect antidote to get that feeling of guilt out of his system.

He could have tried to run in the election, for sure, but with school, his after-school job and to add to that, having to put together, what he hoped would become a movie that he could be proud of, when it was finished, piling even more on his plate at that time would have meant that one of those other parts would have had to give. Taking a position like that, in the highly unlikely event that he was even to win the election, also meant taking on a lot of extra work and responsibilities, that he could do without having to worry about. For his girlfriend however, this could be the perfect opportunity for her to come out of her shell and just the thought of how thankful she would be towards him, when they announced her as the winner of the election, would be enough to help him to excuse himself from the un-pure thoughts about Joey, that the raging hormones running through him wouldn´t allow to forget about, even if he wanted them to.

"What about "The Sensible Party", if we´re the only sensible choice to vote for?" Abby threw out there to Jen, while they were waiting for Jen´s shift at "Screen Time" to come to an end. The sad fact was that Abby rarely had anything interesting to do on her evenings off, if Melissa didn´t have the time to hang out, and as a result, she would often come down to keep company with whoever was working that evening at the video store (be it Pacey, Jen or the both of them).

"Is it technically a party, if you´re the only member so far?" Jen (quite logically) asked her back.

"Here I thought that I could already include you! You want to see Chris and Belinda lose just as badly as I do, don´t you?"

"Admittedly, I´m far from an expert on politics, but I know enough to know that it´s a dirty game and definitely not something, I feel any need to get myself involved in! I´ve played enough "dirty games" for one lifetime, if you really must know!"

"Like what?"

"Like what, what?"

"What kind of dirty games are we talking here? If it was something sexual, then it´s your sworn duty as my best friend to provide me with all of the details!" Abby implored her friend to no avail, since it clearly wasn´t something, Jen wanted to discuss any further, than what she´d already divulged.

"The things that happened during that part of my life and I don´t want everyone, I´m friends with now to know about, I´m taking to the grave! You´ll just have to settle for imagining, what it could have been! Knowing more than I´d like to about your slightly dirty mind, like I do, I can´t imagine that would be a problem for you!" Jen, in no uncertain terms and quite correctly, sharply replied.

"Alright! What if I called my new political project the "We Hate Belinda Party"? It´s sure to gather attention among all of those, who like us can´t stand her fake-righteous self!"

"It´s also sure to get you even more detention, than what you already got today for punching the queen of all bitchdom in the face. How do you think Bessie would react to that?" Jen inquired and Abby instantly knew that Jen was in the right, that poking the proverbial bear that was Bessie Potter, probably wouldn´t be a clever tactical move on her own part. Especially, considering that she still hadn´t told Bessie or Brodie about the first round of detention, she´d already been "sentenced to" earlier that day and wasn´t looking forward to telling them about in the slightest. Even if she couldn´t care less what girls like Belinda or the small-minded majority of Capeside´s population thought of her life choices, she still cared deeply about what those closest to her thought and right now, Bessie and Bodie were near the top of that list.

Just as Abby was trying to think up the perfect name for her freshly started political movement, the store door opened and in came a gasping for breath Jack, holding a couple of VHS covers. Like clockwork, whenever she caught the smallest glimpse of the handsome young Mr. McPhee, it made Jen light up in a dreamy smile. Jen´s crush on him was so obvious, that Abby couldn´t help herself from finding both it and how oblivious Jack was to her friend´s obvious teenage lust after him, more than a little funny.

"Made it on time! I had to bike down here as fast as I could, to get here before closing time!" Jack gaspingly said, while still trying to catch his breath after the hard work-out, he´d just subjected himself to.

"I would have let it slide, just this one time!" Jen flirtingly answered him, as he handed the cassettes to her and she began to scan them back into the system. As she did, Abby tried to catch a glimpse of which movies, he´d been watching. From what she could tell though, they´d probably been rented by his sister, unless Jack had been on a serious Molly Ringwald trip lately.

"So, what have you guys been up to tonight?" Jack asked in a casual, making small talk, kind of manner.

"Not much, although you know miss Edmondson, the art teacher at school? She came in here to rent that movie "Bound" for what has to have been the third time, just in the time I´ve been working here, so ..."

"You´re thinking that she´s like ..." Jack almost finished Jen´s sentence, before stopping himself shy of naming the third person in the room.

"You can say it, Jack! I´m not ashamed anymore to admit, that I prefer girls ... or rather one girl, as it is! Say it with me: Homosexuality!" Abby teasingly said and was amused by how shy Jack got, just at hearing its name said out loud.

"Homosexuality. I´m not some bigot, who has anything against gays, if that´s what you´re thinking" Jack answered her with a small hint of irritation in his voice.

"I never thought, you were, Jack!" she reassured him. "Do you have any good ideas for what I can name my new political party? My ideas clearly all suck or will get me into even more trouble, if I go with one of them and Jen here has been of less help tonight, that having an umbrella, when you´re about to be hit with a Tsunami tidal wave would be, so I´m all too willing to listen to any suggestions, you might have".

"What about "The All-Inclusive Party"? A party for everyone, no matter who they are and what their social standing is" Jack suggested.

"The words "All-Inclusive" sound like you stole them from an ad for a hotel! What about calling it the "Inclusive Party". It still says that you´ll stand up for the outsiders at school, like we are and it doesn´t exclude anyone, who sees a kinship with the message, you´re sending" Jen suggested.

"Which is?" Abby had to ask, since she hadn´t thought that far ahead yet.

"That in order for the school to become a pleasant place to spend time for all of us, you can´t have it being run, even in the slightest way, by people like Chris or Belinda, who have no idea what it´s like to be one of us, because they´ve never tried it" Jack surprisingly threw into the conversation.

"Guys, how would you like to be my joint campaign managers? Of course, it would mean that you´ll be spending many hours working closely together ..."

"I´m in!" Jen enthusiastically chirped in, long before Abby even got to finish her sentence. Jack, on the other hand, wasn´t looking quite as much up for it.

"Please, Jack! I can deliver the message like it´s nobody´s business, but I know that I´d be as awful when it comes to coming up with the finer details, as Steven Seagal is at delivering a convincing acting performance. You and Jen already complete each other´s sentences and you two clearly have a knack for it!" Abby begged him with her eyes and whether it was that or the hopeful look on Jen´s face that made him give in, she didn´t really care.

When that day had begun, she would never have imagined that it would have ended like it did. But, now that it had, she couldn´t wait to get started on what would be her first, and probably only ever, election campaign.

The more Mary-Beth thought about running for class president on the ride home, the more the fear began to creep up in her, that she would stand there tongue tied in front on an entire school assembly and it would be the moment, that made her give up on trying to be more than the mousy girl, who never had the courage to speak up, if she had something interesting to chip in with or heard something, she didn´t like. She could easier see that happening, than herself getting a rousing applause, not that she could remember that ever happening there, if it wasn´t thanks to the school basketball team getting one of their rare home game wins.

The way Dawson had said it though, made her think that it wasn´t impossible and it could at the same time be something they did together and brought them even closer to one another, than they already were. Lately, it had felt to her like he was starting to lose interest in her and he would sometimes zone off to parts unknown, while they were having a casual conversation. That didn´t used to happen, when they´d just begun dating and although, she didn´t have any experience when it came to relationships (except for the few things, she´d tried with Dawson), she couldn´t imagine that it was a beneficial sign of them staying together in the long term, like she´d slowly begun hoping with all of her heart, that they would.

Although, she hadn´t told him yet, the idea of them having sex was rapidly beginning to not feel as scary to her, as it had before their first kiss. She would tell him eventually, when she someday felt ready to, that much she was sure of. Would she sleep with him though, if that was what it took to keep her man from moving on to someone else, who would go all the way with him, like she knew that some of the girls in their grade gladly would? That part, she wasn´t entirely sure of anymore.

END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT